CharActor

Speaker(s): masaru mizuochi, mizumasa, Japan

Born in Japan in 1989. After graduating from the University of Tokyo Graduate School, he continues to conduct art production and stage production activities along with research on new visual expressions. The theme of his works is humanity in the digital world. Applying the knowledge of computer vision, it is expressed in both analog and digital expressions. His work has been presented at museums, events, and conferences in Japan and overseas.

Description: The personality of living things is beautiful. Is it possible to have a personality in the digital world? CharActor is a video work that produces animation by recognizing shader programs as genes and by changing the mathematical expression itself using evolutionary computation.

SoS

Speaker(s): Dennis Del Favero, UNSW, iCinema + EPICentre, Australia
Tomasz Bednarz, UNSW, EPICentre + iCinema, Australia

Description: "SoS" recreates the experiences of two Syrian asylum seekers as they lose sight of each other during a treacherous ocean voyage from Indonesia to Northern Australia.

Smile

Speaker(s): Tomas Laurenzo, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Tomás Laurenzo is an artist and academic who works with both physical and digital media, exploring meaning, power and politics. With a background in both computer science and art, Laurenzo’s work spans across different practices and interests, including new media art, HCI, machine learning, and VR. His artistic production includes installations, music, performance, and digital lutherie. His artworks and performances have been shown globally. He is assistant professor at the School of Creative Media. City University of Hong Kong.

Description: Smile is a mixed-media installation consisting of a screen in a black box, mounted on the wall. When an interactor smiles, drone-footage of the ruins of Gaza fades in. If the interactor stops smiling, the video stops. It only plays when the interactor widely smiles at it.

Tactile Microcosm of ALife

Speaker(s): Toshikazu Ohshima, Ritsumeikan University, College of Image Arts and Sciences, Japan

Toshikazu Ohshima has been a professor at Ritsumeikan University since 2006. In 1991, he received a Doctorate from the Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tsukuba. In 1991, he joined Canon Inc. and worked on research and development of virtual reality. From 1997, he worked as a senior researcher in a national mixed reality (MR) technology project and from 2001 began serving as a section chief at the MR R&D division in Canon Inc. His research interests include MR technologies and its deployment in education, medicine, and the arts. Since 2006, he and his team have continually created technological and educational artworks based on scientific and biological simulations utilizing mixed reality experience. Since 2012, these works of art and edutainment have been annually exhibited at Laval Virtual ReVolution in France. In 2017, “MitsuDomoe,” a virtual ecosystem in a petri dish, was awarded the Laval Virtual Award of Training and Education.

Description: Tactile Microcosm of ALife offers interaction with artificial organisms, whereby the user can enjoy playing with fish-like organisms through aerial imaging and haptic feedback. The holographic organisms float in water in a petri dish, and the user can feel a forcefield of the vital of the organisms via force feedback.

Contact/Sense

Speaker(s): Rewa Wright, University of Newcastle, Australia
Simon Howden, Independent Artist, Australia

Dr. Rewa Wright is Lecturer in Creative Technologies at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, she is Māori from Ngāti Whātua and Ngāpuhi iwi. She uses embodied movements to perform with plants, software, and sensors, in a perceptually challenging infra-red mixed reality. Her vision punctuated by digital augments, she co-composes with the bio-electrical signals of living plants, generating an audio-visual swarm of movement and sound.

Simon Howden is a conceptual artist, sound designer, and a Billboard music producer. He holds an MFA (Intermedia/Sculpture) from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, and completed his BFA in Film at Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Description: When we feel and sense through machines, are we still ourselves? In a mixed reality where embodied actions and blinding visions are part woman/part machine, the tactile surface of plants is a portal that conjures augmented materialities into existence.

Political Crystals: Algorithmic Strategies for Data Visualization

Speaker(s): clarissa ribeiro, unifor, CrossLab, Brazil
herbert rocha, unifor, Laboratorio de Pesquisa em Direito Privado e Internet da Universidade de Brasilia (LAPIN/UnB), Brazil

Description: Combining algorithmic modeling strategies for data visualization with digital fabrication, the work includes the generative design of a series of geometrically intricate crystals-like 3D models using as raw data Twitter APIs having as the search phrase hashtags related to Brazilian 2018 presidential elections twitted from defined geolocations.