A Goldsmiths Computing student’s ‘sign language glove’ has taken first prize in an exclusive South Korean hackathon attended by hand-picked students from some of the world’s best universities.
PhD Arts & Computational Technologies candidate Hadeel Ayoub, third-year BSc Creative Computing student Leon Fedden, and 2016 MSci Creative Computing graduate Jakub Fiala took part in the IBM Watson A.I. Hackathon in Seoul earlier this month. Organised by the Art Centre Nabi, the hackathon focused on pioneering technology for use in social care.
Hadeel, an MA Computational Arts graduate who is now studying for her PhD, has spent the past year working on the second version of her BrightSign glove, which turns hand motions into text and speech. In addition to the new developments in the glove’s technology, she has also consulted with Rose Sinclair from Goldsmiths’ Department of Design on the best textiles to use for the product.
During the three day hackathon, the Goldsmiths team built, programmed and trained the BrightSign glove on site. On the final day they presented the project at a public event with a judging panel including the director of IBM Watson.
The BrightSign glove contains an on-board, battery-powered single board computer, flex sensors and an accelerometer. Used in combination with a range of gestural and semantic analysis tools, users can generate and control reliable speech through a dictionary of hand gestures.
The first version of the design made international headlines in 2015, with Hadeel explaining the glove’s potential to improve communication between people with different disabilities.
The Goldsmiths team, supervised by the Department of Computing’s Dr Rebecca Fiebrink and Dr Mick Grierson, were up against stiff competition from Seoul National University, the Georgia Institute of Technology and New York University, among others.
A festival of experimental sound, film and performance – co-curated by Goldsmiths and London College of Communication – takes place in Rotherhithe this December.
Guy Sherwin >> ‘Sound Cuts’ – 4 projector performance
Sherwin’s film works often use serial forms and live elements, and engage with light, time and sound as fundamental to cinema. Sherwin was guest curator of ‘Film in Space’ an exhibition of expanded cinema at Camden Arts Centre. His films have screened at Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern and Tate Britain.
Alice Kemp >> live art performance
Kemp works with dream-image-language and subtle trance states to create live-art performances and audio compositions. Her practice involves composition, public and private rituals, doll-making, drawing and painting. Her performances have been described as hypnotic, intense, unnerving, beautiful, dark and reflective, aggressive, confusing, meditative, pointless, brave, sensual, baffling, delicate, and absurd.
Simon Katan >> ‘Conditional Love’ – participatory networked device performance
Katan is a digital artist with a background in music and a strong preoccupation with games and play. His work incorporates hidden mechanisms, emergent behaviour, paradox, self-reference, inconsistency, abstract humour, absurdity and wonder. He is a researcher and lecturer at Goldsmiths’ Embodied Audio Visual Interactions group.
Heather Ross >> Domestic Dawn Chorus
Ross is concerned with how human experience is mediated, by exploring the tensions between reality and representation. How do the technologies of reproduction and representation affect the way we understand the world through our senses? Dealing with themes of alienation, melancholy, remoteness, disembodiment and longing, her work conjoins realities and fictions, to convey ambiguous environments, spaces and forms.
Claire Undy & Bill Leslie >> Video work
Claire Undy is an artist and curator, working largely with performance, video and time-based media. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2016, and co-founded the curatorial project Skelf. Bill Leslie is a visual artist whose work draws on Modern abstract sculpture, 1950s B-movies, as well as Russian Constructivism and modern architecture. Concerned with the relationship of sculpture and the photographic image, his works develop through transformations of scale, context and media.
Sunday 11 December
Lee Patterson >> Amplified devices and processes
Working across various forms, including improvised music, field recording, film soundtrack and installation, Patterson attempts to understand his surroundings through different ways of listening. Characterised by revealing subliminal and barely audible sound materials within commonplace things, his unorthodox approach to generating sound has led to collaborations with a host of international artists and musicians.
Áine O’Dwyer >> DJ set with field recordings
With a background combining Irish traditional music and contemporary performance, Áine O’Dwyer creates multi-layered, experiential work that begs questions of historicism and the social proximities of the everyday, as well as the presumed nature of records themselves. For this DJ set, she will play her collection of field recordings, drawing on her knowledge of the acoustics of the Brunel Tunnel from her two year residency there.
Howlround >> Live tape manipulation on 3 reel-to-reel machines, tape loops stretching across the space…
Howlround create recordings and performances entirely from manipulating natural acoustic sounds on vintage reel-to-reel tape machines, with additional reverb or electronic effects strictly forbidden – a process that has seen their work compared to William Basinski, Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread.
Wajid Yaseen & Anthony Elliot >> Oscillators, Extended vocal performance, drawn circuits
Anthony & Wajid’s ‘Crossing Lines’ recently opened the Tempting Failure festival. An improvised vocal and sound-drawing performance, it involved Wajid Yaseen’s experiments in extended vocal techniques with Anthony Elliott’s sculpture-sound-printing rheostat to explore a balance between all-gate square wave generators that allow on-off vocal input. A contrast in frequency and sound texture generated by the two performers and two systems was suspended between the systematic and the unplanned.
Ulla Nolden, graduate of Goldsmiths’ MA/MFA Computational Arts, has been announced as one of four winners of the 2016 FutureFest Art Prize, run by the UK innovation foundation Nesta.
Following an open call for entries, twelve shortlisted artists were selected from over 270 entries responding to four themes of FutureFest – Love, Play, Work and Thrive. Works were showcased at FutureFest in London on 17-18 September 2016. Four winners were selected and announced at the event, following a live audience vote.
Winning the ‘Play’ category, Ulla Nolden’s Pure Movement 3, environment 1.2 maps the behaviour of swarms through intricate algorithms, inspired by an interest in the balance between simplicity and complexity in insect swarms.
The four winners each receive a £500 cash prize. In addition, their work will be launched and promoted on Sedition to an international audience of art collectors and digital enthusiasts. The judging panel included artist Claudia Hart, FIELD creative studio, Ghislaine Boddington (body>data>space) and Dr Morgaine Gaye (Bellweather: Food Trends).
We’re giving away five free tickets to New Scientist Live, which runs 22-25 September 2016.
New Scientist Live is a festival of ideas and discovery, taking place at ExCeL London. Rooted in the biggest, best and most provocative science, New Scientist Live will touch on all areas of human life. The show will feature four immersive zones covering Brain & Body, Technology, Earth and Cosmos. Advance tickets cost £25.
Goldsmiths Computing are running one of the show’s centrepiece exhibits, a psychedelic virtual reality experience called Organic Art VR.
How to enter the competition
Subscribe to Goldsmiths Computing’s blog using the ‘GET POSTS BY EMAIL’ widget on the left of this blogpost. This will sign you up to receive new blogposts by email.
If you can’t see the widget, have a look on the blog homepage. If you’re viewing this on a phone or tablet, scroll down to the bottom.
Closing date: 11pm Tuesday 20 September 2016. We’ll pick five new subscribers at random, and email them on Wednesday 21 September with details of how to claim their free ticket.
‘L-Pattern’ by MFA Computational Arts graduate Angie Fang
What is generative art, and how is it different from traditional art? Ahead of a teacher training day this October, Theo Papatheodorou, course leader of Goldsmiths’ MA/MFA in Computational Arts, explains.
There are many ways of drawing. The traditional way involves taking a pen or pencil and trying to represent an object or a scene. You are in control of the process, so outcome is somewhat predictable.
The generative way of drawing involves relinquishing some of that control. Instead of making images, you make a set of rules (often nowadays executed by a computer program) which generate artworks autonomously.
But generative art is not purely determistic. Randomness adds unpredictability to the final result; at various points the program reaches a fork in the road, and the path taken is chosen by sheer chance. So despite being produced by cold processes, generative art often appears organic, and contains a level of complexity that would be impossible for an artist to produce on their own. The artist is like a gardener; she sows the seeds and tends the shoots – and then waits for something extraordinary to develop.
“Generative artists are chaos artists. They have bred the unpredictable, welcomed it, harnessed it and can fashion it into pleasing forms.” Matt Pearson
Recent graduate Angie Fang was inspired by time-lapse photography to create digitally-generated flower blooms. Random audio input determines the size and location of each petal, creating a unique blossom every time. It’s this mix of the real and the virtual, the organic and mechanical that makes Angie Fang’s work so interesting.
Another student, Lior Ben Gai created a system which ‘grew’ artificial bacterial colonies. He based his work on cellular automata, in which complexity emerges from a simple set of rules. At our recent degree show, visitors manipulate the growth of Lior’s digital colonies by shining a lamp onto a photosensitive petri dish.
Generative processes don’t only result in digital images. The choreographer Merce Cunningham famously threw dice during his performances to decide what the next steps should be. John Cage used the I Ching to decide the sounds, durations and tempo of Music of Changes (1951). Beijing National Stadium, too, was designed generatively. Generative art provides endless possibilities for creativity.
We’re running a special training day on Wednesday 26 October 2016, where we invite art teachers to learn some basic generative drawing techniques, understand how generative art fits within the wider context of art history, and develop ideas for delivering this content in the classroom. Book your place
Dr Theo Papatheodorou is the course leader of Goldsmiths’ Bsc Digital Arts Computing and MA/MFA Computational Arts. He is the founder of visualcortex.cc, a creative technology studio developing installations and interactive projections for live performances. Email him at t.papatheodorou@gold.ac.uk
VICE magazine recently asked three university lecturers: ‘What’s it like to lecture at university while you’re in your twenties?’
One of them was Dr Sarah Wiseman, 29, a research and teaching fellow in the computing department at Goldsmiths University of London. She leads lab sessions, talking to around 50 students at a time, and also has some experience lecturing. Here’s what she said…
“I actually hope the students still think of me as a young person – maybe I’m just getting old and desperately want that to be the case,” she laughs. “I was a bit nervous at first, but I’ve learned a lot after a few years of teaching. I’ve learned it’s absolutely OK to admit you don’t know the answer to something. You’d look like an idiot otherwise. And I’ve learned to freestyle a bit, rather than stick to a script.”
Sarah has taken part in Science Showoff gigs designed to help young academics become more confident public speakers by getting them to do stand-up comedy about their research. “It was kind of terrifying, and definitely put the teaching into perspective,” she says.
When it comes to socialising, Sarah thinks it’s important to maintain a very clear boundary between undergraduate students and academics. “You want to be approachable… but it’s about being viewed as a professional, rather than a friend,” she explains. “There is a culture of end-of-the-day drinks among colleagues in my department, but not with the students. In fact, we do need to be a bit careful about what pubs to go to in the New Cross area to make sure there aren’t awkward encounters.”
More than 50 years after composer Terry Riley created the ever-changing ‘In C’ for an indefinite number of performers, an MFA Computational Arts student from Goldsmiths has designed an artificially intelligent orchestra which will allow musicians to play the piece solo.
Composed in 1964, Riley’s experimental and influential masterpiece consists of 53 short melodic fragments lasting from half a beat to 32 beats, with each phrase repeated an arbitrary number of times.
It has been performed with 11 musicians or up to 124, with each performer having control over which phrase they play and when. The piece also has no set running time – it could last 15 minutes or for hours.
With ‘In C++’ Gregory White has created a series of independent virtual performers who make their own decisions about which notes to play, when to progress to the next bar, whether to play hard or soft, and so on, through a form of artificial intelligence.
Each performer is aware of the others, correcting themselves if they start to lag behind or rush ahead in order to ensure what they play compliments the rest of the ensemble.
The program Gregory has written produces MIDI (digital) notes which are then sent to hardware instruments (physical digital instruments), software instruments, or any other MIDI controlled device – potentially including lights. He’s so far trialled it with chimes, a more droney version with heavy reverb, and a percussion-only virtual orchestra.
The artist explains: “I decided to choose the piece ‘In C’ for my MFA Computational Arts project for a number of reasons, but primarily because when performing Riley’s work, I realised that my thought process was rather algorithmic.
“I had 53 cells of information, each I would repeatedly execute until I decided that I had passed a certain threshold – at which point I would progress to the next cell. When all cells had been played, I would repeat the last until I decided to stop performing, or ‘terminate the program’.
“I thought it would be interesting to take the ensemble element out of the piece, and see how it could change, or what new ideas could be explored, when the decisions about which pitches to play were taken care of.
“What is the human performer’s role? They could perform with an instrument alongside the machine; they could act as a conductor, influencing volume, pattern changes, the texture of the piece, the timbre of each performer, effects processing, and so on. And how is one person’s interpretation of the piece different to an ensemble’s?”
“Plus, I just really, really, wanted to do this project so I could make the C++ pun.”
About the artist
Gregory White’s fine art practice includes photography, filmmaking, sound design, creative coding, and human-computer interaction, as he believes that each informs the other.
He attended the University of East Anglia, and received a Bachelor’s degree in Music Technology with a specialisation in Sonic Arts. Currently Greg (@gregwht) is working as a freelance video editor, photographer, and general sound guy, while studying MA Computational Arts part-time at Goldsmiths.
Gregory White’s ‘In C++’ will be on display at METASIS, the Goldsmiths, University of London MA and MFA Computational Arts show from 8-11 September.
This article, written by Sarah Cox, was first published in Goldsmiths News
