S4AD#3

Coded Costumes

In this talk Molmol Kuo and Zach Lieberman will discuss their background, recent projects together as YesYesNo studio, teaching work, and a recent series of explorations that they are doing around the body, costume and drawing.

Zach Lieberman & Molmol Kuo

With a background in documentary filmmaking, Molmol Kuo began to focus on conversations and storytelling as a young art worker. With a penchant for “doing weird things with electricity,” she builds tools that help tell stories and make art that breaks the barriers between human and object in a whimsical and surprising way.

Her ongoing research focuses on designing interactive art for public spaces with children. She is developing a series of children’s workshops and exhibitions around this research.

Kuo received an M.P.S. from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. She is a partner at YesYesNo Interactives.

Zachary Lieberman is an artist, researcher and hacker with a simple goal: he wants you surprised. In his work, he creates performances and installations that take human gesture as input and amplify them in different ways—making drawings come to life, imagining what the voice might look like if we could see it, transforming people’s silhouettes into music.

He has been listed as one of Fast Company's Most Creative People and his projects have won the Golden Nica from Ars Electronica, Interactive Design of the Year from Design Museum London as well as listed in Time Magazine's Best Inventions of the Year. He creates artwork through writing software and is a co-creator of openFrameworks, an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding. Lieberman helped co-found the School for Poetic Computation, a school examining the lyrical possibilities of code. He is a partner at YesYesNo Interactives.

New Ways of Speaking

One of the biggest challenges facing critics and writers in digital art is finding the right words for experimental artworks. This short poetic talk will explore the new “ways of speaking” (tip of the hat to John Berger) found in surrealist and experimental poetry as they might better describe works of artists working right along the edge, like Sam Rolfes and Harm van den Dorpel. There will be some walkthrough of beloved games and systems-based worlds along the way. My main contention is that as artists push the limits of what can be created with digital technology, writers framing, analyzing, and contextualizing their artworks might move away from the spectacle of “how the piece was made” alone towards “how does it make me see, speak, and think differently.”

Nora Khan

Nora Khan is a writer, a Contributing Editor at Rhizome, and a current Eyebeam Research Resident based in New York City. She writes fiction and criticism, with a general focus on digital art, artificial intelligence, and games, and while at Eyebeam, a specific focus on the history of computerized poetry, bots, and simulations. She has published in Rhizome, Art in America, The Village Voice, California Sunday, After Us, Conjunctions, AVANT, and DIS. She’s a 2016 Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Fellow in Digital Art.

She’s most recently spoken at the Whitney Museum on artist Ian Cheng’s live simulations as part of New Ways to See: Digital Art Criticism Now, and on Together in Electric Dreams, a panel on the present and future of artificial intelligence that she produced for Open Score, an art and technology conference at New Museum. She has also spoken at Printed Matter, Inc., Eyebeam, and the Guggenheim.

Impractice

Chino Kim will speak about his transition from neuroscience and IT to art making, and his explorations of impracticality in life and work.

Chino Kim

Chino Kim is a
creative body
piece of work
closet freak

whose work speaks to the contradictions of being a
human.
user.
sentient beast.

Norms and expectations are his enemy and humor is his
holy lance.
only friend.
favorite.

He works in any medium that doesn’t require him to wash his hands afterward. But in the end,
photography
installation
code

is just the hot dog that delivers the ketchup that is
discomfort.
laughs.
the realization that life is suffering and the only way to end suffering is to eat more ketchup.

Inflatable Architectural Bodies

Inflatable Architectural Bodies is an exploration of Chico Macmurtrie’s amorphic, robotic border crossers.

Chico Macmurtrie

Since the late 1980s, Chico MacMurtrie has explored the intersection of robotic sculpture, new media installation, and performance. MacMurtrie’s work investigates organic life from deep within, finding geometry in all living systems. Chico MacMurtrie and his interdisciplinary collective Amorphic Robot Works/ARW have received numerous awards for their experimental new media artworks, including five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, VIDA Life 11.0, and Prix Ars Electronica. Chico MacMurtrie was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2016.

MacMurtrie/ARW’s works have been presented in major museums and cultural institutions around the world, including the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), Beijing; Hayward Gallery, London; Museo de la Reina Sofia, Madrid; Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Shanghai Biennale; Tri Postal, Lille, (retrospective exhibition).

Upcoming exhibitions include: Pneuma World, a survey exhibition of MacMurtrie/ARW’s Inflatable Architectural Bodies series at Muffatwerk in Munich, and Mundos Alternos, Art and Science Fiction in the Americas, as part of Getty Foundation’s far-reaching exploration of Latin American and Latino Art Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in Los Angeles in 2017.

Exploiting the Creative Potential in Digital Representations of Language

Allison Parrish presents an artist's talk on the opportunities for creative manipulation of language represented digitally (e.g., as characters, as words, as syntactic trees, as entries in lexical databases, as vectors, etc.).

Allison Parrish

Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She has recently given talks on computer-generated poetry at the Electronic Literature Organization conference, !!Con, Alt-AI, SXSW Interactive and Eyeo. From 2014 to 2016, Allison was the Digital Creative Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and has recently been a research resident at DBRS Innovation Labs, a Processing Foundation fellow, and a visiting artist at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU. Allison holds a master's degree from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she is currently a member of the full-time faculty.

Reality Blender

Reality Blender explores building out-of-the-ordinary social interactions through 3D graphics and 'sometime' objects. Laura Juo-Hsin Chen will discuss her current project, Daily Life VR, a web-based game series that simulates life’s most essential activities: eating, pooping, sleeping, etc.

Laura Chen

Laura Juo-Hsin Chen, 陳若昕, is a creative technologist and animator from Taiwan. She is interested in weird human interactions and enjoys creating lighthearted experience for people to imagine different formats of life. Her tools usually are web platform, VR, portable objects, multi-user environment, and physical computing. Laura graduated from ITP, NYU and currently works in Planeta and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Detourning the Self

Detourning the Self examines the use of technology to undermine capitalism.

Sam Lavigne

Sam Lavigne is an artist and programmer based in Brooklyn whose work deals with surveillance, cops, data, and automation. He is currently a research fellow at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry. He is the co-founder of Useless Press, an online publishing collective, and the co-founder of the Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon.

Gesturing Towards Utopias - Radical Play & Social Change

Is play a form of technology? In the creative process, games blur the distinction between art and design. This unique characteristic opens up space for new kinds of interdisciplinary creators seeking accessible avenues for social impact.

Mattie Brice

Mattie Brice is a play and games artist, critic, and educator. Starting from media criticism centered around cultural and literary theories, she grappled with the tech industry's problems with diversity, from representation of marginalized peoples in the content of games to their positions of power and visibility in the creative process of making them. Brice was a part of a DIY movement within video games that created games that were inspired by personal experience and used tools that didn’t require programming. She made experimental games that broadened both the ways that games could be used to communicate with other people, and the kinds of people who could make them. Her first notable work, Mainichi, tours from museums (Museum of Design Atlanta) to art festivals (IndieCade) to game conventions (GaymerX) and more, becoming a prominent work discussed in independent games and queer games studies. Balancing theory with practicing art and design, Brice regularly speaks at conferences (Game Connect Asia Pacific) and universities (Stanford, USC) internationally on creative practice, outsider art, and political engagement. She works for the interests of marginalized creators and players in games, and organizes academic conferences (Queerness and Games Conference) and community events (Lost Levels). Brice currently teaches about play design and art activism in New York City universities (NYU, The New School) and does graduate work in the Integrated Digital Media program at NYU. Her current research and practice interests include using play and performance to engage the public politically, intimate and vulnerable methods of activism, and design processes that account for measuring social impact. She also consults companies on issues of representation and diversity with regards to interactive media and acts as project manager and organizational strategist for design companies and artists. Brice is frequently influenced by cooking, performance art, fashion, fan cultures, dating apps, BDSM, the everyday, and cyborgs.

The Softer Side of Software: Senses, Sensors and Sublimating

Using capacitive and infrared sensors and Makey Makeys, Emilie Baltz is presenting ways that technology can transform the unacceptable into the acceptable (and other thoughts on licking).

Emilie Baltz

Emilie Baltz is an experiential artist and food technologist who creates unconventional food-based work that moves people to discover new worlds one lick, suck, bite, sniff and gulp at a time. Her work includes commissions from EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, New Museum, Yale University, Museum of Art and Design, Museum of Sex and RedBull Studios. She is part of the founding faculty of the School of Visual Arts Products of Design program as well as the founder of the Food Design Studio at Pratt Institute. From 2014-2016 she was a founding member of NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator for art, design and technology hosted at the New Museum. Baltz is currently based out of NEW LAB, an interdisciplinary space designed to support entrepreneurs working in emerging technologies. She, very clearly, likes NEW places.

Anonymity 101: Worst-Case Scenario Counter-Surveillance

Anonymity 101: Worst-Case Scenario Counter-Surveillance covers an introduction to using TAILS, an operating system that will let you bring a covert aspect to your subversive practice. Aside from its worst-case-scenario-protection security design, TAILS routes all internet traffic through Tor, a global anonymity network, which allows anyone to use the internet without correlating what you do on the internet to your daytime identity.

David Huerta

By Day, David Huerta codes and eats cookies in New York City. By night, he helps organize CryptoParties, local teach-in sessions which bring technologists and everyone else together to learn how to protect their online privacy. He has organized dozens of cryptoparties across the US, including one at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of Laura Poitras's Astro Noise exhibition in 2016. Before arriving in New York, he was one of the founding members for HeatSync Labs, an Arizona hackerspace which brings makers, hackers, and the occasional futurist together to build things and teach others how to do the same.

Moments of Collection

This talk starts from ubiquitous moments of data collection, and poses one question: what if the most important things about a dataset are the parts of it that we can neither see nor control?

Mimi Onuoha

Mimi Onuoha is a Brooklyn-based artist and researcher using code and writing to explore the process, results, and implications of data collection. Recently she has taught or been in residence at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, Data & Society Research Institute, and the Royal College of Art. Currently she is a Research Resident at Eyebeam, where she is programmatically and interpersonally investigating data collection, missing datasets, and strategies for intervention and response.

Sensory Percussion: Deep-Dimensional Electronic Control With Acoustic Objects And Machines That Listen

Tlacael Esparza Co-founder of the music tech start-up Sunhouse will lead a workshop and demonstration of Sensory Percussion–a new system for electronic percussive expression. Sensory Percussion is a platform for creating and performing music through acoustic control of digital sound. With the mission of bridging one of the oldest forms of musical expression with the new, Sensory Percussion translates the nuance of acoustic drumming into a flexible and expressive control language, allowing for a new frontier in performance and sound design that seeks a meaningful and intuitive relationship between vibrating objects and electronic processes. This workshop will include a technology overview, a demonstration of SP’s capabilities and a discussion on its conceptual underpinnings and broader goals.

Tlacael Esparza

Tlacael Esparza, co-founder of the music tech start-up Sunhouse, will lead a workshop and demonstration of Sensory Percussion — a new system for electronic percussive expression. Sensory Percussion is a platform for creating and performing music through acoustic control of digital sound. With the mission of bridging one of the oldest forms of musical expression with the new, Sensory Percussion translates the nuance of acoustic drumming into a flexible and expressive control language, allowing for a new frontier in performance and sound design that seeks a meaningful and intuitive relationship between vibrating objects and electronic processes. This workshop will include a technology overview, a demonstration of SP’s capabilities, and a discussion on its conceptual underpinnings and broader goals.