xCoAx 2022Program

In this doctoral research programme, I propose a set of three thematic research projects to investigate the influence of algorithmic curation on artists’ creative processes and viewers’ subsequent creative perception. In the context of the burgeoning “creator economy,” I first review evidence of algorithmic impact on creator’s outputs. Considering the role of process in creative output evaluation, I bring an embodied, situated perspective to online creativity. Based on these discussions, I propose three research streams: first, I tease apart the consideration of process from the consideration of embodiment, asking how each (process & embodiment) influence creative perception in the context of algorithm-made versus human-made art. In this workstream, I also consider the impact of the art viewer’s embodiment (physical versus digital). Next, I construct an algorithmically-curated website of visual images which controls information about the artist, their process, and their output, using the website as an experimental sandbox to interrogate the role of these variables in online creative perception. Finally, I supplement these findings through ethnography with artists and curators, examining the role of algorithmic considerations in their process. Simultaneously, I prompt artists to imagine the possibility of a co-designed algorithm that prioritizes creativity over existing metrics for engagement.

In this transformative exploratory study, we propose to contribute to the definition of the concept of Generative Dance based on the theory of self-organized dynamic systems, in order to: 1) Describe the concepts of Emergent Choreography and Generative Dance (by approximation to the Generative Art concept); 2) Computationally model generative dance and study the emergence of spatio-temporal patterns - using Agent-based model theory and genetic algorithms; 3) Explore collective improvisation, following the cycle Practice-led Research and Research-led Practice (Smith and Dean 2009), integrating the relationship principles observed in the emergent modeling behavior; 4) Know the subjective experience of space-time sharing - togetherness phenomenon - experienced in generative dance.

In my doctoral programme, I aim to lay the foundations for understanding the novel impacts of interactive technologies on knowledge creation in the digital age. Specifically, I propose an ethnographic approach to understand current scholars’ conceptualizations of “interactive research artifacts.” Through this process, I will propose a definition and set of criteria for these artifacts that encompasses the dynamic ways these technologies transform knowledge creation practices. I will consider these artifact creation practices to be creative in nature, and as such, will draw on Design Studies and work on digital creativity to bridge computation, knowledge creation, and communications literature. I will begin with a pilot conference where scholars of all disciplines will be invited to share and discuss interactive research artifacts they have created. From there, I will use ethnographically-informed case studies to explore scholars’ lived experiences with these artifacts. Based off these findings, I will propose a conceptualization of interactive research artifacts and initial design considerations. These will be examined and remoulded in co-design workshops, where, with more scholars, we will co-create design guidelines for the future creation of interactive research artifacts. To design for a future where interactive research artifacts become commonly used scholarly tools, an in-depth understanding of the ways these artifacts are used as knowledge creation tools is critical.

Existing in virtual global networks poses questions on how subjects can maintain agency within them. The shift of digital networks into compartmentalized locked-in platforms facilitates the metamorphosis of subjects into the category of users. The ever-growing absence of a buffer zone between online and offline representation means that online highjacks become increasingly problematic. Currently, there is a rise in emerging efforts to transition bureaucratic citizenship into new modes of digital identity, such as the ID2020 project and other governmental projects seeking to implement digital ID in countries like Australia and Canada, or the digital ID proposed by the World Economic Forum. This shift, in some cases from a centralized state as guarantor to a decentralized allocation of identity allows easy verifiability and access to a multiplicity of services and personal data but also poses questions concerning these systems. This research aims to look at the different models of digital identity that are being developed, thinking about their implications. Researching in an art context, the goal is to develop a speculative project related with digital ID and expropriation, reflecting upon the assetisation of identity. The goal is to think through different theories to explore agency within virtual global networks distributed in planetary-scale assemblages of subjects and technological infrastructures.

Artistic research PhD project based on interactions between visual arts and artificial intelligence. My goals are to understand issues of emergence and autonomy when applied to machine-enhanced and purely machinic creativity, which still lies in the plane of ideas. For that I build a theoretical framework from early cybernetics, passing through systems theory and current development in artificial intelligence, as well as definitions of autonomous systems and emergence. I look into relevant contemporary artworks, specially ones using generative resources. I also propose artworks of my own, which are incorporated into the thesis as commentaries and reports on specific questions and technologies.

The research analyzes the main electronic and digital ensembles for electric guitar in the last decades. Through this, the sense of augmentation of the instrument is deepened, with special emphasis on its integration with the computer. A first section of the research is the interpretation of a series of case studies using Ableton Live software with MAX/MSP, together with a MIDI controller that homogenizes and allows performing the case studies selected for the thesis: Electric Counterpoint (Steve Reich 1987), La cite des saules (Dufourt 1997),Trash TV Trance (Romitelli 2002) and Not I (Prins 2007). A second section is the development of an augmentation proposal for e-guitar that consists of a separation in the hands-feet interface to be able to control effects, volumetric balances and samples and loops. Finally, a reflection is articulated around the augmentation in the electric guitar and its relationship with the concepts of post digital, Smart instruments, modular flexibility and obsolescence.

This paper presents the results of a factorial survey research on perceptions of artistic and scientific creativity in humans and AI. A general reluctance at attributing creativity to artificial systems is well-documented in the literature on the theme. Aim of this survey is to test whether this reluctance is equally strong when participants evaluate scenarios where human and artificial agents are involved in processes of scientific discovery and scenarios where they are engaged in artistic creation processes. The starting hypothesis of the study is that participants should be less hesitant at attributing creativity to artificial agents when the latter engage in scientific discovery processes. Findings, however, disconfirm this assumption, showing that participants attribute significantly less creativity to artificial actors than to human ones, and even more so when they are involved in scientific processes.

This paper proposes an approach to visualising affective metadata from movie reviews on IMDB. First, a natural language processing (NLP) method is applied for automatic topic modelling and sentiment analysis using contextual valence and subjectivity as measures of emotional expression intensity. A t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (t-SNE) was used to project these metadata into a compact 2D representation. A cluster analysis was used to extract the spatial dynamics of this representation, which were mapped into a generative visualization. Each generated visual 'signature' represented the emotional dynamics of a single movie extracted from 150 reviews, for a total of 20 movies. Based on the visualised metadata, a qualitative evaluation of 79 participants demonstrated the capacity to communicate affective metaphors, as well as a robust sense of perceptual consistency. Furthermore, we assert that the generative visualisation of data shows a nuanced expression of an aesthetic approach instead of an abstract articulation of an idea.

This paper seeks to understand and discuss the issues that emerge when gender is attributed to current digital assistants, as part of an ongoing research on the relationship between gender and AI. resulting in portrayals of gender roles, stereotypes and archetypes. This paper focuses on the conceptualization and development of chatbots that ironically expose and portray gender roles, stereotypes and archetypes. It presents recent progress in our theoretical and analytical approaches, addressing a tendency towards the feminization of current digital assistants, and examines current trends of development and justifications for this phenomenon, while debating common concerns regarding gender attribution in AI. IT discusses how the questions addressed in our research are integrated into each bot’s personality and extends this approach to masculine archetypes and stereotypes, inspecting how they are portrayed by artificial intelligence, both in real life and fictional scenarios. In this manner, we seek to foster debate on how these entities reinforce and reflect common conceptions of gender back to us.

This paper aims to diversify the existing critical discourse by introducing new perspectives on the poetic, expressive, and ethical features of tactical media art that involves artificial intelligence (AI). It explores diverse artistic approaches and their effectiveness in critiquing the epistemic, phenomenological, and political aspects of AI science and technology. Focusing on the three representative thematic areas—sociocultural, existential, and political—the discussion focuses on the works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the ambiguities indicative of a broader milieu of contemporary art, culture, economy, and society. With a closing summary of the major issues and possible directions to address them, the paper shows that tactical AI art provides important insights into the AI-influenced world and has the potential to advance computational arts toward a socially responsible and epistemologically relevant expressive stratum.

This article looks through the lens of speculation at a scenario connecting the US-Mexico border complexities with the industrialization of outer space. Based on an art-oriented and multifaceted research process including fieldwork and conversations with Playa Bagdad’s residents, the scrutiny of SpaceX environmental impact assessments, and attendance to several Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) public hearings; this compilation of ideas investigates the subjectivities intrinsic to the coexistence of Playa Bagdad (Tamaulipas, MX) and SpaceX (Texas, US) through the social and political implications of sound.

In this scenario, the noise produced by the launchers’ engines will not only act as mobilizing force resonating in the form of intense acoustic shock waves with the capacity of affecting materiality —including the biosphere and the body––, but as a cultural weapon nurturing an already existing ecology of fear. All of this amid a hybrid geography where the radical asymmetries of neoliberal policies fuel a regime built upon necropolitics which intersect with the rising infrastructure of space exploration.

Ironically, the confrontation between Playa Bagdad and SpaceX remains in silence, as an under-seen techno-political spectacle in which a community lacking political recognition stands in the front row to witness passively the consolidation of an economic zone that promises to delimitate a new cosmological dimension; one perpetuating the validation of progress, exclusively, through hyper-technological advancement.

Preemption is an anticipatory action taken to secure first-options in maximising future gain and/or minimising loss. For instance, in risk management, responses are planned before a crisis takes place; such preemptive decisions are made based on speculations of possible future(s), directed by information feedback and analysis from a variety of sources. A systematic formulation of preemption and its relationship to computation are deeply rooted in the history of WWII; in the big data era, preemption is further augmented by the collaboration of human and machine intelligences, urging a rethink on how information is produced and used. By tracing a timeline of events around the conceptualisation of information, this paper aims at understanding the design and planning implications of preemptive decisions and how it may help us in rethinking speculative design. This paper first revises the idea of ‘information’ through a historical and theoretical study, and how it had been defined differently through the notion of entropy by Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Erwin Schrodinger from fields of cybernetics, information, and quantum theories. It discusses entropy from three perspectives: information compression and reconstruction, information entropy and energy entropy, interpolation and extrapolation. Finally, based on entropic and negentropic use of information, this paper rethinks the roles of speculation and preemption in today’s design context, especially their applications in the collaborative intelligence of humans and machines within distributed, open source networks.

This paper situates artificial intelligence as a vehicle that can allow human agents to engage with complex issues such as global warming. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s conceptualisation of global warming as a ‘hyperobject’ which, by its very nature, resist knowability on a human scale, I consider the extent to which AI, when it is itself approached as hyperobject-like, can become a useful medium for engaging critically with the issue of global warming. The argument, then, is not that AI can make global warming human-knowable, but that through AI, human agents can access the quasi-unknowability of global warming. I begin by surveying Morton’s theory of the hyperobject and its valence in critical discourse on contemporary/digital art, and then explore the positioning of AI as hyperobject-like. This discussion is bookended by analysis of a representative artwork, Tega Brain et al’s Asunder (2019), which, as I argue, addresses global warming issues by incorporating AI as a hyperobject-like technology.

As the tradition of Portuguese embroidery faces a struggle for preservation and valorization, artistic research can reinvigorate its status in the cultural system, through an encounter between tradition and modernity. Emerging digital art practice embodies code as a medium for artistic expression and promotes a recasting of both the artisan’s and the designer’s work, pushing them to discover new domains of artistic creation and to adopt new materials and materialities.

This paper presents a practical enquiry on the application of Soft Circuits as raw material, tool and content in the process of transforming traditional Portuguese embroidery into digital interactive artifacts, converging Art and Science, enhancing artisan skills, and dealing with issues of ethics, participation/collaboration, social innovation and, ultimately, cultural sustainability.

This article examines artistic practices that engage with digital technologies through a critical making methodology. Critical making is described as a hands-on practice that aims to merge critical thinking with making. This is a practice that focuses on the process of making and combines material experimentation with critical thinking about the effects of digital technologies. Critically-made artifacts in the artistic context have the potential to disrupt pre-established notions of art engaged with digital technologies as well as to challenge screen essentialism in artistic production and everyday life. In this paper, it is proposed that critically-made artifacts are a form of post-digital art based on hybridisation of digital and non-digital technologies. This turn in artistic practices engaged with digital technologies is seen as a way to rematerialise digital technologies unfolded in physical space as well as a critical reaction to the post-digital condition, where all aspects of daily life are circumscribed around digital technologies in computational societies.

This paper considers the project of active transformation of texts through the substitution of words, for instance by the ‘N+7’ method of the Oulipans, which replaces each noun in a text by the seventh subsequent noun in a particular (print) dictionary. This method is conservative in that it only allows for intracategorial substitutions; the present paper aims to extend existing semantic interpretative mechanisms in order to handle intercategorial substitution. A type shifting system is proposed for this purpose, and applied to an example, followed by discussion of implications and extensions of the system.

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 synthesizers for live music performances. To address this gap, we propose Autolume-Live, the first GAN-based live VJing-system for controllable video generation. By analysing the needs of VJs and current Deep Learning-based audio-visual systems, we developed a live video synthesiser that extracts musical features, such as the amplitude, pitch and onset strength, and allows mapping these to generate trajectories in the frame latent space. These frames can further be manipulated through a MIDI-Interface which allows the user to improvise, manipulate the Neural Network and adjust the output to accompany live music performances in a co-creative way.

This paper aims to understand if it is possible to speak of a non-anthropocentric visuality. The progressive and continuous increase of information production at a global level has led us to witness a specific set of visual information that, we argue, can be considered to be decentered from anthropocentric ocular optics. If we are in fact able to speak of a non-anthropocentric visuality, as this paper argues, this means that such concept is distinct from a non-human visuality, and that this scopic regime allows for other forms of sensing that extend beyond human sensory capacities. If we subscribe to this perspective, important consequences arise, specifically concerning the relation between visual information and governance, as this paper explores. This analysis reinforces the need to further examine and carefully look at visual information produced outside of ocularcentrism, and its implications for the knowledge that supports itself on it.

This paper analyses aesthetic and design artefacts that represent the identity of an individual through the visualization of personal data, focusing on their reflexive, documental, and biographical potential. To this end, it analyses the concepts, data types, design methodologies, and visualization techniques, as well as the experiential characteristics of these artefacts. This analysis is part of an ongoing research that explores data visualization techniques for the representation of personal identity, highlighting the potential of using personal data as a raw material for portraiture. The research is motivated by the current context of technological ubiquity, wherein virtually all human activities inevitably leave a digital trace. It explores the potential of these records of personal data to convey characteristics of identity that are relevant in private and social spheres. As such, it also points to a reconceptualization of portraiture driven by computational media, as the representation of personal identity through the use of personal data.

This article investigates the relationship of computer viruses with the concept of “cute aggression” and its tentacular ramifications, taking as a springboard the Ika-tako virus: a malware created in 2010 by a Japanese NEET called Masato Nakatsuji, which replaced data files with amateurish drawings of cartoony octopuses and squids. Dividing the analysis into three sections that address issues of its production, content, and reception, and connecting the Ika-taku virus to a set of further transgeographical and transhistorical examples, I seek to demonstrate how these instances of cute aggression push the boundaries of playfulness, spontaneity, and naivety, threading into a territory where cuteness, race, sexuality, and cybercrime conflate.

The notion of communication system as presented in many humanities scholarly works is rooted in engineering and the seminal work of Claude E. Shannon titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - published in 1948. In all, the narrowness of a mathematical understanding of communication, as presented by Shannon, presents severe limitations but also, as it will be shown, possible openings, directions or bridges towards the non-mathematical. In particular, the analysis presented here depicts any notion of communication as being inseparable from any noise. In fact, moving at or beyond the clearly defined mathematical limits that are explicit in Shannon’s theory means to invalidate the very possibility of a communication system at all. It is by looking at these limits, it is argued, that a discourse between a theory of communication and aesthetic theories of digital arts is energised. This is not least because in that dialogue might be found a plausible explanation for the ever-growing love of random functions and statistical modelling by many digital art practitioners..