Category Archives: Events

computation and culture, Events, MSc Data Science

Call for papers/demos: Making and Inventing in Digital Culture

lisa1King’s College London have issued a call for papers and demonstrations for CHArt 2015 conference, part of this year’s Arts & Humanities Festival 2015: Fabrication.

The festival is an annual event which showcases research and features a range of events including exhibitions, performances, lectures, readings, roundtables, debates, film screenings, Q&A sessions and guided walks.

This year’s theme is The Fabrication of Art and Beyond: Making and Inventing in Digital Culture. The CHArt 2015 conference wishes to explore what digital and network technologies mean for the intersection of art and fabrication. CHArt invites theoretical papers and demonstrations of academic and artistic work addressing – metaphorically or literally – questions of the fabrication, meaning and value of art as viewed through the various lenses of digital practices and technologies across a variety of genres.

Themes might include:

  • The making of art and the use of digital technologies in its fabrication.
  • Artifice: art as trickery or deception.
  • Art as experimentation and innovation: creating new methods, ideas, or products.
  • The value of art and its falsification: originality, authenticity and authentication.
  • Art and falsity: can art be false?
  • Art and fabrication: legal and ethical constraints, implications and consequences.
  • Art as innovation or invention?
  • Wearable art: digitally and network enabled fabrics.
  • Art and the arrival of the unforeseeable.
  • Art and the skill of fabrication in digital culture.

Contributions are welcome from all sections of the CHArt community: art historians, artists, archaeologists, architects and architectural theorists and historians, philosophers, archivists, museum professionals, curators, conservators, educators, scientists, cultural and media theorists, content providers, technical developers, users and critics. Postgraduate students are encouraged to submit a proposal.

Submissions should be in the form of a 300-400 word synopsis of the proposed paper or demonstration, with brief biographical information (no more than 200 words) of presenter/s, and should be emailed to chart@kcl.ac.uk by Tuesday 14 April 2015.

More blurb

Art intersects with fabrication. Art as a site of making has been drastically affected by digital and network technologies. The border between being online and offline, if one still exists, has become blurred. This has implications for the ways in which diverse elements are combined to create art. Yet, fabrication also means to devise or construct something new and – more troublingly – to fake and to forge.

Does art involve simply the innovation of changes in what is already established by introducing new methods, ideas, or products? Perhaps more radically it should be understood as that which disrupts what previously was or could be known and invites the arrival of what was unforeseen? What are the implications for art of digital technologies, which enhance the possibilities for it to operate through illusion, manipulation, subversion, and falsification? Or is art is an event where truth is displaced by invention?

Postgraduate students are encouraged to submit a proposal. CHArt can offer assistance with the conference fees for up to four student delegates. Priority will be given to postgraduate students whose proposals are accepted for presentation. An application form and proof of university enrolment will be required. For further details about the Helene Roberts Bursary please email anna.bentkowska@kcl.ac.uk.

CHArt | Computers and the History of Art (www.chart.ac.uk) was established in 1985. CHArt’s mission is to examine and raise awareness of innovative digital techniques that support the study, administration, curation and display of all forms of art and design. CHArt acts as an independent forum for new discussion. The scope of CHArt is necessarily broad to encompass all aspects of the history of art and design, but is also constrained by a focus on how technology supports engagement with this field. Membership of CHArt is open to anyone, but CHArt particularly welcomes those who devise, use, support, research or teach relevant digital processes.

Events, Staff profiles and activity

William Latham’s MUTATOR 1+2 at Edinburgh Science Festival

Goldsmiths’ Professor William Latham is showing his work MUTATOR 1+2 as part of a new exhibition celebrating International Year of Light.

Curated by Edinburgh Science Festival, Summerhall and ASCUS Art & Science, How the Light Gets In brings together a selection of works by international artists intrigued by light in all its forms. The exhibits explore the beauty, form and function of light and its role as a metaphor for knowledge and enlightenment.

When: 4 April – 22 May 2015
Where: Summerhall, Edinburgh EH9 1PL

William Latham was one of the first pioneering UK computer artists and rapidly gained international reputation in the 80s.

His work blends organic imagery and computer animation, using software modelled upon the processes of evolution to generate three-dimensional creations that resemble fantastical ‘other-worldly’ forms such as ancient sea shells, contorted animal horns or organic alien spaceships. The work, produced in collaboration with mathematician Stephen Todd, blurs the barriers between art and science.

His new large-scale Mutator 2 interactive projections show the endless evolution of organic forms steered by the viewer picking and breeding the forms they like. Accompanying the projections are large digitally printed translucent mutation curtains.

With the projections complemented by early hand drawings, etchings and prints from the 1980s, large computer-generated Cibachrome prints and video art from his time at IBM.
Mutator 1+2 is Latham’s first major exhibition in Europe in over 20 years, and was initiated in Brighton at The Phoenix in 2013 (sponsored by Arts Council England). It then toured to iMAL Gallery in Brussels and Centre Space in Dundee.

Events

Seminar: Realtime 3D luxury fashion

fashion

 

Philip Delamore is the founding director of the Fashion Digital Studio at London College of Fashion, which brings together designers, academics and industry leaders to challenge the existing models of technology development and digital strategy.

In this seminar, Philip introduces the first 3D e-commerce platform Change of Paradigm, which enables fashion designers to create 3D simulations of products using 3D CAD software. This allows full interaction between the customer and product prior to purchase and manufacture.

Where: Room 144, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London
When:  5pm – 6pm Thursday 26 March 2015
Cost: Free

Philip discusses the technology behind Change of Paradigm, including:

  • complex cloth physics and  rendering of high quality textures
  • integration to games engines to allow realtime interaction
  • delivery of video streams realtime to multiple users.

Philip has worked at the edge of practice and research for a decade, and is a regular speaker at a diverse range of design, arts and research events. He has exhibited work in Seoul, Milan, London, Hong Kong and Stockholm and recently published in Thames & Hudson’s High Heels: Fashion, Femininity & Seduction and Wiley’s Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing.

computation and culture, Events, Staff profiles and activity

Goldsmiths to host international coding conference

LLVMOn 13 and 14 April 2015, Goldsmiths hosts a gathering of cutting-edge technology experts and enthusiasts at the fifth annual LLVM Conference, sponsored by Google, ARM and others.

LLVM is now used by everyone from amateur coders creating simple apps to Apple, Sony and Google.

Over two days, conference speakers will present the latest issues, developments and applications in the LLVM world, and help strengthen the network of LLVM developers and users through discussion, networking and workshops.

The event will be hosted and chaired by Andy Thomason, a specialist in game programming and compiler theory and lecturer on Goldsmiths’ MSc in Computer Games and Entertainment. Students from the Department of Computing will be showing their work over the course of the event.

The event is open to all, from industry or academia to professional or enthusiast. Material will cover a broad spectrum of themes and topics at various depths, from the technical deep-diving to the surface-scratching.

Registration is now open at £60 for two-day entry. As a limited number of tickets are available, please register as soon as possible.

Events, Inspiration, Students

Christian Marclay at WHITECUBE, Bermonsey

christian_M

Christian Marclay has a new solo exhibition at White Cube. It features surround audiovisual multi-screen projection works using a configuration similar Goldsmith’s new ‘SIML’ space.

The work was produced with the assistance of two of Goldsmith’s MA & MFA Computational Arts students Haein Kim and Antonio Daniele and one of our PhD students Diego Macedodefagundes.

About the exhibition:

Continuing Marclay’s long-standing interest in the relationship between image and sound, the exhibition is comprised of a series of works on canvas and paper that feature onomatopoeia taken from comic books. Unlike earlier instances of sound mimesis in his work, these focus solely on the wet sounds suggestive of the action of painting. Combining cartoon-strip imagery and the dripping, pouring and splashing noises associated with gestural abstraction, the works ironically bridge a gap between art movements as distinct as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. This is also reflected in the method in which they have been made; a combination of painting overlaid with screen printing.

A further set of onomatopoeia is put in motion for the first time in a large-scale video installation which projects across four walls. To make the work, the artist collated a lexicon of the sound effects made by characters in superhero stories. The scanned swatches were then animated using the software programme After Effects in a dynamic choreography that suggests the acoustic properties of each word. ‘Boom’, for example, is no longer static on the page, but bursts into life in a sequence of colourful explosions, while ‘Whooosh!’ and ‘Zoooom!’ travel at high speed around the walls. The work fuses the aural with the visual, and immerses the viewer in a silent musical composition.

The aqueous motif introduced with the paintings runs throughout the exhibition, surfacing in a number of new works that allude to everyday life. In a new video installation entitled Pub Crawl (2014), the artist coaxes sound from the empty glasses, bottles and cans that he finds abandoned on the streets of East London, during early morning weekend walks. In a series of projections that run the length of the gallery’s corridor, these discarded vessels are hit, rolled and crushed, forming a lively sound track that echoes throughout the space.

http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/christian_marclay_bermondsey_2015/

computation and culture, Events, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity, Women in Computing

Transmediale 2015 – Capture All

smart-city

Transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture and technology.

The activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies. In the course of its 28 year history, the annual transmediale festival has turned into an essential event in the calendar of media art professionals, artists, activists and students from all over the world. The broad cultural appeal of the festival is recognised by the German federal government who supports the transmediale through its programme for beacons of contemporary culture.

At the ‘Predict & Command: Cities of Smart Control’ event featured our very own Sarah Kember, Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths. Her work incorporates new media, photography and feminist cultural approaches to science and technology. Experimental work includes an edited open access electronic book entitled Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars (Open Humanities Press, 2011) and ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis’ (Culture Machine, Vol. 11). Her latest monograph, with Joanna Zylinska, is Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (The MIT Press, 2012). Kember is in the process of setting up The Goldsmiths Press – a digital first University Press.

This particular conference addressed ‘post-digital urban life’ where every thing as well as every relation between things and subjects are potentially quantifiable and addressable, and thus rendered operational in a new way for economical and cultural (trans)-actions.

Questions which were raised included: What situations and relations of control over self, work, leisure and everyday life are emerging in the paradigm of the Smart City? What is the role of art in pushing such developments forward and/or resisting or altering their course? And how does civil society respond to these developments, for example in the form of citizen driven ways of outsmarting this new urban situation of technological ubiquity?

http://www.transmediale.de/

 

Events, MA/MFA Computational Art, MSc Computer games and Entertainment, News, Staff profiles and activity

Colliding Worlds

william_Latham

Professor Arthur I Miller and William Latham in conversation:

7:00pm, 10th February, 2015

Shoreditch House
Ebor St, London E1 6AW

Professor Arthur I Miller of UCL will be at Shoreditch House to explore exactly how cutting-edge science is redefining contemporary art, the subject of his latest book ‘Colliding Worlds’.

Arthur will explain the new and exciting era of digital contemporary art as artists strive to depict the wonders of our age of information – take a look at huge data sets worked aesthetically, sculpting with sound, folding together concepts of art with physics, using living matter to manipulate inert materials into new and beautiful forms, and artists who are striving to investigate what changes chip implants, gene transplants, and 3D printed organs make to our idea of what it is to be human.

Following his presentation Arthur will be in conversation with the pioneering computer artist Professor William Latham of Goldsmiths College.

If you would like to attend email Professor Arthur I Miller: a.miller@ucl.ac.uk