Very happy to be featured in the catalogue that celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Intermediale Festival, where we performed in 2015. It comes accompanied with a double CD where our track Jeden, Dwa, Osiem (dla Małgorzaty) is also included!
The fully remote xCoAx 2020, the eighth conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics, and X, is now available at 2020.xcoax.org. The book of proceedings was also published, edited by Mario Verdicchio, Miguel Carvalhais, Luísa Ribas & André Rangel, and designed by André Lourenço. ISBN 978-989-746-266-5. 478 pages.
The Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts has just released a special issue with a selected set of extended papers from the xCoAx 2019 conference. The issue includes works by Sarah Ciston, Catherine Griffiths, Rodrigo Hernández-Ramírez, Tsila Hassine & Ziv Neeman, Rosemary Lee, Gaia Tedone, and Vladimir Todorovic & Dejan Grba, and was guest-edited by André Rangel, Luísa Ribas, Mario Verdicchio, and myself.
Open access at artes.ucp.pt/citarj/
I was interviewed about my book Artificial Aesthetics (in Portuguese) by the University of Porto podcast.
The proceedings of xCoAx 2019, the seventh conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics, and X, are now available at 2019.xcoax.org. Edited by Mario Verdicchio, Miguel Carvalhais, Luísa Ribas & André Rangel. Designed by Catarina Neves. ISBN 978-989-746-220-7. 385 pages.
The Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts has just released a special issue with a selected set of extended papers from the xCoAx 2018 conference. The issue includes works by Graziele Lautenschlaeger, Frieder Nake, Alessandro Ludovico, Marta Flisykowska, Rodrigo Hernández-Ramírez, Pedro Costa, and was guest-edited by André Rangel, Luísa Ribas, Mario Verdicchio, and myself.
Open access at artes.ucp.pt/citarj/
The proceedings of ICLI 2018, the fourth International Conference on Live Interfaces, are now available at liveinterfaces.org/2018/. Edited by José Alberto Gomes, Miguel Carvalhais & Rui Penha. Designed by Michelle Martins. ISBN 978-989-746-170-5. 241 pages.
A paper with Pedro Cardoso at Communication Studies n. 27, vol. 2:
Computational media allow the development of very particular relationships with readers. Their nature allows them to register static information but also complex and contingent behaviours that they are capable to operationalise, thus becoming interactive and immersive. These media exist in a dual state between a surface layer and a subface layer. These two are inextricably connected, with the subface often becoming a black box that can only be peered at through surface effusions that both mediate and isolate it. The procedural layer of the subface can be discovered through a process of virtuosic interpretation that allows readers to form a theory of system, breeding empathy with it, and ultimately, transferring some of its processes to their minds. This paper focuses on how virtuosic interpretation is developed, and how from it stems the development of a unique kind of aesthetic experience. It explores how computational media, through anamorphosis and a dialectics of aporia and epiphany, become narrative games.
A short text on LIA’s new work, “Autumn”.
For a computer artist as LIA, inspiration is not only found within software and computers. The world outside her computer, and nature, have often inspired her, and Autumn, produced at a time when the seasons change and the leaves fall, is a good example of such a case. LIA looks at the world computationally, using drawing as a surveying device to probe for form’s structures, and distil them to their structural essences. These elements are then used as starting points for a process of experimental programming. Experimental not in the sense that new techniques are developed or tested — although they may be, because influences arise from many other fields, and sometimes a mathematical formula or an algorithm can be as poetic as a street paved with fall leaves — but rather experimental as in experimental music, because it is a constructive process that is not planned in advance but that is defined and discovered as it is developed, a process whose goals can only be unearthed through doing. This is how LIA programs morphology, behaviour, and an emergent intricate choreography that spawns the artwork, or better still, that becomes the artwork.
LIA builds systems where everything is in motion, where everything is transient and fleeting, and also illusory. LIA usually works from the simplest, most fundamental, building blocks: points, lines, rotations, translations, etc., with prochronism often building the work’s surface. Forms are not drawn but rather built, from traces of behaviours and from the actions they originated. As such, in Autumn LIA did not actually program autumn leaves, or autumn trees, or what we may also perceive as autumn flowers. She did not draw them or program the piece to draw any such forms. She developed behaviours whose trails may be reminiscent of leaves, trees, or flowers. And what we see are not shapes but chronologies of those movements, vestiges of a dance that once was. We follow behind the action in the work, much as the fallen leaves of autumn follow summer.