Category Archives: computation and culture

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.

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.

computation and culture, EAVI, Inspiration, News, Staff profiles and activity

Major funding for next-generation tech that adapts to human expression

Computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London have been awarded more than £1.6m to lead an international team in accelerating the development of advanced gaming and music technology that adapts to human body language, expression and feelings.

The success of first generation interfaces that capture body movement, such as the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, has demonstrated a public appetite for technology that allows users to interact with creative multimedia systems in seamless ways.

The Rapid Mix consortium will now use years of research to develop advanced gaming, music and e-health technology that overcomes user frustrations, meets next generation expectations, and allows start-ups to compete with developments from major corporations, such as Apple, Google and Intel.

Rapid Mix will bring cutting-edge knowledge from three leading technology labs to a group of five creative industry SMEs, based in Spain, Portugal, France and the UK, who will use the research to develop prototype products.

Newly developed Application Programming Interfaces (the tools that allow software to interact with another programme) and new hardware designs will also be made available to the Do-It-Yourself community through the open access platform.

Rapid Mix is led by Professor Atau Tanaka from the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Dr Rebecca Fiebrink and Dr Mick Grierson.

Professor Tanaka comments: “Humans are highly expressive beings. We communicate verbally but the body is also a major outlet for both conscious and unconscious expression. In this quest for expression we’ve created art, music and technology.

“Technological advances have their greatest impact when they enable us to express ourselves, so it logically follows that new, disruptive innovations need interfaces that take advantage of our expressivity, rather than acting to restrict it”.

“Microsoft has promised a Kinect 2 that detects heart rate to assess gamers’ responses, but small European businesses struggle to compete with the corporations when it comes to getting amazing products from the lab into the public’s hands. Our project aims to overcome this challenge and get new technology directly to users, where it will have true impact.”

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/

computation and culture, Data Science, MSc Data Science

BIG DATA and algorithmic abstractions

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‘The era of ubiquitous computing and big data is now firmly established, with more and more aspects of our everyday lives being mediated, augmented, produced and regulated by digital devices and networked systems powered by software. Software is fundamentally composed of algorithms — sets of defined steps structured to process data to produce an output. And yet, to date, there has been little critical reflection on algorithms, nor empirical research into their nature and work’ – Rob Kitchin

On December 11th 2014 Rob Kitchin will present his paper ‘Thinking critically about and researching algorithms’ in the RHB Cinema at Goldsmiths from 11:00am – 1:00pm.

His paper will begin with an introduction to what constitutes an ‘algorithm’, how they function, and outline the numerous tasks that they now perform in our society. He will address the short fallings of our understandings of algorithms, both in their formulaic structure and their operations in the world and how they are affected by interactions with other algorithms and users.

Critiquing the way in which scientists and technologists would usually present algorithms as ‘purely formal beings of reason’ Rob will discuss how they can transform into ‘abstract entities’ in which their work is often ‘out of control’.

‘…they are: often ‘black boxed’; heterogeneous, often contingent on hundreds of other algorithms, and are embedded in complex socio-technical assemblages; ontogenetic and performative…’

Often the work of many different hands and processes and dispersed across vast networks algorithms become difficult to decode and find their point of origin. They could be considered ‘emergent and constantly unfolding’.

How to govern their nature and work, although difficult, should be considered urgent, with a greater certainty about how ‘algorithms exercise their power over us’.

The lecture will address these concerns and suggest how we may approach researching algorithms through several different access points including: examining source code, reverse engineering and unpacking the wider socio-technical assemblages and examining how algorithms do work in the world.

computation and culture, Events, Inspiration, Whitehead Lecture Series

Whitehead Lecture Series: David Westland

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The Departments of Computing and Psychology at Goldsmiths organise regular seminars by guest speakers throughout the academic year encompassing various aspects of cognition, computation and culture. All are welcome to attend.

 

 

Philosophical Ontology and Computational Models

4pm on  Wednesday 8th October in the Richard Hoggart Building room RHB137a at Goldsmiths College.

The second Whitehead lecture of the autumn term 2014 will be given by David Westland, Dept Philosophy, University of Durham, entitled “Philosophical Ontology and Computational Models”.

ABSTRACT: Models of computation (e.g. finite state machines, cellular automata) have been used extensively in the so-called ‘digital physics’ movement, as well as some areas of applied ontology. But their use has not extended very well to analytic ontology, where philosophers propose and attempt to answer general questions concerning the possible structures of reality. In this discussion he will introduce a domain of mainstream philosophy that is currently receiving a great deal of attention: the properties and laws debate. The basic problem of this discussion is how to understand the fundamental nature of predicates (e.g. ‘is round’) and their close connection to behavior (e.g. ’round entities tend to roll down inclined planes’). A dominant view, which is based upon David Hume’s empiricist philosophy, is that laws of nature are mere descriptions of the world, where the world itself is construed as a vast pattern of objects that are characterised by properties and relations. Importantly, advocates of this approach deny that causes ‘bring about’ their effects in any serious sense, such that there is no real explanation for the occurrence of a specific event. Common sense suggests that striking a match ‘necessitates’ its ignition, but the neo-Humean tradition proposes that the distribution of events is completely accidental. The aim in this discussion, however, is to support a rival position (termed dispositionalism), according to which the natures of properties are intimately connected with their behavior. So construed, properties are ‘active’ entities that are called upon to explain events. That said, he suggests that the dispositionalist project is subject to severe difficulties because it is presently committing itself to a ‘list’ conception of ontology. By this he means that philosophers are approaching ontology as a business of postulating what kinds of entity exist (i.e. dispositional predicates such as ’roundness’) and merely linking these entities up with certain truths (i.e. propositions of behavior such as ’round entities, ceteris paribus, roll down inclined planes’). The promising response, he argues, is to rethink the basic blueprint of a properties and laws ontology in terms of a finite state machine, where if-then imperatives are used to construct future times (modelled as outputs) on the basis of laws of nature (modelled as a transition table) and present times (modelled as inputs). The core idea is that this computational approach to ontology offers a favorable setting for understanding reality as a ‘self-active’ phenomenon, whereby the key dispositionalist notions of explanation and activity are properly realised.

 David Westland is currently based at the Dept. of Philosophy at the University of Durham, where he has worked closely with Dr. Sophie Gibb and – before his untimely death in January 2014 – the Internationally renowned metaphysician Professor E. J. (Jonathan) Lowe on the topic of ontological structuralism and natural laws.  David’s research has focused around modal issues in anti-Humeanism, dynamic theories of time, and the connection between computational models and analytic ontology.