Category Archives: performing arts

Two art/sci exhibitions, one name: Sensoria from Sept. 16 – Oct. 30, 2022 in Gdansk, Poland and in Toronto, Canada

I got a notice (via email) from Toronto’s ArtSci Salon about Sensoria: The Art and Science of Our Senses 2022. This looks interesting and it is confusing as to which site is hosting which installations/art pieces. It starts nice and easy and then … Here’s more from the notice,

Sensoria: the Art & Science of Our Senses is a multi-site exhibition and symposium that bridges LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Held simultaneously in both locations, the exhibition and symposium will engage multi-sensory research that revitalizes our sensory connections to our surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies.

The exhibition component is co-curated by distinguished curator Nina Czegledy (Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene, 2020 & Leonardo/ ISAST 50th Celebrations, 2018) and Sensorium director Joel Ong.  Czegledy brings together an international network of artists and scholars who explore the intersection of art, science and the senses. Sited concurrently in both Poland and Toronto, the exhibition will explore the dissociative potential of contemporary technologies on the senses, treating it not only as a social crisis but also an opportunity for creative play and experimentation. It aims to engage a conversation about the senses from the perspective of art, but also science, incorporating artists that straddle the boundaries of knowledge production in a variety of ways.

The event will be complemented by a workshop by Csenge Kolozsvari.

Kolozsvari brings together somatic practices (crawling side by side, drawing, moving with bags full of water, walking backwards, playing with breath, touching textures, voicing etc.) with the concept of the schiz, cut, or interval, following philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus. The aim is to build practices that do not presuppose where bodies begin and end, and to agitate the habitual narratives of bodily borders and edges as solid and knowable.

The symposium leverages the exhibition content as the starting point for more in-depth conversation about the connective aesthetics of everyday sensing and the knowledge-creation potential of artists and scientists collaborating in innovative ways. The socio-political turbulences we have experienced worldwide during the last decade have created unprecedented social and personal strife. While connections are sustained now amongst virtual networks that straddle vast spaces, how might we consider the sharing of intimate senses through smell, touch, and bodily movement as a form of mutual support? The symposium explores questions such as these with keynote presentations by Ryszard Khuszcynski [I believe this is the correct spellling: Ryszard Kluszczyński], Chris Salter and David Howse, as well as roundtables between artists and scientists, and performances by Csenge Kolozsvari and York University’s DisPerSions Lab (led by Doug Van Nort). All aspects of the symposium will be presented with virtual components, so as to allow both in-person engagement in Toronto and virtual presence in Gdansk and elsewhere.

Now for details about the Gdansk portion, from the LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) event page, (Note 1: This is quite lengthy. Note 2: If you follow the link to the LCCA event page, you may need to click the English language option [upper right hand corner of the screen] and, then, scroll down to click MORE at the bottom of the left text column.)

Dates of the exhibition: 16 September–30 October 2022
Location: CCA Laznia 1 oraz CCA Laznia 2
Curator: Nina Czegledy

Exhibition: September 16-October 30, 2022
Places: Laznia 1 ( Jaskółcza 1) and Laznia 2 (Strajku Dokerów 5), Gdańsk

Opening: September 16, 2022
– time. 19.00 (Laznia 1, Dolne Miasto)
– time. 20.30 (Laznia 2, Nowy Port)

During the vernissage, we provide transport by bus from Łaźnia 1 to Łaźnia 2 and back.

Artists:
Guy van Belle | Karolina Hałatek | Csenge Kolozsvari | Hilda Kozari | Agnes Meyer-Brandis | Gayil Nalls | Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris | Artur Żmijewski

Sensoria, The Art & Science of Our Senses

Curatorial Statement

Nina Czegledy

Introduction

Sensoria, The Art & Science of Our Senses a multi-site project is focused on multisensory perception in the arts and the sciences. The cross-disciplinary initiative explores our sensory world through scientific, social, cultural and scholastic interpretations. The exhibitions, performances and the symposium link LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland (1) and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art and Technology at York University, Toronto, Canada (2) in a cross-institutional and inter-cultural collaboration. The participation of international artists in the exhibition and symposium span the globe from New Zealand to Finland to the Czech Republic and reflect on the effects of recent ecological and socio-cultural alterations on sensory organisms in humans and other species.

We perceive the world through our senses, yet for a long time the senses were treated as independent perceptual modules. Contemporary research confirmed that our senses are fundamentally interrelated and interact with each other (3). Moreover, our perception of visual, auditory or tactile events change as a result of information exchange between receptors (4). The impact of radical changes such as the constraints of the COVID 19 Pandemic caused extensive psycho-emotional stress and has affected every aspect of our life from geopolitics to economies to the arts and sciences including sensory awareness (5). Considering implications of COVID-19 for the human senses Derek Victor Byrne noted that initial work has shown short- and likely longer-term negative effects on the human senses (6). Curatorial reflection of these issues presented in the last years became essential.

The way that we perceive our environment via our sensory systems has been frequently a source of controversy concerning one of the basic characteristics of our existence. (7).

As David Howes observed ”The perceptual is cultural and political, and not simply (as psychologists and neuroscientists would have it) a matter of cognitive processes or neurological mechanisms located in the individual subject” (8)

With the changing notions of the constitution of sentient beings a revision of knowledge – led to a closer engagement with the traditional experience by indigenous peoples. The benefits of Nature on our sensorial being are well known, however it is important to remember that our attitude to, and representation of Nature is always closely linked to political, religious, environmental and social considerations. In investigating sensory awareness the impact of the geographical, cultural and social context on individual sensory perception cannot be underestimated (9).

Curatorial research and development of the Sensoria project since 2019 was aimed to present the theme in an unconventional way. International artist residencies, workshops, presentations and thematically related round table discussions in collaboration with local Polish academic and corporate research institutions were offered before the Pandemic in 2019 and 2020. Strategically, the exhibitions now focus on a “return” to the sensory capacity of the body after the last two and a half years of telematic and virtual modes of communication that have biased the audio-visual spectrums of sensory experience.

While the estrangement of the senses have been exacerbated by technologies in the way media elements have contributed to the dissociation of the senses from one another and a subsequent bias of audio-visual content in our digital and virtual environments, the SENSORIA exhibition adapt what Caroline Jones (10) has described as the “creatively dissociated self”. In her landmark exhibition “Sensorium” of 2006 , she considers the dissociative potential of contemporary technologies on the senses as an invitation to engage in creative play and experimentations around this prospect. In this way, SENSORIA builds on the unique interests of the artists curated around the olfactory, tactile and sonic senses; and explores the tensions of telematic/virtual co-presence over two geographically separate galleries.

The exhibition’s primary goal is to create a broad visibility for the wide variety of art project concerning sensory perception. It aims to engage a conversation about the senses from the perspective of art, but also science, incorporating artists that straddle the boundaries of knowledge production in a variety of ways. In Poland, the exhibition linked established European artists with local Polish ones; the Toronto hub similarly links international artists in the main hubs with local artists. In this way, the exhibition forges networks across continents and ideas, bringing a range of different perspectives together to explore how our globalized world has both linked and disconnected us from one another. In addition, being situated simultaneously in both sites, Sensoria also builds on the unique interests of the artists curated around the olfactory, tactile and sonic senses; and explores the tensions of telematic/virtual co-presence over two geographically separate galleries. Sensoria artists, curated through a collaborative process with the project’s lead curators and team members, have been invited to considered site-specific adaptations of their internationally renowned artworks. In this way, the goal of the project is to revitalize our sensory connections to our immediate surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies; and to share in a collective experience and discussion of them. In addition, the symposium component hosted by Sensorium at York University focuses on a “return” to the sensory capacity of the body after the last two and a half years of telematic and virtual modes of communication that have biased the audio-visual spectrums of sensory experience. The constraints of the Pandemic have precipitated our current estrangement from our sensuous surroundings, and with the gradual and tentative reopening of regulations in North America, Europe and the world this Spring, we expect a resurgence in a desire for people to engage once again with the multi-sensory sensorium, prioritizing the senses of smell, touch and taste that have broadly been neglected in collective experience. The Sensoria symposium will feature artists, curators and theorists through a series of keynote lectures, performances and artist panels.

Sincere thanks to the LAZNIA Team, especially Lila Bosowska and Aleksandra Ksiezopolska for our curatorial collaboration in the difficult times of the last three years. Sincere thanks to Ryszard Kluszczyński for advising the Sensoria project.

Respectful acknowledgements to Jadwiga Charzynska Director of Laznia.

Last but not least deepest thanks to Prof. Yu-Zhi Joel Ong for his role in expanding Sensoria into an international cross-institutional collaboration.

Reference

1 LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland

2 Sensorium: Centre for Digital Art and Technology at York University (Sensorium) Toronto, Canada. https://sensorium.ampd.yorku.ca/

3 Burston, D and Cohen J. 2015 Perceptual Integration, Modularity, and Cognitive Penetration In: Cognitive Influences on Perception: Implications for Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Action (pp.123-143). Oxford University Press

4 Masrour F, Nirshberg, G, Schon Nm Leardi J and Barrett Emily Revisiting the empirical case against perceptual modularity Front Psychol. 2015; 6: 1676. Published online 2015 Nov 4. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01676

5. Tasha R Stanton, T,R and Spence Charles. The Influence of Auditory Cues on Bodily and Movement Perception. Front. Psychol., 17 January 2020 Sec. Perception Science https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03001

6. Byrne, V Effects and Implications of COVID-19 for the Human Senses, Consumer Preferences, Appetite and Eating Behaviour: Volume I Foods. 2022 Jun; 11(12): 1738. Published online 2022 Jun 14. doi: 10.3390/foods11121738

7. Mc Cann, H. Our sensory experience of the pandemic https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/

8 Howes, D Architecture of the Senses. https://www.david-howes.com/DH-research-sampler-arch-senses.htm

9 D B Rose Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Inter-actions in the Sentient World Environmental Humanities 3(1):93-19

10 Jones C. The Mediated Sensorium. https://citythroughthebody.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/sensorium.pdf

Descriptions of the artworks presented at Sensoria:

Agnes Meyer Brandis Berlin based artist contributes One Tree ID and Have a tea with a Tree“ to the Sensoria exhibition. One Tree ID is a biochemical and Biopoetic Odour Communication Installation The project One Tree ID transforms the ID of a specific tree into a perfume that can then be applied to the human body. By applying it, a person can invisibly wear not just characteristics of the tree he/she is standing next to, but also use parts of its communication system and potentially have a conversation that – although invisible and inaudible by nature – might still take place on the biochemical level plants use for information exchange. VOC and Have a tea with a Tree provides a booking link to a personal video conference with up to 16 trees. The trees will participate in real time. Address for conference booking: www.teawithatree.com. The internet protocol is secured.

Polish artist Karolina Hałatek will present “Ascent” – a large-scale site-specific light installation that embodies a variety of archetypical and physical associations – from microscopic observations, electromagnetic wave dynamics, and atmospheric phenomena of a whirlwind to a spiritual epiphany. Most importantly, Ascent offers a unique immersive experience, that invites the viewer to become its central point, and transforms the perception of the viewer on a sensual level. The light and the fog create a monumental dynamic space that is participatory, the space that opens up a new dimension and directs the attention toward the bodily sensations in the explicit environment. The viewer is free to approach the work according to its own sensual response, but direct interaction can offer the potential to evoke a new perceptual imagination.

Bodylandscapes by Csenge Kolozsvari is a single channel video piece feeling-with the fascial planes (connective tissues) of bodies; thinking them beyond human scales and temporalities, as constantly emerging fields. The camera is a listening device for the softness of skin-talk; a composition of detailed skin-textures and close-ups of body parts that are imperceptibly transitioning into one another, following creases and swellings, creating landscapes in-the-making. The video is a proposition for remembering the ecological ways of our belonging, of other ways of knowing, connecting into the vastness that surrounds us and moves across us, of becoming-environment once again.

Artur Zmijewski a Polish artist asked a group of visually impaired people to paint the world as they see it. The result is compiled in Blindly a video with sound. Some of the volunteers were congenitally disabled; others became blind in their lifetime. In the film they draw self-portraits and landscapes, occasionally asking the artist for instructions or giving verbal explanation for their decisions. Their paintings are clumsy and abstract. It is however not the resulting works but the process of making them that is at the core of the film.

Hilda Kozari leads a 3 hour-long memory workshop with visually impaired participants and Emilia Leszkowicz a local neuroscientist coordinated with the Education Department of LAZNIA. The workshop is focused on, triggering smell memories and discussions of the scents and the memories triggered by them. Tactility is also a theme of this workshop for the visually impaired participants which is conveyed via felt discs in various sizes. From the different sizes of the discs it is possible to form the Braille verbs and messages.

The findings and results of the workshop material to be transferred on the Sensoria exhibition walls. The multisensory installation is accessible for visually impaired visitors during the exhibition. For other visitors for rethinking perception, enjoying the smell and touch of the installation and seeing the Braille signs as spatial, visually fascinating structure. It is hoped that this is an opportunity recognising the visually impaired as active members of the community.

Gayil Nalls from New York city brings her World Sensorium project to Sensoria World Sensorium which was officially part of New York City’s millennium event “Times Square 2000: The Global Celebration at the Crossroads of the World,” where for 24 hours around New Year’s Eve, the peoples and cultures of nations around the world were celebrated through sight, sound, and—with World Sensorium— scent. World Sensorium is a large-scale, transdisciplinary, olfactory artwork comprised of botanical substances formulated by country population percentages into a single global essence. The phytoconstituents are those most valued by humanity since ancient times, plants established through ethnobotanical research and a global survey process with world governments. Discussion of the World Sensorium link between psychology and olfaction, and the phenomena of odor-evoked memory follows. Individuals attending are invited to participate in ‘Experience World Sensorium:Poland “ and have a chance to dive beneath the insightful a fragmentary memoir of their own experience at a future date.

Raewyn Turner & Brian Harris, New Zealand based artists present Read Reed at Sensoria. Read Reed proceeds from the mythological story of the discretion of Midas’s hairdresser who, feeling that he may betray Midas’s trust, dug a hole in the earth and spoke into it whereby he laid his secret, only to have the secret broadcast to the world via the whispering reeds which grew over the hole. ReedRead relates to data misinterpretation, hidden secrets and the desire for vast wealth. The artists are using the story of secrets whispered into a hole in the earth and the inevitable leakage and exposure of secrets as a starting point. Data from any source including reeds swishing in the wind may be formed into letters and words that relate to digital capitalism and the obscuring of knowledge through the unknowns of ambiguity, uncertainty and risk. Both the clandestine nature of pervasive monitoring and the authorization for increasing the scope and breadth of collected information originates with NSA’s aspiration to sniff it all, know it all, exploit it all etc., and is part of creating the conditions for digital capitalism.

Guy Van Belle in collaboration with Krzysztof Topolski and the Gdansk University Choir present Fanfara Gdansk performance using a simple and open setup for the participatory visitors/performers. For centuries the arts were rather interested in the non-human expressions around or communication and phenomena that we faintly or hardly understand. To quote Paul Demarinis “Music is sound to my ears”. The sound score gives an indication of discrete and continuous time, pitches and amplitudes, complexities and silences, some combinatory ideas, etc. in the form of sounds you can listen to, sing/play along with it or counter, imitate and enrich it… The expressivity and performativity aims at providing a real time interpretation of the sound score.

The Fanfara Gdansk performance consists of a backtrack with recorded and computer generated birdsongs, which is transmitted over local FM, and received by the musicians on headsets from their phones, tables, portable radio receivers. All musicians are ‘singing’ along with the birdsongs, but they can also bring additional small handheld objects that produce sound: battery operated electronics; resonating objects, … some megaphones and small amplifiers will be available, but all wearable.
The singers from the choir move slowly in formation together with the additional musicians and participatory audience, towards the entrance of the exhibition. Any single movement from the musicians and the audience influences the position of the others.

There’s more about the Toronto portion of the exhibitions, etc. on York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technologies’ events page, Note: This is where it gets a little confusing as it seems that some of these artists are displaying the same pieces in two different cities at the same time: World Sensorium has a version in Poland and a version in Toronto; Read Reed is in Poland and ReedRead is in Toronto; I’m not sure about One Tree ID, which seems to be in two places at once,

Courtesy: York University

SENSORIA: the Art & Science of Our Senses is a multi-site exhibition and symposium that bridges LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Held simultaneously in both locations, the exhibition and symposium will engage multi-sensory research that revitalizes our sensory connections to our surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies.

Register for the symposium Oct. 4–5, 2022: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/symposium-sensoria-the-art-and-science-of-our-senses-tickets-418241681127.   

The symposium will also feature 2 keynote performances from 12:45pm EST each day:  The Power of the Spill by Csenge Kolozsvari Oct. 4, 2022, and Doug Van Nort Electro-Acoustic Orchestra Oct. 5, 2022. 

EXHIBITION

September 26 – October 14, 2022
Gales Gallery, York University
105 Accolade West Building,
86 Fine Arts Road, Toronto, ON 

Held at the Gales Gallery, the Sensoria exhibition will feature the works:

One Tree ID.  Agnes Meyer-Brandis,
SunEaters.  Grace Grothaus,
World Sensorium.  Gayil Nalls,
Emergent: A Mobile Gallery featuring “The Connection”, Michaela Pňaček,  Roberta Buiani, Lorella Di Cintio and Kavi
ReedRead.  Raewyn Turner/ Brian Harris 
Kinetic Shadows.  Hrysovalanti Maheras 
Marching Choir Guy Van Belle  

The exhibition is also open during Nuit Blanche as part of the AGYU’s Streams” project.

In addition, Csenge Kolozsvari will be leading the Schizo-Somatic Workshop on Oct. 3, 2022. Please click on the hyperlinks for separate registration. 

SYMPOSIUM

SENSORIA: The Art and Science of Our Senses symposium presents keynote lectures, discussions and performances around the connective aesthetics of everyday sensing and the knowledge-creation potential of artists and scientists collaborations. Registration link : https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/symposium-sensoria-the-art-and-science-of-our-senses-tickets-418241681127

Running from Oct. 4–5 (9am – 12noon EST), The symposium will feature keynote lectures by Ryszard Kluszcynski , Chris Salter and David Howse; roundtable discussions by the artists/theorists/scientists Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Rasa Smite, Katarzyna Pastuszak, Grace Grothaus, Katarzyna Sloboda, Raewyn Turner/Brian Harris, Hilda Kosari [a web search suggests that Kozari is a more correct spelling] and Agnieszka Sorokowska.

The symposium will also feature 2 keynote performances from 12:45pm EST each day:  The Power of the Spill by Csenge Kolozsvari Oct. 4, 2022, and Doug Van Nort Electro-Acoustic Orchestra Oct. 5, 2022. 

In addition, Csenge Kolozsvari will be leading the Schizo-Somatic Workshop on Oct. 3, 2022. Please click on the hyperlinks for separate registration. 

Symposium Schedule:

Tuesday, Oct. 4: 9am – 130pm EST
9:00 : Introductions and land acknowledgement (Joel Ong)
9:05 : Introduction from Sensoria Curator (Nina Czegledy)
9:10 : Introduction from LAZNIA (Jadwiga Charzynska, Director)
9:30 : Keynote 1 —Professor Ryszard Kluszcynski
10:30 : Sensoria Panel 1 — Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Rasa Smite, Katarzyna Pastuszak, Grace Grothaus (Discussant)
12:00 :  Lunch Break
12:30 : Keynote Performance 1 — Csenge Kolozsvari [Sensorium Flex Space] + Q&A
1:30 : End

Wednesday Oct 5th 9am – 130pm EST

9:00 : Introductions and land acknowledgement
9:10 : Curatorial presentation  (Toronto curatorial team)
9:30 : Keynote 2 — Professors Chris Salter and David Howse
10:30 :  Sensoria Panel 2 — Katarzyna Sloboda, Raewyn Turner/Brian Harris, Hilda Kosari, Agnieszka Sorokowska, Hrysovalanti Maheras (Discussant)
12:00 : Lunch Break
12:30 : Keynote Performance 2 — Doug Van Nort Telematic Orchestra  [DisPerSions Lab] + Q&A
1:30 : Ending Notes

Description: 

SENSORIA: the Art & Science of Our Senses is a multi-site exhibition and symposium that bridges LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Gdansk, Poland and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology at York University in Toronto, Canada. Held simultaneously in both locations, the exhibition and symposium will engage multi-sensory research that revitalizes our sensory connections to our surroundings, through and despite technological tools, networks and latencies.

The exhibition is co-curated by distinguished curator Nina Czegledy (Agents for Change: Facing the Anthropocene, 2020 & Leonardo/ISAST 50th Celebrations, 2018) and Sensorium director Joel Ong, with the support of assistant curators Eva Lu and Cleo Sallis-Parchet. Sensoria explores the intersection of art, science and the senses, bringing together an international network of artists: Guy van Belle, Roberta Buiani, Lorella Di Cintio, Grace Grothaus, Kavi, Hrysovalanti Maheras, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Michael Palumbo, Michaela Pnacekova, Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris. Sited concurrently in both Poland and Toronto, the exhibition will explore the dissociative potential of contemporary technologies on the senses, treating it not only as a social crisis but also an opportunity for creative play and experimentation. It aims to engage a conversation about the senses from the perspective of art, but also science, incorporating artists that straddle the boundaries of knowledge production in a variety of ways.

The symposium leverages the exhibition content as the starting point for more in-depth conversation about the connective aesthetics of everyday sensing and the knowledge-creation potential of artists and scientists collaborating in innovative ways. The socio-political turbulences we have experienced worldwide during the last decade have created unprecedented social and personal strife. While connections are sustained now amongst virtual networks that straddle vast spaces, how might we consider the sharing of intimate senses through smell, touch, and bodily movement as a form of mutual support? The symposium explores questions such as these with keynote presentations by Ryszard Khuszcynsk [Kluszcynski]i, Chris Salter and David Howse, as well as roundtables between artists and scientists: Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Gayil Nalls, Rasa Smite, Katarzyna Pastuszak, Grace Grothaus, Katarzyna Sloboda, Hilda Kosari [Kozari], Agnieszka Sorokowska, Hrysovalanti Maheras, Raewyn Turner and Brian Harris. All aspects of the symposium will be presented with virtual components, so as to allow both in-person engagement in Toronto and virtual presence in Gdansk and elsewhere. 

The event will be complemented by a workshop byCsenge Kolozsvari.  Kolozsvari’s Schizo-Somatic Session brings together somatic practices (crawling side by side, drawing, moving with bags full of water, walking backwards, playing with breath, touching textures, voicing etc.) with the concept of the schiz, cut, or interval, following philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus. The aim is to build practices that do not presuppose where bodies begin and end, and to agitate the habitual narratives of bodily borders and edges as solid and knowable. 

Csenge Kolozsvari’s performance The Power of the Spill is a multidisciplinary live performance working at the intersection of digital and imaginary technologies. It uses live video feedback, algorithmic processes of image (Hydra), sound as well as a movement-choreography informed by somatic practices. This project is a study on visual perception and how it affects our ways of making sense of the world, aiming to create an alternative lens that acknowledges the vitality of objects, a topology that is cross-species, the ways seemingly separate entities are in constant exchange, towards a more ecological way of being. The performance is in collaboration with Kieran Maraj, with original live coding by Rodrigo Velasco. Performance will be followed by a Q&A with the artist. 

Doug Van Nort’s performance The Telematic Orchestra  

The sense of touch (or tactility) is not highlighted in the image for the poster but there are some workshops which incorporate that sense.

I apologize for the redundancies and for not correcting or noting the errors in the various texts and with people’s names.

One final note, York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technologies was last mentioned here in an October 26, 2020 posting about an ArtSci Salon event.

AI & creativity events for August and September 2022 (mostly)

This information about these events and papers comes courtesy of the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI (artificial intelligence) at Simon Fraser University and, as usual for the lab, the emphasis is on music.

Music + AI Reading Group @ Mila x Vector Institute

Philippe Pasquier, Metacreation Lab director and professor, is giving a presentation on Friday, August 12, 2022 at 11 am PST (2 pm EST). Here’s more from the August 10, 2022 Metacreation Lab announcement (received via email),

Metacreaton Lab director Philippe Pasquier and PhD researcher Jeff Enns will be presenting next week [tomorrow on August 12 ,2022] at the Music + AI Reading Group hosted by Mila. The presentation will be available as a Zoom meeting. 

Mila is a community of more than 900 researchers specializing in machine learning and dedicated to scientific excellence and innovation. The institute is recognized for its expertise and significant contributions in areas such as modelling language, machine translation, object recognition and generative models.

I believe it’s also possible to view the presentation from the Music + AI Reading Group at MILA: presentation by Dr. Philippe Pasquier webpage on the Simon Fraser University website.

For anyone curious about Mila – Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute (based in Montréal) and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence (based in Toronto), both are part of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy (a Canadian federal government funding initiative).

Getting back to the Music + AI Reading Group @ Mila x Vector Institute, there is an invitation to join the group which meets every Friday at 2 pm EST, from the Google group page,

unread,Feb 24, 2022, 2:47:23 PMto Community Announcements🎹🧠🚨Online Music + AI Reading Group @ Mila x Vector Institute 🎹🧠🚨

Dear members of the ISMIR [International Society for Music Information Retrieval] Community,

Together with fellow researchers at Mila (the Québec AI Institute) in Montréal, canada [sic], we have the pleasure of inviting you to join the Music + AI Reading Group @ Mila x Vector Institute. Our reading group gathers every Friday at 2pm Eastern Time. Our purpose is to build an interdisciplinary forum of researchers, students and professors alike, across industry and academia, working at the intersection of Music and Machine Learning. 

During each meeting, a speaker presents a research paper of their choice during 45’, leaving 15 minutes for questions and discussion. The purpose of the reading group is to :
– Gather a group of Music+AI/HCI [human-computer interface]/others people to share their research, build collaborations, and meet peer students. We are not constrained to any specific research directions, and all people are welcome to contribute.
– People share research ideas and brainstorm with others.
– Researchers not actively working on music-related topics but interested in the field can join and keep up with the latest research in the area, sharing their thoughts and bringing in their own backgrounds.

Our topics of interest cover (beware : the list is not exhaustive !) :
🎹 Music Generation
🧠 Music Understanding
📇 Music Recommendation
🗣  Source Separation and Instrument Recognition
🎛  Acoustics
🗿 Digital Humanities …
🙌  … and more (we are waiting for you :]) !


If you wish to attend one of our upcoming meetings, simply join our Google Group : https://groups.google.com/g/music_reading_group. You will automatically subscribe to our weekly mailing list and be able to contact other members of the group.

Here is the link to our Youtube Channel where you’ll find recordings of our past meetings : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdrzCFRsIFGw2fiItAk5_Og.
Here are general information about the reading group (presentation slides) : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zkqooIksXDuD4rI2wVXiXZQmXXiAedtsAqcicgiNYLY/edit?usp=sharing.

Finally, if you would like to contribute and give a talk about your own research, feel free to fill in the following spreadhseet in the slot of your choice ! —> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1skb83P8I30XHmjnmyEbPAboy3Lrtavt_jHrD-9Q5U44/edit?usp=sharing

Bravo to the two student organizers for putting this together!

Calliope Composition Environment for music makers

From the August 10, 2022 Metacreation Lab announcement,

Calling all music makers! We’d like to share some exciting news on one of the latest music creation tools from its creators, and   .

Calliope is an interactive environment based on MMM for symbolic music generation in computer-assisted composition. Using this environment, the user can generate or regenerate symbolic music from a “seed” MIDI file by using a practical and easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). Through MIDI streaming, the  system can interface with your favourite DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) such as Ableton Live, allowing creators to combine the possibilities of generative composition with their preferred virtual instruments sound design environments.

The project has now entered an open beta-testing phase, and inviting music creators to try the compositional system on their own! Head to the metacreation website to learn more and register for the beta testing.

Learn More About Calliope Here

You can also listen to a Calliope piece “the synthrider,” an Italo-disco fantasy of a machine, by Philippe Pasquier and Renaud Bougueng Tchemeube for the 2022 AI Song Contest.

3rd Conference on AI Music Creativity (AIMC 2022)

This in an online conference and it’s free but you do have to register. From the August 10, 2022 Metacreation Lab announcement,

Registration has opened  for the 3rd Conference on AI Music Creativity (AIMC 2022), which will be held 13-15 September, 2022. The conference features 22 accepted papers, 14 music works, and 2 workshops. Registered participants will get full access to the scientific and artistic program, as well as conference workshops and virtual social events. 

The full conference program is now available online

Registration, free but mandatory, is available here:

Free Registration for AIMC 2022 

The conference theme is “The Sound of Future Past — Colliding AI with Music Tradition” and I noticed that a number of the organizers are based in Japan. Often, the organizers’ home country gets some extra time in the spotlight, which is what makes these international conferences so interesting and valuable.

Autolume Live

This concerns generative adversarial networks (GANs) and a paper proposing “… Autolume-Live, the first GAN-based live VJing-system for controllable video generation.”

Here’s more from the August 10, 2022 Metacreation Lab announcement,

Jonas Kraasch & Phiippe Pasquier recently presented their latest work on the Autolume system at xCoAx, the 10th annual Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X. Their paper is an in-depth exploration of the ways that creative artificial intelligence is increasingly used to generate static and animated visuals. 

While there are a host of systems to generate images, videos and music videos, there is a lack of real-time video synthesisers for live music performances. To address this gap, Kraasch and Pasquier propose Autolume-Live, the first GAN-based live VJing-system for controllable video generation.

Autolume Live on xCoAx proceedings  

As these things go, the paper is readable even by nonexperts (assuming you have some tolerance for being out of your depth from time to time). Here’s an example of the text and an installation (in Kelowna, BC) from the paper, Autolume-Live: Turning GANsinto a Live VJing tool,

Due to the 2020-2022 situation surrounding COVID-19, we were unable to use
our system to accompany live performances. We have used different iterations
of Autolume-Live to create two installations. We recorded some curated sessions
and displayed them at the Distopya sound art festival in Istanbul 2021 (Dystopia
Sound and Art Festival 2021) and Light-Up Kelowna 2022 (ARTSCO 2022) [emphasis mine]. In both iterations, we let the audio mapping automatically generate the video without using any of the additional image manipulations. These installations show
that the system on its own is already able to generate interesting and responsive
visuals for a musical piece.

For the installation at the Distopya sound art festival we trained a Style-GAN2 (-ada) model on abstract paintings and rendered a video using the de-scribed Latent Space Traversal mapping. For this particular piece we ran a super-resolution model on the final video as the original video output was in 512×512 and the wanted resolution was 4k. For our piece at Light-Up Kelowna [emphasis mine] we ran Autolume-Live with the Latent Space Interpolation mapping. The display included three urban screens, which allowed us to showcase three renders at the same time. We composed a video triptych using a dataset of figure drawings, a dataset of medical sketches and to tie the two videos together a model trained on a mixture of both datasets.

I found some additional information about the installation in Kelowna (from a February 7, 2022 article in The Daily Courier),

The artwork is called ‘Autolume Acedia’.

“(It) is a hallucinatory meditation on the ancient emotion called acedia. Acedia describes a mixture of contemplative apathy, nervous nostalgia, and paralyzed angst,” the release states. “Greek monks first described this emotion two millennia ago, and it captures the paradoxical state of being simultaneously bored and anxious.”

Algorithms created the set-to-music artwork but a team of humans associated with Simon Fraser University, including Jonas Kraasch and Philippe Pasquier, was behind the project.

These are among the artistic images generated by a form of artificial intelligence now showing nightly on the exterior of the Rotary Centre for the Arts in downtown Kelowna. [downloaded from https://www.kelownadailycourier.ca/news/article_6f3cefea-886c-11ec-b239-db72e804c7d6.html]

You can find the videos used in the installation and more information on the Metacreation Lab’s Autolume Acedia webpage.

Movement and the Metacreation Lab

Here’s a walk down memory lane: Tom Calvert, a professor at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and deceased September 28, 2021, laid the groundwork for SFU’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology (SIAT) and, in particular studies in movement. From SFU’s In memory of Tom Calvert webpage,

As a researcher, Tom was most interested in computer-based tools for user interaction with multimedia systems, human figure animation, software for dance, and human-computer interaction. He made significant contributions to research in these areas resulting in the Life Forms system for human figure animation and the DanceForms system for dance choreography. These are now developed and marketed by Credo Interactive Inc., a software company of which he was CEO.

While the Metacreation Lab is largely focused on music, other fields of creativity are also studied, from the August 10, 2022 Metacreation Lab announcement,

MITACS Accelerate award – partnership with Kinetyx

We are excited to announce that the Metacreation Lab researchers will be expanding their work on motion capture and movement data thanks to a new MITACS Accelerate research award. 

The project will focus on ​​body pose estimation using Motion Capture data acquisition through a partnership with Kinetyx, a Calgary-based innovative technology firm that develops in-shoe sensor-based solutions for a broad range of sports and performance applications.

Movement Database – MoDa

On the subject of motion data and its many uses in conjunction with machine learning and AI, we invite you to check out the extensive Movement Database (MoDa), led by transdisciplinary artist and scholar Shannon Cyukendall, and AI Researcher Omid Alemi. 

Spanning a wide range of categories such as dance, affect-expressive movements, gestures, eye movements, and more, this database offers a wealth of experiments and captured data available in a variety of formats.

Explore the MoDa Database

MITACS (originally a federal government mathematics-focused Network Centre for Excellence) is now a funding agency (most of the funds they distribute come from the federal government) for innovation.

As for the Calgary-based company (in the province of Alberta for those unfamiliar with Canadian geography), here they are in their own words (from the Kinetyx About webpage),

Kinetyx® is a diverse group of talented engineers, designers, scientists, biomechanists, communicators, and creators, along with an energy trader, and a medical doctor that all bring a unique perspective to our team. A love of movement and the science within is the norm for the team, and we’re encouraged to put our sensory insoles to good use. We work closely together to make movement mean something.

We’re working towards a future where movement is imperceptibly quantified and indispensably communicated with insights that inspire action. We’re developing sensory insoles that collect high-fidelity data where the foot and ground intersect. Capturing laboratory quality data, out in the real world, unlocking entirely new ways to train, study, compete, and play. The insights we provide will unlock unparalleled performance, increase athletic longevity, and provide a clear path to return from injury. We transform lives by empowering our growing community to remain moved.

We believe that high quality data is essential for us to have a meaningful place in the Movement Metaverse [1]. Our team of engineers, sport scientists, and developers work incredibly hard to ensure that our insoles and the insights we gather from them will meet or exceed customer expectations. The forces that are created and experienced while standing, walking, running, and jumping are inferred by many wearables, but our sensory insoles allow us to measure, in real-time, what’s happening at the foot-ground intersection. Measurements of force and power in addition to other traditional gait metrics, will provide a clear picture of a part of the Kinesome [2] that has been inaccessible for too long. Our user interface will distill enormous amounts of data into meaningful insights that will lead to positive behavioral change. 

[1] The Movement Metaverse is the collection of ever-evolving immersive experiences that seamlessly span both the physical and virtual worlds with unprecedented interoperability.

[2] Kinesome is the dynamic characterization and quantification encoded in an individual’s movement and activity. Broadly; an individual’s unique and dynamic movement profile. View the kinesome nft. [Note: Was not able to successfully open link as of August 11, 2022)

“… make movement mean something … .” Really?

The reference to “… energy trader …” had me puzzled but an August 11, 2022 Google search at 11:53 am PST unearthed this,

An energy trader is a finance professional who manages the sales of valuable energy resources like gas, oil, or petroleum. An energy trader is expected to handle energy production and financial matters in such a fast-paced workplace.May 16, 2022

Perhaps a new meaning for the term is emerging?

AI and visual art show in Vancouver (Canada)

The Vancouver Art Gallery’s (VAG) latest exhibition, “The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” is running March 5, 2022 – October 23, 2022. Should you be interested in an exhaustive examination of the exhibit and more, I have a two-part commentary: Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver (Canada) Art Gallery (1 of 2): The Objects and Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver (Canada) Art Gallery (2 of 2): Meditations.

Enjoy the show and/or the commentary, as well as, any other of the events and opportunities listed in this post.

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Artificial Intelligence at the Vancouver (Canada) Art Gallery (2 of 2): Meditations

Dear friend,

I thought it best to break this up a bit. There are a couple of ‘objects’ still to be discussed but this is mostly the commentary part of this letter to you. (Here’s a link for anyone who stumbled here but missed Part 1.)

Ethics, the natural world, social justice, eeek, and AI

Dorothy Woodend in her March 10, 2022 review for The Tyee) suggests some ethical issues in her critique of the ‘bee/AI collaboration’ and she’s not the only one with concerns. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has produced global recommendations for ethical AI (see my March 18, 2022 posting). More recently, there’s “Racist and sexist robots have flawed AI,” a June 23, 2022 posting, where researchers prepared a conference presentation and paper about deeply flawed AI still being used in robots.

Ultimately, the focus is always on humans and Woodend has extended the ethical AI conversation to include insects and the natural world. In short, something less human-centric.

My friend, this reference to the de Young exhibit may seem off topic but I promise it isn’t in more ways than one. The de Young Museum in San Francisco (February 22, 2020 – June 27, 2021) also held and AI and art show called, “Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI”), from the exhibitions page,

In today’s AI-driven world, increasingly organized and shaped by algorithms that track, collect, and evaluate our data, the question of what it means to be human [emphasis mine] has shifted. Uncanny Valley is the first major exhibition to unpack this question through a lens of contemporary art and propose new ways of thinking about intelligence, nature, and artifice. [emphasis mine]

Courtesy: de Young Museum [downloaded from https://deyoung.famsf.org/exhibitions/uncanny-valley]

As you can see, it hinted (perhaps?) at an attempt to see beyond human-centric AI. (BTW, I featured this ‘Uncanny Valley’ show in my February 25, 2020 posting where I mentioned Stephanie Dinkins [featured below] and other artists.)

Social justice

While the VAG show doesn’t see much past humans and AI, it does touch on social justice. In particular there’s Pod 15 featuring the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL). The group “combine[s] art and research to illuminate the social implications and harms of AI” as per their website’s homepage.

In Pod 9, Stephanie Dinkins’ video work with a robot (Bina48), which was also part of the de Young Museum ‘Uncanny Valley’ show, addresses some of the same issues.

Still of Stephanie Dinkins, “Conversations with Bina48,” 2014–present. Courtesy of the artist [downloaded from https://deyoung.famsf.org/stephanie-dinkins-conversations-bina48-0]

From the the de Young Museum’s Stephanie Dinkins “Conversations with Bina48” April 23, 2020 article by Janna Keegan (Dinkins submitted the same work you see at the VAG show), Note: Links have been removed,

Transdisciplinary artist and educator Stephanie Dinkins is concerned with fostering AI literacy. The central thesis of her social practice is that AI, the internet, and other data-based technologies disproportionately impact people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, and disabled and economically disadvantaged communities—groups rarely given a voice in tech’s creation. Dinkins strives to forge a more equitable techno-future by generating AI that includes the voices of multiple constituencies …

The artist’s ongoing Conversations with Bina48 takes the form of a series of interactions with the social robot Bina48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, 48 exaflops per second). The machine is the brainchild of Martine Rothblatt, an entrepreneur in the field of biopharmaceuticals who, with her wife, Bina, cofounded the Terasem Movement, an organization that seeks to extend human life through cybernetic means. In 2007 Martine commissioned Hanson Robotics to create a robot whose appearance and consciousness simulate Bina’s. The robot was released in 2010, and Dinkins began her work with it in 2014.

Part psychoanalytical discourse, part Turing test, Conversations with Bina48 also participates in a larger dialogue regarding bias and representation in technology. Although Bina Rothblatt is a Black woman, Bina48 was not programmed with an understanding of its Black female identity or with knowledge of Black history. Dinkins’s work situates this omission amid the larger tech industry’s lack of diversity, drawing attention to the problems that arise when a roughly homogenous population creates technologies deployed globally. When this occurs, writes art critic Tess Thackara, “the unconscious biases of white developers proliferate on the internet, mapping our social structures and behaviors onto code and repeating imbalances and injustices that exist in the real world.” One of the most appalling and public of these instances occurred when a Google Photos image-recognition algorithm mislabeled the faces of Black people as “gorillas.”

Eeek

You will find as you go through the ‘imitation game’ a pod with a screen showing your movements through the rooms in realtime on a screen. The installation is called “Creepers” (2021-22). The student team from Vancouver’s Centre for Digital Media (CDM) describes their project this way, from the CDM’s AI-driven Installation Piece for the Vancouver Art Gallery webpage,

Project Description

Kaleidoscope [team name] is designing an installation piece that harnesses AI to collect and visualize exhibit visitor behaviours, and interactions with art, in an impactful and thought-provoking way.

There’s no warning that you’re being tracked and you can see they’ve used facial recognition software to track your movements through the show. It’s claimed on the pod’s signage that they are deleting the data once you’ve left.

‘Creepers’ is an interesting approach to the ethics of AI. The name suggests that even the student designers were aware it was problematic.

For the curious, there’s a description of the other VAG ‘imitation game’ installations provided by CDM students on the ‘Master of Digital Media Students Develop Revolutionary Installations for Vancouver Art Gallery AI Exhibition‘ webpage.

In recovery from an existential crisis (meditations)

There’s something greatly ambitious about “The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” and walking up the VAG’s grand staircase affirms that ambition. Bravo to the two curators, Grenville and Entis for an exhibition.that presents a survey (or overview) of artificial intelligence, and its use in and impact on creative visual culture.

I’ve already enthused over the history (specifically Turing, Lovelace, Ovid), admitted to being mesmerized by Scott Eaton’s sculpture/AI videos, and confessed to a fascination (and mild repulsion) regarding Oxman’s honeycombs.

It’s hard to remember all of the ‘objects’ as the curators have offered a jumble of work, almost all of them on screens. Already noted, there’s Norbert Wiener’s The Moth (1949) and there are also a number of other computer-based artworks from the 1960s and 1970s. Plus, you’ll find works utilizing a GAN (generative adversarial network), an AI agent that is explained in the exhibit.

It’s worth going more than once to the show as there is so much to experience.

Why did they do that?

Dear friend, I’ve already commented on the poor flow through the show and It’s hard to tell if the curators intended the experience to be disorienting but this is to the point of chaos, especially when the exhibition is crowded.

I’ve seen Grenville’s shows before. In particular there was “MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture, a massive survey documenting the emergence of a mode of creativity that materialized in the late 1800s and has grown to become the dominant model of cultural production in the 21st century” and there was “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games + Art.” As you can see from the description, he pulls together disparate works and ideas into a show for you to ‘make sense’ of them.

One of the differences between those shows and the “imitation Game: …” is that most of us have some familiarity, whether we like it or not, with modern art/culture and anime/manga/etc. and can try to ‘make sense’ of it.

By contrast, artificial intelligence (which even experts have difficulty defining) occupies an entirely different set of categories; all of them associated with science/technology. This makes for a different kind of show so the curators cannot rely on the audience’s understanding of basics. It’s effectively an art/sci or art/tech show and, I believe, the first of its kind at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Unfortunately, the curators don’t seem to have changed their approach to accommodate that difference.

AI is also at the centre of a current panic over job loss, loss of personal agency, automated racism and sexism, etc. which makes the experience of viewing the show a little tense. In this context, their decision to commission and use ‘Creepers’ seems odd.

Where were Ai-Da and Dall-E-2 and the others?

Oh friend, I was hoping for a robot. Those roomba paintbots didn’t do much for me. All they did was lie there on the floor

To be blunt I wanted some fun and perhaps a bit of wonder and maybe a little vitality. I wasn’t necessarily expecting Ai-Da, an artisitic robot, but something three dimensional and fun in this very flat, screen-oriented show would have been nice.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-asset.jpeg
Ai-Da was at the Glastonbury Festival in the U from 23-26th June 2022. Here’s Ai-Da and her Billie Eilish (one of the Glastonbury 2022 headliners) portrait. [downloaded from https://www.ai-darobot.com/exhibition]

Ai-Da was first featured here in a December 17, 2021 posting about performing poetry that she had written in honour of the 700th anniversary of poet Dante Alighieri’s death.

Named in honour of Ada Lovelace, Ai-Da visited the 2022 Venice Biennale as Leah Henrickson and Simone Natale describe in their May 12, 2022 article for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),

Ai-Da sits behind a desk, paintbrush in hand. She looks up at the person posing for her, and then back down as she dabs another blob of paint onto the canvas. A lifelike portrait is taking shape. If you didn’t know a robot produced it, this portrait could pass as the work of a human artist.

Ai-Da is touted as the “first robot to paint like an artist,” and an exhibition of her work, called Leaping into the Metaverse, opened at the Venice Biennale.

Ai-Da produces portraits of sitting subjects using a robotic hand attached to her lifelike feminine figure. She’s also able to talk, giving detailed answers to questions about her artistic process and attitudes toward technology. She even gave a TEDx talk about “The Intersection of Art and AI” in Oxford a few years ago. While the words she speaks are programmed, Ai-Da’s creators have also been experimenting with having her write and perform her own poetry.

She has her own website.

If not Ai-Da, what about Dall-E-2? Aaron Hertzmann’s June 20, 2022 commentary, “Give this AI a few words of description and it produces a stunning image – but is it art?” investigates for Salon (Note: Links have been removed),

DALL-E 2 is a new neural network [AI] algorithm that creates a picture from a short phrase or sentence that you provide. The program, which was announced by the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI in April 2022, hasn’t been released to the public. But a small and growing number of people – myself included – have been given access to experiment with it.

As a researcher studying the nexus of technology and art, I was keen to see how well the program worked. After hours of experimentation, it’s clear that DALL-E – while not without shortcomings – is leaps and bounds ahead of existing image generation technology. It raises immediate questions about how these technologies will change how art is made and consumed. It also raises questions about what it means to be creative when DALL-E 2 seems to automate so much of the creative process itself.

A July 4, 2022 article “DALL-E, Make Me Another Picasso, Please” by Laura Lane for The New Yorker has a rebuttal to Ada Lovelace’s contention that creativity is uniquely human (Note: A link has been removed),

“There was this belief that creativity is this deeply special, only-human thing,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., explained the other day. Maybe not so true anymore, he said. Altman, who wore a gray sweater and had tousled brown hair, was videoconferencing from the company’s headquarters, in San Francisco. DALL-E is still in a testing phase. So far, OpenAI has granted access to a select group of people—researchers, artists, developers—who have used it to produce a wide array of images: photorealistic animals, bizarre mashups, punny collages. Asked by a user to generate “a plate of various alien fruits from another planet photograph,” DALL-E returned something kind of like rambutans. “The rest of mona lisa” is, according to DALL-E, mostly just one big cliff. Altman described DALL-E as “an extension of your own creativity.”

There are other AI artists, in my August 16, 2019 posting, I had this,

AI artists first hit my radar in August 2018 when Christie’s Auction House advertised an art auction of a ‘painting’ by an algorithm (artificial intelligence). There’s more in my August 31, 2018 posting but, briefly, a French art collective, Obvious, submitted a painting, “Portrait of Edmond de Belamy,” that was created by an artificial intelligence agent to be sold for an estimated to $7000 – $10,000. They weren’t even close. According to Ian Bogost’s March 6, 2019 article for The Atlantic, the painting sold for $432,500 In October 2018.

That posting also included AI artist, AICAN. Both artist-AI agents (Obvious and AICAN) are based on GANs (generative adversarial networks) for learning and eventual output. Both artist-AI agents work independently or with human collaborators on art works that are available for purchase.

As might be expected not everyone is excited about AI and visual art. Sonja Drimmer, Professor of Medieval Art, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, provides another perspective on AI, visual art, and, her specialty, art history in her November 1, 2021 essay for The Conversation (Note: Links have been removed),

Over the past year alone, I’ve come across articles highlighting how artificial intelligence recovered a “secret” painting of a “lost lover” of Italian painter Modigliani, “brought to life” a “hidden Picasso nude”, “resurrected” Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s destroyed works and “restored” portions of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting “The Night Watch.” The list goes on.

As an art historian, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the coverage and circulation of these projects.

They have not, in actuality, revealed one secret or solved a single mystery.

What they have done is generate feel-good stories about AI.

Take the reports about the Modigliani and Picasso paintings.

These were projects executed by the same company, Oxia Palus, which was founded not by art historians but by doctoral students in machine learning.

In both cases, Oxia Palus relied upon traditional X-rays, X-ray fluorescence and infrared imaging that had already been carried out and published years prior – work that had revealed preliminary paintings beneath the visible layer on the artists’ canvases.

The company edited these X-rays and reconstituted them as new works of art by applying a technique called “neural style transfer.” This is a sophisticated-sounding term for a program that breaks works of art down into extremely small units, extrapolates a style from them and then promises to recreate images of other content in that same style.

As you can ‘see’ my friend, the topic of AI and visual art is a juicy one. In fact, I have another example in my June 27, 2022 posting, which is titled, “Art appraised by algorithm.” So, Grenville’s and Entis’ decision to focus on AI and its impact on visual culture is quite timely.

Visual culture: seeing into the future

The VAG Imitation Game webpage lists these categories of visual culture “animation, architecture, art, fashion, graphic design, urban design and video games …” as being represented in the show. Movies and visual art, not mentioned in the write up, are represented while theatre and other performing arts are not mentioned or represented. That’ s not a surprise.

In addition to an area of science/technology that’s not well understood even by experts, the curators took on the truly amorphous (and overwhelming) topic of visual culture. Given that even writing this commentary has been a challenge, I imagine pulling the show together was quite the task.

Grenville often grounds his shows in a history of the subject and, this time, it seems especially striking. You’re in a building that is effectively a 19th century construct and in galleries that reflect a 20th century ‘white cube’ aesthetic, while looking for clues into the 21st century future of visual culture employing technology that has its roots in the 19th century and, to some extent, began to flower in the mid-20th century.

Chung’s collaboration is one of the only ‘optimistic’ notes about the future and, as noted earlier, it bears a resemblance to Wiener’s 1949 ‘Moth’

Overall, it seems we are being cautioned about the future. For example, Oxman’s work seems bleak (bees with no flowers to pollinate and living in an eternal spring). Adding in ‘Creepers’ and surveillance along with issues of bias and social injustice reflects hesitation and concern about what we will see, who sees it, and how it will be represented visually.

Learning about robots, automatons, artificial intelligence, and more

I wish the Vancouver Art Gallery (and Vancouver’s other art galleries) would invest a little more in audience education. A couple of tours, by someone who may or may not know what they’re talking, about during the week do not suffice. The extra material about Stephanie Dinkins and her work (“Conversations with Bina48,” 2014–present) came from the de Young Museum’s website. In my July 26, 2021 commentary on North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery 2021 show “Interior Infinite,” I found background information for artist Zanele Muholi on the Tate Modern’s website. There is nothing on the VAG website that helps you to gain some perspective on the artists’ works.

It seems to me that if the VAG wants to be considered world class, it should conduct itself accordingly and beefing up its website with background information about their current shows would be a good place to start.

Robots, automata, and artificial intelligence

Prior to 1921, robots were known exclusively as automatons. These days, the word ‘automaton’ (or ‘automata’ in the plural) seems to be used to describe purely mechanical representations of humans from over 100 years ago whereas the word ‘robot’ can be either ‘humanlike’ or purely machine, e.g. a mechanical arm that performs the same function over and over. I have a good February 24, 2017 essay on automatons by Miguel Barral for OpenMind BBVA*, which provides some insight into the matter,

The concept of robot is relatively recent. The idea was introduced in 1921 by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his work R.U.R to designate a machine that performs tasks in place of man. But their predecessors, the automatons (from the Greek automata, or “mechanical device that works by itself”), have been the object of desire and fascination since antiquity. Some of the greatest inventors in history, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, have contributed to our fascination with these fabulous creations:

The Al-Jazari automatons

The earliest examples of known automatons appeared in the Islamic world in the 12th and 13th centuries. In 1206, the Arab polymath Al-Jazari, whose creations were known for their sophistication, described some of his most notable automatons: an automatic wine dispenser, a soap and towels dispenser and an orchestra-automaton that operated by the force of water. This latter invention was meant to liven up parties and banquets with music while floating on a pond, lake or fountain.

As the water flowed, it started a rotating drum with pegs that, in turn, moved levers whose movement produced different sounds and movements. As the pegs responsible for the musical notes could be exchanged for different ones in order to interpret another melody, it is considered one of the first programmable machines in history.

If you’re curious about automata, my friend, I found this Sept. 26, 2016 ABC news radio news item about singer Roger Daltrey’s and his wife, Heather’s auction of their collection of 19th century French automata (there’s an embedded video showcasing these extraordinary works of art). For more about automata, robots, and androids, there’s an excellent May 4, 2022 article by James Vincent, ‘A visit to the human factory; How to build the world’s most realistic robot‘ for The Verge; Vincent’s article is about Engineered Arts, the UK-based company that built Ai-Da.

AI is often used interchangeably with ‘robot’ but they aren’t the same. Not all robots have AI integrated into their processes. At its simplest AI is an algorithm or set of algorithms, which may ‘live’ in a CPU and be effectively invisible or ‘live’ in or make use of some kind of machine and/or humanlike body. As the experts have noted, the concept of artificial intelligence is a slippery concept.

*OpenMind BBVA is a Spanish multinational financial services company, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), which runs the non-profit project, OpenMind (About us page) to disseminate information on robotics and so much more.*

You can’t always get what you want

My friend,

I expect many of the show’s shortcomings (as perceived by me) are due to money and/or scheduling issues. For example, Ai-Da was at the Venice Biennale and if there was a choice between the VAG and Biennale, I know where I’d be.

Even with those caveats in mind, It is a bit surprising that there were no examples of wearable technology. For example, Toronto’s Tapestry Opera recently performed R.U.R. A Torrent of Light (based on the word ‘robot’ from Karel Čapek’s play, R.U.R., ‘Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti’), from my May 24, 2022 posting,

I have more about tickets prices, dates, and location later in this post but first, here’s more about the opera and the people who’ve created it from the Tapestry Opera’s ‘R.U.R. A Torrent of Light’ performance webpage,

“This stunning new opera combines dance, beautiful multimedia design, a chamber orchestra including 100 instruments creating a unique electronica-classical sound, and wearable technology [emphasis mine] created with OCAD University’s Social Body Lab, to create an immersive and unforgettable science-fiction experience.”

And, from later in my posting,

“Despite current stereotypes, opera was historically a launchpad for all kinds of applied design technologies. [emphasis mine] Having the opportunity to collaborate with OCAD U faculty is an invigorating way to reconnect to that tradition and foster connections between art, music and design, [emphasis mine]” comments the production’s Director Michael Hidetoshi Mori, who is also Tapestry Opera’s Artistic Director. 

That last quote brings me back to the my comment about theatre and performing arts not being part of the show. Of course, the curators couldn’t do it all but a website with my hoped for background and additional information could have helped to solve the problem.

The absence of the theatrical and performing arts in the VAG’s ‘Imitation Game’ is a bit surprising as the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) in their third assessment, “Competing in a Global Innovation Economy: The Current State of R&D in Canada” released in 2018 noted this (from my April 12, 2018 posting),

Canada, relative to the world, specializes in subjects generally referred to as the
humanities and social sciences (plus health and the environment), and does
not specialize as much as others in areas traditionally referred to as the physical
sciences and engineering. Specifically, Canada has comparatively high levels
of research output in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, Public Health and
Health Services, Philosophy and Theology, Earth and Environmental Sciences,
and Visual and Performing Arts. [emphasis mine] It accounts for more than 5% of world research in these fields. Conversely, Canada has lower research output than expected in Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, Enabling and Strategic Technologies,
Engineering, and Mathematics and Statistics. The comparatively low research
output in core areas of the natural sciences and engineering is concerning,
and could impair the flexibility of Canada’s research base, preventing research
institutions and researchers from being able to pivot to tomorrow’s emerging
research areas. [p. xix Print; p. 21 PDF]

US-centric

My friend,

I was a little surprised that the show was so centered on work from the US given that Grenville has curated ate least one show where there was significant input from artists based in Asia. Both Japan and Korea are very active with regard to artificial intelligence and it’s hard to believe that their artists haven’t kept pace. (I’m not as familiar with China and its AI efforts, other than in the field of facial recognition, but it’s hard to believe their artists aren’t experimenting.)

The Americans, of course, are very important developers in the field of AI but they are not alone and it would have been nice to have seen something from Asia and/or Africa and/or something from one of the other Americas. In fact, anything which takes us out of the same old, same old. (Luba Elliott wrote this (2019/2020/2021?) essay, “Artificial Intelligence Art from Africa and Black Communities Worldwide” on Aya Data if you want to get a sense of some of the activity on the African continent. Elliott does seem to conflate Africa and Black Communities, for some clarity you may want to check out the Wikipedia entry on Africanfuturism, which contrasts with this August 12, 2020 essay by Donald Maloba, “What is Afrofuturism? A Beginner’s Guide.” Maloba also conflates the two.)

As it turns out, Luba Elliott presented at the 2019 Montréal Digital Spring event, which brings me to Canada’s artificial intelligence and arts scene.

I promise I haven’t turned into a flag waving zealot, my friend. It’s just odd there isn’t a bit more given that machine learning was pioneered at the University of Toronto. Here’s more about that (from Wikipedia entry for Geoffrey Hinston),

Geoffrey Everest HintonCCFRSFRSC[11] (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks.

Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, together with Yoshua Bengio [Canadian scientist] and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning.[24] They are sometimes referred to as the “Godfathers of AI” and “Godfathers of Deep Learning“,[25][26] and have continued to give public talks together.[27][28]

Some of Hinton’s work was started in the US but since 1987, he has pursued his interests at the University of Toronto. He wasn’t proven right until 2012. Katrina Onstad’s February 29, 2018 article (Mr. Robot) for Toronto Life is a gripping read about Hinton and his work on neural networks. BTW, Yoshua Bengio (co-Godfather) is a Canadian scientist at the Université de Montréal and Yann LeCun (co-Godfather) is a French scientist at New York University.

Then, there’s another contribution, our government was the first in the world to develop a national artificial intelligence strategy. Adding those developments to the CCA ‘State of Science’ report findings about visual arts and performing arts, is there another word besides ‘odd’ to describe the lack of Canadian voices?

You’re going to point out the installation by Ben Bogart (a member of Simon Fraser University’s Metacreation Lab for Creative AI and instructor at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU)) but it’s based on the iconic US scifi film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As for the other Canadian, Sougwen Chung, she left Canada pretty quickly to get her undergraduate degree in the US and has since moved to the UK. (You could describe hers as the quintessential success story, i.e., moving from Canada only to get noticed here after success elsewhere.)

Of course, there are the CDM student projects but the projects seem less like an exploration of visual culture than an exploration of technology and industry requirements, from the ‘Master of Digital Media Students Develop Revolutionary Installations for Vancouver Art Gallery AI Exhibition‘ webpage, Note: A link has been removed,

In 2019, Bruce Grenville, Senior Curator at Vancouver Art Gallery, approached [the] Centre for Digital Media to collaborate on several industry projects for the forthcoming exhibition. Four student teams tackled the project briefs over the course of the next two years and produced award-winning installations that are on display until October 23 [2022].

Basically, my friend, it would have been nice to see other voices or, at the least, an attempt at representing other voices and visual cultures informed by AI. As for Canadian contributions, maybe put something on the VAG website?

Playing well with others

it’s always a mystery to me why the Vancouver cultural scene seems comprised of a set of silos or closely guarded kingdoms. Reaching out to the public library and other institutions such as Science World might have cost time but could have enhanced the show

For example, one of the branches of the New York Public Library ran a programme called, “We are AI” in March 2022 (see my March 23, 2022 posting about the five-week course, which was run as a learning circle). The course materials are available for free (We are AI webpage) and I imagine that adding a ‘visual culture module’ wouldn’t be that difficult.

There is one (rare) example of some Vancouver cultural institutions getting together to offer an art/science programme and that was in 2017 when the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (at the University of British Columbia; UBC) hosted an exhibition of Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s work (see my Sept. 11, 2017 posting about the gallery show) along with that show was an ancillary event held by the folks at Café Scientifique at Science World and featuring a panel of professionals from UBC’s Faculty of Medicine and Dept. of Psychology, discussing Cajal’s work.

In fact, where were the science and technology communities for this show?

On a related note, the 2022 ACM SIGGRAPH conference (August 7 – 11, 2022) is being held in Vancouver. (ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery; SIGGRAPH is for Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.) SIGGRAPH has been holding conferences in Vancouver every few years since at least 2011.

At this year’s conference, they have at least two sessions that indicate interests similar to the VAG’s. First, there’s Immersive Visualization for Research, Science and Art which includes AI and machine learning along with other related topics. There’s also, Frontiers Talk: Art in the Age of AI: Can Computers Create Art?

This is both an international conference and an exhibition (of art) and the whole thing seems to have kicked off on July 25, 2022. If you’re interested, the programme can be found here and registration here.

Last time SIGGRAPH was here the organizers seemed interested in outreach and they offered some free events.

In the end

It was good to see the show. The curators brought together some exciting material. As is always the case, there were some missed opportunities and a few blind spots. But all is not lost.

July 27, 2022, the VAG held a virtual event with an artist,

Gwenyth Chao to learn more about what happened to the honeybees and hives in Oxman’s Synthetic Apiary project. As a transdisciplinary artist herself, Chao will also discuss the relationship between art, science, technology and design. She will then guide participants to create a space (of any scale, from insect to human) inspired by patterns found in nature.

Hopefully there will be more more events inspired by specific ‘objects’. Meanwhile, August 12, 2022, the VAG is hosting,

… in partnership with the Canadian Music Centre BC, New Music at the Gallery is a live concert series hosted by the Vancouver Art Gallery that features an array of musicians and composers who draw on contemporary art themes.

Highlighting a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music compositions, this second concert, inspired by the exhibition The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, will spotlight The Iliac Suite (1957), the first piece ever written using only a computer, and Kaija Saariaho’s Terra Memoria (2006), which is in a large part dependent on a computer-generated musical process.

It would be lovely if they could include an Ada Lovelace Day event. This is an international celebration held on October 11, 2022.

Do go. Do enjoy, my friend.

Drag artists making science more accessible

I can remember kids describing science (and mathematics too) as a drag never imagining this, “Meet The Drag Artists Who Are Making Science More Accessible,” a 17 – 20 min. segment on the Science Friday (SciFri ) radio programme (broadcast on US National Public Radio).

Luckily, there’s a webpage devoted to the segment where you’ll find all kinds of interesting tidbits like this (Note: Links have been removed),

Each generation has had science communicators who brought a sometimes stuffy, siloed subject into homes, inspiring minds young and old. Scientists like Don Herbert, Carl Sagan, and Bill Nye are classic examples. But our modern age of social media has brought more diverse communicators into the forefront of science communication, including the wild, wonderful world of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] drag stars.

These are queer folk who mix the flashy fashions of the drag world with science education. Some, like Kyne, use TikTok as a medium to teach concepts like math. Others, like Pattie Gonia, use drag to attract more people to the great outdoors. The accessibility of the internet has made these personalities available to a wide audience.

Kyne and Pattie Gonia join Ira [SciFri host Ira Flatow] to talk about the magic drag can bring to science education, and why they think the future of SciComm looks more diverse than the past.

You’ll find images similar to this one of Pattie Gonia in the SciFri article,

This dress is trash—in a good way. With the help of recycling, one queen’s trash is Pattie Gonia’s treasure. Credit: Pattie Gonia [downloaded from https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/science-friday/segments/science-advisor-resigns-covid-drug-treatments-science-drag-artists-feb-11-2022-part-1]

You can listen to the segment, read transcripts, watch videos, and find more information on the “Meet The Drag Artists Who Are Making Science More Accessible” webpage.

Research communicated by puppets

Yes, there’s protein folding as explained by puppets,

An April 25, 2019 article by Madeleine O’Keefe for BU (Boston University) Today describes both the course “Thinking through Puppets and Performing Objects: Using Theatrical Tools to Communicate the Complex, the Abstract, and the Technical” and a then upcoming Puppet Slam performance (Note: Links have been removed),

Thinking through Puppets is the brainchild of Felice Amato, a College of Fine Arts assistant professor of art education and a Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future faculty associate, and Anna Panszczyk (CAS’97), a College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program senior lecturer.

The course is part of the BU Cross-College Challenge (XCC), the Hub’s signature project-based, one-semester four-credit elective course open to juniors and seniors from all 10 undergraduate schools and colleges. It fulfills four Hub units: Creativity/Innovation, Oral Communication, Research and Information Literacy, and Teamwork/Collaboration.

Amato previously taught K-12 art in public schools and focused her doctoral work on puppetry. Panszczyk focuses on children’s literature and culture in her writing, and says she was interested in working with Amato to see how a puppet project could help students develop the aforementioned four Hub skills.

The course attracted six undergraduates, … . Suddenly, they were thrust into a world of cutting, crafting, sewing, gluing, shaping, and molding. They worked with fabric, wood, paper, everyday trash, and more—even M&Ms.

“It was definitely challenging,” Kasanaa [Vinamre Kasanaa. senior at BU] acknowledges. “Taking the leap from our passive classes, which are information-intensive—you get the information, you regurgitate it out on paper, you write, you debate—it’s all abstract.…Tapping your fingers on the screen is not a replacement for craftsmanship, where you’re using your hands. So that’s the one thing that we all were able to learn, because most of us made our own puppets and made these things by ourselves.”

An important aspect of the XCC courses is working on real-world projects with a variety of on-campus and community clients. As the culmination of Thinking through Puppets, Amato, Panszczyk, and their students produced puppet slams …

What exactly is a puppet slam? Amato defines it as “a series of short experimental pieces,” each typically about three minutes long. Puppet slams got their launch at Puppet Showplace Theater, but have become so popular that they now are held all over the world. Heather Henson, daughter of Jim Henson, the Emmy-winning creator of the Muppets, supports a national Puppet Slam Network.

Devyani Chhetri’s March 26, 2020 article for BU Hub updates the story with a description of the 2020 class’s Puppet Slam,

They say that actions speak louder than words. Nothing was more true when XCC students took the stage last Friday to reveal the anxieties of the world borne from issues such as climate change, sexual harassment and immigration— through puppets.

In …, “Puppets against Climate Change”, two puppets are seated in a car and driving around puppet city when they ignore a sign that said ‘no dumping’ and throw trash out of the car.

With Rindner’s [Alexis Rindner, BU student] exaggerated puppet voice leaving the audience in splits, the two puppets are struck soon after by a ‘trash’ comet that decimates the puppet planet.

The humor of the moment gives way to a grim montage of a destroyed planet when the ghosts of the puppets go over the years of excesses where deforestation and pollution in the name of progress led to global warming and the puppet planet’s eventual demise.

You can find the Puppet Slam Network here. The homepage includes a map of various Puppet Slam members.

There are three network members in Canada: Vancouver International Puppet Festival (VIPF) in British Columbia, Calgary Animated Objects Society (CAOS) in Alberta, and the Winnipeg Puppet Slam in Manitoba.

As far as I’m aware, none of the three Canadian members are focused on explicitly communicating research in the manner of the Boston University programme.

Sci-fi opera: R.U.R. A Torrent of Light opens May 28, 2022 in Toronto, Canada

Even though it’s a little late, I guess you could call the opera opening in Toronto on May 28, 2022 a 100th anniversary celebration of the word ‘robot’. Introduced in 1920 by Czech playwright Karel Čapek in his play, R.U.R., which stands for ‘Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti’ or, in English, ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’, the word was first coined by Čapek’s brother, Josef (see more about the play and the word in the R.U.R. Wikipedia entry).

The opera, R.U.R. A Torrent of Light, is scheduled to open at 8 pm ET on Saturday, May 28, 2022 (after being rescheduled due to a COVID case in the cast) at OCAD University’s (formerly the Ontario College of Art and Design) The Great Hall.

I have more about tickets prices, dates, and location later in this post but first, here’s more about the opera and the people who’ve created it from the Tapestry Opera’s ‘R.U.R. A Torrent of Light’ performance webpage,

This stunning new opera combines dance, beautiful multimedia design, a chamber orchestra including 100 instruments creating a unique electronica-classical sound, and wearable technology [emphasis mine] created with OCAD University’s Social Body Lab, to create an immersive and unforgettable science-fiction experience.

As for the opera’s story,

The fictional tech company R.U.R., founded by couple Helena and Dom, dominates the A.I. software market and powers the now-ubiquitous androids that serve their human owners. 

As Dom becomes more focused on growing R.U.R’s profits, Helena’s creative research leads to an unexpected technological breakthrough that pits the couples’ visions squarely against each other. They’ve reached a turning point for humanity, but is humanity ready? 

Inspired by Karel Čapek’s 1920’s science-fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots (which introduced the word “robot” to the English language), composer Nicole Lizée’s and writer Nicolas Billon’s R.U.R. A Torrent of Light grapples with one of our generation’s most fascinating questions. [emphasis mine]

So, what is the fascinating question? The answer is here in a March 7, 2022 OCAD news release,

Last Wednesday [March 2, 2022], OCAD U’s Great Hall at 100 McCaul St. was filled with all manner of sound making objects. Drum kits, gongs, chimes, typewriters and most exceptionally, a cello bow that produces bird sounds when glided across any surface were being played while musicians, dancers and opera singers moved among them.  

All were abuzz preparing for Tapestry Opera’s new production, R.U.R. A Torrent of Light, which will be presented this spring in collaboration with OCAD University. 

An immersive, site-specific experience, the new chamber opera explores humanity’s relationship to technology. [emphasis mine] Inspired by Karel Čapek’s 1920s science-fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots, this latest version is set 20 years in the future when artificial intelligence (AI) has become fully sewn into our everyday lives and is set in the offices of a fictional tech company.

Čapek’s original script brought the word robot into the English language and begins in a factory that manufactures artificial people. Eventually these entities revolt and render humanity extinct.  

The innovative adaptation will be a unique addition to Tapestry Opera’s more than 40-year history of producing operatic stage performances. It is the only company in the country dedicated solely to the creation and performance of original Canadian opera. 

The March 7, 2022 OCAD news release goes on to describe the Social Body Lab’s involvement,

OCAD U’s Social Body Lab, whose mandate is to question the relationship between humans and technology, is helping to bring Tapestry’s vision of the not-so-distant future to the stage. Director of the Lab and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science, Kate Hartman, along with Digital Futures Associate Professors Nick Puckett and Dr. Adam Tindale have developed wearable technology prototypes that will be integrated into the performers’ costumes. They have collaborated closely with the opera’s creative team to embrace the possibilities innovative technologies can bring to live performance. 

“This collaboration with Tapestry Opera has been incredibly unique and productive. Working in dialogue with their designers has enabled us to translate their ideas into cutting edge technological objects that we would have never arrived at individually,” notes Professor Puckett. 

The uncanny bow that was being tested last week is one of the futuristic devices that will be featured in the performance and is the invention of Dr. Tindale, who is himself a classically trained musician. He has also developed a set of wearable speakers for R.U.R. A Torrent of Light that when donned by the dancers will allow sound to travel across the stage in step with their choreography. 

Hartman and Puckett, along with the production’s costume, light and sound designers, have developed an LED-based prototype that will be worn around the necks of the actors who play robots and will be activated using WIFI. These collar pieces will function as visual indicators to the audience of various plot points, including the moments when the robots receive software updates.  

“Despite current stereotypes, opera was historically a launchpad for all kinds of applied design technologies. [emphasis mine] Having the opportunity to collaborate with OCAD U faculty is an invigorating way to reconnect to that tradition and foster connections between art, music and design,” comments the production’s Director Michael Hidetoshi Mori, who is also Tapestry Opera’s Artistic Director. 

“New music and theatre are perfect canvases for iterative experimentation. We look forward to the unique fruits of this collaboration and future ones,” he continues. 

Unfortunately, I cannot find a preview but there is this video highlighting the technology being used in the opera (there are three other videos highlighting the choreography, the music, and the story, respectively, if you scroll about 40% down this page),


As I promised, here are the logistics,

University address:

OCAD University
100 McCaul Street,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 1W1

Performance venue:

The Great Hall at OCAD University
Level 2, beside the Anniversary Gallery

Ticket prices:

The following seating sections are available for this performance. Tickets are from $10 to $100. All tickets are subject to a $5 transaction fee.

Orchestra Centre
Orchestra Sides
Orchestra Rear
Balcony (standing room)

Performances:

May 28 at 8:00 pm

May 29 at 4:00 pm

June 01 at 8:00 pm

June 02 at 8:00 pm

June 03 at 8:00 pm

June 04 at 8:00 pm

June 05 at 4:00 pm

Tapestry Opera’s ‘R.U.R. A Torrent of Light’ performance webpage offers a link to buy tickets but it lands on a page that doesn’t seem to be functioning properly. I have contacted (as of Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at about 10:30 am PT) the Tapestry Opera folks to let them know about the problem. Hopefully soon, I will be able to update this page when they’ve handled the issue.

ETA May 30, 2022: You can buy tickets here. There are tickets available for only two of the performances left, Thursday, June 2, 2022 at 8 pm and Sunday, June 5, 2022 at 4 pm.

Data Meditation and three roundtables: a collection of Who Cares? March 2022 events

You can find out more about Toronto’s Art/Sci Salon’s Who Cares? speaker series in my February 9, 2022 posting. For this posting, I’m focusing on the upcoming March 2022 events, which are being offered online. From a March 7, 2022 Art/Sci Salon announcement (received via email),

We’re pleased to announce our next two events from our “Who Cares?” Speaker Series

Nous sommes heureux d’annoncer notre deuxième événement de notre “Who Cares?” Série de conferences

March 10 [2022], 2:00-3:00 pm [ET]

Data Meditation: Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico

HER – She Loves Data 

Nuovo Abitare

Join us for a discussion about questions like: 

Why does data have to be an extractive process?

What can we learn about ourselves through the data we generate everyday?

How can we use them as an expressive form to represent ourselves?

Data Meditations is the first ritual designed with the new approach of HER: She Loves Data, which addresses data as existential and cultural phenomena, and the need of creating experience (contemporary rituals) that allow societies and individuals to come together around data generating meaning, new forms of solidarity, empathy, interconnection and knowledge.

Rejoignez-nous pour une discussion basée sur des questions telles que : 

Pourquoi les données doivent-elles être un processus d’extraction ?

Que pouvons-nous apprendre par rapport à nous, grâce aux données que nous générons chaque jour ?

Comment pouvons-nous les utiliser comme une forme expressive pour nous représenter ?

Data Méditations est le premier rituel conçu avec la nouvelle approche de HER [elle] : She loves Data , qui parle des données en tant que phénomènes existentiels et culturels , mais également , la nécessité de créer des expériences [ rituels contemporains ] qui permettent aux sociétés et aux individus de se réunir autour de données générant du sens , de nouvelles formes de solidarité , empathie ,  d’interconnexion et de connaissance. 

Register HERE/Inscrivez-vous ici

[Beyond triage and data culture roundtable]

March 11, 5:00-7:00 pm [ET]

Maria Antonia Gonzalez-Valerio,
Professor of Philosophy and Literature, UNAM, Mexico City.
Sharmistha Mishra,
Infectious Disease Physician and Mathematical Modeller, St Michael’s Hospital
Madhur Anand,
Ecologist, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph
Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico,
Independent Artists, HER, She Loves Data

One lesson we have learnt in the past two years is that the pandemic has not single-handedly created a global health crisis, but has exacerbated and made visible one that was already in progress. The roots of this crisis are as cultural as they are economic and environmental.  Among the factors contributing to the crisis is a dominant orientation towards healthcare that privileges a narrow focus on data-centered technological fixes and praises the potentials of technological delegation. An unsustainable system has culminated in the passive acceptance and even the cold justification of triage as an inevitable evil in a time of crisis and scarcity.

What transdisciplinary practices can help ameliorate the atomizing pitfalls of turning the patient into data?
How can discriminatory practices such as triage, exclusion based on race, gender, and class, vaccine hoarding etc.. be addressed and reversed?
What strategies can we devise to foster genuine transdisciplinary approaches and move beyond the silo effects of specialization, address current uncritical trends towards technological delegation, and restore the centrality of human relations in healthcare delivery?

L’une des leçons que nous avons apprises au cours des deux dernières années est que la pandémie n’a pas créé à elle seule une crise sanitaire mondiale, mais qu’elle en a exacerbé et rendu visible une qui était déjà en cours. Les racines de cette crise sont aussi bien culturelles qu’économiques et environnementales. Parmi les facteurs qui contribuent à la crise figure une orientation dominante en matière de soins de santé, qui privilégie une vision étroite des solutions technologiques centrées sur les données et fait l’éloge du potentiel de la délégation technologique. Un système non durable a abouti à l’acceptation passive et même à la justification froide du triage comme un mal inévitable en temps de crise et de pénurie.

Quelles pratiques transdisciplinaires peuvent contribuer à améliorer les pièges de l’atomisation qui consiste à transformer le patient en données ?
Comment les pratiques discriminatoires telles que le triage, l’exclusion fondée sur la race, le sexe et la classe sociale, la thésaurisation des vaccins, etc. peuvent-elles être abordées et inversées ?
Quelles stratégies pouvons-nous concevoir pour favoriser de véritables approches transdisciplinaires et dépasser les effets de silo de la spécialisation, pour faire face aux tendances actuelles non critiques à la délégation technologique, et pour restaurer la centralité des relations humaines dans la prestation des soins de santé ?

Register HERE/Inscrivez-vous ici

We wish to thank/ nous [sic] the generous support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, New College at the University of Toronto and The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University; the Centre for Feminist Research, Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, The Canadian Language Museum, the Departments of English and the School of Gender and Women’s Studies at York University; the D.G. Ivey Library and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto; We also wish to thank the support of The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences

There are two more online March 2022 roundtable discussions, from the Who Cares? events webpage,

2. Friday, March 18 – 6:00 to 8:00 pm [ET]
Critical care and sustainable care

Suvendrini Lena, MD, Playwright and Neurologist at CAMH and Centre for Headache, Women’s College Hospital, Toronto
Adriana Ieraci, Roboticist and PhD candidate in Computer Science, Ryerson University
Lucia Gagliese – Pain Aging Lab, York University

(online)

3. Friday, March 25 – 5:00 to 7:00 pm [ET]
Building communities and technologies of care

Camille Baker, University for the Creative Arts, School of Film media and Performing Arts
Alanna Kibbe, independent artist, Toronto

(online)

There will also be some events in April 2022 and there are two ongoing exhibitions, which you can see here.

Who Cares? a series of Art/Sci Salon talks and exhibitions in February and March 2022

COVID-19 has put health care workers in a more than usually interesting position and the Art/Sci Salon in Toronto, Canada is ‘creatively’ addressing the old, new, and emerging stresses. From the Who Cares? events webpage (also in a February 8, 2022 notice received via email),

“Who Cares?” is a Speaker Series dedicated to fostering transdisciplinary conversations between doctors, writers, artists, and researchers on contemporary biopolitics of care and the urgent need to move towards more respectful, creative, and inclusive social practices of care in the wake of the systemic cracks made obvious by the pandemic.

About the Series

Critiques of the health care sector are certainly not new and have been put forward by workers and researchers in the medical sector and in the humanities alike. However, critique alone fails to consider the systemic issues that prevent well-meaning practitioners to make a difference. The goal of this series is to activate practical conversations between people who are already engaged in transforming the infrastructures and cultures of care but have few opportunities to speak to each other. These interdisciplinary dialogues will enable the sharing of emerging epistemologies, new material approaches and pedagogies that could take us beyond the current crisis. By engaging with the arts as research, our guests use the generative insights of poetic and artistic practices to zoom in on the crucial issues undermining holistic, dynamic and socially responsible forms of care. Furthermore, they champion transdisciplinary dialogues and multipronged approaches directed at changing the material and discursive practices of care. 

Who cares? asks the following important questions:

How do we lay the groundwork for sustainable practices of care, that is, care beyond ‘just-in-time’ interventions?

What strategies can we devise to foster genuine transdisciplinary approaches that move beyond the silo effects of specialization, address current uncritical trends towards technological delegation, and restore the centrality responsive/responsible human relations in healthcare delivery?

What practices can help ameliorate the atomizing pitfalls of turning the patient into data?

What pathways can we design to re-direct attention to long lasting care focused on a deeper understanding of the manifold relationalities between doctors, patients, communities, and the socio-environmental context?

How can the critically creative explorations of artists and writers contribute to building resilient communities of care that cultivate reciprocity, respect for the unpredictable temporalities of healing, and active listening?

How to build a capacious infrastructure of care able to address and mend the damages caused by ideologies of ultimate cure that pervade corporate approaches to healthcare funding and delivery?

The first event starts on February 14, 2022 (from the On care, beauty, and Where Things Touch webpage),

On care, beauty, and Where Things Touch

Bahar Orang (University of Toronto, Psychiatry)

Feb. 14 [2022], 10:30 am – 12-30 pm [ET]

This event will be online, please register HERE to participate. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. 

A Conversation with Bahar Orang, author of Where Things Touch, on staying attuned to the fragile intimacies of care beyond the stifling demands of institutional environments. 

This short presentation will ask questions about care that move it beyond the carceral logics of hospital settings, particularly in psychiatry. Drawing from questions raised in my first book Where Things Touch, and my work with Doctors for Defunding Police (DFDP), I hope to pose the question of how to do the work of health care differently. As the pandemic has laid bare so much violence, it becomes imperative to engage in forms of political imaginativeness that proactively ask what are the forms that care can take, and does already take, in places other than the clinic or the hospital? 

Bahar Orang is a writer and clinician scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Her creative and clinical work seeks to engage with ways of imagining care beyond the carcerality that medical institutions routinely reproduce

Here’s the full programme from the Who Cares? events webpage,

Opening dialogue
February 14, 10:30-12:30 pm [ET]
On care, beauty, and Where Things Touch

Bahar Orang, University of Toronto, Psychiatry

( Online)

Keynote
Thursday March 10, 1:00-3:00 pm [ET]
Keynote and public reveal of Data meditation

Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico
independent artists, HER, She Loves Data

(Online)

Roundtables
1. Friday, March 11 – 5:00 to 7:00 pm [ET]
Beyond triage and data culture

Maria Antonia Gonzalez-Valerio, Professor of Philosophy and Literature, UNAM, Mexico City.
Sharmistha Mishra, Infectious Disease Physician and Mathematical Modeller, St Michael’s Hospital
Madhur Anand, Ecologist, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph
Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico, independent artists, HER, She Loves Data

(Online)

2. Friday, March 18 – 6:00 to 8:00 pm [ET]
Critical care and sustainable care

Suvendrini Lena, MD, Playwright and Neurologist at CAMH and Centre for Headache, Women’s College Hospital, Toronto
Adriana Ieraci, Roboticist and PhD candidate in Computer Science, Ryerson University
Lucia Gagliese – Pain Aging Lab, York University

(online)

3. Friday, March 25 – 5:00 to 7:00 pm [ET]
Building communities and technologies of care

Camille Baker, University for the Creative Arts, School of Film media and Performing Arts
Alanna Kibbe, independent artist, Toronto

(online)

Keynote Conversation
Friday, April 1, 5:00-7:00 pm [ET]
Seema Yasmin,  Director of Research and Education, Stanford Health Communication Initiative [Stanford University]
Bayo Akomolafe,  Chief Curator of The Emergence Network

(hybrid) William Doo Auditorium, 45 Willcox Street, Toronto

Exhibitions
March 24 – April 30

Alanna Kibbe – TRANSFORM: Exploring Languages of Healing. Opening March 31, 5 pm 
Canadian Language Museum, 2275 Bayview Avenue, York University Glendon Campus

(Hybrid event. Limited in person visits by appointment)

Camille Baker INTER/her. Opening April 7, 4 pm [ET]
Ivey Library, 20 Willcox Street, New College, University of Toronto

(Hybrid event. Limited in person visits by appointment)

Closing Presentation and Interactive Session
Karolina Żyniewicz – Signs of the time, Collecting
Biological Traces and Memories

Artist talk: April 8, 4:00-6:00 [ET]
Memory Collection: Apr 9, 2:00-4:00

* The format of this program and access might change with the medical situation

We wish to thank the generous support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada,  New College, the D.G. Ivey Library, and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto; the Centre for Feminist Research, Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, The Canadian Language Museum, the Departments of English and the School of Gender and Women’s Studies at York University. We also wish to thank the support of The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences

This series is co-produced in collaboration with the ArtSci Salon

Hopefully, one of those times works for you.