Talks, Discussions and Showcases

Performative arena – historical and philosophical views
June 21st | 11h00-13h00  in Sala Fernando Lopes

José Bragança de Miranda 
Mediation powers have for too long confiscated our thinking and acting. A real-life situation seems to not count if not mediated through the flow of collective forces. It’s crucial to analyse the tension between minimal, improbable, spontaneous actions, and the collective unconscious that has always repressed the ‘anarchic’ way of facing the world.  

Roundtable: Luis Claudio Ribeiro & José Gomes Pinto   
We are immersed in a world where networks rule. This phenomenon is not new, yet it has become more conscious and ubiquitous, more practical, more instrumental, more visible. This Round Table dwells on the phantoms that are howling our present culture; from sound to image. 

Georg Trogemann
The devastating consequences of our technical actions show that a sober scientific analysis is not enough to integrate technology culturally and to change human action. What is missing are other narratives about our entanglement with technology. A few short performative examples will be shown that introduce the Poetics of Making.

Boris Debackere
Psyched to extend our reality (XR), it becomes imperative to reconsider how media and environments relate.  Media are not merely a conduit for information, they are spaces where information is distributed and experienced. Mediated Environments is a proposition to explore alternative spatial metaphors when we deem to extend reality.

Moderation: Manuel Bogalheiro

Mediation and body
June 21st | 14h30-16h30 in Sala Fernando Lopes

Teresa Cruz 
Computational art and the re-skilling of the embodied mind: a brief reflection on the new avenues of art, mediation and the skilled body in the computational environment.

Showcase: Stephen Whitmarsh (remote, France) & Atau Tanaka (remote, UK)
The Brain-Body Digital Musical Instrument project. A presentation of the EAVI EMG board for muscle interaction, including the use the Mentalab Explore for brain EEG recordings,  and the ways of interfacing them with digital and modular sound synthesis using our Max and Python libraries. A presentation of EMG and EEG fundamentals will be followed by a musical demonstration (streamed).

Alex McLean (remote, UK) & Kate Sicchio  (remote, USA)
This talk will explore how live coding, pattern making and movement may be intertwined to understand each other.

Miguel Carvalhais
How the non-sensorial phenomena so meaningful for computational art need to be mediated by works and interpreted by audiences. The dynamics of this process are very particular and become themselves meaningful for the aesthetic experience.

Roundtable with all participants in this panel

Moderation: Rodrigo Hernández-Ramírez

Mediation and environment 
June 22nd | 11h00-13h00 in Sala Fernando Lopes

Felipe Portela
In one way or another, turbulence is involved in the vast majority of systems upon which life depends, fascinating engineers, physicists and mathematicians alike. Portela will discuss how the (apparent) disordered motion of fluids actually conceals a large degree of organisation – rendering aesthetic and scientific complexity to what is one of the unsolved problems of classical mechanics.

Rosemary Lee 
How the co-option of scientific imaging techniques and apparatus in artistic practices may contribute to new forms of visual knowledge production. Looking at data-intensive approaches to image-making, this presentation considers how various forms of visualisation relate to existing ideas of objectivity in images.

Jamie Perera
We are in the Anthropocene, paralysed in our collective response to climate change, unable to move from a parasitic to a symbiotic relationship with ourselves, let alone the planet. Jamie explores data sonification as a gateway to accessing our ecological and systemic grief, and deep listening as a way to radically deconstruct and redefine mental structures that have pushed us out of sync with nature. 

Roundtable: Martin Howse & Ivo Louro
Towards a new theory of the “becoming geological”: questions of rendering experiential environmental change and exchange through the anthropogenic, with a particular focus on interactions between particulate matter and environmental conditions.

Moderation: André Sier

Mediation and social behaviours
June 22nd | 14h30-16h30 in Sala Fernando Lopes

Sally J. Norman (remote, New Zealand)
Social behaviours we invest in live interfaces both reflect and shape us. Norman discusses how technologies resulting from this mediation incorporate diverse social mores and senses of agency, reflecting a range of approaches to each other and to our environment.

John Klima
Why I Have No Interest In Digital Media Experiences. Today there are so many ways to express oneself using the plethora of tools and technologies freely available. This is wonderful! But for Klima, it was always about looking for the “wrong way” to do it, as an initial vector for an emergent process.

Roundtable: Nikolas Gomes & Diogo Vasconcelos
Starting from the installation “Concerto para Piano e Pandemia”, we will seek to raise some questions about the contingent aspects inherent in open artistic processes and their aesthetic consequences. A conversation about the idea of ​​control in artistic production and what may or may not happen when it is given up.

Raphael Perret
All around the world, citizens, activists and journalists collect evidence of human rights violations by using mobile devices to film and photograph their experiences, which are shared almost in real time via social media. Truth Detectives — a very serious game – trains a person to become a full–fledged open source intelligence (OSINT) investigator.

Moderation: Filipe Luz

Talk at Human Entities
June 22nd | 18h30 | Palácio Sinel de Cordes, Campo Santa Clara, Lisboa

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado
Departing from the exploration of the limits of the senses, Torres examines the concepts of interpretation, translation, and misrepresentation, reflecting on the mediated sensorial experiences that (re)construct our perceived reality and that in turn serve to establish a cultural hegemony within the history of Technology and the Arts.

In-between the analogue and the digital
June 23nd | 15h00-17h30 in Auditório Agostinho da Silva

Thor Magnusson (remote, Greece)
Magnusson will start by deconstructing the apparent distinction between the analogue and the digital, but then focus on what it means for us when creating musical instruments. He will explore the symbolism of the analogue, the electric and the digital and explore the use of these from a semiotic perspective.

Chris Kiefer (remote, UK)
The Feedback Musicianship Network has been running for the past year, and has featured many new hybrid instruments where analogue and digital process are intimately connected through acoustic materials.  Kiefer will report on research themes that have arisen from the network, and discuss hybrid instruments based on his experiences of playing the Feedback Cello.

Showcase: Kazike & Rajele Jain
“And it would be wise to treat both the digital and the analog as coequal branches (…) We proceed thus through the analog itself (…) by describing it – description being a characteristically analog method… The many qualities of the analog will appear along the way, whether as continuous variation, as proportion, or through the non- or extra-digital domains of sensation or contingency.” Galloway, Golden Age of Analog

Roundtable: Adriana Sá & Jonas Runa & Gonçalo Gato&Oyvind Brandtsegg (remote, Norway)
Departing from how the disparities between an audible acoustic input and its digital analysis inform her musical idiom, Sá asks Runa, Gato and Brandtsegg about other ways of embracing – as a creative engine – that which in computer science is often called ‘error’.

 Moderation: Victor Flores