Students on the BA course work in various formats, such as performance, sculpture, participatory events, robotic processes, sound and data. On the Erasmus master’s AAU semester, the students investigate the ontological effects of a culture of ubiquitous information. Both courses address the challenges to art (and any productive mode) in what Donna Haraway calls a “mixed-up time”, in which “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 1.).

Through the problem-based learning methods, the students are encouraged to take the roads of knowledge production that are “less travelled by”; meaning that, to use Haraway’s phrase, they are asked to “stay with the trouble” of contemporaneity. How does technology transcend itself as mere means in our urge (re-)present, experience and contextualize art and culture?

Aalborg University (AAU)

Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark, has been providing students with academic excellence, cultural engagement and personal development since its inception in 1974. AAU is currently consolidating its profile as dynamic and problem-based research and an educational institution aiming at finding innovative solutions to global and complex challenges.

Seeds10110100

Cristina Palomares (ES), Melinda Varro (DK), Christine Hvidt (DK), Anna Major (DK), Daniela Maciel (DK/PT), Sidsel Abrahamsen (DK)

Seeds10110100 is a sound-reactive generative-art installation consisting of ecologies living together as a community, mimicking a living organism through light. They organize their community through interaction with the surroundings and according to a set of rules. The artwork changes its behavior depending on the level of interaction, seeking to demonstrate the continuous exchange of information between systems.

Sumbiophilia

Stefan Engelbrecht Nielsen (DK), Alberte Husted Larsen (DK), Karina Lindegaard Aae Jensen (DK), Louise Ørsted (DK), Maria Emilie Nielsen (DK)

Sumbiophilia is an “Association of Experimental Explorers of Symbiotic Existence” that investigates how it is possible for humans, nature, and technology to exist in a mutually beneficial manner. The association proceeds from an investigation of an abandoned area near Limfjorden in Northern Jutland through artistic experiments and explorations. Sumbiophilia aspires to find novel ways for humans to live with nature, moving away from the existing perception of how we organize our existence. We hope that our work will inspire others to join us in the exploration and encourage further investigation at other sites around the world.

Skin

Bas van den Boogaard (NL), Vibeke Thorhauge Stephensen (DK), Karina Lindegaard Aae Jensen (DK), Louise Ørsted (DK), Stefan Engelbrecht Nielsen (DK)

Skin is a morphing of old techniques and digital technology. It addresses the use and effect of modern technology by transforming insensible transmissions into a vibrotactile embodied experience. Skin uncovers the extent to which transmissions surround us when we step into the digital world; first encounters are left with an unsettling feeling of being surrounded in this new unknown territory. We lack the proper tools to get a human understanding, but with Skin our sensory apparatus is equipped for this.

Adjunct Infection

Shivani Anja Luithle (AU/DE)

Adjunct Infection explores the anxieties between the living and the technologically manipulative through boundaries of the cyborg and the organic, the impact of technology on our sense of self, and vulnerability to restraint and isolation in a society where we are no longer only extended physically but also mentally. These wearable sculptures aim to awaken our presence, and provoke intimate reflection and revelation, under the blind and distancing dependence on our everyday attachments.

A Universe of Memories

Gabrielle Maria Lepianka (DK), Sidsel Abrahamsen (DK), Matilde Nobel (DK)

A Universe of Memories is about the objects that you surround yourself with that have a certain memory or feeling attached to them. It might be an old bracelet or a coin, objects that do not necessarily have any obvious or material value but hold big sentimental value. Displayed in a giant mobile, the audience gets the opportunity to walk around in others’ memories and experience the sensation connected to the object representing them.

deadartist.me

André Mintz (BR), Olga Lukyanova (RU)

The project takes Internet politics as a central topic, reflecting upon it from the analogy of network as a trap. It does so through a web application that offers users a simple, futile web service that, in exchange for their Facebook data, shows them which dead artist they are a reincarnation of. Performing data collection, anonymization, analysis and presentation, the project aims at the playful defunctionalization of technology it is based on.

Suono Specchio

Ina Čiumakova (LT), Rodrigo Guzman S. (MX), Stefan Palitov (MK)

Suono Specchio (lit. sound or play mirror) is an interactive sound installation that explores the use of the face as a possible interface for musical expression. The installation consists of a one-way mirror with which the user interacts by gesticulating. Facial gestures are mapped to specific musical and poetic elements, which are played back to the user through headphones or speakers. Suono Specchio expands the expressive capabilities of one’s own face while at the same time posing questions regarding the phenomenological and archaeological significance of mirrors and reflective surfaces.

Memorial to Forgotten Sounds

Adriaan Odendaal (ZA), Karla Zavala (PE), Luis Bracamontes (MX), Sultana Ismet Jerin (BD)

Memorial to Forgotten Sounds is a pop-up exhibition that showcases neomaterial sound souvenirs created from the sound waves’ digital sound pieces that belong to forgotten or unused online archives, as a way to reactivate them. These sound souvenirs thus become mnemonic devices to respond to the era of ubiquitous contextual computing and the Internet of Things. It represents an exploration for alternative ways to improve online archival practices and the preservation of media arts cultures through mnemonic strategies for post-digital contexts. It is based on Wolfgang Ernst and Wendy Chun’s idea that archives consist not only in storage but also in memory and access.
https://memorialtoforgottensounds.tumblr.com

Encode

Jasper Fung (HK)

Encode consists of a hacked fire alarm and images of newspaper printed on a stainless-steel plate. The plate is connected to the fire alarm by electrical wiring, which forms a closed circuit. The fire alarm plays percussive patterns that are essentially Morse code/Chinese commercial code. These codes are derived from keywords from the popular Chinese social-media blogging site Weibo, which has been censored by the government of the People’s Republic of China.

Perpetuum Mobile recreates the impression of a real-time echo within a controlled environment; a traveling sound that loses the consistency of its original source, and transforms over space and time. By focusing on this phenomenon, the installation examines endeavors to measure time and contrasts the rigid order in such systems by counterpointing them with the disorder and unpredictability of experience. The apparent structure represented by time-measuring devices is falsified and challenged by introducing the effects of the very chaos they attempt to organize and codify.

Credits

This installation was exhibited at the Bacchus Temple, Baalbeck in 2016 supported by Studiocur/art and the Baalbeck International Festival.

Originally commissioned for This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time curated by Angela Harutyunyan and Nat Muller. Tijs Ham, sound engineer.

Part of Global Collaborations, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the American University of Beirut Art Galleries and Collections

Funded/supported by: AFAC, STEIM, Amodo, Mondriaan Fund

With acknowledgment to: Tijs Ham, Cherine Karam, Kesper Kovitz

www.cynthiazaven.com

Jessica Cheers (AU), Leah Gustafson (AU), Samantha Glennie (AU)

Teaching City is an experiential learning framework highlighting urban issues through playful interactions. It offers an antidote to the industrial-age pedagogy of the classroom, subverting the preconceptions of citizens through “knowledge interventions” embedded in urban spaces—the city is the teacher.

The Ars Electronica Futurelab Academy was created to support students and educators from international partner institutions in transdisciplinary practice. Since 2012, the platform has enabled collaborations between Ars Electronica and universities across the world.

Creative Catalyst Drop-In Sessions

THU 7. 9.
1 PM–1:15 PM
4 PM– 4:15 PM

FRI 8. 9.
1 PM–1:15 PM
4 PM–4:15 PM

SAT 9. 9.
3 PM–3:15 PM

SUN 10. 9.
1 PM–1:15 PM

Credits

Supported by:

Associate Producer: Quinty Pinxit-Gregg (AU)
Technical Support: Matthew Strachan (AU),
with special thanks to Jacina Leong and Linda Knight

This project was supported by The Creative Lab, and QUT Creative Industries.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Felix Palmerson (AU), Georgia Pierce (AU), Sophie Barendse (AU), Jayden Grogan (AU), Oscar Connor (AU), Isabella Hood (AU), Matilda Skelhorn (AU), Phillipa Chapman (AU), Jessica Martin (AU), Peter Lloyd (AU), Yanto Browning (AU), Cameron Whelan (AU), Greg Jenkins (AU), Dr. Stephanie Hutchison (AU)

SynapSense is a performative installation heightening our bodily awareness. Sensorial understanding through enactment is revealed via three modes: explore, calibrate and create. Interaction creates the soundscape—touch enables investigation and sound reflects exploration.

The Ars Electronica Futurelab Academy was created to support students and educators from international partner institutions in transdisciplinary practice. Since 2012, the platform has enabled collaborations between Ars Electronica and universities across the world.

Performance Times

THU 7. 9.
7:20 PM–7:40 PM
9:05 PM–9:25 PM

FRI 8. 9.– SUN 10. 9.
6:40 PM–7:00 PM

MON 11. 9.
1 PM–1:20 PM
3 PM–3:20 PM
7 PM–7:20 PM

Credits

Supported by: Artistic Direction: Dr. Stephanie Hutchison (AU); Producer: Quinty Pinxit-Gregg (AU); Technical support: Matthew Strachan (AU); Lighting Design: Glen Hughes (AU)

This project was supported by The Creative Lab, and QUT Creative Industries.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The modular synthesizer keeps the musician at the heart of the proposal and controls the musical fluctuation. The stage design allows the audiovisual medium to deploy in space via a specific structure composed with four transparent screens and four points of sound diffusion. It offers to the public a quadrophonic and quadrascopic image for a total synaesthetic experience.

Credits

Co-production: Arcadi (Paris/FR), Stereolux (Nantes/FR)
Support: La Muse en Circuit (Alfortville/FR)

People who come into contact interact primarily by bodily behavior, following natural and cultural implicit knowledge. This interaction is a multimodal process controlled by tension as media leading to a homeostatic state of pleasure—there is a border to a person’s space where intimacy starts; crossing the borders of hedonic bodies is generating common environments.

As music is to media-arts, the installation is an experimental setting bridging art and science. In order to acquire knowledge it enables recipients to experience the creative power of mediatization, of Feeling the Ex-Tension of the auditory body—just as bio-acoustics acquire the knowledge-intensifying sonic and sonifying behavioral interaction of animals to achieve communis. The sound of mating behavior is the most sensual to every body leading to the rebirth of bodies in common environments, of pleasure evolving physical, social and virtual lives.

While the specialized BA course may be relatively new, over time electronic and computer music has developed deep roots at the Anton Bruckner University. In 1995 Adelhard Roidinger initiated the Studio for Advanced Music and Media Technology (SAMT), which in 2008 was renamed in Computer Music Studio and has since been headed by Andreas Weixler. Since the university’s new building opened in 2015, students as well as researchers in computer music have had the opportunity to work in a cutting-edge studio infrastructure allowing production as well as presentation of multi-channel compositions.

The BA course in computer music and media composition (as well as the MA in musical composition) do not confine themselves to training young musicians in the skills necessary for the production of musical pieces based on set standards of the media industries. They encourage artistic exploration of potential new musical forms and practices in response to today’s rapidly evolving digital media landscape, which is constantly re-shaping our listening habits, lives, communities and societies.

The three installations presented at the POSTCITY, laying out sonic spaces rather than musical sequences, reflect not only this fundamentally open approach to the question of what musical art is or could be these days, but also the media composition course’s deep integration into the university’s other fields of study ranging from instrumental performance to acting and dance.

Text: Volkmar Klien

Magnetic Islands

Angélica Castelló (MX)

In an audiovisual installation, a woven tapestry made of cassette tape, a field-recording composition for two customized radios, the Vienna-based Mexican composer and sound artist Angélica Castelló reconfigures the sound and scenographic environments of religious and pagan traditions of altars that she has been exploring through the use of old radios and cassette players. For this exhibit she has created a memory blanket, a shield to protect us from oblivion, made precisely of cassette tape, a magnetophonic material. This flexible sculpture—a sort of seaweed of woven tape—is made by the artist in clear reference to the idea of texture, textile and magnetism. It refers to the immense patience required by the craft of weaving, essential to storytelling as well. The piece includes a sound composition that Castelló made with transformed field-recordings, radio waves and acoustic sounds amplified by two customized old radios—a sound emission of oceanic textures with an engrossing power that characterizes her beautiful and seductive work.

Credits

Commissioned by Constellations of the Audio Machine in Mexico for the CTM Festival in Berlin.

Text: Carlos Prieto
Pictures: Felix Blume

Anatomy of the Underground

Tobias Leibetseder (AT), Astrid Schwarz (AT)

The room oscillates. Four speakers generate a three-dimensional acoustic sculpture that opens itself through the movement in space and time. It is an almost haptic experience. By stimulating the natural frequency of the spatial modes, the place is almost set in motion.

The composition makes the stimulus frequencies move around as they follow the room-oriented modes accompanied by the visitors. Wandering through the space also becomes a walk through of the composition itself. The oscillation of the vibrations, the constantly changing frequencies and the interference become noticeable on one’s own body. It becomes the projection surface for the acoustic peculiarities. Architecture, surfaces and materials of the place flow into an anatomy of the underground in the shimmering of time.

Xuán

Lukas Jakob Löcker (AT), Roberta Lazo Valenzuela (CL), Yiran Zhao (CN)

Xuán is transliterated from either of two Chinese characters with the same pronunciation and intonation: 悬 means “hanging,” while 旋 means “spinning.” The title, in its ambiguous potential of different meanings, is representative of the piece as a whole. The objects of this performative installation comprise speakers and flashlights hanging with and under a transparent net of nylon string, giving the appearance of floating in space. The floor underneath is covered with a white projection surface to reflect the light from overhead. The performers in their motions trigger one another’s movements, initiate new movements in turn, as well as changes in already moving objects. Through the moving lights and sounds, the space is made ambiguous, as acoustic reflection and changing illumination alter the perception of volume and resonance.

The installation consists of a total of eight video projectors, which are subdivided into 630 sub-projections using 288 concave mirrors, and of forty audio channels that create a field of sound. In this third edition of the project, Kimchi and Chips again deal with the boundary between materiality and immateriality, reality and illusion, existence and non-existence.

With the title they refer to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity (in which space is not yet bent by matter, and superluminal velocity does not yet appear, as in the general theory of relativity formulated later).

Credits

www.kimchiandchips.com

Engineering: Chung Youngjae, Studio Sungshin
Sound Design: Pi Junghoo

In collaboration with Arts & Creative Technology Center

Commissioned by Asia Culture Center

V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media (NL)

The Summer Sessions pop-up exhibition shows a selection of outcomes realized through the international exchange of emerging talents within the Summer Sessions network. Summer Sessions are short-term residencies for young and emerging artists, organized by an international network of cultural organizations.

Each summer the partners participating in this network for talent development collaborate to offer professional production support and expert feedback to artists in the realization of a new artwork or design. Local talents from each partner’s geographic region are scouted and selected for a residency abroad, where they are offered highly productive atmospheres and specific kinds of expertise at one of the international partners in the international network. While the pop-up exhibition illustrates the kind of results that this pressure-cooker residency format results in, a live event will highlight the experiences that participants have had abroad, and the effects these experiences had on their early careers.

Credits

The projects are produced as part of the Summer Sessions Network for Talent Development in a co-production with Metamedia Association, Kitchen Budapest, Art Center Nabi, Arquivo 237 and V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media

The Physical Rhythm Machine

Philip Vermeulen (NL)

The installation is a closed system that shoots balls at up to 130 kilometers per hour to create sound patterns in extreme violence. The installation cannot only be seen as an instrument, which the artist can play live, but also as an autonomous system, which creates rhythms with the help of algorithms. It breathes the flavors of rough mechanics and the early experiments of the classical minimalist movement.

Emotion Hero

Ruben van de Ven (NL)

What does it mean to feel 48 percent surprised and 18 percent joyful? Over recent years new software has emerged that estimates what people feel based on their facial expressions. Emotion Hero is a project consisting of a game and an exhibition that encourage the visitor to investigate how faces and feelings are represented by this software. The central question is what are we looking at when we read emotion scores? Which leads one to wonder what we are looking for in these numbers.

Web Spaces

Jip de Beer (NL)

Web Spaces is an ongoing investigation into the structure of web pages. How can three-dimensional beings, like you and me, explore the virtual landscape of web pages? By rendering the building blocks of a web page in three dimensions, the architecture beneath its surface is revealed.

Origin: Sustained

Mischa Daams (NL)

Origin: Sustained is an audiovisual expedition into the abstract, organic universe that results from a feedback loop between an lcd screen and a video camera. A machine that controls the camera is composed to unfold a hypnotizing voyage of abstract patterns. This happens before the eyes of the audience, in real time. This evolutionary copy-process, where one image feeds and mutates the next, demands for continuation. So in order to sustain this loop, Daams has deployed a perception algorithm to look at and respond to the chaotic patterns that emerge. The machine as steersman is responsible for the unfolding and continuity of the light/life cycle, resulting in the film.
Origin: Sustained is commissioned by FIBER with the support of the Mondriaan Fund NL and Stroom Den Haag. The first automatic expedition ‘Origin:Cycle #1’ was realized as part of the Summer Sessions network in a co-production of Art Center Nabi and V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, with support of the Creative Industries Fund NL.