Tag Archives: Ars Electronica

Highlights from Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) April 2025 Metacreation Lab newsletter

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There’s a local (Vancouver, Canada) event coming up, as well as, a call for papers, an opportunity to watch a workshop presented in Toronto, Montréal, and Berlin and more in these highlights from the April 2025 issue of the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI newsletter (received via email). The first items are being listed in date order.

Ars Electronica and Vancouver AI [artificial intelligence] Community Meetup

From the April 2025 Metacreation Lab newsletter,

Call for Papers – EXPANDED 2025 at Ars Electronica

The 13th edition of the EXPANDED Conference, focusing on animation and interactive art, will be held from September 3–5, 2025, at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, as part of the Ars Electronica Festival.

Organized in cooperation with ACM [Association for Computing Machinery], the conference invites submissions in categories of Research Papers and Art Papers. Topics of interest include AI-generated images, generative art, virtual production, human-AI collaboration, XR, and more.

Submission deadline: April 27, 2025

More Information

Vancouver AI – April 30 [2025] at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

Metacreation Lab has proudly supported the Vancouver AI Community Meetup since the beginning. This time, Mission #16 of BC’s vibrant AI community meetup series. This edition features a talk by Philippe Pasquier, exploring the latest in generative and creative AI systems.

Also on the lineup is a special performance by K-PHI-A, a live trio featuring Philippe, PhD student Keon Ju Maverick Lee, and VJ Amagi (Jun Yuri). Their piece, Revival, is an improvisational audiovisual performance where human musicians and AI agents co-create in real time. It blends percussion, electronics, and AI-driven visuals using Autolume and other systems developed at the Metacreation Lab.

Event info and tickets

Ars Electronica: what is it?

Ars Electronica started life as a festival in 1979 still being produced annually and is now a larger enterprise. From the Ars Electronica About webpage,.Note Links have been removed

Art, Technology, Society

We have been analyzing and commenting on the Digital Revolution since 1979. Since then, we have been developing projects, strategies and competencies for the Digital Transformation. Together with artists, scientists, technologists, designers, developers, entrepreneurs and activists from all over the world, we address the central questions of our future. The focus is on new technologies and how they change the way we live and work together.

…

A new festival. The first Ars Electronica begins on September 18, 1979. 20 artists and scientists from all over the world gather at this new “Festival for Art, Technology and Society” in Linz to discuss the Digital Revolution and its possible consequences. This Ars Electronica is small, but groundbreaking. The initiative for this came from Hannes Leopoldseder (AT), director of the Upper Austria regional studio of the Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF), who is passionate about everything that has to do with the future. Together with the electronic musician Hubert Bognermayr (AT), the music producer Ulli A. Rützel (DE) and the cyberneticist and physicist Herbert W. Franke (AT), he lays the foundation stone for a festival that will become the world’s largest and most important of its kind.

…

Between art, technology and society. Over the past four decades, a number of pioneers have turned Ars Electronica into a creative ecosystem that now enjoys a worldwide reputation.
 
Since 1979 we celebrate once a year the Ars Electronica Festival. More than 1,000 artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists are coming to Linz, Austria, to address central questions of our future. For five days, everything revolves around groundbreaking ideas and grand visions, unusual prototypes and innovative collaborations, inspiring art and groundbreaking research, extraordinary performances and irritating interventions, touching sounds and rousing concerts.
 
Since 1987 we have been awarding the Prix Ars Electronica every year. With several competition categories, we search for groundbreaking projects that revolve around questions of our digital society and rehearse the innovative use of technologies, promising strategies of collaboration and new forms of artistic expression. The best submissions will receive a Golden Nica, considered by the global media art scene to be the most traditional and prestigious award ever.
 
Since 1996 we have been working at the Ars Electronica Center year after year with tens of thousands of kindergarten children, pupils, apprentices and students on questions concerning the ever-increasing digitalization of our world. The focus is on the potential of the next Game Changer: Artificial Intelligence.
 
Also since 1996 we operate the Ars Electronica Futurelab, whose international and interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists is researching the future. With interactive scenarios, we prepare central aspects of the Digital Revolution for the general public in order to initiate a democratic discourse.
 
1998 we initiated create your world. The year-round programme is developed together with young people and includes a competition for under 19 year olds, a festival of its own and a tour through the region. We see create your world as an invitation and challenge at the same time and want to encourage young people to leave the role as mere users of technology behind, to discover new possibilities of acting and designing and to implement their own ideas.
 
2004 we started Ars Electronica Export with a big exhibition in New York. Since then we have been to Abuja, Athens, Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Bilbao, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Doha, Florence, Kiev, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Moscow, Mumbai, Osaka, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, Tunis, Venice and Zaragoza. Together with partners from art and culture, science and education, business and industry, we organize exhibitions and presentations, conferences and workshops, performances and interventions at all these locations.
 
Since 2013 our team at Ars Electronica Solutions has been developing market-ready products inspired by visions and prototypes from the artistic cosmos of Ars Electronica. We develop innovative, individual and interactive products and services for exhibitions, brands, trade fairs and events.
 
Since 2016 we are active all year round in Japan. Especially in Tokyo and Osaka we work together with leading Japanese universities, museums and companies, develop and present artistic projects, design workshop series and Open Labs and dedicate ourselves to the future of our digital society in conferences.
 
In order to actively shape the digital revolution, people are needed who have a feel for change and recognize connections, develop new strategies and set a course. This is precisely where the 2019 created Future Thinking School aims to support companies and institutions.
 
Whether at home in the living room or in the office, whether in the classroom or in the lecture hall, in the streetcar or subway, on the train – from everywhere Home Delivery accompanies our virtual visitors on an artistic-scientific journey into our future since 2020.
 
All our activities since September 18, 1979 have been documented in the form of texts, images and videos and stored in the Ars Electronica Archive. This archive provides us with a unique collection of descriptions and documentations of more than 75,000 projects from four decades of Ars Electronica.

The Conference

The conference (September 3 – 5, 2025) is held as part of the festival (September 3 – 7, 2025). The festival’s theme is PANIC yes/no. As for the conference, it does not seem to have a theme, from the Ars Electronica Expanded 2025 Conference on Animation and Interactive Art webpage, Note: A link has been removed,

The Expanded Conference (Expanded 2025) will take place from September 3rd to 5th as part of the Ars Electronica Festival 2025. This call for paper focuses on academic papers in the field of Expanded Animation and Interactive Art that explore and experiment with visual expression at the intersection of art, technology, and society. We will have two categories (Research Paper and Art Paper), where submissions will undergo a rigorous review process. All selected speakers will be given a free pass to the Ars Electronica Festival (September 3rd to 7th).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • 3D Scanning
  • AI-generated Images
  • AI-based artworks
  • Artistic Computer Animation
  • Art & Science collaboration projects
  • Audio-visual Experiments
  • Data Journalism and Animated Documentary
  • Data Visualizations
  • Digital Media Art History
  • Digital, Hybrid, and Expanded Theater
  • Expanded Animation
  • Generative Art
  • Human-AI interaction and Human-AI collaboration
  • Hybrids between Animation and Game
  • Media Facades
  • Music Visualization
  • New approaches to artistic research and practice-based methodologies
  • Participatory art projects
  • Performance Projects
  • Playful Interactions and Experiences
  • Projection Mapping
  • Projects using NFT, Metaverse, Social Media
  • Reactive and Interactive audio/visual Work
  • Real-time CG
  • Scientific Visualizations
  • Site-specific Installations
  • Sound Art and Soundscapes
  • Tangible Interfaces and New Forms of Experiences
  • Transmedia Narratives
  • Virtual Humans and Environments
  • Virtual Production
  • VR, AR, MR, XR

…

Again, the submission date for your paper is April 27, 2025. Good luck!

Vancouver AI Community Meetup

Prepare yourself for some sticker shock. Tickets for the meetup are listed at $63.00. As noted earlier, there will be a “talk by Philippe Pasquier, exploring the latest in generative and creative AI systems.and a special performance by K-PHI-A, a live trio featuring Philippe, PhD student Keon Ju Maverick Lee, and VJ Amagi (Jun Yuri). Their piece, Revival, is an improvisational audiovisual performance where human musicians and AI agents co-create in real time.”

Here’s more about Vancouver AI meetups in a video, which appears to have been excerpted from the March 2025 meetup,

Here’s more about the event from its YouTube webpage,

We Don’t Do Panels. We Do Portals. Vancouver AI: March 2025 Recap

This wasn’t a meetup. It was a lightning strike. A 3-hour detonation of mind, matter, and machine where open-source fire met ancestral spirit, and the UFO building lit up like a neural rave.

—————-

⚡ What Went Down:

Damian George (Steloston) & his son Ethan kicked the night off with a warrior’s welcome—Indigenous songs from Tsleil-Waututh territory that cracked open the veil and set the frequency.

—————-

Cai & Charlie spun lo-fi beats with a side of C++ sorcery. DIY synths, live visuals, and analog rebellion powered by AI hacks and imagination. This is what machine-human symbiosis sounds like.

—————-

Michael Tippett dropped cinematic subversion with Mr. Canada, a gonzo AI-generated political series where satire meets social critique and deepfakes become truth bombs. (The king has a button that disables the F-35 fleet—yeah, that happened.)

—————-

Cian Whalley, Zen priest & CTO, took us beyond the binary—teaching us how emotion, code, and consciousness intersect like neural lace. Toyota factory metaphors and Digital Buddha hotlines included.

—————-

Philippe Pasquier, the SFU professor we don’t deserve, taught us how to train your own AI models on your art. No scraping, no stealing. Just artists owning their data and their destiny. Bonus: transparent LED cubes and a revival performance next month with AI-powered music agents. 🔮🎶

—————-

Michelle from Women X AI showed us what a real grassroots intelligence network looks like: 45+ women in tech meeting monthly, giving back to the DTES, and building equity into the foundation of AI.

—————-

Niels showed us what radical vulnerability looks like—raw stories of startup survival, burnout, almost crashing (literally), and choosing sustainable hustle over hypergrowth hype.

—————-

Loki Jorgensen repped the new Mind, AI, and Consciousness crew—channeling 2,000 years of philosophical grind into one big ontological jam session. Curious cats only.

—————-

Patrick Pennefather & Kevin the Pixel Wizard rolled out UBC’s AI video lab with student creators turning prompts into art and AI into cinema. Kevin’s mentorship = 🔥.

—————-

Brittany Smila, our resident poet laureate, slayed the crowd with a poem that read like a bootleg instruction manual for being human. Typos included. Plum cake recipes too.

—————-

Darby stepped up with real UX [user experience design] energy—running card sorts and mapping our collective brain to build a proper web infrastructure for the VAI [Vancouver artificial intelligence] hive mind. Web3 who?

—————-

Rival Technologies’ Julia & Dale announced our first-ever Data Storytelling Hackathon. $2,500 prize, survey data that slaps, and a chance to show how AI can amplify truth instead of burying it. (Brittany wrote the hot dog prompt, you’re welcome.)

—————-

Cloud Summit’s YK Sugi, Bibi Souza & Andre made waves repping an all-volunteer, all-heart community cloud event coming in hot during Web Summit week. Code meets care. Sponsors fund causes. Real ones only. Fergus dropped serious policy weight—WOSK Centre for Dialogue BC AI report now live. If you want a seat at the government table, this is your guy.

—————-

Kushal closed the night with a flamethrower. Called out UBC’s xenophobic DeepSeek ban. Defended open-source warriors from China and France (💥shoutout Mistral). No prisoners. No apologies. Just truth. –

—————

Khayyam Wakil wrapped it all up with the keynote of the night: a design rebel’s journey from Saskatoon boats to LA VR labs to immersive media Emmys. Lessons in surrender, reinvention, and the real art of quitting right. 🔥

—————-

📍Location: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre — Vancouver, BC (aka the UFO mothership)

🪐 Astronomers on deck. Observatories open till 11. Community stays weird till 10. 🎧 Full audio, speaker list & projects: vancouver.bc-ai.net

🎟️ Next portal opens May 28: lu.ma/VAI17 🖤❤️✊🔥🏴

We don’t do TED Talks. We host real-time cultural reckonings. This is AI for the people—and it’s only getting louder. Bring your edge. Bring your stickers. Bring your weird.

You can go here to get your ticket for the April 30, 2025 Vancouver AI Community Meetup and to find out about more about some of the AI events in Vancouver. You may want to check out the possibility of getting an annual pass or membership in the hope of making attendance more affordable.

Two papers and two workshop recordings from the Metacreation Lab

From the April 2025 Metacreation Lab newsletter,

Missed the Autolume Workshop? Watch It Online Now

After holding Autolume workshops in Toronto, Montreal, and Berlin, we brought the Autolume workshop online earlier in April, and the recordings are now available.

Whether you’re new to Autolume or want a refresher, this hands-on session walks you through training your own generative models, creating real-time visuals, and exploring interactive art, all without writing a single line of code.

Join our mailing list and hop into the Discord channel to stay in the loop and connect with others using Autolume.

Watch Workshop Recordings

Metacreation Lab at ISEA2025 in Seoul

The Metacreation Lab will be at ISEA 2025 with both a paper presentation and a live performance.

PhD student Arshia Sobhan, with Dr. Philippe Pasquier and Dr. Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda, will present “Broken Letters, Broken Narratives: A Case Study on Arabic Script in DALL-E 3”. This critical case study examines how text-to-image generative AI systems, such as DALL-E 3, misrepresent Arabic calligraphy, linking these failures to historical biases and Orientalist aesthetics.

The preprint is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20459

In collaboration with sound artist Joshua Rodenberg, Arshia will also present “Reprising Elements,” an audiovisual performance combining Persian calligraphy, sound art, and generative AI powered by Autolume. This performance is an artistic endeavour that celebrates the fusion of time-honoured techniques with modern advancements.

Watch: https://youtu.be/ykNt7lNeL34?si=AIQUGKFDD0iVgt99

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MIDI-GPT Paper Now Available in AAAI Proceedings

Our paper “MIDI-GPT: A Controllable Generative Model for Computer-Assisted Multitrack Music Composition” is now officially published in the proceedings of the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

MIDI-GPT leverages Transformer architecture to infill musical material at both track and bar levels, with controls for instrument type, style, note density, polyphony, and more. Our experiments show it generates original, stylistically coherent compositions while avoiding duplication from its training data. The system is already making waves through industry collaborations and artistic projects.

Read the paper

A quick note about ISEA 2025

I wrote about the upcoming symposium in my April 16, 2025 posting, “International Symposium on Electronic/Emerging Art 2025 (May 23 – 29, 2025) in Seoul, Korea.” If nothing else, you might want to check out the “ISEA theme, ‘동동 (憧憧, Dong-Dong): Creators’ Universe’, May 23 – 29, 2025 in Seoul” subsection. The theme intrigues me greatly.

Proximal Fields from September 8 – 12, 2021 and a peek into the international art/sci/tech scene

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Toronto’s (Canada) Art/Sci Salon (also known as, Art Science Salon) sent me an August 26, 2021 announcement (received via email) of an online show with a limited viewing period (BTW, nice play on words with the title echoing the name of the institution mentioned in the first sentence),

PROXIMAL FIELDS

The Fields Institute was closed to the public for a long time. Yet, it
has not been empty. Peculiar sounds and intriguing silences, the flows
of the few individuals and the janitors occasional visiting the building
made it surprisingly alive. Microorganisms, dust specs and other
invisible guests populated undisturbed the space while the humans were
away. The building is alive. We created site specific installations
reflecting this condition: Elaine Whittaker and her poet collaborators
take us to a journey of the microbes living in our proximal spaces. Joel
Ong and his collaborators have recorded space data in the building: the
result is an emergent digital organism. Roberta Buiani and Kavi
interpret the venue as an organism which can be taken outside on a
mobile gallery.

PROXIMAL FIELDS will be visible  September 8-12 2021 at

https://ars.electronica.art/newdigitaldeal/en/proximal-fields/

it [sic] is part of Ars Electronica Garden LEONARDO LASER [Anti]disciplinary Topographies

https://ars.electronica.art/newdigitaldeal/en/antidisciplinary-topographies/

see [sic] a teaser here:

https://youtu.be/AYxlvLnYSdE

With: Elaine Whittaker, Joel Ong, Nina Czegledy, Roberta Buiani, Sachin
Karghie, Ryan Martin, Racelar Ho, Kavi.
Poetry: Maureen Hynes, Sheila Stewart

Video: Natalie Plociennik

This event is one of many such events being held for Ars Electronica 2021 festival.

For anyone who remembers back to my May 3, 2021 posting (scroll down to the relevant subhead; a number of events were mentioned), I featured a show from the ArtSci Salon community called ‘Proximal Spaces’, a combined poetry reading and bioart experience.

Many of the same artists and poets seem to have continued working together to develop more work based on the ‘proximal’ for a larger international audience.

International and local scene details (e.g., same show? what is Ars Electronica? etc.)

As you may have noticed from the announcement, there are a lot of different institutions involved.

Local: Fields Institute and ArtSci Salon

The Fields Institute is properly known as The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences and is located at the University of Toronto. Here’s more from their About Us webpage,

…

Founded in 1992, the Fields Institute was initially located at the University of Waterloo. Since 1995, it has occupied a purpose-built building on the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto.

The Institute is internationally renowned for strengthening collaboration, innovation, and learning in mathematics and across a broad range of disciplines. …

…

The Fields Institute is named after the Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields (1863-1932). Fields was a pioneer and visionary who recognized the scientific, educational, and economic value of research in the mathematical sciences. Fields spent many of his early years in Berlin and, to a lesser extent, in Paris and Göttingen, the principal mathematical centres of Europe of that time. These experiences led him, after his return to Canada, to work for the public support of university research, which he did very successfully. He also organized and presided over the 1924 meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto. This quadrennial meeting was, and still is, the major meeting of the mathematics world.

There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and Fields felt strongly that there should be a comparable award to recognize the most outstanding current research in mathematics. With this in mind, he established the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, which, contrary to his personal directive, is now known as the Fields Medal. Information on Fields Medal winners can be found through the International Mathematical Union, which chooses the quadrennial recipients of the prize.

Fields’ name was given to the Institute in recognition of his seminal contributions to world mathematics and his work on behalf of high level mathematical scholarship in Canada. The Institute aims to carry on the work of Fields and to promote the wider use and understanding of mathematics in Canada.

The relationship between the Fields Institute and the ArtSci Salon is unclear to me. This can be found under Programs and Activities on the Fields Institute website,

2020-2021 ArtSci Salon

Description

ArtSci Salon consists of a series of semi-informal gatherings facilitating discussion and cross-pollination between science, technology, and the arts. ArtSci Salon started in 2010 as a spin-off of Subtle Technologies Festival to satisfy increasing demands by the audience attending the Festival to have a more frequent (monthly or bi-monthly) outlet for debate and information sharing across disciplines. In addition, it responds to the recent expansion in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] area of a community of scientists and artists increasingly seeking collaborations across disciplines to successfully accomplish their research projects and questions.

For more details, visit our blog.

Sign up to our mailing list here.

For more information please contact:

Stephen Morris: smorris@physics.utoronto.ca

Roberta Buiani: rbuiani@gmail.com

…

We are pleased to announce our upcoming March 2021 events (more details are in the schedule below):

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Ars Electronica

It started life as a Festival for Art, Technology and Society in 1979 in Linz, Austria. Here’s a little more from their About webpage,

…

… Since September 18, 1979, our world has changed radically, and digitization has covered almost all areas of our lives. Ars Electronica’s philosophy has remained the same over the years. Our activities are always guided by the question of what new technologies mean for our lives. Together with artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists, we shed light on current developments in our digital society and speculate about their manifestations in the future. We never ask what technology can or will be able to do, but always what it should do for us. And we don’t try to adapt to technology, but we want the development of technology to be oriented towards us. Therefore, our artistic research always focuses on ourselves, our needs, our desires, our feelings.

…

They have a number of initiatives in addition to the festival. The next festival, A New Digital Deal, runs from September 8 – 12, 2021 (Ars Electronica 2021). Here’s a little more from the festival webpage,

Ars Electronica 2021, the festival for art, technology and society, will take place from September 8 to 12. For the second time since 1979, it will be a hybrid event that includes exhibitions, concerts, talks, conferences, workshops and guided tours in Linz, Austria, and more than 80 other locations around the globe.

…

Leonardo; The International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology

Ars Electronica and Leonardo; The International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) cooperate on projects but they are two different entities. Here’s more from the About LEONARDO webpage,

Fearlessly pioneering since 1968, Leonardo serves as THE community forging a transdisciplinary network to convene, research, collaborate, and disseminate best practices at the nexus of arts, science and technology worldwide. Leonardo’ serves a network of transdisciplinary scholars, artists, scientists, technologists and thinkers, who experiment with cutting-edge, new approaches, practices, systems and solutions to tackle the most complex challenges facing humanity today.

As a not-for-profit 501(c)3 enterprising think tank, Leonardo offers a global platform for creative exploration and collaboration reaching tens of thousands of people across 135 countries. Our flagship publication, Leonardo, the world’s leading scholarly journal on transdisciplinary art, anchors a robust publishing partnership with MIT Press; our partnership with ASU [Arizona State University] infuses educational innovation with digital art and media for lifelong learning; our creative programs span thought-provoking events, exhibits, residencies and fellowships, scholarship and social enterprise ventures.

…

I have a description of Leonardo’s LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous), from my March 22, 2021 posting (the Garden comes up next),

Here’s a description of the LASER talks from the Leonardo/ISAST LASER Talks event page,

“… a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of LASER is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building.”

To be specific it’s Ars Electronica Garden LEONARDO LASER and this is one of the series being held as part of the festival (A Digital New Deal). Here’s more from the [Anti]disciplinary Topographies ‘garden’ webpage,

Culturing transnational dialogue for creative hybridity

Leonardo LASER Garden gathers our global network of artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together in a series of hybrid formats addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Animated by the theme of a “new digital deal” and grounded in the UN Sustainability Goals, Leonardo LASER Garden cultivates our values of equity and inclusion by elevating underrepresented voices in a wide-ranging exploration of global challenges, digital communities and placemaking, space, networks and systems, the digital divide – and the impact of interdisciplinary art, science and technology discourse and collaboration.

Dovetailing with the launch of LASER Linz, this asynchronous multi-platform garden will highlight the best of the Leonardo Network (spanning 47 cities worldwide) and our transdisciplinary community. In “Extraordinary Times Call for Extraordinary Vision: Humanizing Digital Culture with the New Creativity Agenda & the UNSDGs [United Nations Sustainable Development Goals],” Leonardo/ISAST CEO Diana Ayton-Shenker presents our vision for shaping our global future. This will be followed by a Leonardo Community Lounge open to the general public, with the goal of encouraging contributions to the cultural environments of different regions through transnational exchange and community building.

Getting back to the beginning you can view Proximal Fields from September 8 – 12, 2021 as part of the Ars Electonica 2021 festival, specifically, the ‘garden’ series.

ETA September 8, 2021: There’s a newly posted (on the Fields Institute webspace) and undated notice/article “ArtSci Salon’s Proximal Fields debuts at the Ars Electronica Festival,” which includes an interview with members of the Proximal Fields team.

Ars Electronica and gender

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A Sept. 12, 2016 essay in the Guardian by Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Addie Wagenknecht, Camilla Mørk Røstvik, and Kathy High discusses the festival’s top prizes and the preponderance of male winners (Note: Links have been removed),

Today [Sept. 12, 2016] is the last day of the annual Ars Electronica festival, held in Linz Austria. Over the past 37 years it has aimed to provide an environment of “experimentation, evaluation and reinvention” in the area broadly defined as art, technology and society. Its top award, the Golden Nica, honours forward-thinking work with broad cultural impact, in an effort to “spotlight the ideas of tomorrow.” However, the prize, hailed by many in the field as the top honour for artists working with science and technology, has a gender problem.

This was uncovered by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg after she received an honourable mention in the Hybrid Arts Category last year. The prize’s online archive showed that throughout its 29-year history, 9 out of 10 Golden Nica have been awarded to men.

It was only weeks before the festival and her work was already shipped. Unable to withdraw, Heather began discussing the problem with other artists to develop a plan. A painstaking review of the statistics confirmed that more than 90% of winners self-identified as male. Although fewer women had applied, there was no shortage of great female artists among the applicants: the archive included internationally recognized women such as Rebecca Gomperts, Lillian Schwartz, Mariam Ghani, Pinar Yoldas, Daisy Ginsberg, Holly Herndon, Kaho Abe, and Ai Hasegawa. In response, Heather and the other artists developed a social media campaign: #KissMyArs.

There was an interesting response to the campaign (Note: Links have been removed),

… While many were supportive, some voiced disagreement, including 2013 Golden Nica winner Memo Atken. He commented on what he viewed as the campaigners’ misrepresentation of statistics, focusing only on the winners rather than diversity of submissions. After being confronted with a significant backlash to these comments on social media, pointing out among other things that the prize was not a lottery and there was no shortage of impressive female applicants, Atken apologised.

On the flip side artists Golan Levin and Mushon Zer-Aviv critiqued the campaign as not being radical enough for their liking and calling for a “feminist revolution across media arts.”

The two artists criticizing the campaign are both male and far less likely to suffer the kind of repercussions that women do. From the Sept. 12, 2016 essay,

In an insular field like art and technology, making a statement means that you risk your career. Heather Dewey-Hagborg writes, “My participation in this campaign stemmed from a frustration that this highly esteemed prize was one designed for men, and others need not apply. As women in art and tech we are consistently under-recognised, under-funded, and written out of history. We are made to feel that our work must simply not be as good as that of our male peers, and if only we made better work we would attain the same accolades and accomplishments as they did. Last year I finally realised that this was bullshit.”

Addie Wagenknecht, a collaborator on the campaign, became aware of issues of gender bias in the tech industry when she joined a game development company out of college. Constantly surrounded by “a few thousand men” at game conferences started to feel suffocating, although a decade later she felt a shift in attitudes, not only toward women but also people of colour and from LGBTQ communities.

Nevertheless, Addie sees Ars Electronica’s top prize, as “the perfect metaphor of how women are represented”. It is a golden sculpture of an idealised female form, with her head cut off: “I find the irony in the ‘award’ being of a headless woman, to speak volumes towards how we commodify women within the communities in which we claim to be honouring.” She sees the male-bias of the prize as connected to a larger systemic problem which excludes women from exhibitions, under-cuts and discounts women’s work in galleries, and ultimately cuts women out of the larger canon of contemporary art.

The systemic issues mentioned by Dewey-Hagborg and Wagenknecht can also be seen in the world of film. A July 12, 2016 article by Nico Lang for Salon.com discusses film criticism in the context of the ‘all women Ghostbuster’ reboot (Note: Links have been removed),

After months of fanboys arguing over a movie no one has even seen, critics finally got a peek at Paul Feig’s “Ghostbusters” reboot, in which comedians Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, and Melissa McCarthy suit up to fight the supernatural. And much to the relief of everyone who has spent months preparing themselves for the worst, the consensus is mainly positive: The film currently holds a 77 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

There is, however, a growing gender divide over the film’s reception. As of the time of writing, the film’s scores from female reviewers are considerably higher, with 84 percent of women giving the movie a thumbs up. Time’s Stephanie Zacharek comments, “The movie glows with vitality, thanks largely to the performers, who revel in one another’s company.” Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis writes that it’s “cheerfully silly” and Kate Muir of U.K.’s The Times says it’s a “rollickingly funny delight.”

On the flip side, 77 percent of the critics who gave the film a thumbs down are male.

Roger Ebert’s one-time sidekick, Richard Roeper, called it a “horror from start to finish,” while David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter referred to “Ghostbusters” as a “bust.” That disparity has hampered the film’s reception: Currently, there’s a 10 percentage point difference between male and female opinion on the movie. If reviewing were left up to male critics alone, “Ghostbusters” would have a 74 percent approval rating.

What gives? As Meryl Streep pointed out in a 2015 speech, this discrepancy is likely due to the fact that in a way, these critics are watching two different movies.

“Women are so used to that active empathizing with the active protagonist of a male-driven plot,” Meryl Streep said during a 2015 panel. “That’s what we’ve done all our lives. You read history, you read great literature, Shakespeare, it’s all fellas. But they’ve never had to do the other thing. And the hardest thing for me, as an actor, is to have a story that men in the audience feel like they know what I feel like. That’s a really hard thing. It’s very hard thing for them to put themselves in the shoes of female protagonist.”

Because men are commonly treated as the default in movies—the everyman who stands in for the audience—they rarely are forced to empathize with others’ perspectives. If cinema does not reflect men’s experiences, it can, thus, be difficult for male audience members to see themselves in the picture in the way women are forced to. That affects not only the way that men interact with movies but also how they review them.

I wonder if this same type of bias, the man’s perspective and approach to art and technology as the default might also affect the Ars Electronica prize system?

In any event, there’s much food for thought in both the Guardian piece (which offers some suggestions for positive change) and the Salon piece (which has some fascinating statistical information on how female critics and male critics differ in their judgments).

Digital artist at CERN (European Particle Physics Laboratory): apply by Sept. 26, 2012

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CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, is accepting applications from digital artists for a residency. I mentioned the first competition in my Sept. 21, 2011 posting and briefly profiled the chosen artist, Julius Von Bismarck, and his CERN project in a Mar. 20, 2012 posting.  Here’s some information about this second competition which closes in two days, from the Arts@CERN website,

The 2012 open call for artists working in the digital domain to win the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN award has just opened. It closes September 26th 2012. For further details and to make your online submissions please go to www.aec.at/collide.

We are  looking for digital artists who will be truly inspired by CERN, showing their wish to engage with the ideas and/or technology of particle physics or with CERN as a place of scientific collaboration, using them as springboards of the imagination which dare to go beyond the paradigm. You might be a choreographer, performer, visual artist, film maker or a composer – what you all have in common is that you use the digital as the means of making your work and/or the way of presenting it.

The award includes prize money, a production grant and a funded residency in two parts – with an initial 2 months at CERN with a CERN scientist as mentor to inspire your work. The second part is a month with the Futurelab team and mentor at Ars Electronica Linz with whom the winner will develop and make new work inspired by the CERN residency.

I have found more information about the 2012 digital artist  residency competition on Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN,

The aim of the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN prize is to take digital creativity to new dimensions by colliding the minds of scientists with the imaginations of artists. In this way, we seek to accelerate innovation across culture in the 21st century – creating new dimensions in digital arts, inspired by the ideas, engineering and science generated at CERN, and produced by the winning artist in collaboration with the transdisciplinary expertise of the FutureLab team at Ars Electronica.

The residency is in two parts – with an initial two months at CERN, where the winning artist will have a specially dedicated science mentor from the world famous science lab to inspire him/her and his/her work. The second part will be a month with the Futurelab team and mentor at Ars Electronica Linz with whom the winner will develop and make new work inspired by the CERN residency. From the first meeting between the artists, their CERN and Futurelab mentors, they will all participate in a dialogue which will be a public blog of their creative process until the final work is produced and maybe beyond. In this way, the public will be able to join in the conversation.

This final work will be showcased both at the Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN, in Geneva and at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. It will also be presented in the Prix Ars Electronica’s “CyberArts” catalogue.

The winning artist will receive

10,000 Euros prize money

Rent, subsistence and travel are funded from a designated limited fund that is in addition to the prize money. The awarding of this prize is thanks to the generosity of Ars Electronica and the funding of the creative residencies made possible by the generosity of anonymous donors. All artists insurances for the residencies are funded by the Exclusive Sponsor of all artists insurances for the Collide@CERN programme, UNIQA Assurances SA Switzerland.

….

Each submission has to be online and include the following parts:

Checklist for Submissions:

  • A personal testimony video which introduces the artist who describes why and how this residency will inspire new work (Up to 5 min.)
  • An outline of a possible concept/idea which the artist wishes to pursue at CERN and Futurelab
  • A draft production plan with costings and timeline
  • A selected portfolio of work which showcases work the artist is proud of

….

collide@prixars.aec.at

Tel. +43.732.7272-58

Prix Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH
Ars-Electronica-Straße 1
4040 Linz, Austria

Please do check the 2012 digital artist  residency competition webpage for full details.

 

Fish and Chips: Singapore style and Australia style

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A*STAR’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), located in Singapore, has announced a new platform for testing drug applications. From the April 4, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

A cheaper, faster and more efficient platform for preclinical drug discovery applications has been invented by scientists at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN), the world’s first bioengineering and nanotechnology research institute. Called ‘Fish and Chips’, the novel multi-channel microfluidic perfusion platform can grow and monitor the development of various tissues and organs inside zebrafish embryos for drug toxicity testing. This research, published recently in Lab on a Chip (“Fish and Chips: a microfluidic perfusion platform for monitoring zebrafish development”) …

From the IBN April 4, 2012 media release,

The conventional way of visualizing tissues and organs in embryos is a laborious process, which includes first mounting the embryos in a viscous medium such as gel, and then manually orienting the embryos using fine needles. The embryos also need to be anesthetized to restrict their motion and a drop of saline needs to be continuously applied to prevent the embryos from drying. These additional precautions could further complicate the drug testing results.

The IBN ‘Fish and Chips’ has been designed for dynamic long-term culturing and live imaging of the zebrafish embryos. The microfluidic platform comprises three parts: 1) a row of eight fish tanks, in which the embryos are placed and covered with an oxygen permeable membrane, 2) a fluidic concentration gradient generator to dispense the growth medium and drugs, and 3) eight output channels for the removal of the waste products (see Image 2). The novelty of the ‘Fish and Chips’ lies in its unique diagonal flow architecture, which allows the embryos to be continually submerged in a uniform and consistent flow of growth medium and drugs (…), and the attached gradient generator, which can dispense different concentrations of drugs to eight different embryos at the same time for dose-dependent drug studies.

…

Professor Hanry Yu, IBN Group Leader, who led the research efforts at IBN, said, “Toxicity is a major cause of drug failures in clinical trials and our novel ‘Fish and Chips’ device can be used as the first step in drug screening during the preclinical phase to complement existing animal models and improve toxicity testing. The design of our platform can also be modified to accommodate more zebrafish embryos, as well as the embryos of other animal models. Our next step will involve investigating cardiotoxicity and hepatoxicity on the chip.”

As a pragmatist I realize that, to date, we have no substitute for testing drugs on animals prior to clinical human trials so this ‘type of platform’ is necessary but it always gives me pause. Just as the relationship between human and animals did the first time I came across a ‘Fish and Chips’ project in the context of a performance at the 2001 Ars Electronica event in Linz, Austria. As I recall Fish and Chips was made up fish neurons grown on silicon chips then hooked up to hardware and software to create a performance both visual and auditory.

Here’s an image of the 2001 Fish and Chips performance at Ars Electronica,

Ars Electronica Festival 2001: Fish & Chips / SymbioticA Research Group, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Guy Ben-Ary

You can find a full size version of the image here on Flickr along with the Creative Commons Licence.

The Fish and Chips performance was developed at SymbioticA (University of Western Australia). From SymbioticA’s Research page,

SymbioticA is a research facility dedicated to artistic inquiry into knowledge and technology in the life sciences.

Our research embodies:

  • identifying and developing new materials and subjects for artistic manipulation
  • researching strategies and implications of presenting living-art in different contexts
  • developing technologies and protocols as artistic tool kits.

Having access to scientific laboratories and tools, SymbioticA is in a unique position to offer these resources for artistic research. Therefore, SymbioticA encourages and favours research projects that involve hands on development of technical skills and the use of scientific tools.

The research undertaken at SymbioticA is speculative in nature. SymbioticA strives to support non-utilitarian, curiosity based and philosophically motivated research.

They list six research areas:

  • Art and biology
  • Art and ecology
  • Bioethics
  • Neuroscience
  • Tissue engineering
  • Sleep science

SymbioticA’s Fish and Chips project has since been retitled MEART, from the SymbioticA Research Group (SARG) page,

Meart – The semi-living artist

The project was originally entitled Fish and Chips and later evolved into MEART – the semi living artist. The project is by the SymbioticA Research group in collaboration with the Potter Lab.

The Potter Lab or Potter Group is located at the Georgia (US) Institute of Technology. Here’s some more information about MEART from the  Potter Group MEART page,

The Semi living artist

Its ‘brain’ of dissociated rat neurons is cultured on an MEA in our lab in Atlanta while the geographically detached ‘body’ lives in Perth. The body itself is a set of pneumatically actuated robotic arms moving pens on a piece of paper …

A camera located above the workspace captures the progress of drawings created by the neurally-controlled movement of the arms. The visual data then instructed stimulation frequencies for the 60 electrodes on the MEA.

…

The brain and body talk through the internet over TCP/IP in real time providing closed loop communication for a neurally controlled ‘semi-living artist’. We see this as a medium from which to address various scientific, philosophical, and artistic questions.

Getting back to SymbioticA, my most recent mention of them was in a Dec. 28, 2011 posting about Boo Chapple’s (resident at SymbioticA) Transjuicer installation at Dublin’s Science Gallery (I’ve excerpted a portion of an interview with Chapple where she describes what she’s doing),

I’m not sure that Transjuicer is so much about science as it is about belief, the economy of human-animal relations, and the politics of material transformation.

On that note I leave you with these fish and chips (from the Wikipedia essay about the menu item Fish and Chips),

Cod and chips in Horseshoe Bay, B.C., Canada, December 2010. Credit: Robin Miller

CERN’s artist-in-residence speaks

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CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in conjunction with Ars Electronica was looking for an artist-in-residence last fall (my Sept.21, 2011 posting). They found one, Julius Von Bismarck. From the Arts@CERN webpage,

Creative collisions between the arts and science have begun at CERN with the first Collide@CERN artist, Julius Von Bismarck starting his digital arts residency at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory outside Geneva. He was chosen from 395 entries from 40 countries around the world from the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN competition launched last September 2011.

To mark this special occasion, the first Collide@CERN public lecture open to everyone will take place on March 21st 2012 at CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation, with a drinks reception at 18.45 and with presentations starting at 19.30 [CET].

This talk will be livestreamed tomorrow (March 21, 2012) at 11:30 am PST (or 19:30 CET, which is GMT + 1 hr).

There’s not much text on Von Bismark’s website but I did find this on the about him webpage,

1983
born in Breisach am Rhein
raised in Riad (Saudi Arabia), Freiburg and Berlin
2003
Abitur in Berlin
from 2005
student of “visual communication” at the UdK Berlin
from 2006
student at “Digitalen Klasse” by Prof. Joachim Sauter
2007
student at the MFA-Programm of Hunter Collage New York
from 2009
student at Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments) “Klasse Olafur Eliasson”

Clicking on the art pieces will get you more images and some (very little) additional text. I clicked on Versuch unter Kreisen; Ordinary lamps become circles over time to find not only images and more text but a couple of videos including this one (for which he offers no explanation),

I recognized Gale Sondergaard, Dorothy Lamour, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby because I love old movies (Road to Rio).

As for what Van Bismarck will be doing at CERN, here’s how they describe it on the Arts@CERN webpage,

Julius Von Bismarck is one of the most exciting artists of his generation, being awarded the first Collide@CERN residency by the jury for “his proposal and work which manipulates and criticises our notions of reality in unpredictable ways, often with inventive use of video, objects and public interventions”. His works are also characterised by his fascination with complex philosophical and scientific ideas as well as his profound interrogations about the purpose of the invention of technology. He is studying with the great Danish/Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson in Berlin.

There is more about Van Bismarck and his work here at ‘the creative project’ website in a Dec. 6, 2011 blog posting Julia Kaganskiy. The accompanying video is in German with English subtitles; the posting is in English.

Collide@CERN dance/performance prize

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The Collide@CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) arts project has announced a second arts residency this time for a dancer/performer (I mentioned the first residency, which was for a digital artist, in my Sept. 21, 2011 posting). This second competition has a deadline of Dec. 20, 2011. From the Nov. 23, 2011 notice on the International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts,

The new Collide@CERN dance and performance prize is funded by the City and Canton of Geneva to celebrate Geneva as an important place for the arts and science past, present and future.

The chance to win this funded residency is open to choreographers and performers born in Geneva, or international artists from any country currently working or living in Geneva. The organisers are looking for dynamic artists in dance or performance who enjoy stretching boundaries, will be truly inspired to feed their imagination with the science of particle physics, and is interested in engaging with the laboratory in a multiplicity of ways.

The Collide@CERN Geneva prize comprises a bursary of 15,000CHF which allows the winning artist to work for 3 months at CERN, including giving two public lectures at the Globe of Science and Innovation, contributing a blog about the creative arts/science process and regular lunchtime advice sessions at CERN. The winning artist will be assigned a special science inspiration partner for the duration of their residency and have an office on site.

The prize also includes a grant of up to 15,000 CHF to cover the costs of developing a new CERN-inspired work with associate artists during the 3-month residency. Submissions open 4 November must be received by 20 December 2011. The winner will be announced in January 2012.

There is no age requirement, you must either have been born in Geneva or currently living and/or working there; you will receive a total of up 30,000 Swiss francs (15,000 as a bursary for living expenses and another 15,000 for a new CERN-inspired project).  Also (from the Collide@CERN Geneva Prize in Dance and Performance page on the CERN website),

To apply, you need to send the following:

  • A personal testimony and a description of a proposed project no more than 3 pages
  • A curriculum vitae, including examples of projects in DVD or website

They do very much expect a project that speaks to particle physics, from the Collide@CERN dance/performance prize page,

Space, time and gravity are the fundamental forces in dance and performance, just as they are in particle physics.

There will be more arts projects from the Collide@CERN initiative,

Collide@CERN explores elements even more elusive than the Higgs Boson – human ingenuity, creativity and imagination. It is CERN’s new experiment in arts and science: a 3-year artist’s residency programme initiated by the laboratory.

The Collide@CERN prize – an open call to artists working in different art forms – will be awarded annually until 2013. It comprises prize money and a residency grant for up to 3 months at CERN. The winning artists will interact and engage with CERN scientists in order to take their artistic work to new creative dimensions. Two domains were announced in 2011 – Digital Arts and Dance/Performance. We aim to add additional awards in new art forms when we achieve additional external funding – so sign up to Twitter and our RSS feed to keep posted.

They have quite a list of artists and sponsoring organizations for this arts project,

Some of the greatest artists working today are creative patrons of the Collide@CERN project: Swiss architect Jacques Herz, Japanese artist Mariko Mori, German photographer Andreas Gursky, British sculptor Antony Gormley, musician Brian Eno, wildlife artist Frans Lanting, and Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist. These world-famous artists have all have visited CERN and been inspired by the work we do here.

Our international cultural partnerships with leading arts organisations support the project. Our renowned cultural partners include the digital arts organization Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, the sound and music conservatoire IRCAM in Paris, France and the Free Word centre literature house in London, UK.

I look forward to hearing more about future residencies as they are announced. Meanwhile, good luck if you’re applying for the dance/performance prize.

Arts residency collides with CERN and Ars Electronica

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Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN Artists Residency Prize is inviting submissions.  CERN, for anyone unfamiliar with the institution,  is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics which is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). From the Arts@CERN page describing the residency in Geneva (Switzerland),

CERN’s latest experiment colliding the minds of scientists with the imagination of artists opens with the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN prize in digital arts. This is the first prize to be announced as part of the new Collide@CERN Artists Residency 3 year programme initiated by the laboratory.

This new prize marks a 3 year science/arts cultural partnership and creative collaboration between CERN and Ars Electronica – which originated with CERN’s cooperation with Origin – the Ars Electronica Festival in 2011.

We are looking for digital artists who will be truly inspired by CERN, showing their wish to engage with the ideas and/or technology of particle physics or with CERN as a place of scientific collaboration, using them as springboards of the imagination which dare to go beyond the paradigm. You might be a choreographer, performer, visual artist, film maker or a composer – what you all have in common is that you use the digital as the means of making your work and/or the way of presenting it.

You need to register (here) to make a submission. Multiple submissions can be made by either the artist(s) or other interested party.

Full details can be found at the Ars Electronica ‘CERN artists residency’ page,

The aim of the Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN prize is to take digital creativity to new dimensions by colliding the minds of scientists with the imaginations of artists. In this way, we seek to accelerate innovation across culture in the 21st century – creating new dimensions in digital arts, inspired by the ideas, engineering and science generated at CERN, and produced by the winning artist in collaboration with the transdisciplinary expertise of the FutureLab team at Ars Electronica.

The residency is in two parts – with an initial two months at CERN, where the winning artist will have a specially dedicated science mentor from the world famous science lab to inspire him/her and his/her work. The second part will be a month with the Futurelab team and mentor at Ars Electronica Linz with whom the winner will develop and make new work inspired by the CERN residency. From the first meeting between the artists, their CERN and Futurelab mentors, they will all participate in a dialogue which will be a public blog of their creative process until the final work is produced and maybe beyond. In this way, the public will be able to join in the conversation.

This final work will be showcased both at the Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN, in Geneva and at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. It will also be presented in the Prix Ars Electronica’s “CyberArts” catalogue.

It’s a pretty exciting opportunity that includes a prize of 10,000 Euros plus accommodation and travel.

We are looking for digital artists who will be truly inspired by CERN, showing their wish to engage with the ideas and/or technology of particle physics and with CERN as a place of scientific collaboration, using them as springboards of the imagination which dare to go beyond the paradigm. You might be a choreographer, performer, visual artist, film maker or a composer – what you all have in common is that you use the digital as the means of making your work and/or the way of presenting it.

Here’s a checklist for the submission(s),

  • A personal testimony video which introduces the artist who describes why and how this residency will inspire new work (Up to 5 min.)
  • An outline of a possible concept/idea which the artist wishes to pursue at CERN and Futurelab
  • A draft production plan with costings and timeline
  • A selected portfolio of work which showcases work the artist is proud of

The submission platform was opened Sept. 15, 2011 and will close on October 31, 2011. For anyone working up till the last second to make a submission, you may want to keep in mind the timezones. I assume the submission platform is being operated out of Switzerland. Good luck!