EAVI, News, Staff profiles and activity

Goldsmiths researcher awarded Marie Curie Fellowship

about_presentation_800x400-783x250We are very pleased to announce that Dr Baptiste Caramiaux, post-doc on Goldsmiths’ MetaGesture Music project team, has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship.

Baptiste’s project, entitled MIM – Enhancing Motion Interaction through Music Performance will be carried out in partnership with McGill University, Montreal with a final phase at IRCAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The project aims to enhance Human Motion–Computer Interaction through a multidisciplinary approach between experimental psychology, music technology and computational modelling.

The project contributes to two main uncharted research areas:

  1. It contributes to the fundamental understanding of sensorimotor learning processes by considering complex human motion, specifically motion in music performance.
  2. It represents an original application of computational modelling by modelling expressive musical gestures and transferring these models to interactive systems.

Congratulations, Baptiste!

This blog post was adapted from a recent post on the EAVI website

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.

Data Science

Jobs at Goldsmiths Computing

Goldsmiths Department of Computing is recruiting three post-doctoral research assistants in areas including computer science, mathematics and statistics.

Type of Contract: Three years fixed-term, full time
Salary: £31,462 to £34,110 (incl London Weighting)
Closing date for applications: 30 April 2015
Interview date: w/c 11 May 2015

The Role
The recently-founded Goldsmiths Centre for Intelligent Data Analytics is seeking post docs to join a new industrial research project working with our partners at a large city financial institution to develop a fully-functional state-of-the art spend analytics system.

We are particularly interested in applicants with specialisms in machine learning and/or statistics. It is also essential that applicants have strong programming abilities.

We are looking to extend our team, which already has strong expertise in many aspects of mathematics, computer science and artificial intelligence. We have already had considerable success in working together as a team developing new research ideas and deliverables to customers.

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.

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.”

Creativity, independence and learning by doing.