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Pavel Seldemirov with his project The Becoming became the winner of the inaugural Audi Born-digital Award aimed at supporting Russian media artists. The Becoming is a total installation that recreates the space of a poetically interpreted forest, filled with plants and portal displays. Visitors will be able to go on a journey where cultural artifacts and traces of 2020, which has already become an important milestone for all mankind, will appear among the virtual trees. A ventilator that connects real and virtual worlds; a lake whose surface breaks like a showcase; coronavirus trapped in the river like deep-sea mines; the graph of the stock market crash in the form of mountains on the horizon – from these images the artist collects our collective dream, reminiscent of events on a planetary scale.

In his works, Pavel Seldemirov combines interest in theory with the construction of complex systems using digital technologies. In accompanying texts to algorithmic light installations, the author often refers to the problems of ontology and semiotics, encouraging the viewer not only to interact with the object at the sensory level but also to go to philosophical reflections. This approach is a result of the author's background: Pavel took a course on the art analysis through anthropological methodology at the Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Arts, and also took Andrey Velikanov's course on the philosophy of art. In 2018, the artist graduated from the Moscow Rodchenko School (Interactive, Communication and Mixed Media department). Pavel mentions Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard and Spinoza among the theorists who influenced him most. By studying the line of philosophy from Stoics to Spinoza, though Deleuze to Brian Massumi's philosophy of speculative pragmatism and Levi Bryant's object-oriented philosophy, Pavel puts the scope of his artistic interests on determinism and predestination in the act, ethics as a science about relations between objects, and aesthetics as an access practice, logics of sensation and affection, theories of formation. In his art practices, Pavel designs experiences and impressions. The combination of a philosophical commentary with a minimalistic, self-sufficient visuality seems unexpected only at first glance. After all, text (programming language) is also included in the DNA of installations. According to Pavel, after the course of Velikanov, the language became the main tool of work for him, while programming gives the greatest freedom for creativity. A light beam became one of the most malleable materials in the hands of an artist-programmer.

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SOUR DIRT attempts to render the poisonous, weedy and weird reality of digital world making by navigating the liminal spaces between unruly wilds, non-living growth and toxic clouds. Developed within a time of multivalent crises, this works maps an experiential unconscious of our relationship to Land/Life/Nature and how we interact, manipulate and journey through it within physical and digital spaces. Interrogating the ways in which we consume, image, capture and experience ecologies and landscapes in the physical and virtual realm, using this as an analogy for complex stories of our mutating climate and our ceaseless extraction, manipulation, production and consumption  

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Diane Edwards

SOUR DIRT attempts to render the poisonous, weedy and weird reality of digital world making by navigating the liminal spaces between unruly wilds, non-living growth and toxic clouds. Developed within a time of multivalent crises, this works maps an experiential unconscious of our relationship to Land/Life/Nature and how we interact, manipulate and journey through it within physical and digital spaces. Interrogating the ways in which we consume, image, capture and experience ecologies and landscapes in the physical and virtual realm, using this as an analogy for complex stories of our mutating climate and our ceaseless extraction, manipulation, production and consumption  

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Between - Project by Manqin Zhang

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THE EDGE OF THE WORLD - Project by Natalie Maximo

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Soyun Park

Translated Face Filter (2019)In collaboration with Jung Hyun Kim

Globalization, led by the widespread supply of the internet has brought people together. Accordingly, the frequency of communication in a different language to our mother tongue has been increased. In fact, every language has a distinctive way of expressing. In the process of translation, we adapt language to the foreign language's structure. As we often compromise with its language structure, the nuance of the original message gets distorted and some part of language gets muted. Then think about it, what sentence will tell you about yourself the most? Let’s see how the machine interprets it in a global matter.

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Oracle clock is a smart alarm clock that uses a neural network to compose a new melody every time it is set to go off. The neural network was trained on a large corpus of performances of classical and modern piano music: tunes may seem familiar, but they’ve never been played before. By exposing its user to a new composition during awakening, it attempts to "prolong the moment of unadulterated perception that precedes cognitive interpretation".

snoozes for a random amount of minutes

Concept by Harm van den Dorpel design by Laurel Schwulst programming by soft

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a screensaver by Harm van den Dorpel

“Temporality is” is an artwork in the form of screensaver that uses Gaussian smoothing, a function used in noise reduction for digital images, and a frozen loading spinner, to adorn live uploaded images scraped from photo sharing sites. The images are shown for a random number of seconds before disappearing. The blurring effect and static circle emulate a frozen moment in time, eliciting a sense of disruption in the viewer waiting for the theatricality that has become standard in UX culture. The work renders the mundane as a digital artefact without opulence but with an almost unnerving sense of pause in time that requires a still appreciation of a moment where nothing happens. (Terence Sharpe)

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"Through reading lichen as autobiographical records of one’s discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined (Berger on drawing 2005) — in which past, present and future is assembled. Drawing, in a broad understanding of the word, will be the central practice at the field station. By noticing local changes in these micro-ecologies over time (a form of situation-specific knowledge), he will be collecting lichen drawings as means of environmental critique. The humanist act of noticing, he thinks, is a crucial starting point for thinking about our futures."

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Using GANs to Create Fantastical Creatures

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Jake Elwes - Digital Whispers

raspberry pi computer, LCD screen, speaker and custom program

Tweets in a 2 mile radius of the pieces’ installation are displayed on an LCD screen while the computer simultaneously whispers the tweets as a live performance.

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Jake Elwes - CUSP

A familiar childhood location on the Essex marshes is reframed by inserting images randomly generated by a neural network (GAN*) into this tidal landscape. Initially trained on a photographic dataset, the machine proceeds to learn the embedded qualities of different marsh birds, in the process revealing forms that fluctuate between species, with unanticipated variations emerging without reference to human systems of classification. Birds have been actively selected from among the images conceived by the neural network, and then combined into a single animation that migrates from bird to bird, accompanied by a soundscape of artificially generated bird song. The final work records these generated forms as they are projected, using a portable perspex screen, across the mudflats in Landermere Creek. The work both augments and disrupts the natural ecology of the location, as flocks of native birds enter a visual dialogue with these artificial ones.

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Shell Song

Everest Pipkin 2020

Everest Pipkin’s Shell Song is an interactive audio-narrative game which explores the concept of deep-fake voice technologies and the datasets that go into their construction. By considering physical and digital bodies and voices, it asks what a voice is worth, who can own a human sound, and how it feels to come face to face with a ghost of your body that may yet come to outlive you. The piece reminds us that data is people, both in representations of data that is collected but also tools built by people to collect this data.

Commissioned by ODI Data as Culture for the Rules of Engagement online exhibition and produced as part of the ODI’s R&D programme exploring sustainable ethical practice around data, funded by Innovate UK.

shell-song.neocities.org

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ARTIFICIAL VOYAGER

THE VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORDS ANALYSED BY AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE [PROTOTYPE] "Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977. A bottle into the cosmic ocean. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. The Voyager 1 probe is currently the farthest human made object from Earth." Using the logic of an AI algorithm, this performance offers an alien perception of the content of Voyager Golden Records. Virgin of all deep understanding, the algorithm re-aggregates all the sound snippets according to rules of purely formal & statistical correlations (timbre, spectrum, and dynamics).