A(I)nimal-Centered AI Jam

A digital workshop on December 5 2023
14:00 – 17:00 EST
via Zoom

About the ACA Jam

A digital workshop in designing imaginaries for AI-animal interactions

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Organisers

Alinta Krauth and Jason Nelson

How to sign up

Dates and time: December 5 2023 at 14:00 – 17:00 EST via Zoom

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About

Researchers from the University of Bergen are looking for participants for an exciting online workshop on Sci-Fi design fictions, focused on the intersection of AI and nonhuman animals. The workshop will involve scenario building and ideation to imagine positive or ethics-led future uses of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Participants do not need in-depth practical knowledge of AI in order to take part, as the intentions of this workshop are to play with design fictions, and to take a Science-Fiction and creative approach.

This hands-on workshop will involve creating fictional, fantastical, and potentially ‘impossible’ designs in digital group work. We will use narrative-building creative practice techniques such as stakeholder characterisations, writing and design prompts and world-building, and apply these to a scenario involving human/animal interactions. The workshop is aimed at two juxtaposing audiences who may be equally concerned with animal well-being and ACI: those with a design or creative practice background, but limited knowledge of AI, or those with an AI background but limited knowledge of creative practice techniques. All are welcome!

In recent years, many scholars have called for AI-related fields to undertake interspecies relations more carefully, and to better consider the implications their technological tools might have on species other than humans. There is a fast-growing and generally unmet need for more concern from AI fields towards their direct and indirect effects on individual animals as well as entire ecosystems. How can we instead move towards projects that are care-led, or that put animal well-being first, or that aim to develop empathy towards other species? We aim to create inspiring and thought-provoking examples in this workshop on Sci-Fi design fictions for AI/animal futures.

This FREE workshop will take place online on December 5 2023 at 14:00 – 17:00 EST via Zoom. You can sign up in advance to receive your Zoom link via Google Forms. You can also email the organisers directly at alinta(dot)krauth(at)uib(dot)no

Intended Activities and Workshop Layout

The workshop will run virtually, to promote international interaction and accessibility. Sign up to receive your Zoom link!
Please sign up for a Miro board account before coming to the workshop.
We will open with brief discussion on AI technology, AI and Animals and sub-track familiarization.
Participants form teams in Zoom break-out rooms and choose a sub-track.
Participants build Sci-Fi ‘narratives’ from the chosen sub-track with the help of a template.
Group participants more fully develop a digital sketch or diagram of their design fiction concept based around the narrative they have built.
At the end of the workshop, participants will share designs and discuss together.
‘Coffee breaks’ will be included.

Proposed Outcomes

Each group will leave with a Science Fiction AI and Animal narrative they’ve created.
Each group’s narrative will be added to the A(I)nimal-Centred AI Jam research website. Participants can consent to have their work or a description of their work displayed on the website prior to the workshop. The participant sign-up process will involve a consent process. All works will be credited to the participants.
A dynamic and interactive digital narrative will also be created with the participants contributions, built by digital artist and writer, Jason Nelson.
The research this workshop is based on is being expanded via Alinta Krauth’s fellowship at Arizona State University’s Centre for Science and the Imagination, aligned with their ‘Applied Sci-Fi project’. As such, participants may be contacted again to see if they are interested in taking part in further interactions.
We intend to offer future A(I)nimal-Centred AI Jams, refining the workshop based on participant feedback.

Consent to Participate

By signing up to this workshop, you consent to sharing your group’s final design with the workshop hosts, and to have a picture of your group’s design displayed as a workshop outcome on the A(I)nimal-Centred AI Jam website. The image and idea can be credited with the names of the group participants, or simply as a group number. You may choose to edit how your credit is displayed for this image on the website before publication.

Please contact our hosts to discuss this, should you have any questions or concerns.

Methodology: Science Fiction world-building as design fiction

This workshop promotes the use of a ‘Sci-Fi- design fiction’ approach that allows participants to engage in world-building and fleshing out scenarios exploring animal-focused tools or uses of AI. This approach will involve narrative-building creative practice techniques such as stakeholder characterisations, creative writing prompts and collaborative world building and to apply these to a scenario involving human/animal interaction.

AI has long been a concept associated with the Sci-Fi genre. The speculative storytelling and imaginary futures of Sci-Fi have left an indelible mark on the course of technological progress, extending its impact to AI development. Sci-Fi is often seen as an important method to help humanity consider the ethical implications of AI by imagining possible future scenarios. For example, two Sci-Fi authors were employed in 2023 by the UK Ministry of Defence to write short stories about future technologies and implications on warfare. Acknowledging this symbiotic interplay between speculative visions and real-world innovations, a growing multi-disciplinary field of practitioners, including Sci-Fi writers, futurists, scholars, and technologists, now employ science fiction as a cognitive instrument, not only for contemplation on future societies, but also for proactive application as a tool for innovation and foresight. Importantly, Sci-Fi narratives are also employed by writers to work through ideas of technological engagements between humans and other species. In this way, Sci-Fi, as a thinking tool, can help us to think-through interspecies scenarios that may be currently outside, or on the cusp of, the realms of science and technology.

Design fiction has conceptual similarities to the Sci-Fi genre. It is a creative approach to design that leverages storytelling and narrative techniques to imaginatively envision and explore possible futures, often emphasizing the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies and innovations. It blurs the boundaries between design and Sci-Fi narratives, allowing designers, researchers, and thinkers to articulate and visualize potential scenarios and artefacts that might not yet exist. Design fiction provokes critical reflection, offering a unique lens through which to engage with the complexities of our rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Poster


Background

Connecting Animals and AI: a question of ethics

In recent years, use of AI technology has swiftly raised many significant ethical questions and concerns regarding AI/human interaction. Within this concern, a smaller number of scholars have made recent calls to action asking AI-related fields to undertake interspecies relations more carefully, and to better consider the implications their technological tools might have on species other than humans. There is a fast-growing and generally unmet need for more concern from AI fields towards their direct and indirect effects on individual animals as well as entire ecosystems. Current research on the use of AI in spaces that involve animals, or the impacts of AI on animals, include a wide range of examples, such as use of AI to control or monitor animals, direct interactions between animals and AI, or AI technology made for unrelated purposes that have unintended impacts on animals including indirectly affecting our ethical feelings towards animals.

The use of AI systems monitoring animals in factory farming, while by no means the only example, gives us a good indication of some of the many ways in which AI and sensors are being used in collaboration to interact with animals, including forms of ‘machine vision’, ‘machine listening’, and AI-made decisions. For example, AI systems are employed to monitor various aspects of factory farm animal life, including body weight, body temperature, vocalizations and/or other communication signals. Machine learning models have been designed to recognize disease and investigate mortality rates, as well as to visually identify medical issues such as parasites. In certain instances, AI can directly manipulate animals, sometimes with intentions that do not prioritize their well-being, administering electric shocks, emitting sounds, and capturing and sorting animals based on characteristics.

Given the fast-evolving nature of AI research, while there has been a rise in calls for ethically-sound approaches to AI engineering and implementation regarding animals, the actual practice of implementing strong animal ethics into large-scale AI projects is still emergent and needs further discussion. We find several possible examples under development such as: using AI to search for crop types producing plant proteins with physical parameters that mimic meat, with the hope being this research ultimately leads to less animals being subjected to factory farming. For a further example, AI systems that can predict the toxicity of novel chemicals are being developed: research which holds the potential to reduce chemical testing on animals.

There is also a further potential positive avenue for AI systems, which relates to the concept of developing empathy towards animals from humans, and promote positive anthropomorphism. The potential importance of this use of AI is based on our human notion of needing to see other creatures as ‘persons’ or as ‘minded’ in order to be caring and empathetic towards them. Many people hold beliefs that deny the mindedness of animals. Therefore, we see uses of AI that point towards decoding of animal signals, or even interspecies communication, as having the potential to drive empathy. Project CETI is one such example, a large research project still under development that is aimed at using AI to decode whale song. Part of their mission is to consider what it might mean for human/animal relations if we could partially understand what whales are ‘saying’. Humans have long yearned to talk with the animals: It is a concept seen across Sci-Fi, fantasy, children's stories, poetry, and a multitude of other literature and art forms, and one that could radically shift our understandings, ethics, religions, and cultural interactions with other species. We see these as inspiring and thought-provoking examples to follow as part of a workshop on Sci-Fi design fictions for AI/animal futures.

Pilot Study: The Flying Fox Translator

Before this workshop, a pilot study was conducted to explore how ‘Sci-Fi-led design fiction’ ideation techniques could generate new directions for our AI-focused creative practice. This process resulted in the concept of a ‘translator’ for flying fox vocalizations that interpreted flying fox vocalizations into human equivalent concepts. Building from the design fiction process, the concept was actualized into a web-based application that can recognize seven different flying fox signals, and generate a translation, based on the vocalization classifications of Christesen and Nelson. The purpose of the tool was to promote empathy and personhood of flying foxes to the public in areas of Australia where flying foxes and humans live in close proximity – highly contested spaces in which flying foxes can be openly hated and demonized by the public. This pilot idea serves as the inspiration for the kinds of design fictions that can be built and addressed in this workshop. prototype prototype


Organisers

Dr Alinta Krauth

Dr. Alinta Krauth (PhD) is a creative technologist and researcher of ethical digital practices involving more-than-human participants and situations, originally from the ‘outback’ of Queensland, Australia. She is an Associate Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. She is interested in how digital art may be applied to highlight animal and environmental relationality and materiality. Much of her research involves ecological themes and scientific fieldwork alongside ecology experts and wildlife rescue organisations. Her recent work on interspecies communications and decoding the vocalisations of grey-headed flying foxes using AI techniques is currently shortlisted for Europe’s prestigious major creative technology award, the S+T+ART Prize through Ars Electronica. Her academic, literary, creative, and hybrid works have been exhibited and published globally, including featuring in The SAGE Encyclopedia of The Internet, Electronic Book Review Journal, and Social Alternatives Journal. Selected recent installations of her creative works have been seen in ZAZ10st Gallery Times Square NY, Science Gallery Detroit Detroit USA, The Glucksman Gallery Cork Ireland, HOTA Gold Coast Australia, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich Switzerland, Gallery 3.14 Bergen Norway, Art Laboratory Berlin Berlin Germany, The Powerhouse Sydney Australia.

Alinta with flying foxes Dr Jason Nelson

Dr. Jason Nelson (PhD) is a researcher of creative technologies and cultural uses of artificial intelligence technologies. He is also the creator of wondrous digital poems and fictions, builder of art games and all manner of digital art creatures. He is an Associate Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway and Adjunct Academic at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around the globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list, such as the Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize, a Webby Award, The Digital Writing Prize, organizational boards he frequents, such as the Australia Council Literature Board and the Electronic Literature Organization, and fellowships he’s adventured into, such as a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Bergen, and a Moore Fellowship at the National University of Ireland. Jason

Related websites

Jason Nelson: www.secrettechnology.com
Alinta Krauth: www.alintakrauth.com

Contact us directly at alintakrauth(at)gmail(dot)com


Cicada Mountain


Connected: Birth-Death-Rebirth

Connected: Birth-Death-Rebirth by Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo & John Alberse
with collaborator Wesley Taylor

Date: 2023
Media: Virtual Reality, Projection, Custom-made hand scanning box
Find the Artists



Connected: Birth-Death-Rebirth is an art installation that extends the physical environment with physical, virtual, and networked environments. It creates networked aesthetics through a virtual world consisting of various new creatures, captured hands of the audience. Connected is an extract of our body and generates virtual lives (birds, trees, and snakes). In the project, the new organisms created by audience members build their society and interact with each other in the virtual world. Their behaviors and interactions mimic the relationships of nature. Some are active, vibrant, and fast, but others are quiet, passive, and slow. In addition, a small group of them is neutral and indifferent. They are integrated bodily, consciously, pre-consciously, and intertwined with the virtual world.

The installation consists of a white box, a projection screen, and a VR headset. The audience can participate in the project actively or passively. They can create new organisms by putting their hands or objects into the white box in front of the projection screen. Their input becomes a flock of birds, a group of trees, or snakes in the projected virtual environment. Participants can get immersed in the virtual environment through a projection or a VR headset. In the virtual environment with a VR headset, they can navigate the world of Connected: Birth-Death-Rebirth by walking or teleporting using the Oculus controllers. They see the dynamism of the trees, birds, and snakes in the environment. They are born, grow, interact, dead, and are reborn in the environment. The world in the VR headset provides a dynamic immersion where the mind, body, and environment interweave and communicate with each other inside of technically mediated, spatially enclosed, and sensuously interactive computational environments. Connected The Artists:

Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo is an interactive artist/researcher focusing on aesthetics of interactive experience. Currently she is an associate professor in the School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts and a faculty fellow in the Institute for Applied Creativity and the Center for Health Systems & Design at Texas A&M University. Seo received a Ph.D. in Interactive Art and Technology from Simon Fraser University in Canada and an MFA in Computer Arts from School of Visual Arts (SVA). With interdisciplinary, interactive art practice, Seo investigates the intersection between body, nature and technology. Seo has been focusing on the aesthetic qualities of human experience, the relationships that emerge through interactions within artworks, the underlying beauty and pattern inherent in the nature. Seo has chosen interactive art for her creative practice and research in particular as it encourages immersive and embodied relationships within a work of art and with participants. Connected


DE-compose II

DE-compose II by donna davis

Year: 2022
Media: single channel video
Sound Design by Luke Lickfold
Find the Artists



…”a poetic, meditative video work that foregrounds the mystery and beauty of interspecies relationships and organic decay.” (Dr. Lisa Chandler, University of Sunshine Coast, Australia)

DE-compose II explores some of the hidden ecological players, such as microbes and fungi, who perform intrinsic roles in the health of our planet. Often associated with words like pest, germ, rot or decay, these valuable organisms create beauty, in their dynamic and transformative actions recycling nutrients to support new life.

Challenging often unfavorable connotations this work uses imagined imagery of microbes and fungal hyphae, overlaid with an evocative soundscape to create a vibrant and beautiful kaleidoscope of decay in an effort to challenge our unconscious bias with respect to such notions. The work invites the viewer to consider their own bias and how this may inform their ecological understanding and action; inviting contemplation about interspecies relationships, roles and accountability within the biosphere.

The work was created during …”Davis’ long-term artist residency with the Wood, Termite, Fungi (WTF) international research project led by the University of Miami. Davis’ artworks have evolved from field trips, research, conversations, and interactions with the research team, from which she produces multilayered works weaving project information into imaginative digital pieces that engender a wider consideration of the interconnectedness of all life. … in so doing, she asks us to value the hidden players vital to these ongoing natural cycles, and to perceive our intrinsic interconnectedness with the non-human world.”

“…[Davis]… encourages us to shift from our human-centric perspectives to reflect on the activities of species that we might find repellent, or simply overlook. Instead, Davis enables us to perceive them as beautiful, significant life-forms whose actions in breaking down dead trees contribute to the carbon cycle that is intrinsic to sustaining life on Earth.”

(Excerpts from ‘Deconstructing Decay: Donna Davis’ DE-compose works’, by Adjunct Associate Professor Lisa Chandler University of Sunshine Coast, Australia, August 2022.)

Created in response to an art-science residency embedded within The Wood, Termite & Fungi Project, an international research project, led by University of Miami, studying tropical deadwood carbon fluxes, in order to improve current carbon models used for climate forecast modelling. Donna Davis The Artist:

Donna Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines human and non-human relationships with respect to ecological health. Exploring the intersections between art and science she is often embedded within ecological research projects. Her work tells stories that examine the science through a creative lens; exploring imagined futures and constructing new ways of ‘seeing’ complex natural systems and our role within them.

Davis has undertaken a number of residencies, including: Queensland State Archives, Brisbane Botanic Gardens, Queensland Herbarium, Department of Environment and Science and is currently artist in resident on projects with Australian Tropical Herbarium and University of Miami. Davis holds a Bachelor of Arts (ART) from Curtin University and has works held in both public and private collections. She has exhibited widely in both solo and selected group exhibitions; and had her work feature in state and national touring exhibitions.

Instagram


Dolphins in the Reservoir

Dolphins in the Reservoir
Will Luers (coding and images), Hazel Smith (text) and Roger Dean (sound)

Dolphins in the Reservoir: Play the interactive work here
(Opens in new tab)

Date: 2022
Media: An interactive recombinant work of text, image and sound.
Link to Will Luers
Link to Hazel Smith & Roger Dean Dolphins Dolphins in the Reservoir is an interactive and recombinant work that employs moving images, text and sound. It envisages a society stretching into the future, through fragmented and transitory evocations of what our society is like now and how we might understand it. It confronts the many social challenges (climate, disease, authoritarianism and technological change) we face through the subjective, contradictory and often uncanny experiences of individuals. Saturated with media, the individual experiences a multimodal montage of the imaginal and the mundane, the institutional and the vernacular, the dystopian and utopian, the human and the non-human; discourses over which they have limited control.

The interface, a programmed montage of media elements, evokes a murky, liminal realm. The piece is structured in six distinct cycles, which repeat with considerable variation. V/users can either drive the piece with clicks, or use the autoplay facility. In either case they can click and drag to rearrange elements in each cycle.

The screened text ranges between short narratives, poems and aphoristic statements contained in boxes of varying sizes that both complement and jostle against each other. Thematically it passes through six topics that impinge on society now and the development of future societies. These topics are challenges to health, the environment, and our fast-eroding democracy; our attempts to educate order out of chaos; philosophical and scientific ways of thinking about consciousness; and the possibilities and challenges the future presents including the rise of AI. A distinct metaphorical text about dolphins, which transmutes many of the ideas in the boxed text, creates a dialogue between the human and non-human on several different levels (mammalian, technological and environmental). It consists of fourteen sections that are sequenced one per cycle and then repeat.

Animated loops with images suggesting a passing material age (container ships, tanks, oil rigs) are layered with those of an information age (mapped and encoded models of bodies, molecular structures and virtual architecture. A single cycle of the work grows from isolated media fragments towards a dense plurality and diversity, arriving at a composition of inclusive abstraction, before returning again to the singular and fragmented.

The musical narratives move at different paces and with varying relationship to text, image and user interaction. The three preformed musical sources juxtapose environmental and machine sounds, acoustic and digitally transformed instrumental sound. They also include sound progressions that sonify the statistics of waves of Covid-19 in the world at large, juxtaposed with those of one particular country. One of the three preformed tracks features trumpet playing by internationally renowned soloist John Wallace, a long term collaborator in (austra)LYSIS, the creative ensemble of which all three authors are part. As the work progresses, the sound fields become more dense, though they continually fight for survival, and occasionally become submerged. They also undergo increasing real-time and variable transformations, so that the textures change over long periods.

The juxtaposition and multilayering of text, images and sound also employs polysemy and synaesthesia to enhance multiple dimensions of sensation and understanding.

The Artists:

Will Luers is digital artist, writer and media arts teacher. In the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver, he teaches multimedia authoring, creative programming, digital storytelling and digital cinema. As an artist-researcher in academic and experimental digital publishing, he created the international online journal The Digital Review and is the current Managing Editor of its sister journal, electronic book review.

Hazel Smith is a poet, performer, new media artist and academic. She has published five volumes of poetry and short prose including The Erotics of Geography (with CD Rom), Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii, 2008, Word Migrants, Giramondo, 2016 and Ecliptical, Spineless Wonders, Sydney, 2022. Hazel has published two CDs of poetry and numerous performance and multimedia works; she has also performed and broadcast her work extensively nationally and internationally. In 2017, her multimedia collaboration with Will Luers and Roger Dean, novelling, was shortlisted for the Turn on Literature Prize, an initiative of the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. In 2018 novelling was awarded First Prize in the international Electronic Literature Organisation’s Robert Coover Award. Hazel is Emeritus Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University. She has authored several academic books including The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship, Routledge, 2016. She is a founding member of the sound and multimedia ensemble austraLYSIS and her website is at www.australysis.com.

Roger Dean is a composer/improviser/performer and researcher. He has created, presented and published several hundred compositions and sound works for intermedia art collaborations, and made numerous recordings. He is a represented composer of the Australian Music Centre, of which he has also been chair. His creative work appears on sixty LP/CD releases. Dean’s output ranges from acoustic to electroacoustic composition both for performers and for real-time algorithmic generation, as well as acousmatic (completely pre-composed and digitally recorded) music for live projection in concert. His music is often computer-interactive, and much involves improvisation. Many of his compositions are intermedia works for radio, DVD, and the Internet.

Dean’s composition and improvisation is deeply informed by his breadth of performing experience, both as pianist and laptop artist, and formerly as double bass player. He has worked in most of the leading new music ensembles in London and Sydney. He is founder and director of the sound and multimedia ensemble LYSIS, which became austraLYSIS when it moved to Australia in 1989. Dean has also been very active in European and Australian jazz.


Ghost Plant Radio

Ghost Plant Radio by Polina Enuvesta

Explore the interactive work on Mozilla Hubs
(Opens in new tab)

Year: 2021
Media: XR Data Visualisation in Mozilla Hubs
Link to Polina Enuvesta

The Ghost Plant, also known as Monotropastrum, is an unusual flower that has white stem and leaves and is unable to perform photosynthesis. It assembles mycoheterotrophic relationships with the kingdom of fungi in order to survive. Plant and fungus populations are known to distribute information across long distances. Underground connections create a kind of communication network which allows us to imagine how nonhuman agents interact. What will ghost plant radio broadcast across Japan?

The concept is presented as creative data visualization in XR. Open biodiversity data from gbif.org is used to create a 3D communication network model in the boundaries of Japan island, exposed in Mozilla Hubs. Ghost Plant Radio The Artist:

Polina Enuvesta is an emerging digital artist with a degree in Sociology and professional retraining in Moscow School of Contemporary Arts as a specialist in New Media. The main theme covered by the artist is reimagining technology by the means of speculative design, 3D and VR in order to explore alternate ways of development. Enuvesta’s practice focuses on preserving the value of hand-crafted in digital environments, poetic imagery and overcoming the feeling of fatality by keeping connection between human, nature and technology. In 2023 Polina Enuvesta took part in Digital Air artist residency by CCI Fabrika and 8XR.


Guardian of the mirage

Guardian Of The Mirage by Liudmila Fridman

Year: 2022
Media: Generative Art
Link to Luidmila Fridman



“Guardian of the mirage” belongs to the collection "terra_futura_vita.exe ". I began its creation, inspired by cyberculture and its influence on the construction of concepts for the future of humanity. Thinking about the coming era, I discourse of spirituality and materialistic tendencies of modern science, fantasize about the synergy of the emotional and the synthesized, about the junction of the natural and the innovative, how once imagined scenarios can be made true and evaluated empirically. This artwork is an attempt at reflection on the development of network technologies. It shows a metaphysical mirage materializing into reality under the supervision of a guardian. The silent caretaker is connected to a network that communicates the surrounding high-tech facilities and the natural environment.

I draw attention to utopian theories of modern reality transformation, generated by transhumanism, which turns an individual out of a subject of social and spiritual relations into an object of techno-informational modifications that has no bodily and local limitations. Thus, many concepts of overcoming physical limits, on the one hand, reveal new ideas and have the potential to control the evolution of human nature, and the process of formation of a connected cluster of information technologies, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies and cognitive sciences can be the apogee of the development of a cybernetic society. On the other hand, it generates a number of ethical problems approved by the anthropocentric principle of being.

In this regard, such main question as: "Will there be a need for a human spirit in all–encompassing holistic view of the planet, the macrocosm and itself - as a cosmic being, the subject of cosmic evolution?” is reflected in this artwork.

I invite the viewer into the prosperous pictures of the distant future, in which creativity, spirituality, faith and idealism are opposed to the burden of hegemonization, pragmatism and materialism of the current era, indulge in dreams of the times when a person's understanding of himself as part of a single harmonious cyber community will become the norm, and rethinking physical boundaries in conjunction with humanism and sustainable development will turn out to be relevant trends for research. Lucien.Art The Artist:

Liudmila Fridman is a visual artist and photographer who uses a pseudonym “Lucien.Art”. Her specializations are digital art projects, short music videos, mixed media projects and photography. In collection “terra_futura_vita.exe” Lucien.Art uses generative art and data visualizations (including artificial intelligence and machine learning based works), author's methods of color correction, as well as sound engineering. Forming images and soundings, she shows mirages of abstract cybersociety. Sensations, elements, time, sounds, people and neural networks are woven together in her digital art project. The author pays special attention to the phenomena of “posthuman” and "cyberreality", which, in her opinion, are the keys to understanding the socio-cultural consequences of the technocratic era. Lucien.Art depicts how humanity, using the achievements of the modern cluster of sciences, creates new spaces for life, cognition, creativity and communication. Her works remind us that we are all manifested as particles of a single world, and our planet is our common heritage. Each of the artworks is an attempt to rethink the problematic of a technocratic utopia and imagine a future reality that opens the way to fantastic opportunities.


Lifeline

Lifeline by Krista Leigh Steinke

Year: 2021
Media: Digital Video
Audio, graphics, and musical score by Sherman Finch
Link to Krista Steinke
Link to Sherman Finch

“Lifeline” is an abstract visualization of the flow of water – our planet’s lifeline. In this piece, each line of video is a sample extracted from footage of various bodies of water collected across the country. Similar, in a way, to a doctor drawing blood or a scientist collecting a water specimen to test the health of a lake. In the resulting work, the layered audio of a heartbeat monitor draws parallels to the human body as lines move across the composition like veins or air passages. The 5-minute. video starts slow, changes, builds to a crescendo, then slows down to end or repeat. Lifeline The Artists:

Krista Leigh Steinke is an interdisciplinary lens-based artist working in moving image, experimental photography, installation, and collage. She regularly exhibits and screens her work in museums, galleries, and film festivals across the country, as well as internationally. Her work has received support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Glasscock Center for Humanities, and a Fellowship from the Howard Foundation. She has been invited to be a visiting artist at numerous colleges and universities and has participated in several art and media festivals as an exhibiting artist, speaker, or curator. She currently teaches at Texas A&M and divides her time between Houston, TX and rural New York State.

Sherman Finch is an artist, musician, and educator with over 20 years of experience. His work ranges from interactive research, kinetic sculpture, sound art, musical composition, to graphic design. Since 2000, he has collaborated with Steinke on several film and video projects as a sound artist, interactive programmer, and graphic designer. Their past projects have been screened and exhibited both nationally and internationally. He currently teaches in the College of Art & Media at Sam Houston University.


Listening in the Wild

Listening in the Wild: Reimagined Listening in the Wild by Leah Barclay
With Lyndon Davis & Tricia King

Listening in the Wild: See the work here
(Opens in new tab)

Year: 2020-2022
Media: Sound with imagery
Find the Artist Listening Listening in the Wild: Reimagined Listening in the Wild is a series of immersive soundscapes and site-specific photography exploring environments across the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. The project was commissioned for Horizon Festival 2020 in Australia and produced live and streamed for listeners at home as remote experiences during Covid-19 lockdowns. These experiences are created by artists Lyndon Davis, Dr Leah Barclay and Dr Tricia King as transient listening experiences interwoven with Kabi Kabi stories. The locations include virtual sound walks through Eudlo Creek National Park, a journey along the Maroochy River and an ocean expedition from Mooloolaba Beach with all audio produced and mixed live by Leah Barclay. Each soundscape is accompanied by site-specific photography by documentary photographer Tricia King.

These virtual listening experiences are interwoven with Kabi Kabi stories from Lyndon Davis and investigate how remote embodied experiences of natural environments can facilitate ecological empathy, cultural knowledge and connection to place. Listening in the Wild builds on a large-body of research in immersive media art responding to ecological crisis and climate action. Under the cultural guidance of Kabi Kabi artist Lyndon Davis, Listening in the Wild explored new ways of using virtual technologies with live soundscapes and site-specific photography to connect audiences to locations and cultural knowledge across the Sunshine Coast. The project developed new tools for streaming audio in a high-quality format and asked how we can appropriately and effectively use audio-visual experiences to connect communities to place and develop a deeper understanding of cultural and environmental knowledge. Listening The project was awarded the 2021 APRA Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music – the highest accolade for experimental music in Australia. Judges’ comments included ‘There are no projects more exciting and necessary in Australia at this time.’ Listening The Artist:

Leah Barclay is a sound artist, designer and researcher who works at the intersection of art, science and technology. Leah's research and creative work over the last decade has investigated innovative approaches to recording and disseminating the soundscapes of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to inform conservation, scientific research and public engagement. Her work explores ways we can use creativity, new technologies and emerging science to reconnect communities to the environment and inspire climate action. Leah has been the recipient of numerous awards and her work has been commissioned, performed and exhibited to wide acclaim internationally by organisations including the Smithsonian Museum, UNESCO, Ear to the Earth, Streaming Museum, Al Gore’s Climate Reality and the IUCN. Leah’s augmented reality sound installations have been presented across the world from Times Square in New York City to the Eiffel Tower in Paris for COP21. Leah leads several research projects including Biosphere Soundscapes and River Listening that focus on advancing the field of ecoacoustics. The design of these interdisciplinary projects are responsive to the needs of collaborating communities and involve the development of new technologies including remote sensing devices for the rainforest canopy and hydrophone recording arrays in aquatic ecosystems. Listening


Men in Jeans

Men in Jeans by Sophie Hilbert

Year: 2018
Media: Digital Video
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A digital video montage showing men staging themselves and their jeans in muddy settings. Originally shown as YouTube content, the insight into the online community around such content highlights scenes in which protagonists appear alone in nature. Omnipresent marketing campaigns that associate jeans with a particular brand of masculinity and myths of the working class are assimilated into a playful mix of mud, nature, body and pants that goes beyond the intended consumer relationship. Thereby casting the environment as a creative partner to play and engage with. The diegetic sound was subsequently recorded in a studio. Men in Jeans The Artist:

Sophie Hilbert (* 1996 in Werdau) studied in the fine arts department of Kunsthochschule Kassel and was a participant in the Goldrausch program for women artists Berlin 2022. Her video works were shown at the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image (Frankfurt am Main) Internationale Kurzfilmtagen Oberhausen (online), Werkleitz Festival and Kommunale Galerie Berlin. She is a member of the exhibition collective f r e e e n t r y and Tokonoma, a platform for young art and clubculture in Kassel.


Mikrokosmika

Mikrokosmika by Alejandro Brianza, Jessica Rodríguez & Luis Guzmán

Year: 2015
Media: Mono-channel digital video
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Events occur, happen, and overlap constantly – most of which are not given any social, cultural or personal importance. Miniature worlds escape our sight (and all senses) daily. Mikrokosmika tries to evoke the feeling of attending to one of these miniature universes, and the casual behaviors generated by their habitants in their fast-paced lives. Imagine... How interesting it would be to listen through a microscope? Mikrokosmika The Artists:

Alejandro Brianza [Argentina]
Composer, researcher and teacher. Master in Methodology of Scientific Research. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Humanities – Music at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral. He teaches at the Universidad del Salvador, Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de Lanús, where he is also part of research related to sound technology, electroacoustic music, artistic research and contemporary languages, of which he has given talks, lectures and workshops at congresses, festivals and various national and international academic meetings.

Jessica Arianne Rodriguez [Mexico]
Multimedia artist, designer and researcher. She is currently studying a doctorate program in Communications, New Media, & Cultural Studies at McMaster. Her practice and research projects focus on audiovisual practices such as visual music, electronic literature, video experimentation, sound art, visualization/sonification, live coding, among others, collaborating with composers, writers, designers, and other visual artists.

Luis Manuel Guzmán [Mexico]
With a degree in arts and a keen user of computers and systems, he is interested in the implications of creativity and programming for activism and social development. The use of open source platforms and web spaces is the current forum for his research.

The collaboration:

Andamio is a collaboration platform where producers from different backgrounds can be found, generating long distance projects. Sound is the basic element that we understand as image and text at the same time. The raw material of Andamio is the confrontation of these codes, apparently contradictory but that share narratives, both in construction and production.

Andamio works within three lines: production, research and education. All are related not only to the union and develop of sound in other disciplines, but also in the use of different technologies to produce experiences. Such experiences are shared through our memories, forming constantly mutating narratives. Collaboration is an axis of work in Andamio, even-though we have people that constantly work in the projects, Andamio also seeks to work with other artists that can provide alternative perspectives.


Re:Peat



Re:Peat by Anne Yoncha
Collaborative sound piece with composer Daniel Townsend

Year: 2022
Media: Stereo microscopy images of preserved sphagnum moss plant from conserved peatland, field recordings from Latvasuo & Pikkusaarisuo peatland extraction sites, hyperspectral imaging of soil core samples read as graphic music notation.
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Re:Peat is a recent EDUFI Fulbright Finland Fellowship research project focusing on peatland extraction and restoration in Finland. Our hyperspectral images were made with a Specim FX-17 camera using wavelengths of 900 – 1700 nanometers. These images allow us to see details in soil structure invisible to the naked eye. We hear two sonified core samples, the unrestored sample panned left and restored panned right, moving low to high. Ash, an industrial byproduct from burning peat for power and heat at Toppila station in Oulu, has been used to treat the soil, de-acidifying it and perhaps leading to a viable novel ecosystem for reindeer forage.

My work combines experimental art + ecological science to explore mechanics of plant physiology. By translating these processes into artworks, I aim to build affinity with unfamiliar ecologies apparently out of sight or possessing different temporalities than our own. My practice combines digital sensing technology, such as bio-data sonification, and analog processes including painting with ink I make from locally-sourced plant matter – so the materials used in the piece add another layer of data.

When public understanding of ecological problems is limited, creative artists have been historically successful in uncovering background narratives, thereby shaping how scientifically-declared emergencies are perceived and acted upon. How do we balance a sense of urgency in the time of climate change with potential unintended consequences of our interventions? Re:Peat The Artist:

Anne Yoncha (US) is Assistant Professor of Art at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. Born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, she earned her MFA at the University of Montana and recently completed a Fulbright fellowship at the Natural Resources Institute Finland, working with restorationists to make collaborative art-science work about former peat extraction sites outside Oulu. Her practice combines digital sensing technology, such as bio-data sonification, and analog, traditional processes including painting with ink she makes from locally-sourced plant matter. Her ongoing research with the HAB (High Altitude Bioprospecting) working group began in Fall 2019 at Field_Notes, a residency of Finland’s Bio Art Society at Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in subarctic Lapland, where she worked with artists, biologists, and programmers to attempt to detect high-altitude microbes using a heli-kite. Outside the studio she can often be found doing another kind of environmental “research” via bicycle. Re:Peat


slugs'n'tongues

slugs'n'tongues by Margareta Klose & Peter Várnai (Studio Matchka)

Year:2022
Media: Oral poem animation



we are more-than-human within
our microbial spacetimes
we are heterotopia
more-than-human relations

slugs'n'tongues considers a fantasmatic parallel reality where (multi)species morph between slugs and tongues like microbes. As they do, they produce velar, uvular and glottal noises, and perform love poems.

slugs'n'tongues was exhibited at Parallel Vienna, 18th Athens Animfest, Best Austrian Animation festival, Tricky Women Festival Vienna and Fest Anča in Žilina, Slovakia. Studio Matchka The Artists:

Since 2022 the duo Studio Matchka, Margareta Klose & Peter Várnai have been creating poetic 3D animations of fantasmatic parallel realities where multispecies morph between cyborgs and surreal creatures, performing love poems and sounds. We freak the boundaries between human beings, microbes, viruses, genders, animals, things, machines, science fiction and science facts, while freaking out about the dichotomies that constitute us in a lifelong transformation process full of surprising kinships and caring with each other.


The Museum of Ecological Racism and Human-Animal Connection

The Museum of Ecological Racism and Human-Animal Connection
by Jaewook Lee

The Museum of Ecological Racism and Human-Animal Connection: Explore the VR work here
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Year: 2022
Media: Virtual Reality Virtual Exhibition
Find the Artist Jaewook Lee The Museum of Ecological Racism and Human-Animal Connection is an innovative virtual exhibition within the Metaverse that confronts the intricate and frequently underappreciated issues surrounding environmental justice, the struggles of marginalized communities, and the symbiotic relationship between human and non-human species. Utilizing the Metaverse, the Spatial.io platform, this VR exhibition aims to provide an immersive and boundary-defying experience, bringing together individuals from various backgrounds to engage in meaningful discussions about the systemic environmental challenges communities worldwide face.

As an artist, my motivation is rooted in the conviction that art can catalyze significant conversations, raise awareness, and challenge conventional viewpoints. Through the Spatial.io Metaverse platform, I aim to establish an all-encompassing and captivating virtual environment, enabling visitors to delve into the unsettling reality of environmental racism and the deep connections that unite us with the natural world.

This VR space seeks to illuminate the stories and struggles of those most affected by these challenges, highlighting the need for equitable solutions and sustainable practices. The Water Justice Hall urges visitors to confront the realities of environmental injustice and reflect on their roles and responsibilities in addressing these issues.

The Museum of Ecological Racism and Human-Animal Connection transcends the limitations of traditional exhibitions by fostering a sense of global unity and shared responsibility. By immersing visitors in the pressing issues of our time, it aims to inspire empathy, understanding, and collective action toward a more equitable and environmentally-conscious future. As an artist, I hope this virtual exhibition will serve as a platform for change, encouraging individuals from all walks of life to join in pursuing environmental justice and preserving our shared planet.

The Artist:

Jaewook Lee is an artist using AR, VR, 3D animation, video game, and video installation as artistic media. Lee’s work addresses issues of environmental justice and presents the intertwined relationship between culture, nature, and politics. Lee is the recipient of awards such as the 4th SINAP (Sindoh Artist Support Program) and the SeMA Emerging Artists and Curators Supporting Program by the Seoul Museum of Art. Lee has participated in exhibitions, talks, performances, and screenings at such venues as Santa Fe Art Institute (2022), Museo de Antofagasta in Chile (2020), Hong-Gah Museum in Taiwan (2018), Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2017), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2017), MEINBLAU Projektraum in Berlin (2016), NURTUREart in New York (2014), and the Museo Juan Manuel Blanes in Montevideo (2014), among others. Sculpture Magazine featured Lee’s work in May 2017. Lee’s work is in the permanent collections of several institutions, including the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Ansan, South Korea, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, Jordan. Lee received MFAs from Carnegie Mellon University and the School of Visual Arts. Lee is an Associate Professor of New Media Art at Northern Arizona University.


The Patterns of the Past - The Promise of Tomorrow

The Patterns of the Past - The Promise of Tomorrow
by Grayson Cooke
Sound composition by Dugal McKinnon

Year: 2022
Media: Digital Video
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“The Patterns of the Past – The Promise of Tomorrow”, was commissioned by Geoscience Australia to represent Australian innovation in using satellite data for climate science at the COP27 climate conference in Egypt in 2022. Produced by media artist Grayson Cooke and composer Dugal McKinnon, the film uses satellite data from the Digital Earth Australia and Digital Earth Africa platforms to demonstrate how Earth Observation contributes to strategies for both visualising and measuring change, and supporting better decision making on climate adaptation and mitigation. The film shows changing patterns of landscapes and waterways between 2018 and 2021, tracking key environments in Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales in Australia, and in the African countries of Nigeria, Botswana, Mali, Senegal, Algeria, Tunisia, Namibia, Ethiopia and Mauritania. Cooke The Artists:

Grayson Cooke is an interdisciplinary scholar and media artist, Associate Professor of Media at Southern Cross University. He has exhibited and performed internationally, in major forums including the Japan Media Arts Festival and the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York. www.graysoncooke.com

Dugal McKinnon is the Deputy Director of the New Zealand School of Music and Co-Director of the Lilburn Studios for Electronic Music. He is a composer and sound artist whose output encompasses electronic, acoustic and text media. Together, Dugal and Grayson have produced audiovisual works screened and exhibited around the world.


Vaches

Vaches by Jean-Michel Rolland

Year: 2018 –
Media: Audiovisual ‘photovideographies’
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“The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.” (Leonardo da Vinci)

‘Vaches’ is a series of 5 videos that questions our relationship to the animal world. Are we hopelessly carnivorous or is veganism the future of humanity? Will we ever be compassionate enough to give up our animality and satisfy our appetites without killing?

The videos in the ‘Vaches’ series are what I call photovideographies, they are photographs (or photographic series) to which I give a temporality. Since January 2018, I have decided to reinvest the still image as a basic material for new audiovisual experiments aimed at demonstrating that video art can be based on snapshots. Photographic art thus changes status by acquiring temporality and becomes video art. In the history of non-digital photography, only the succession of still images, such as chronophotography, made it possible to introduce a deployment in time. But with digital art it is possible to achieve a chrono-visual variation by asking the colors to move within the pixels of the image.

By manipulating the pixels of the original images according to algorithms generated with Processing software, they represent the torments that we inflict on so-called cattle animals. Vaches The Artist:

Jean-Michel Rolland is a French artist born in 1972. A long time a musician and a painter, he brings together his two passions - the sound and the image - in digital arts since 2010.

Through video artworks, generative art, audiovisual performances and interactive installations, he questions the temporality, a genuine fourth dimension inherent to moving image, as well as the duality between his two favorite mediums, the sound and the visual.

His formal research is guided by the desire to reveal the intrinsic nature of our perceptual environment and to twist it to better give new realities to the world around us.

His works, always very experimental, are a reflection of the sometimes unexpected internal world of their author and are however the object of an important diffusion abroad. Several have been rewarded for their originality, by United Nations University (Dresden Germany), Digital Graffiti in Miami (USA), Multimatograf (Russia), dokumentART (Germany and Poland), the University of North Carolina (USA), Festival do Minuto (Brazil), Artaq (France), ArchiShorts (Canada) and The International Video Art Review (Poland).


We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us
by Eamon O'Kane

Year: 2017-2019
Media: Three-screen video installation (video extract)
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We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us, explores the psychology of climate change and carbon as a material. This video piece is presented as a three-screen installation or two projection installation that examines carbon in all its forms. The title is a quote from Walden by Henry David Thoreau, and the work investigates humankind’s relationship to the natural world, entropy and the Anthropocene. The film includes diagrams of the molecular make up of carbon as well as images of the earth taken from outer space and images of the solar system from NASA’s archive. Part of the narrative is taken from Primo Levi’s book The Periodic Table and his chapter on carbon and it also explores the psychology of climate change.

The film attempts to highlight the interconnectedness of things on earth and in the universe and in this way could be seen to be a Hyperobject. In fact Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects which elaborates on this concept outlines the beginning of the coal revolution and the steam engine as a Hyperobject and also as the start of the journey towards the development of the Anthropocene where a fine layer of soot is deposited all over the world followed up by the atomic age in the 1940s and 50s where radioactive material is deposited over all things on earth through the detonation of many atomic bombs and later with disasters such as Chernobyl. eamon okane The Artist:

O'Kane has had over forty solo exhibitions including shows in Berlin, Frankfurt, Dublin, Zurich, New York, London and Copenhagen. He was short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in London in 2007. His artwork is in numerous public and private collections worldwide including Deutsche Bank; Burda Museum, Baden Baden, Germany; Sammlung Südhausbau, Munich; Limerick City Gallery; FORTIS; DUBLIN 98FM Radio Station; Microsoft; Bank of Ireland Collection; Irish Contemporary Arts Society; Country Bank, New York; Office of Public Works; P.M.P.A. and Guardian Insurance; Donegal County Library; UNIBANK, Denmark; NKT Denmark; HK, Denmark; Den Danske Bank, Denmark; Sammlung Strack, Cologne, Germany; Letterkenny Institute of Technology; University Of Ulster, Belfast; Sammlung Winzer, Coburg, Germany; British American Tobacco, Bayreuth, Germany; Aspen RE, London; Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Collection.

Eamon O'Kane has taken part in many residencies including ARP at The Irish Museum of Modern Art (2004), The Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship at the BSR in Rome (2006) and at Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris (2008).


Credits

An exhibition of digital art
curated by Alinta Krauth
for the International Digital Media & Art Association (iDMAa)
with website assistance from Jason Nelson
of the Center for Digital Narrative. idmaa logo CDN logo