This paper describes the concepts, ideas, background and operations of The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Reqiuis Circumspice) a digital video installation that produces a continuous stream of weather-responsive panoramic images from the top of the Monument in the City of London. The work, which was commissioned by Julian Harrap Architects, was part of a £4.5 million refurbishment of the 17th century landmark, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Dr. Robert Hooke to commemorate the Great Fire of London in 1666.
The Project
Fascinated by the dual function of the structure, I decided to develop a work that referenced its scientific and historical significance and its role as a Monument sited in the centre of London. The architect’s brief required that the installation provide access to the magnificent views available from the top to those who were unable (or unwilling) to climb the 311 stairs to the observation platform, and I wanted to explore the potential for a work that would respond to the surrounding and ever-changing weather conditions and provide high-definition panoramic images of the view for display on a video screen located at the base of the Monument and to make an image-stream available on the internet. The brief also stipulated that the installation should be capable of providing updated images twenty fours a day, seven days a week and be operational for three years! It was clear to me that this challenging project would require a knowledgeable and skilled collaborator. Working closely with media technologist Onno Baudouin at Sandbox, a digital media R&D lab at the University of Central Lancashire, we considered a number of options before selecting a robust and reliable digital stills camera to provide the images for the project. Onno developed eight different custom software programs for the installation including camera control and the manipulation of the image output of the camera all remotely accessible via the internet. The image stream from the camera is modified in real time by meteorological information about the wind speed and direction, air temperature and pressure.

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Dr. Chris Meigh-Andrews is an artist, writer and curator and Professor of Electronic and Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire, where he has established the Electronic and Digital Art Unit (EDAU). Meigh-Andrews has been exhibiting his video and installation work internationally since 1978 and his site-specific works often feature renewable energy systems and are designed to interact with their environment. His most recently completed commissioned installation produces a live stream of panoramic time-lapse images from the top of the Monument in the City of London. Curatorial projects include The Digital Aesthetic (2001) and Digital Aesthetic 2 (2007) with the Harris Museum; Analogue: Pioneering Video from the UK, Poland and Canada (with Catherine Elwes), an international touring exhibition (2006-2009) and Yes Snow Show, (with Elisabetta Fabrizzi) at the British Film Institute, London (2009). His book, A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function was published by Berg in 2006, and in Japan by Sangensha, Tokyo in 2011, and he is currently working on an enlarged and updated edition which will be published in 2013.

The advent of smartphone and tablet devices has resulted to the convergence of a wide variety of media and technology. This phenomenon will inevitably continue as app developers continue to innovate and hardware manufacturers improve their products. Art is also finding a home on such devices. This has led to art being purchased and consumed much in the same way as media commodities such as books, music or movies. How does this new approach alter the relationship between the participant and the art? What are the benefits for the creator? And what does the future hold for mobile art?

In this talk, James will explore these questions whilst discussing his own approach to this new electronic canvas as a platform for building unique interactive tools for creative expression.

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James Alliban is an artist, interaction designer and speaker from London. His research and artistic practice covers a wide range of areas including generative art, interactive installations, augmented reality, mobile apps, 3D printing and data visualization. James is primarily concerned with building interactive toys and immersive environments that adopt an abstract aesthetic and offer new forms of creative expression. By exploring the experiential nature of technology, he aims to encourage play and generate curiosity. James holds an MA in Hyperfictions from the University of Hertfordshire.

This paper presents research findings of my recently completed doctoral artistic research into the externally controlled human face, entitled: “Facial Hacking: The Twisted Logic of Electro-Facial Choreography”
Perfect Paul: “On the Expressive Potential and Political Implications of the Digitally Controlled Human Face.”
Facial expression research usually deals exclusively with the face in suspension, that is, static facial expressions that designate various emotional states or their role in verbal communication. However, my work takes a radically different approach as facial movement is rooted in digital instead of neural computation.

External digital computational control over the face inherently allows for an unprecedented systematic exploration of the space of possible facial movement patterns that I call dynamic face space. This in contrast to static face space that ‘just’ explores the end states of facial muscular contraction. My PhD research has pushed this systematic approach to its ultimate consequence by a formalization of facial features and logical operations into an explorative computational facial language, The Language of Facial E-motion.(1) This language has been deployed in a series of experiments with the aim to map out dynamic face space and possibly unveil unseen facial movement patterns. This method, named Choreologic Probing, has succeeded remarkably well and has resulted in an electro-facial choreographic vocabulary describing these newly found movement patterns.

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Arthur Elsenaar (1962) is a performance artist and facial hacker from the Netherlands. Elsenaar has a fascination with the intimate relationship of electricity and the human body and is the originator of algorithmic facial choreography.
Elsenaar has recently been awarded a Ph.D. from Nottingham Trent University in the UK on his pioneering artistic research into the expressive potential of the computer-controlled human face. His research presents a radical new view of human facial expression as a site for electro-facial choreography.
His award winning work has been shown throughout Europe and the United States of America and has been acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Since 2010 he is lecturing at the ArtScience Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatoire and Royal Academy of the Arts in the Hague, The Netherlands.

Ideogenetic Machine is an interactive installation that incorporates portraits of participants into an algorithmically generated comic book. A camera captures the portraits live while an edge detection algorithm transforms the photographic image into a “line drawing”. Face detection is utilized to insert-code generated speech bubbles into the narrative.

The software creates never repeating compositions using a set of rules that approximate the compositional decisions made by a human comic book author. The comic is projected live, and consists of the algorithmically processed portraits as well as randomly chosen story elements from a database of drawings illustrating speculative narratives based on current news and events.

Documentation of the project and its design process will illustrate the way technology can open up new forms of participation and expand the notion of the audience. A participatory paradigm enabled by technology makes people more willing to collaborate with each other, as well as with the artist. This paper argues that the most compelling participatory artistic experiences are not necessarily the result of complicated sensors or networks. The attention of the audience is more firmly held if the artwork brings participation beyond the passive paradigm of action and reaction, and creates space for the unpredictability of individual human creativity.

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Nova Jiang’s work engages with the evolving definition of public space through new forms of participation enabled by technology. Concerned with fostering a sense of community, she often creates situations that allow people to relate in unexpected ways. She wants to inspire people’s curiosity about each other as well as their everyday surroundings through play. Quite often, she succeeds in transforming strangers into collaborators. Her most recent projects focus on sharing the tools of artistic production as well as methodologies for creative thinking.

Nova Jiang is currently a fellow at Eyebeam in New York. She holds a masters degree from the Design Media Art Department, University of California, Los Angeles. She has exhibited work at festivals, galleries and museums including 01SJ Biennial, San Jose; Sundance, Park City; TEDActive, Palm Spring; Sonar, Barcelona; Glow, Santa Monica; Transitio_MX, Mexico City; Japan Media Art Festival, Tokyo; Medialab-Prado, Madrid; De Oosterpoort, Groningen; LM Projects, Los Angeles; The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh; Milan Public Design Festival, Milan among other venues. She is also the recipient of a Skowhegan Fellowship, a Black Rock Arts Foundation Grant and a Sculpture Space Grant.

The aim of this talk is to foster a basic understanding about gesture recognition algorithms and how it can be used or adapted to your own needs. The theoretical treatment of this interesting topic is supported by practical demonstrations of the Kinetic Space toolkit and an introduction on how to use it for your own needs.
The Kinetic Space allows everybody to record and recognize customized gestures using depth images as provided by the PrimeSense PS1080, the Kinect or the Xtion sensors. The software observes and comprehends the user interaction by analyzing a skeleton representation of the user. The unique analysis routines allow to not only detect simple gestures such as pushing, clicking, forming a circle or waving, but also to recognize more complicated gestures as, for instance, used in dance performances or sign language.
The toolkit has already been used by media artists, dancers and alike to connect and to control a wide range of third party applications/software such as Max/MSP, Pure Data, VVVV, Resolume, etc. via the OSC protocol. Some of these applications, games and installations will also be presented in this talk.
The Kinetic Space toolkit including documentation on how to install and run it, can be downloaded from http://kineticspace.googlecode.com.

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Matthias Wölfel received the Diploma in electrical engineering and information technology and a PhD in computer science focusing on speech technology from the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2003 and 2009 respectively. He participated in an exchange program with the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth and stayed at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, as a visiting researcher. Since 2010 he is a lecturer at the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (lecturing Digital Speech Processing) and at the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe (lecturing Designing Gestural Interfaces and Kinetic Space).He has published approximately 60 publications including the book Distant Speech Recognition (Wiley, 2009), and has been cited more than 350 times in total. Besides projects, funded by the German government, he has worked for the European Projects: FAME, CHIL and TC-Star. His research interests include speech and language processing, computer vision, computer graphics and human-computer-interaction.

Autonomous machines can produce a new kind of abstract art detached from any relation with the real world or, in opposition, from its deconstruction as a mean to achieve nonobjective representation. Additionally this new kink of abstraction is nonhuman in essence, as once the human operator triggers the process he loses control on the outcome. The absence of conscience, external control or predetermination, allow artistic robots to engender creativity in its pure state, without any representational, aesthetic or moral flavor.
If abstract art is to be produced by mechanical devices, the main point to be addressed is that no teleological setting can be assigned to such an application, given its constitutive purposeless characteristic. When collective robotics is thought as an artistic medium, no “utility” or “objective” function should be considered.
The new kind of abstraction produced by autonomous robots based on emergent properties is natural in essence, i.e., it exists.

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Leonel Moura is a European artist born in Lisbon, Portugal, that works with AI and robotics. He created in 2003 his first swarm of ‘Painting Robots’, able to produce original artworks based on emergent behavior. Since then he has produced several artbots, each time more autonomous and sophisticated. RAP (Robotic Action Painter), 2006, created for a permanent exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, is able to generate highly creative and original art works, to decide when the work is ready and to sign it, which it does with a distinctive signature. ISU (The Poet Robot), 2006, generates random poems, very much in the style of the Lettrist Movement and of Concrete Poetry.
In 2007 the Robotarium, the first zoo dedicated to robots and artificial life, opened in Alverca.
In 2009 he curates the show “INSIDE [art and science].
Leonel Moura has been appointed European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation (2009).

LumiBots is a swarm robotic installation designed to provide a visual and tangible experience of an abstract concept. A small swarm of simple, autonomous robots demonstrates how global behaviour is formed without a central control mechanism or invisible information transfer. Local information transfer between the robots is made visible in form of fading luminescent trails, utilizing phosphorescent material (glow-in-the-dark paper). The robot platform was specially designed to be simple and inexpensive. The robots follow simple and obvious rules, visualizing the structures behind a complex phenomenon.
The lumiBots are science as well as art. The fact that many complex behaviours, structures and systems rely on simple rules and the interactions between their components is not obvious. This principle is referred to as emergence. The lumiBots are a tangible visualisation of an abstract principle. They show the beauty of complex systems.

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Mey Lean Kronemann’s works are science as well as art. Her installations have been exhibited both in a scientific context and in the art context. Since 2006, she has been exploring the topic of emergence, swarm behaviour, and how interaction and rules generate complex structures. In 2008, her interactive floor projection schuechterne lichter was awarded by the Digital Sparks Award (Honorary Mention).
Mey Lean Kronemann defines emergent interactive installations as an advanced form of generative design/art:
The artist designs the settings, and the rules. The artwork itself emerges from the rules and the interaction with the visitors, rather like in a game than in a classical art piece. As a consequence, Mey Lean Kronemann‘s installations are highly immersive.
Although she does have quite some experience with building interactive things, the technology never stands in the foreground in Mey‘s work. Her focus is on the human‘s reaction. Her installations invite people to think, learn and socialise. They encourage the visitors to interact with both their environment and with each other in a playful way.

Mey Lean Kronemann (born 1982) lives and works in Berlin. She has studied Interaction Design at Malmö University in Sweden, and Product Design as well as Interface Design at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences in Germany, where she graduated in 2009. In 2010, she was a research fellow at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences.

This showcase of practical artworks and art experiments done during a short stay at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (SFCI). All the cases have in common the use of computer vision as a creative tool for artists. They also happen to have some level of robotics involved, whether with the use of a robot itself or some robotic motor.
The core idea is the approach to the work of art as if it would be a multidisciplinary engineering project. Finding the right solution to a technical problem or dealing with unexpected harware/software behaviours forces the creative team to be flexible, acquire new skills, and take decisions in situ, but also to appreciate the artistic potential of serendipity. One example of the unexpected discovery is when deviation errors, due to lack of precision of a computer vision controlled robot, leads to movements that are seen as more animated-like (in the sense of the Latin anima) from the point of view of the spectator, that may find more interesting an unexpected behaviour than a regular repetition of movements.

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David Sanz Kirbis is an multidisciplinary experimenter interested in how things work and in finding creative solutions to technical projects. He is currently working in the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia towards a PhD to study how computer vision techniques, normally used in robotics or surveillance, can be applied to create new forms of audiovisual expression.
With an eclectic background as pizza deliverer, graphic designer, computer technician, soldier, independent filmmaker, and industrial design engineer, he is interested in several fields like design, mechanics, electronics, programming, robotics, philosophy and photography.
David recently spent a summer hosted at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, directed by Golan Levin, to share knowledge, meet people experimenting in related areas of interest and to get involved in ongoing projects of the STUDIO.

The spread of new platforms and technologies in the world in the past decade has deeply transformed people, society, business, learning & teaching, art and all aspects of human life. As Marshall McLuhan said, and we have been witnessing along the history: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us”. There has never been a time like now: the speed of change in technology has never been so fast. Therefore, the transformations and possibilities that technology brings today are also fast as never before. In this context, many aspects affect the artistic creation, from the modifications in human relationships and behavior to new ways of interactions and computer mediated experiences.

The present paper/presentation addresses the main trasnformations in the human behavior due the introdution of the emergent technologies and then discusses the new possibilities in art by using the emerging platforms for transmedia creations.

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Martha Gabriel is an awarded Brazilian artist and researcher exploring several forms of emerging media and technology in her artworks. She focuses on the use of computers in the mediation of human relationships with the world and the cybridism that results from that. Engineer, postgraduate in Marketing and Design, masters degree in Art, Martha is pursuing her PhD in Art with a research on transmedia storytelling in art. Her works have been exhibited all around the world, in Asia, Europe, USA and Brazil, including events like ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Florence Biennale, among others. Professor and course leader at HSM Education, Brazil.