Category Archives: Inspiration

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

Transmediale 2015 – Capture All

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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/

 

computation and culture, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity

Michael Cook, named by Forbes in their Top 30 under 30

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Michael Cook, Researcher from the Department of Computing was named by Forbes in their Top 30 under 30  list. Mike is currently “making a creative AI called ANGELINA that can design its own original games.

Michael Cook is a PhD student at Imperial College in London, where he also studied for an MEng Computing. He’s also a Research Associate at Goldsmiths College’s Computational Creativity Group.

For his PhD project he asks questions like: Can we evolve entire games from nothing? Can we start with literally nothing at all, except a few basic ideas about what a game contains, and ask a computer to design levels, populate them with characters, and wrap it all up in a ruleset that is both challenging and fun?

Find out more:

Games by ANGELINA: http://www.gamesbyangelina.org/

Forbes in their Top 30 under 30 : http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mlg45ehell/michael-cook-27/

Goldsmiths College’s Computational Creativity Group: http://ccg.doc.gold.ac.uk/

BSc Creative Computing, BSc Digital Arts Computing, Inspiration, MA/MFA Computational Art

Creative computing courses at Goldsmiths

We are one of the top interdisciplinary computing departments in the country – working across art, music, journalism, gaming, and many other subject areas. This video features students and staff from our creative undergraduate and postgraduate programmes talking about how the culture of Goldsmiths makes us unique.

Please see the Goldsmiths website for further details about the courses that we offer: http://www.gold.ac.uk/computing/studywithus/

If you wish to pursue undergraduate study, please note that the UCAS deadline for application for September 2015 entry is 15th January 2015.

Inspiration, Students

PC Music #3 in FactMag’s 50 best albums list

Recently graduated Pop & Music Computing students from Goldsmiths chart at number 3 in FactMag’s 2014 50 best albums list, under the name PC Music produced in association with DIS and Red Bull.

It is a set of mixes from A. G. Cook, GFOTY, Danny L Harle, Lil Data, Nu New Edition and Kane West and works as a kind of showcase for the artists who are associated with the label.

PC Music have been making huge waves in the scene with often divided opinions. They emerged just last year (2013) with some dismissing them as ‘a kind of joke’, with others describing them as ‘the most compelling pop music in recent memory’.

Whatever side you take, they raise important questions in this ‘post ironic’ landscape, forcing you to re-evaluate your views around pop music and sampling.

FACTMAG 

Events, Inspiration, Students, Uncategorized

THE N0THING, SEEKING ANSWERS_   

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On 4th and 5th December C&R space in Deptford held performances of the work of  Elías Merino, Rian Treanor and Daniel del Rio with ‘three approaches to abstract computer-generated music’. They presented their project ‘The Nothing, Seeking Answers’ a multifocal installation, based on a set of unanswered questions, conceptual reflections and hermeneutics about abstract computer music and algorithmic composition.

The installation allowed for complete immersion within the varied soundscapes, set in darkness apart from the spill of light from the entrance, with the composers completely hidden from view.

Elías Merino, a composer and sonic artist presented an abstract composition of pure sine waves against,  distortion, fizzle and creeks, contrasting meditative sound against abrasive noise. He develops his work in computer-generated composition, electroacoustic music, soundscape and concrète sounds as an abstract and imaginary object away from the acoustic environment, processing sound through digital technology.

EAVI, Events, Inspiration, Staff profiles and activity

Atau Tanaka, Fiducial Voice Beacons: Action @ Science Museum Lates

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Wednesday 26th November 

20.00 – 20.20 and 21.00 – 21.20

@ Information Age gallery
Science Museum, Exhibition Road, SW7 2DD London, United Kingdom

Information Age is a newly opened gallery within the Science Museum which celebrates more than 200 years of innovation in communication and information technologies. Artist Atau Tanaka has been invited to respond to the newly commissioned artwork for the gallery, Fiducial Voice Beacons by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Fiducial Voice Beacons is an interactive sound and light installation consisting of beacons situated within the ceiling of the Information Age gallery. Each beacon stores sound recordings that can be heard by visitors using an app on their mobile device. The sound recordings are voice messages that relate to information and have been collected from scientists, poets, artists and thinkers from the past and the present. Visitors are invited to interact with the artwork and to record their own messages thereby replacing the existing ones and producing a quasi-living archive.

In Lozano-Hemmer’s artwork the audience enjoy the relatively personal experience of listening to the audio content through headphones or the speaker on their hand-held device. Atau Tanaka, together with Rebecca Fiebrink, Steph Horak and Adam Parkinson (members of the Embodied Audiovisual Interaction (EAVI) research group) will present two unique performances that transform the usually localised listening experience of the work into a shared, collective event. Tanaka’s performance the installation will be “played” by the performers with the use of smartphones that are plugged into a sound system, creating a moment where the sound of the beacons is rendered palpable to a larger audience.

This event has been organised by MFA curating students from Goldsmiths, University of London.