Chaired by Prix Ars Electronica jurors, these discussions provide fascinating insights into the individual categories.

• Cedrik Fermont (CD/BE/DE), Dimitri della Faille (BE/CA), Not Your World Music: Noise In South East Asia (Golden Nica)
• Lucas Abela (AU), Gamelan Wizard (Award of Distinction)
• Marco Donnarumma (IT/DE), Corpus Nil (Award of Distinction)

Chair: Rikke Frisk (DK), jury member of the 2017 Prix Ars Electronica

It attempts to translate the current climate of demagogy, terror and disdain for the democratic institutions of this Southeast Asian country into sound and visuals. It is based on field recordings, synthetic sounds and visuals and will receive its world premiere at the Big Concert Night.

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.

The concept was developed out of three different areas: the application of sound in medical science, coronary artery bypass surgery, and machine learning. The performance is based on the assumption that in the near future a surgeon will work with an advising machine while in surgery.

The installation is built using the performer’s real heart from MRI scans, enlarging its actual size. It is designed to interact when the performer plugs in audio cables and bridges connections, as is the case in coronary-artery bypass surgery. During the performance, the storyline is led by the sound, the mixed video of medical images and the live performance from the webcam. The video and the sound not only lead the storyline but also present the machine, which gives instruction to the performer as a physician. The patient (the heart) being operated on symbolizes human consciousness and faith. The performance poses the question: If machines can reason even better than humans, will we as humans lose some abilities and not even believe ourselves anymore?

Credits

This project was realized in cooperation with Fraunhofer MEVIS and Ars Electronica Futurelab (Peter Freudling, Erwin Reitböck).

We’re incredibly complex, trillions of moving parts. But they’re all non-miraculous robotic parts.” Furthermore, today’s AI is a creation of man in his own image with a possible evolution towards the Super-AI. Inside such a loop of creation and design, religion finds its way to establish itself and become respected as a god, still observing but preferring to keep its distance and not intervene directly.

Monastic Vowels of a Computational Kind is an interactive installation augmenting the POSTCITY with an imaginary soundscape of a temple of unknown times, but serving a Super-AI-created religion communicating through sonic attraction. Various themes such as the “great flood”, “angel”, “redemption” are offered within soundscape compositions through interaction with the installation space.

The visitor uses the dedicated iPhone app to reach the sonic imprints of this temple. Their perceptual experience continuously oscillates between the realm of the current installation space and the augmented apparitions of the temples within that space, depending on the positional information, orientation and the angle at which the iPhone is held.

The graphic icons distributed at various locations in the installation space are informative as points of interaction for the visitor. Their design emerges as a mixture of the “Utopian” alphabet and the “Aurebesh” alphabet letters.

About the artist

Sinan Bökesoy (TR) is an artist, composer and software developer, who has continued his education, academic activities, and international career for many years in Paris, France. He received his PhD from University of Paris under the direction of H. Vaggione, and his music compositions on micro sound synthesis, performances with robotic instruments and softwares he developed such as the Cosmosf are well known. He is the founder of sonicPlanet and sonicLAB , developing products on advanced sound synthesis and sonic augmented reality applications supported continuously with artistic activities.

Read more: starts-prize.aec.at.

This project is presented in the framework of the STARTS Prize 2017. STARTS Prize received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732019.

The acoustic emissions of a tree in the Swiss Alps were recorded with special acoustic sensors, and all other non-auditory ecophysiological measurement data were sonified–that is, translated into sounds and music. The recordings and sonified measurements were implemented in a number of different media art installations under the preamble “treelab“, which at the same time served as a research environment, in order to display and examine the temporal and spatial connections between plant sounds, physiological processes, and environmental conditions in an artistic­scientific observation system.

Most of the sounds that occur in a plant arise due to drought stress. Thirsty plants make an inaudible noise; acoustic emissions from plants lead to conclusions on their state and on the environmental conditions. During our research project it became clear that our observation system could make another fundamental phenomenon tangible: namely, how plants in Central Europe react to ever-longer periods of heat and drought in the course of climate change. The reconstruction and staging of the life processes and environmental conditions of a tree in an artistic-technical environment has led to new forms of observation and artistic design with an innovative instrument: correlations of measured values and patterns in natural processes become aesthetic effects–abstract measurement data are reflected in images and sounds. The intention of our observation system is to create an all-encompassing experience from complex data sets, and thus to draw a holistic picture of the life processes and environmental conditions of a tree that is under pressure from changing climatic conditions.

Credits

Sonification and artistic realization: Marcus Maeder, Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

Scientific data and analysis: Roman Zweifel, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL)

ICST members of staff involved: Philippe Kocher, Jonas Meyer, Thomas Peter.

Conception lmmersive Lab: Jan Schacher, Daniel Bisig, Martin Neukom, Philippe Kocher (ICST).

Supported by Swiss National Science Foundation SNF, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL.

About the artists

Marcus Maeder (CH) is a sound artist, researcher and composer of electronic music. Maeder studied Fine Arts in Lucerne, Switzerland and Philosophy in Hagen, Germany and is currently pursuing his PhD in Environmental Systems Sciences at ETH Zurich. As a researcher at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology (ICST) of the Zurich University of the Arts, Maeder is working on Data Sonification, Acoustic Ecology and Bioacoustics and artistic investigations of ecological processes and phenomena that are related to climate change and environmental issues.

Roman Zweifel (CH) studied Biology at the University of Zurich and the ETH Zurich, where he gained a doctor’s degree for his ecophysiological work The Rhythm of Trees. He works as a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and runs the private company natkon.ch, selling measurement equipment and expertise for ecological research. Roman Zweifel has strong expertise in tree physiology and electronics and his career is characterised by interdisciplinary and free-spirited projects.

Read more: starts-prize.aec.at.

This project is presented in the framework of the STARTS Prize 2017. STARTS Prize received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732019.

Currently, the Modular Rhythm Machine is composed of 36 modules. Each is conceived both as a modular construction piece and as a self-playing wooden box-drum. They are respectively equipped with a servo-motor attached to a stick and an ultrasonic sensor to detect people’s proximity. Its modularity allows for flexibility in shape, size and construction.

This project is funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT and by MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

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

Every visitor is invited to hear the different sounds, to accept the cost of production and to become part of the art industry. When an investment is made in all the machines at the same time they will perform one superior composition.

All the machines are part of the collection of the artist-led nothing more foundation (nm), which decided to distribute these automatons to various cultural organizations, in order to collect micropayments that will be used to support other artistic activities that create more coin-operated artworks.

Credits

nothing more foundation (Hilkmann, Knierzinger, Muik, et al.)