RHIZA

Noor Stenfert Kroese (NL)

Rhiza is an interspecies connector that invites you to plant your bare feet on her mycelium. Through the skin, your biggest organ to sense the outer world, you can connect with the mycelium’s electrical communication. This hybrid sensation between mushrooms and mycelium’s bio feedback is then transferred back to your body via light and tactile sensory impulses.

Rhiza emerged as an aspiration to enable human beings to transgress their own species and connect with otherness in multiple ways. This complex network with their subtle blend of cooperation and conflict can be seen as an example for how we relate with each other, and our environmental systems. Just like human society, this growing inter-species society is characterized by variety, with its capacity to help and to hinder, to cooperate and to exploit. Nature is built on connections, and so are we.

Credits:
This project has received funding from ÖH Projektförderung.

Bio:
Noor Stenfert Kroese works with embodied interactive installations at the intersection of science, technology and human activity. She works across various media such as light, new media and bio-art. Creating space to experience and reflect on developments in science, society and technology that seem elusive but are essential for discovering where humanity is going.. Her practice zooms in on an abstract subject,converting it into a physically embodied experience. In order to connect with ideas, space, emotions and the other. A moment of reflection in a reality that continues to develop faster and faster. Her work does not provide a direct answer but seeks the space to ask questions and to experience them in a world in which you consciously take a place in a moving, uncontrollable network.

FUTUREFALSEPOSITIVE

Kristina Tica (RS)

FUTUREFALSEPOSITIVE is a project based on StyleGAN and object recognition algorithms applied to the ritual of Turkish coffee mug reading. A collection of these pictures composed the initial database out of which new images have been generated. 15000 real-life and generated images are then morphing into an animation and used to train the algorithm to recognize objects out of these random shapes created by the coffee stains and generated noise. The algorithm performs this continuous object recognition process in real time—reading the mug—while producing new visual narratives in a loop. In this process the relation has been established between false positives in computer vision and psychological phenomena of pareidolia and apophenia. The interplay between prediction as a false positive and prophecy as apophenia - the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things - does not only focus on absurdity but on possibilities of creative interpretation when trying to understand the technical processes behind machine intelligence.

Bio:
Kristina Tica (*1995, Belgrade) completed her BA Painting, University of Fine Arts and MA Digital Arts, Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade and is currently studying at Kunstuniversität Linz, MA Interface Cultures. She participated in several study programs within Central Saint Martins, UAL and Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Her body of work is focused on the examination of forms and semiotic keys of visual languages in different media. She works across various media such as painting, video installation and generative new media art. Her works have been exhibited at festivals such as The Wrong, Ars Electronica Festival, Speculum Artium. She is the recipient of the art+science AI Lab National Selection Award (Serbia) 2020. Currently lives and works in Linz.

Private Garden

Qian Xu (CN)

In 2020, the pandemic has greatly changed our daily life. The artist noticed that during the quarantine an increasing number of people, including herself, were spending more and more time at home in their beds. The bed has become an intimate and versatile place to do a lot of things, including eating, reading, getting rest, and recovering from the stress caused by the chaotic situation. Therefore, she found the resemblance between beds and gardens in the aspect of spiritual healing and formed the idea of “Private Garden”.

Based upon this idea, the interactive installation Private Garden involves the projection of garden visuals onto the surface of a bed. A machine-learning algorithm is trained with a database of images from traditional Chinese gardens to generate the projected virtual garden. Visitors can lie in the bed and interact with the visual projection and ambient sound using their body movements, thus having an intimate and mimetic experience of wandering and resting in one’s private garden.

Credits:
This project has received funding from ÖH Projektförderung. Technical support: Dr. -Ing. Ding Luo.

Bio:
Qian Xu was born in 1990 in China. She has a background in industrial design, software engineering, and UI/UX design.

SenriAn

Nomi Sasaki Otani (PE/JP)

SenriAn is a personal exploration of subjective space, memory, and migration. This peep media installation explores the phenomenon of reminiscence by displaying AI-generated images from a dataset composed of the artist’s Chinese ink paintings and family photographs from her childhood. Can these digitally generated images reveal the mutable nature of memories? Inside a box, the artist aims to reconstruct SenriAn, her grandparents’ Japanese tea house, by using a personal dataset to unfold her faint memories through AI-generated images. These images are revealed only when two spectators peep together, referring to the nature of memories, which revive with each transmission.

Bio:
Nomi Sasaki is a Peruvian Japanese visual artist devoted to Chinese black ink tradition and animation. Her work explores scale and dimension, the material nature of water, the behavior of light, and how these elements can create new landscapes and atmospheres for multidisciplinary performances. Her recent work focuses on micro realities and peep media.

CnC Punch needle Machine MK-1

Hess Jeon (KR) & Seo Son (KR)

This embroidery machine—not far in nature from those that already exist in mass manufacturing warehouses—is here presented as an artwork, redirecting the artist’s questions from “results” to “processes”, from “means of production” to “reason”, emphasizing the artists’ ideas and intentions in the use of open-source technologies by artists. All components, software, and systems in this project originate from other existing open-source projects, therefore this artwork is not a product of the sole creativity of the artist, but an example of collective construction. The CNC Punch Needle Machine dreams of collective evolution over individual enlightenment.

The CNC Punch Needle Machine MK-1 “punches” a small length of thread into a stretched canvas, and, dot by dot, it “prints” out texts or images. For its presentation at Ars Electronica Festival 2021, it will print out and display direct quotes from the viewers and critics.

Bio(s):
Hess Jeon is an object-oriented artist and designer from South Korea. With a focus on modern machines and their effect on current cultures and communities, he likes to dabble with speculative designs, supported by artistic research and playful reasoning. Having studied Industrial Design in Dublin, he is currently undertaking a master program in Linz.

Seo Son is a South Korean object-oriented artist with a keen interest in textiles, ceramics, and organic materials. She actively engages with social issues, whilst emphasizing the consumption and recycling of common materials. She is currently based in Linz, Austria.

Ear to Ear

Anaïs Lossouarn (FR)

«Walls have ears»

Ear to Ear is a participative sound installation that plays a collection of secret stories told in many languages by people of different nationalities. Ceramic ears punctuate the space, dots of color crossing the walls. As we approach them, we can hear voices telling these intimate stories, lend an ear to the wall and you will share their secret lives. In a more secluded place, the “confessional”, you are invited to share your own secrets, fragments of your story, that will be included in the installation and played as well through the ears throughout the exhibition space.

Bio:
Anaïs Lossouarn is a young French artist working with mechatronics.
The question central to her work concerns human dependency on technology.
She explores and finds inspiration in the intimate links that we maintain with digital machines, building works that combine humor and absurdity through the juxtaposition of old and new media. Subjects that excite her curiosity include obsolescence, hacking and artificial life. Using her skills in mechatronics, her recent works explore the unexpected animation of objects through different techniques. This detournement or re-appropriation that employs the use of sound, movement and visual elements, endows these ordinary objects with a certain poetry as they behave in unexpected ways. She holds a BA from the Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence and is currently engaged in masters degree studies, with a specialization in “Real time Art”.

Technology is…

Lea Schnell (AT)

The work Technology is… aims at examining the socio-political impact of technological discourses in society and making their presence tangible through a touch-sensitive interface. The interface of the installation consists of letters made of copper-coated circuit board which forms the sentence, “Technology is not neutral”. The material used is a basic component of common electronic devices. The installation refers to the technological production processes by bringing this normally invisible material to the forefront. When the visitors touch the words composing the sentence, sound recordings of discourses about science and media will be activated, triggering a polyphonic cascade of voices, fragments of speeches, opinions, statements, and controversial points of views on technology. In this way, the users can find their own path of ‘listening’ to the sentence.

Bio:
Lea Schnell is an artist and researcher from Vienna. Her research interests include VR/MR based interaction, interactive sound installations, as well as cultural and media theories questioning cultural narratives shaping society. Currently she is attending the MA program Interface Culture at the University of Art and Design in Linz. In her recent artistic practice, she aims to examine the socio-political dimension of technology in the form of interactive sound artworks encompassing soundwalks and haptic sound interfaces which are developed as non-linear sonic narratives.

PHC (Painfully Human Chatbot)

Iosune Sarasate Azcona (ES)

Painfully Human Chatbot is a piece that deals with the demand or pressure to be constantly available. The aim beyond this effect is to provoke a reflection on the human assimilation of mechanical processes and capabilities and whether the constant and increasing use of technology has created new values in our society today. Values that were previously expected of machines. In this way and as a contrast, the project presents a Chatbot that also assimilates human attitudes. Although the main function of this application is to be constantly available, PHC will try to keep a work schedule, and in its code, tiredness and laziness will be implanted. This work proposes an absurd exercise of contrast, to somehow resist the increasing mechanization of people.

Bio:
Iosune Sarasate Azcona is a visual artist from Spain. In her work she looks for alternative options or detours through technology as a response to sociopolitical reality in the hope of creating possible futures that are not solely tied to a few interests. She completed a BA in Arts and an MA in Visual Arts and Multimedia, and is currently studying at Kunstuniversität Linz, MA Interface Cultures.

2m

Kevin Blackistone (US)

A visualization and auditory expansion of spatial relations.

• What distances do we keep between ourselves and others?
• How do we vary our movements in response to these?
• What dimensional requirements do we maintain in our personal environment?
  
  

These questions have become strangely and newly manifest throughout the past year’s safety protocols and isolations. Here, they are condensed into a form of radial rotary music box responding to the distances of those entering while sonically expanding their presence to occupy an acoustic space larger than their physical forms.

Bio:
Kevin Blackistone works by incorporating emergent technological combinations of generative, immersive, interactive and performative practices. These are used to conceptualize the collection and handling of data, information and memory through the lenses of hierarchy and complexity in the domains of personal, social, scientific and political dynamics. Prior to joining the Interface Cultures Masters program, his studies included a BA in Intermedia and Digital Arts (UMBC, US) and an intramural research fellowship with the NIH Laboratory of Neurogenetics. His awards have included the Johns Hopkins Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund for his immersive installation, Who’s Watching – A Surveillance Apparatus and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation’s Rubys Arts Award for Extensions of the Self.

Tele_Code

Sara Koniarek (AT)

For centuries cryptography has been used to ensure information secrecy and safe communication. We come across coded language in many different aspects of life. Historically queer people have had to use various codes and signals to indicate their sexual orientation to each other, without being put in danger. Tele_Code aims to shine a light on these hidden parts of history, which unfortunately are still only rarely taught within education systems.

This game takes inspiration from the Anne Lister Cypher, who used a substitution code to write about her relationships with women within her almost 5 million words long diaries. The single-player video game takes the player into a maze full of encoded teletext pages, who then must find hints which give them parts of the cypher. Caught in a maze of encrypted teletext, the players find themselves on a search for the right translation hints to encode the final teletext page and unlock the secret last page.

Bio:
Sara Koniarek is an Austrian multimedia artist. Her works focus on the duality and relationship of analog and digital, as well as language cryptography and coding, aesthetically positioned between post-internet and classic photo- and videography. She completed her BA in graphic design and photography and is currently studying at the Kunstuniversität Linz, MA Interface Cultures.

Injected sounds referring to dissolution

Bálint Budai (HU)

Post-lockdown sounds exhibited in a virtual space. Step by step, we are getting back to “normal” - Layer by layer we are getting closer to the dissolution and earning our free space back. This 3D garden represents our unity through sound compositions that are communicating with each other.

Contributing sound artists:

Alejandro Quiñones Roa (CO) Bálint Budai (HU) Błażej Kotowski (PL) Daphne Xanthopoulou (GR) Polina Khatsenka (BY) Rozi Mákó (HU) Vahid Qaderi (IR)

Bio:
Bálint Budai is a Media artist based in Linz. He was born in Budapest, Hungary. Formerly he studied music and dance and he has a degree in graphic design and printmaking. His practice combines painting, dancing, music/percussion, performances and poetry into multimedia installations and interactive art pieces.

In between nodes

Razieh Kooshki (IR) & Vahid Qaderi (IR)

“The only reality is existence.”

There have always been and there will always be doubts about the reality of the world we live in. Is it real or is it just a dream, or a designed virtual space? Even if someone comes and leads us to the real world by offering the famous red pill, we can still question that world too. Is that one finally real? Or is it another designed space? And what if we design reality? What if we design a reality within a virtual reality that lies inside another virtual reality…? How many designed worlds do we need to cross to finally reach reality?

In this VR project the artists designed parallel virtual spaces. Users can move in any scene and interact with some objects and sounds and move to another scene using the virtual VR headset located in each scene and discover a new world.

Bio(s):
Razieh Kooshki is an experimental visual artist from Iran, based in Linz, Austria. She has a background in graphic design, video art and 3D animation and has contributed to video games. Her main interest and works during the past 5 years has been Interactive Visual art.

Vahid Qaderi is a composer from Iran, based in Linz, Austria. In addition to his main profession making electronic music, he has a background in 3D animation, visual art and video games.

Razieh and Vahid have been collaborating together for over 10 years in many different fields, including 3D Animation, video games and Audio Visual performances.

Eerie me

Barbara Jazbec (SI)

Eerie me is an interactive sculpture representing a strange creature that embodies the symbiosis of memories and imagination of a Furby and the artist herself. The interaction between the spectator and the sculpture activates the creature in a synergistic relationship. Happy and traumatic memories create a memento that spectators can relate to.

At its time of commercialization, the interactive toy “Furby” was original and technologically advanced and fascinating not only for kids but became a cultural artifact which is still recognizable today. The artist explores personal ways to hack the toy and expand its identity by including parts of her body and personality in a hybrid creation and transcending her life into a new existence.

Bio:
Barbara Jazbec is an intermedia artist from Trbovlje, Slovenia. She completed a bachelor’s degree in Media and Arts from Tampere University of Applied Sciences in Finland. Currently, she is in the MA program Interface Cultures in Linz, Austria. Her background is mainly working with 360-degree video and video installations. Her latest research interests are mostly focused on interactive installations. In her work she merges odd personal experiences with a sci-fi futurism and a tinge of humour. She finds beauty in strange and odd things. Barbara organizes and leads different experimental video workshops and is the curator of the international video festival DigitalBigScreen 360° in Trbovlje, Slovenia, which is running at the same time as Speculum Artium.

Tara’s Diary

Parisa Ayati (IR) & Mahnaz Rastgoumoghaddam (IR)

“Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It’s about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.” Bruce Sterling

During the past few decades, the Internet has become an inseparable part of everyday life. It has shifted from a possibility to a must. As we move forward and the Internet becomes more advanced and ubiquitous, its impacts on society, politics and ecology have increased so much that we cannot neglect them anymore. Tara’s Diary is an AR book telling the personal stories of a 29 year old woman living in 2052. Through the illustrated book combined with Augmented Reality, the reader engages with different aspects of her daily life influenced by a speculative evolution of the internet for that time. This project looks at the internet and its current infrastructure through a critical lens, employing science fiction writing and design thinking techniques to speculate about the internet in the future. Trying to stay clear from mere dystopian or utopian mindsets, the stories of the book will span between undesirable futures and potential areas for improvement.

Bio(s):
Parisa Ayati (*1992, Iran) is a media artist and visual designer based in Linz, Austria. Focused on interaction design, she explores the intersection between visual design, science, and technology. Her works consist of motion design, interactive installation, data visualization and, generative art. Recently, she has been intrigued by the ways science fiction and speculative design can help humans design a better future and enhance their lives.

Mahnaz Rastgoumoghaddam is a freelance visual development artist and illustrator, working in Entertainment and Animation industries. Her work consists of designing characters, environments for animation movies and game art developments and also developing heads-up displays for video games. She focuses on creating the emotional connection to the story’s theme, by capturing dramatic story moments, plot thrusts and moods within character and environment designs. This brings out the cinematic potential of each story.

Sonic Utopias

Daphne Xanthopoulou (GR)

“Cassandra falls asleep in a temple. In the darkness, snakes approach her and lick her ears, cleaning her senses so that she can hear secret voices that other people don’t. When she wakes up, she can hear the future[…]”

Sound has always been associated with practices of divination. In a time when imagination is rendered short by a prevalent fixation on dystopian futures, we tune into the resistant voices that create an outside to this totalized world by nurturing structures of individual and communal resistance. “Sonic Utopias” is a sonic fiction series of utopian narratives and tales of subversion from a (not so) distant earth.

Five seashells placed on a tray of sand, hold in their bowels another future narrative, that can be listened to by bringing the shell close to our ear. The sand draws a reference to the childhood practice of sandcastles; A metaphor for the necessity of world-building in frail times.

Credits:
“Sonic Utopias”, is a collaborative series of sonic fiction hosted by Movement Radio - Onassis Stegi (ATH, GR) in 2021.

Bio:
Daphne Xanthopoulou is a Greek sound artist, based between Barcelona and Linz. Her work discusses the relationships between human and non-human agencies, emerging technologies and spirituality, mundane life, and fiction. Through a variety of formats, she explores ecologies of collective composition, environmental listening, and communal healing.

A_____MANIFESTO

Funda Zeynep Ayguler (TR)

A____Manifesto is a combination of a data sculpture, AR experience, and a generated text. A large collection of manifestos dating from the 17th Century until today have been transformed into 3D shapes by using text mining techniques that reconstruct linguistic contexts of words from the raw text data. Locally sourced mycelium fungus is used as filling material to create an organic living sculpture out of this digital hybridization. The AR experience is based on the points of the data cloud, in which every dot represents a word in corpus of the raw text. Inside an abstract vector space derived from real-world language corpora, words become points in a n-dimensional space, where algebraic calculations operate on the syntactic and semantic creation of language. A combination of transformer-based architectures is used to generate a new manifesto that mimics human-written text. Donna Haraway, whose fingerprints are plastered all over science, art, and politics, informs the generated manifesto.

Bio:
Funda Zeynep Aygüler is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Weimar. She has background studies in Architecture, graduated from Anadolu University with a degree in Animation, and is currently completing her master’s degree in Media Art and Design at Bauhaus University Weimar. Her work is influenced by many cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary practices. She continues to explore her practice as a filmmaker, animator, photographer, and work and gain experience in an area focused on creative use and investigation of new media.

Exciting Research

Jo Caimo (BE)

People participate by wearing a device (MOODY®) that measures their excitement-level together with the distances between them. A clip on the ear measures the temperature constantly while a small light (rgb-led) shows the color/ level of excitement. The scale goes from blue (low excitement) to red (high excitement). All data is sent to a server. With the data of the excitements and mutual distances of the people, we will develop algorithms to visualize and even stimulate the ‘Energies between People’.

During the expo you can join the workshop where we will build devices, upgrade and test algorithms and embody the jewel while interacting with others. You are also invited to add topics to the device-manual and discuss the user-politics.

A world where everyone’s mask seems to fall off and where social interconnectivity is made aware. It can break the ice and change social constructions by making everybody more ‘sensitive’.

WORKSHOP: WEDNESDAY-SATURDAY 12:00-13:00 @ACADEMY OF THOUGHTS

Manual Manifesto by Sebastian Sprenger

Credits:
Manual Manifesto: Sebastian Sprenger
Production & Development: Jo Caimo, Jorge Guevara
Development & Technical support: Pieter-Jan Beeckman

Bio:
Jo Caimo is a visual artist and inventor of objects and instruments. With his objects and instruments he investigates “the collective” versus “the inner”, and he therefore challenges the spectator to become part of his work. He develops effective measuring instruments and platforms through which we can better understand subconscious patterns and mechanisms in co-creation processes.

Future Memories of Deep Water

Indiara Di Benedetto (IT)

What are the changing conditions for Archaeology in underwater ecosystems? Can challenges be predicted and solutions imagined using Machine Learning?

With the passage of time, underwater artifacts are encrusted with coral, algae or other marine organisms. How do human activities and pollutions undermine these natural environments? What will our underwater heritage be like in the future?The project: “Future Memories of Deep Water” explores how algorithms can be used for predicting new entanglements between underwater artifacts and the changing environment where they are discovered. We reflect on current problems and dangers for marine environments, such as “plasticrust” and plastic pollution. Built upon experimental speculation, Future Memories of Deep Water calls for the protection of threatened marine ecosystems and aims to create awareness and encourage preservation of cultural heritage.

Credits:
In cooperation with Giulia Berrettoni Project Mentorship by Alexia Achilleos

Bio:
Indiara Di Benedetto (*1994) is an experimental media artist with a main background in video art, photography and visual communication. Her practice is based on unconventional projection surfaces, immaterial-material connections, planned obsolescence and human relationships in the context of technology. Her recent artistic research focuses on the transdisciplinary approach between interactive art, technology, science, archaeology and bio art in relation to memory and mnemonic practices applied to storytelling and narratives.

LEONARDO LASER LINZ

Die Gartenlaube

In September, 202 1 , Linz is joining the Leonardo Art & Science Evening Rendez-Vous (LASER) network. This international
program brings together artists, scientists, scholars and the general public for inspiring presentations and conversations. the LEONARDO LASER LINZ, hosted by the Interface Cultures department of the University of Art and Design Linz, will be held during the Ars Electronica 2021 Festival. For the LASER launch event, more sustainable ways of living, local and global environmental protection and artistic and scientific developments for a “climate-modern” future, will be given a special interdisciplinary focus. in a modernized Gartenlaube, themes such as Climate-Care, Climate-Digital and Climate-Social (as proposed by Christoph Thun-Hohenstein), will be debated and discussed.

Other specific topics will be presented, including Interspecies Collaboration, The Mind of Plants, Herbal Pedagogy,
Biodynamic Farming and an exploration and celebration of artistic and folk wisdom, to bring us all together for a “Gartenlaube Waltz”.

PARTICIPANTS: Dr. Christoph Thun-Hohensteindr Dr. Monica Gagliano Dr. Martin Pfosser Leisenhof Gärtnerei Mag. Gabriele Winkler Dr. Christa Sommerer Fabricio Lamoncha Christiana Kazakou

CRITICAL DATA

Is the name of a course at interface Cultures taught by Manuea Naveau since last October 2020. Over the past two semesters and during the pandemic, we have explored the use of digital data, data processing systems, and related knowledge. By analyzing artistic works at the intersection of digital art, Big data and machine learning, as well as ethics, philosophy, and political/social engagement, we have critically examined the place society and its environment can take in relation to the latest technological developments. In the context of ACADEMY OF THOUGHTS, we ask ourselves what critical data might be and mean in the context of an art university? in business and computer science it is defined that critical data must be identified in order to improve sales and product quality. If we leave the idea of economic success behind and focus on society and ecology, how can we understand critical data in an arts setting?

COLLABORATING PARTNERS DURING THE LAST SEMESTER: CYENS Centre of Excellence Nikosia Kleanthis Neokleous, Doros Polydorou, Myrto Aristidou, Alexia Achilleos, Demetris Shammas, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Kyriakos Kyriakou, Pinar Barlas, Stella Kleanthous and Jahna Otterbacher.
TU Wien / future.lab
Rudolf Scheuvens, Ian Banerjee, Jerome Becker und Madlyn Miessgang, Emma Gisinger

COLLABORATING PARTNERS WITHIN THE ACADEMY OF THOUGHTS: Martin Zeilinger, Rosemary Lee, Aisen Caro Chacin, César Escudero Andaluz, Violette Bule, Martin nadal and the CryptoWiener