Author: Louise Hisayasu

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'O Oysters, come and walk with us!' To talk of many things: Of intelligent shoes — and Spaceship Earth — and encrypted sealing-wax — Of hybrid cabbages — and cyborg kings — And why the sea is boiling hot — And whether soft robotic pigs have wings.'
 
The project is a practice-based research on on art, science, technology and archival practice from intersectional perspective. As a part of Politics of the Machine: Art and After conference, we would like to invite the conference participants to become a part of an intellectual adventure with us. Forget the big elephant in the room and let's talk about oysters and their shells over a nice cup of coffee during the breaks. Our talks will be recorded, archived, analyzed and published in line with an academic paper. Participants will also receive their copies as co-producers of our ‘research poem.’

Biography

Taguhi Torosyan is an art worker from Yerevan, Armenia. She previously curated Nest Artists Residency and Community Center program at ICA Yerevan and taught at the Department of Art History, Theory and Management at Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography. Taguhi has shown in Armenia and internationally at Schwankhalle Bremen, Golden Apricot IFF, One Shot International Film Festival and ACCEA, Yerevan. Residencies and fellowships attended include apexart, NYC and Bunker, Ljubljana.  Mahzabin Haque is a curator and photographer from Bangladesh. She has been involved with several art organizations and independent curatorial projects mostly based in Bangladesh and the region for last 6 years. She has been a Rave Fellow (2016), funded by IFA (Institute for Foreign cultural relations) and worked with the Sprengel Museum Hannover in Germany. She was also participant of the Curators Agenda Vienna (2016) with a scholarship from Austrian Federal Chancellery (cultural section). Mahzabin exhibited her photography projects in Bangladesh, India and Myanmar.  Lanchi Nguyen was born in Vietnam, and has pursued her graduation in Professional Communication from RMIT University, Australia. She is greatly concerned with audience research and harbors great interest in creating mutual conversation with the audience. This passion enhanced when she was working for gallery / art studios in Vietnam. Having observed the potential of interactive artwork in engaging participants in voicing their own opinions, she hopes to contribute to make such artwork more approachable to the local audience, with a belief that it would help to improve the shortage of public sphere in the country. That devotion led her to participate in Media Arts Cultures, where she hopes to learn more about socially engaged art / interactive art and do research on audience of these art genres. Auto-ethnographic methodology – especially through interviews – is her focus at the moment, hoping to systematically analyse the personal experiences of the participants and further understand their cultural experience.
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Cookies is a game based on the tetris game logic, that gives a sense of control to the user of The game. is based in the construction of meaning through the change of words syntax. The words are originally from the dialogue that Mark Zuckerberg and the U.S senate had in the last hearing concerning the privacy policies of facebook. In the game we expose the control as an illusion, because is embedded in the logic of a game and prearranged parameters.

Biography

Heng Sun is from Cambodia where he got his BA in media management. His professional background was in journalism and TV programming in both case his focus was on politics and community development. Heng’s current interest is in game culture and critical play because of their potential for social engagement.

Hoi Ting Yeung is a daily life collector from Hong Kong. Graduated from School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong in 2014. She has been working in South Taiwan Film Festival and Videotage as VMAC (Videotage Media Art Collection) archivist. She has a bad habit of hard to forget things. She believes there’s spirit in Time. Collecting memories that people want to remember is her interest.

Paula Moya is from Colombia, where she studied a BA in Literature and in filmmaking. Her short film LEAKAGE (Director and Scriptwriter) was awarded the Colombian Film Fund in 2013. She has worked as Assistant Director in Colombia and Assistant to a producer in large-scale Hollywood films as THE 33. Currently, she is working as a producer in the creative documentary SUNLESS MORNING, a portrait of a woman between Paris and Bogota.

Thanks also to Uğur Kaya, who was a tech collaborator in this project.

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Via Project 02CO2, its team is investigating how the machine impacts and contextualizes artistic perception and how do data layers produced through digital activity change the perception of Earth and alter its atmosphere within the framework of Machines of Atmospheres.

Focusing on search engines as a source of CO2 emissions which are causing climate change, the project 02CO2 aims to create tools that are able to transmit the notion about effects of an everyday personal activity on the environment. Tracking of wi-fi usage during the conference on Politics of the Machines – Art and After (taking place in EVA-Copenhagen between the 15-17 of May 2018) provides the team with data for the real-time visualisation in form of a balloon installation of the visitors' minute to minute online behaviour. On a playful manner, participants are invited to perform search enquires in order to find answers to specific questions. 1 balloon channel is interactively reacting to the number of their enquiries and measures the related CO2 emission, while other channels that are corresponding to different data flow streams of the conference building contextualizes this private game in the frame of general everyday dynamics in web ecology of the particular space. In fact, one single Google search produces about 0.2 grams of CO2 according to Google Environmental Reports. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of heat-trapping (greenhouse) gases, which is released through both natural processes (such as volcanic eruptions) and human activities. There is indisputable scientific evidence that increased levels of greenhouse gases (GHG) cause global warming which leads to temperature rise, warming of oceans, melting of glaciers, the rise of sea levels and ocean acidification, increasing forest fires and deforestation, just to mention a few.

Biography

Atiq Hashmi is a technology enthusiast who likes to explore how technology is helping to visualize arts and cultures while maintaining the integrity of cultural data. Having graduated as an electrical engineer and working with latest digital technologies for the preservation of heritage sites in Pakistan, encouraged him to come to Europe under Erasmus Mundus program to explore Media Arts Cultures field at a broader level. Currently, he is studying the anthropogenic impacts on the environment and how these impacts can be visualized at an individual level to establish the connection of people with environmental issues at more personal level. In the latest project 02CO2 he is programming the robotic parts of the installation including the functions of the four stepper motors.

Adrienn Lestyán is a skilled writer and a passionate soul from Budapest, exploring the world at the intersections of arts, written words, along with mind and body practices. She has a background in communication, journalism, and blogging. In the recent years, based in Berlin, she used to be responsible for diverse cultural projects as a project coordinator for festivals, exhibitions and workshops related to wearable technology, fashion tech and critical making. She is particularly fond of interactive artistic experiments and installations enhancing the engagement of the audience to act, to communicate and to reflect.

Daria Vdovina is a representative of a young generation of an independent proactive Ukrainians, who used to work in the cultural sector primarily in curatorial and managerial positions. Nowadays she pursues a masters degree in digital art, technology and media culture within Erasmus Mundus joint degree Media Arts Cultures, focusing her studies on the interconnection and overlaps between technology and environment, digital culture and politics of the machines from the ecological perspective. She aims to explore concerns of Artificial Life and Urban Studies when it comes to discussions of such phenomena as Postnatural landscape, Smart City, Next Nature, BioDesign, architecture and BioArt.

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TokiSonus ( lit. Sound Language) is a sound project designed as an approach to build a system or a non-verbal "alphabet”, where sounds and signs are correlated in such a way that users can construct their own message and establish a basic form of conversation. TokiSonus is a combination of two words: toki, which means talk/language in Toki Pona (constructed language) and sonus, in Greek meaning sound. It’s a new form of interaction, where Toki Pona glyphs associatively navigate through everyday sounds of Aalborg, creating new narratives through engaging in a stream of memories. The purpose is to create a sonic archive of these sounds while experimenting with the usage of language as a storytelling/communicative device. The actual keyboard of computer has been transformed, letters have been replaced by glyphs and each of them is connected with one sound. Giving these keys a new life affords the participant the ability to record sonic messages, encoded with their personal sentiments, these messages can be shared and will be saved in our sound archive, with their accompanying verbal translation.

Biography

Louise Hisayasu is a researcher from Sāo Paulo, Brazil. Throughout the last decade, she has been based in London and Berlin working in the fields of music communication, events production and archiving. She is interested in the intersectional space and grey areas that exist between culture, language, memories and the arts.

Binh Nguyen was working in Advertising as a copywriter with an undergraduate degree in Literature & Communication from National University in Vietnam. Joining Media Arts Cultures helps her to further develop her interest in BioArt and BioCouture, especially in new sustainable textile materials in fashion industry.

Gohar Vardanyan is an art historian from Armenia, where she was a lecturer of Modern and Contemporary Art History in Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts and in few non-formal educational spaces. She had participated in various conferences and talks, organized workshops for students, wrote articles and concepts for exhibitions. She also participated in few exhibitions as a conceptual artist.

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"The definition of pornography is widening, there is more available than ever before and it is easily accessed. It has become a sub-obsession facilitated by the acceleration of technology within the last 50 years. Our project The Porno Machine is used as a metaphor of contemporary society and its pornographic fixation. It seeks to utilize a bathroom at the Aalborg University in Copenhagen, a logical place for our work for the analogies of any public restroom with a wider context of both technology and pornography. It is a transient space that only appears to be unaffected by the arrival of advanced technologies, a place that seams depersonalized although for many it serves to express most intimate needs and instincts, long in use for sex, bathroom cruising, use of illegal substances. The restroom was once managed by a bathroom attendant whose mandate was to suppress all these unauthorized actions, until the technologies eliminated this profession which in our concepts makes them a 'gentle reminder'; of job destruction. For the EVA Conference in Copenhagen, we intend to present an ephemeral version of the prototype, which will be displayed only for 15 minutes each day of the conference, at the three different sites of the Aalborg University in Copenhagen. The 15 minute multimedia piece will be showcased on Tuesday 15.05. 2018 at 19:20 in the bathroom near the Foyer area. On Wednesday 16.05.2018 and Thursday 17.05.2018 the event will be held at noon at unnamed locations within the Aalborg University building."

Biography

Graham King graduated with an undergraduate degree in screenwriting from Depaul University in Chicago. Before that he studied theatre at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts in Hartford Connecticut. He regularly watches films and pornography and plays (arguably) too many video games.

Clio Flego studied at IUAV University in Venice and received a graduate degree in Visual and Performing Arts. She cooperated with cultural institutions for international festivals and events. She works as video maker, activist and cultural manager.

Boris Abramovic is cultural manager and artist from Montenegro. He graduated in Arts and Design from the University of Montenegro. He curated and exhibited internationally, managed cultural projects in formal and informal settings, designed and implemented initiatives focused on culture, intercultural dialogues, policies, and youth.