Abstract

HKU students are usually mainly focused on discovering their own artistry and makership. As an Expertise Center for Creative Entrepreneurship, we encourage students in their graduation year to look ahead to their future career. What value can they deliver in domains within and outside the arts? What do their broader value packages look like and how can they extend their propositions by working together? Specifically, I look at how technological developments impact the creation and development of value packages. For example, how fashion collective Studio PMS has (re)developed itself as a digital fashion agency, and how AI-tools, like DALL-E and Midjourney, can have an impact on the roles of artists and designers.

Bio

Tom van de Wetering works as a program manager of HKU X: the entrepreneurship and talent program of HKU (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht). He is also a lecturer within the faculty of HKU Arts & Economics and teaches about creative business models, strategy design and funding. After receiving his master’s degree in New Media & Digital Culture at Utrecht University in 2011, he worked for 6 years as a business developer and board member of medialab SETUP and co-founded Open Concept: a design cooperation for social innovation.

The HKU Expertise Centre for Creative Entrepreneurship helps students, alumni and lecturers to develop as entrepreneurs, by stimulating their capacity for creative change, their strategic insight and their active enterprising attitude.

Abstract

The craze for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) that erupted in early 2021 thrust the art world into the debate on the blockchain, the decentralized public ledger that holds these tokens, as well as cryptocurrencies, and promises to make “verifiable digital scarcity” a reality. Born out of the 2008 financial crisis and seen by many as the cornerstone of a new, more private, more secure Web3, the blockchain has changed the global economy and is now reshaping the digital environment in which art is increasingly being created, distributed, and exchanged. Is speculation the be-all and end-all of this trend? Will the blockchain’s promise of disintermediation destroy the art world as we know it? Are NFTs an opportunity for artists or a scam perpetrated against them?

Bio

Domenico Quaranta is an art critic, curator and educator interested in the ways art reflects the current technological shift. His texts have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, books and catalogues. He is the author of Beyond New Media Art (2013) and Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain and NFTs (2022) and the editor of several books, including GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (2006, with M. Bittanti). Since 2005 he has curated several exhibitions, including Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Brescia 2011; Basel and New York 2012); Cyphoria (Quadriennale 2016, Rome) and Hyperemployment (MGLC, Ljubljana 2019–2020). He lectures in Interactive Systems and he is a co-founder of the Link Art Center (2011–2019).

Abstract

What is the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright infringement procedures? How has Creative Commons changed copyright opportunities? How can the potential of digital communication be exploited without violating the law? The talk will present 'copyright strikes' in order to discuss the main issues related to copyright laws and rules; the main procedures and tools to protect content on the one hand, and the right to communicate and disseminate information on the web on the other, will be considered. Today, a User Interface must allow for a correct user experience not only for human beings but also for artificial entities, consequently an inclusive design approach must be diffused among artists in order to deal with and take advantage of the technological evolution, avoiding being manipulated by it.

Bio

Enrico Bisenzi is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome where he teaches design and visualization techniques. He was interested in digital communication even before the spread of the Internet in Italy, working on several editorial and research projects at the National Research Center (Istituto di Documentazione Giuridica, now called ITTIG). In the 2000s, Bisenzi became interested in digital communication on the Web supporting various public institutions and private companies. He has been involved in digital accessibility and usability for decades, contributing to the restyling of Municipalities, Museums, Hospitals, Olympic Committees and several private companies that were grappling with the issue of Inclusive Design, dealing with: optimizing websites for search engines and social networks, taking into account the different linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the various target audiences; providing an appropriate level of readability of texts and content; verifying hosted content, protecting it from possible copyright attacks; checking the responsive effect on different devices, setting them up for long-term preservation.

Abstract

We will discover with Adriano Bonforti (Founder) and Gianluca Cannavale (Head of Patamu Legal) how Patamu generates a proof of authorship for any creative work, allowing to protect one's creativity and publish or share works safely. The protection is instantaneous and is carried out by means of a legally recognized timestamp. The author keeps all the rights on the deposited works, has no further obligations towards Patamu, and can use, share, or publish works as he/she prefers. The evidence of authorship generated with Patamu is valid in all the 172 countries that signed the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. The validity of our timestamps is legally recognized and guaranteed by the European Union, as the certification authority that produces our timestamps is certified to be compliant with the EU 910/2014 eIDAS regulation on Digital Trust services. Patamu Registry can be used by anyone interested in proving and protecting the authorship of an artwork or an idea. The Patamu project has won institutional prizes for social innovation and is powered by Innovaetica company. During the presentation we will talk about Creative Commons licenses and traditional copyright. We will also discuss how it is possible to find a balance between the protection of authorship and the dissemination of one’s artistic works. Finally, we will briefly discuss how sharing of creative ideas can spark innovation and generate artistic biodiversity. All attendees will receive a free Patamu Academy account for one year.

Abstract

The Summer School participants will get an insight into collective intelligence and debate the safety of online sharing within the scope and case study of Group-Think. This project is a sports and protest program developed for schools, where students together test and develop collective intelligence exercise. In 2023, Jacobsen will start doing wikithons to teach her participants how they can upload and share their collective intelligence exercises with the world. These exercises or parts of the exercises will not be shared if it makes young protestors ‘vulnerable’ to violent measures of crowd control. Jacobsen has formerly been asked by the German police to develop crowd control methods for them, but kindly declined, because her art is for the public. Her lobby is the safety of protestors, rights of assembly and to keep a positive view on our civic right to nonviolently assemble in protest. As a political educator, Jacobsen finds it of upmost importance to involve schools and educators worldwide in this quest.

Bio

Stine Marie Jacobsen is a conceptual artist, her artistic practice is diverse and made like a ‘hyvemind’ - with a lot of collective brain activity. There is never only one single object in Jacobsen’s work - her work is like a node, a hypertext made up by many co-created objects. As with many self-developed systems or algorithms, the artist programs a core concept - and the nodes, the various art objects are in themselves atomizations of knowledge units, which together and continuously in her ongoing projects form the whole work. Knowledge is never finite, and in the same way, Stine prefers to see her work, as an ongoing and infinite archival understanding and mapping of human psychology and relations. Jacobsen’s artistic research thematically focuses on violence, laws and language. Over the past 10 years, she has gained extensive experience in conflict zones and post-colonial contexts in countries such as Colombia, Lebanon, Greenland and Eastern Ukraine through workshop, film, and podcast productions. Stine Marie Jacobsen lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with an MFA in 2009 and a BFA from CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, USA in 2007. In 2015, she was awarded an innovative educational grant from Node curatorial studies in Berlin; in 2016 she was awarded a peace Fellowship by the Rotary Foundation and in the same year won the Berlin Art Prize.

Abstract

Video games represent the largest cultural consumption space in the XXI century. An interactive art form practiced by nearly three billion people around the world who, on a digital canvas, espied literature, architecture, drawing, music, film, painting and photography. If video games can be considered the tenth art form, at the same time they can be a tool to support cultural institutions in reaching and engaging new audiences. From the Father and Son video game published by the National Archaeological Museum of Naples to PlayAlghero playful strategy to the PLAY exhibition at the Reggia di Venaria, the presentation aims to discuss the centrality of an engagement design approach.

Bio

After years spent working for entertainment companies such as Electronic Arts Mobile and Vivendi Games on iconic titles like Fifa, The Sims, Crash Bandicoot, Harry Potter, Fabio Viola has dedicated his career to the use of playful practices in public and private spaces Considered one of the most influential gamification designers in the world, he was awarded the “Design Lessons” award during the Milan Fuorisalone in 2018. Author of books such as Gamification - Videogames in Everyday Life (2011) and The Art of Engagement (Hoepli 2017), he is currently an adjunct professor for several Italian universities and academies. In 2016 he founded the international collective of artists TuoMuseo specializing in the intersection of gaming and cultural heritage. Over the years he has signed productions such as Father and Son for the National Archaeological Museum of Naples with 5 million downloads, A Life in Music, the first video game in the world produced by the Teatro Regio di Parma, Past for Future for the Marta of Taranto and The Medici Game for the Uffizi Galleries. Game Designer for several EU funded projects, he is currently curator for the Royal Palace of Venaria of PLAY – Videogame Art and Beyond.

Abstract

As digital mediation, and immersive technologies in particular, blur boundaries between physical and digital embodied presence. In this session, Galit Ariel will discuss emerging frictions and opportunities of redefining embodied presence, identity, and interaction. Asking core questions related to:

/ New body agencies and self-expressions

/ New modes of selfhood, from extended selves to digital beings, metamorphic bodies to disembodied selves

/ New embodied interactions and intimacies

/ New body biases, hierarchies and taboos.

Bio

Galit is a TechnoFuturist and a thought leader within the field of immersive tech. She defines herself as a ‘Techtivist’ since she is passionate about a future in which technology is integrated into everyday life, but not control it. Her goal is to bridge the gap between pixels, atoms, and neurones to create tools and platforms that help people experience these worlds in new (and better) ways. Galit authored numerous thought pieces, articles and papers, her book Augmenting Alice – The Future of Identity, Experience and Reality explores the way Augmented Reality’s diffusion will shift cultural and functional paradigms and redefine core concepts related to culture, space, experience and ethics. Galit currently lives in Toronto and is working on art/tech speculative projects, as well as her next book. Through her innovation lab “Future Memory Inc.”, helping organizations, policymakers and commercial clients shape their tech futures by exploring immersive narratives, interaction tools and experiences.

Abstract

Abstract During the workshop, participants will be engaged in the art project The Critters Room, a multimedia art project by the collective Jan Voxel (of which Pietribiasi is a member) dedicated to particulate matter, other invisible inhabitants of the air, their inextricable and unexpected relationships with humans and their possibility to continue living on this planet and to imagine art in the Anthropocene. The workshop aims to share with the participants the theoretical and practical knowledge gained during a yearlong artistic process. Since the first day of the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic (March 8th, 2020), Cinzia Pietribiasi put outdoor a microscope slide to capture the air we breathe. She did it daily in a process which lasted 440 days in different cities of the Pianura Padana, one of the most polluted areas in the Europe. The goals of the artistic process were to collect samples of air, to find out all those inhabitants of the air, to take pictures with a microscope, to create a considerable archive of microscope slides, photos, and environmental data. Participants will be provided with a Critters Kit, that will be used by participants to learn how to capture samples of the air. After the workshop attendees may bring the kit with them to continue the experience in their territories, enlarging the existing archives on the website. Focusing on the most relevant emergencies of our present, the American philosopher, PhD in biology and ecofeminist scholar Donna Haraway defines “critters” referring to all microbes, plants, animals, humans and non-humans with whom we should make a bond: in her words, we should learn to “make kin”. In her book Staying with the trouble, she believes “making kin” with the more-than-human world is an urgent ethical responsibility. Speaking about the Anthropocene, Haraway writes: “Critters - human and not - become with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding”. Like lichens we should learn how to live or die well on our collapsing planet: “We are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the earth. Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations between and among rocks and critters for living and dying well”. Finally, creating large European critters archive and incepting and developing a European critters community responds to this suggestion: making kin as a new non-anthropocentric paradigm.

Bio

Cinzia Pietribiasi is a transdisciplinary artist. She develops her artistic research in digital art and performing art, focusing especially on the memories collection, spoken accounts and public history, dealing with the creation of archives and inception of communities as art practices. Within her artistic process, she reconsiders the role of the artist and the artistic field in relation to the new challenges in the Anthropocene. Currently she is participating in various research initiatives, as a Junior Scientist in the Eu4ART_differences European project at the Fine Arts Academy of Rome, as a freelance professor of Computer Art at the Academy of Fine Art “Alma Artis” in Pisa, as freelance consultant in social impact projects regarding citizen science and empowerment of digitalization. Until 2019 she worked as a theatre director with people with mental diseases and as a freelance theatre teacher with children and teenagers in public schools. Among her independent artistic productions there are artworks of generative graphics, My body Atlas and The Critter Rooms (winner of the “Bando Residenze Digitali 2021”), as a member of Jan Voxel collective (with a physicist and software engineer Lorenzo Belardinelli and a dancer and set designer Lidia Zanelli). She has been director and performer in the Pietribiasi / Tedeschi Company, which she founded with Pierluigi Tedeschi (writer and performer). The company's productions range from video-installations to multimedia theater.

Abstract

Immersive technologies coupled with superior virtual environments, artificial intelligence algorithms, faster processors, and biometrics are launching a new era in virtual experiences, entertainment, and storytelling. At the same time these technologies have the potential for reinforcing stereotypes, contributing to massive economic and social disruptions, and implementing new systems of invasive monitoring and control. What do these new developments in VR/AR mean for education, entertainment, social policy, and systems of codified knowledge? Like their predecessors the telephone, television, and mobile phone, what are the impending new vistas and reduced horizons? Biometrics and the uploading and tracking of personal data spans areas from healthcare to advertising, with implications for law, criminal justice, entertainment (gaming), education and sports. Machine learning and algorithms are harvesting and making use of big data in new and startling ways. Some of it allows pinpoint accuracy in determining issues of public health, economics, climate change, storytelling, political leanings, and the migration of populations. What does all this data, in combination with new technologies, mean? Combined with the acceleration of VR/ AR and technologies of immersion, how will societies react? What are some current and future artistic strategies that deal with this? The lecture will analyze these questions from the author’s artistic and curatorial experience introducing the VR installation Atmospheric Forest and RIXC festival exhibition case Virtualities and Realities curated by Raitis Smits and Rasa Smite.

Bio

Raitis Smits, PhD, is artist and founding director of RIXC Center for New Media Culture in Riga and curator of the annual RIXC Art Science festival. He teaches as Associate Professor at Art Academy of Latvia, Visiting Lecturer at MIT ACT. In 2017 Raitis was a Fulbright Researcher in the Graduate Center of NYC. In his artistic practice, Raitis Smits works together with Rasa Smite. Their work has been shown in Post MoMA, Futurium museum, Venice Architecture Biennale, Ars Electronica Center, ZKM, HeK, Van Abbe Museum, KUMU museum and other venues. Raitis Smits has received PRIX Ars Electronica, Award of Excellence from the Latvian Ministry of Culture, the winner of Falling Walls award, twice nominated for Purvitis Prize in visual arts in Latvia and nominated for the World Technology Award.

Abstract

By exploiting the empirical approach of neuroscience and physiology, it is possible to investigate the brain-body mechanisms enabling interactions with man-made images, shedding light on the functional mechanisms enabling the perceptual experience. In doing so, some of the concepts we normally use when referring to aesthetics and art can be deconstructed. The talk will present some results of the author’s research showing that creative expressive processes, in spite of their progressive abstraction and externalization from the body, keep their bodily ties intact. Creative expression is tied to the body not only because the body is the instrument of creative expression, but also because it is the main medium allowing its experience.

Bio

Vittorio Gallese is Full Professor of Psychobiology at the Department of Medicine and Surgery - Neuroscience Unit - of the University of Parma. As a neuroscientist, his main contributions include the discovery, together with colleagues from Parma, of mirror neurons, and the elaboration of a neuroscientific model of perception and intersubjectivity, the Embodied Simulation Theory. His scientific production is attested by more than 300 international publications, the publication of two books as author and three books as editor. Vittorio Gallese received many recognitions and awards. He won the Grawemeyer Prize for Psychology for the year 2007, the Arnold Pfeffer Prize for Neuropsychoanalysis in New York in 2010, the Musatti Prize from the Italian Psychoanalytic Society in 2014, and the Humboldt Forschung Preis from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Germany, in 2019. He also received the Laurea Honoris Causa from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 2010.

Abstract

How cognitive science can be a 'consumer' of artistic data, in contrast to cognitive explanations of artistic phenomena, illustrated with a corpus of visual experimentations in Renaissance art.

Bio

Philosopher, member of Academia Europaea, Research Director at CNRS, Director of Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, and Professor at EHESS, Casati works on issues related to the perception/representation of space and of objects in space. He has published more than one hundred and fifty articles in scientific journals or collections, several books, and has taught and done research at SUNY Buffalo, Turin, IUAV, Dartmouth College, and Columbia University. With Achille Varzi he published two classic contributions at MIT Press (Holes and Parts and Places); also at MIT Press, along with neurophysiologist Patrick Cavanagh, he published The Visual World of Shadows. His present research concerns navigational tools (maps, GPS) to remedy disorientation (The Cognitive Life of Maps, MIT Press, forthcoming), and conceptual negotiation regarding environmental problems, particularly in the marine environment. Part of this research takes place during ocean crossings on sailboats (Transat ARC 2019), and is documented in Oceano (Einaudi 2022; PUF 2022), and in the anthology The Sailing Mind (Springer 2022). He is also author for non-specialist audience, some of his books have been translated into ten languages, such as Contro il colonialismo digitale that generated a wide debate on the use of digital technologies in school. Casati also received appreciation for narrative work, his book La Lezione del freddo won the ITAS prize and the Procida-Elsa Morante prize.

Abstract

The online archive exhibition F+F 1971, launched on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the F+F School of Art and Design in Zurich, explores and presents the F+F as a relevant European hub for experimental art and design. Since its foundation in 1971, the F+F has become known for its radical democratization and experimental ideas on design research. In the workshop, such historical approaches will be reactivated and related to current topics. Beginning with an introduction to the history of F+F, the participants continue with practice-based exercises, using archival documents and drawing inspiration from the online exhibition. The workshop promotes role play, self-awareness, and team building. The workshop is led by Riccarda Naef (art mediator, artist), and Michael Hiltbrunner (cultural anthropologist, art archive researcher).

Bios

Dr. phil. Michael Hiltbrunner is a cultural anthropologist and art scholar at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research at Zurich University of the Arts. His recent research focuses on personal archives of research-based art and the F+F School in Zurich as a lab for experimental design. He also works as an independent curator and lectures on art theory and cultural analysis.

Performance artist, art mediator and musician, Riccarda Naef studied at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts as well as at ZHdK, Zurich University of the Arts. In her performances, she explores social norms, challenging stereotypical role models, especially those of the female body as an idealized image of beauty. Since joining Saint City Orchestra as a touring violinist in 2019, the instrument has often accompanied performances. Riccarda Naef also works as a freelance curator and has been organizing 1- to 24-hour performance workshops with Johanna Müller since 2017. Through experimental bodywork and the exploration of one's own limits, Naef aims to create shared spaces in which collective experiences are made possible.

Abstract

Human abstractions live in our mind. Human Values such as Love, Power, Peace, Knowledge, are human abstractions. If making art is giving shape to ideas, we can do it in a different way. We can shape human values directly from our mind. Controlling the form just by thinking! Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI) makes neuro-design possible. This morphogenesis of values goes beyond the traditional culture-based representations (allegory for Liberty, the red pictogram of the heart for Love…). Each human value can be considered as a dynamic living form. Its ecosystem is the human mind. Like Nature assessing the evolution of living forms, through EEG (Electro Encephalography) it can assess forms and their relevance in representing abstractions and values. The resulting liquid shape submitted to dynamic forces is like Thought in motion. The generated forms become NFT on the Blockchain, opening the path for new market forces that drive the trade of Human Values. From Sublimation to Reification, artworks penetrate strata of human activities that were out of the artist’s reach. Ethics, Finance, Politics, Philosophy become, thanks to transactional practices, the new playground for artist at the world level. The process of neuro design can be considered as HUGAN, were the now common AI GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) opposing a computer-based Generator to a carefully taught computer-based Discriminator may shift the status to the artist. In the Brain Factory and VoV this is the human brain that plays the role of the Discriminator. In the curatorial process involved in AI generated Art, the artist steps back from the position of designing concepts, it uses new tools that, in the like of paint-tubes, become concept-tubes or rhetoric-tubes. Curating variations to orient evolution of constantly evolving shapes may have become the new present of the artist’s practice.

Bio

Maurice Benayoun (a.k.a. MoBen or 莫奔) is a French contemporary artist based in Paris and Hong Kong, is a new media pioneer, curator and theorist. His work uses a variety of media, including video, computer graphics, immersive virtual reality, internet, performance, EEG, 3D printing, and media art installations. Often conceptual, Maurice Benayoun's work is a critical investigation into the mutations of contemporary society induced by emerging or newly adopted technologies. It has been said of him that he "invented the 3D CGI series when Sesame Street was still fashionable", that he "tunneled under the Atlantic in VR while discovering the world wide web", and that he started the first collection of contemporary art in Virtual Reality when many "expected coloured canvases and white marble". Moreover, Benayoun uses technology and his creativity to activate public spaces, such as the city of Shanghai with QR codes. His actions have transformed the Triumphal Arch into a Peace Monument, and the façade of Hong Kong's tallest tower into a public art space; he has used weather data to forecast the world's emotions, and compared citizens' emotions with financial actions on the façade of a merchants' building. Currently, his work focuses on converting human thoughts into objects, and human values into negotiable tokens.

Abstract

Technological development and scientific research are diffracted visions of the same contemporary cultural and artistic horizon. Particularly for their interest towards human beings, around a non-hierarchical dialogue with what surrounds us and the consequent formalization in both corporeal and identity terms. If the idea of Artificial Intelligence is today perceived in a nuanced way between super-intelligent machines and expanded human minds, bodyhacking and biotechnologies promise to alter our bodies and to expand formal, sensory, and intellectual boundaries in a context of reality regulated by increasingly intelligent machines, intertwined with widespread networks, metaverses, blockchains and VR worlds. Considered by digital cultures themselves as elements that are still too far and separate, even the contexts of contemporary art look at these areas for their mere aesthetic (and economical) potential. Without adequate thinking on the ethical and social implications that emerge from their overlapping and the importance of a compelling reflection on new ways of dialogue and balance between our expanded bodies and “entangled” elements around us. An ontologically constituted context of different "species", phenomena, organic and inorganic "objects", other "living beings", humans and otherwise. A very original and fresh investigation of this kind has been carried out in the last fifteen years by a courageous bunch of international artists and designers. In their hallucinated and interdisciplinary dialogue with AI algorithms, networks and in the wet embrace with biology, they have been speculating and developing new narratives, aesthetics and designing our (physical and digital) bodies of tomorrow in the constant changing relationship between human and non-human technoscientific elements. What their research suggests is to definitively overcome the limits of anthropocentric culture, widen the boundaries of different posthuman currents in the interdisciplinary dialogue among art, design, philosophy, and critical theory, formalize an ethical reconfiguration of conformity to its contamination with diversity. Fluid like the expanded bodies which talks about, queer in its very nature in constant transformation, opposed to binarism nature-culture, technology-science, real-virtual, sex-gender, art-design, this lecture tells dreams and nightmares, utopias and dystopias, constraints, and freedom of new human beings in this reconfiguring contemporary era.

Bio

Marco Mancuso (PhD, Digital Cultures) is a critic, curator, and professor. For about twenty years he has been dealing with the impact of technologies and science on contemporary art, design and culture, investigating the boundaries with philosophical thought in search of new ways of dialogue between human beings and the non-human context. He founded the digital art platform Digicult in 2005 and teaches at the Alma Mater University of Bologna, the Carrara Academy of Fine Arts in Bergamo and Naba Milan. He has curated exhibitions and events at national and international level while his essays, reviews and interviews have appeared also in numerous magazines, books and catalogues. He has collaborated over the years with some of the most important media labs and festivals including Transmediale, Sonar + D, Sonic Acts, Baltan Laboratories, STRP, V2, Elektra, Todaysart, Impakt. He is one of the founders of the SSH - Sound Studies Hub of the Iuav University of Venice, partner of the European EMAP / EMARE program and advisory board member for the Future Innovation project of the Museum of Science and Technology of Milan. He has published the books Art, Technology and Science (2018) and Interview with New Media Art (2020) for Mimesis Edizioni.

Abstract

Alongside analogue-manual form-making (done by hand based on observation), digital modelling and generative form creation are increasingly common. The results of computer-aided form support and generation are now inevitably embedded in our object culture and are becoming a dominant part of art education. In education, the analogue means of creating a form based on observing what is seen comes before the digital. This conditions students at an elementary level to transpose what they see in three-dimensions onto the two-dimensional plane (drawing) and to create spatial forms manually (sculpture). In the future, the uniqueness and novel economy of new technologies of construction (see, for instance, additive processes and 3D printing) will place additional focus on digital form-making.

Bios

Ádám Albert is an artist, educator, and researcher. He is an Associate Professor and head of the Department of Artistic Anatomy, Drawing and Geometry at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts as well as director of the Art and Art Theory College for Advanced Studies. Currently, he is heading the Hungarian work packages of the European project EU4ART_differences. Between 2017 and 2020 he was the leader of the research project: Artistic research and cooperation — Inter and cross disciplinary projects, research infrastructure development and capacity enlargement at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In the framework of its subproject entitled The Role of the Interaction of Verbal and Visual Modalities in Fine Arts Education, the Visual Art & English dictionary was published, in which he worked as the editor. As a further outcome of the project, Albert and his colleague Imre Lepsényi founded the Digital Fabrication Laboratory which operates within The Hungarian University of Fine Arts in the Department of Artistic Anatomy, Drawing and Geometry. Albert works in a variety of media, often using forgotten craftsman techniques, typically working with materials from private and institutional archives. His works are featured in the permanent collection displays at the Hungarian National Gallery and Ludwig Museum - Contemporary Art Museum Budapest.

Kitti Klaudia Harmati lives and works in Budapest. She is a fresh graduate from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where she studied Graphic Arts. At the university she has been a coordinator and team member of the Art and Art Theory Advanced College since 2017, and a laboratory assistant in the Digital Form Creation Lab since 2019. She has also gained experience at Hochschule für Bildenke Künste Dresden and the Fine Arts Academy of Rome during EU4ART short term mobilities, and in 2021 she was awarded a National Excellence Program research scholarship, working on the topic of data visualization of headcount data from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. Kitti took part in group exhibitions both in the Kunsthalle der HfBK (Dresden, Germany) and the Vasarely Museum (Budapest, Hungary). She has also been represented in an anthology titled Now I know, daylight, published by Pilot Press (London) in 2021. In 2022 Kitti curated The Man Who Stepped in Paint, a group show at MKE PROFIL (Budapest).

Attila Mézes is a stone sculptor-conservator artist from Želiezovce. In his early years he became interested in music and he studied piano. Between 2009 and 2013 together with her twin sister they won the Piano in Modern Rythm four-hands piano competition four times. In 2016 with musical band Double Twins, he won third place in Mihály Tompa National Contest in the category of Sang poems. He studied sculpture in the Secondary School and College of Arts and Crafts in Budapest. He studied conservation in the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where he worked on numerous 3D projects in the Digital Form Creation Lab. His thesis details restorative additions made with the help of 3D, including digital scanning, digital modelling, and additive manufacturing. In 2021 he made a public sculpture called Flora in memoriam to the village Kovácspatak.

Abstract

INOUT will interview Universon, an emerging multimedia artist experimenting with different technologies, including Artificial Intelligence. Universon will describe "[S]", a virtual world where experiencing an alternative life is possible. A focus of this dialogue will be on the mimesis of reality and human experiences given by algorithms and calculating their limits.

Bio

INOUT is a collective formed by Walter Maiorino, Alessia Mutti, Francesca Paganelli and Eleonora Scarponi. The group focuses on digital and generative art through the use of AI. The dialogue with Universon is the first result of the ongoing project Artificial Research / Artistic Intelligence, investigating with machine-learning technologies the semanticization of artificial experiences.

Abstract

The workshop will investigate the concept of Relational Modularity. After a large and necessary preparatory work, that aims to the acquisition of concepts related to the idea of modules, interactive modules, relationships between modules, aesthetic and functional parallel evolution of relationships, a physical lab will start with alumni. It will continue, trying to materialize the acquired concepts, thanks to the use of painting as an applicative method. The work, therefore, will be implemented with a collective painting exercise based on innovative methodologies developed over years of intense research activity in Art Psychology methods, while always winking to new high technologies, in terms of creating analogical ideas that may be applied in technological fields, this as ideas or as new techniques that might explain on how dynamics and objects are ruled and rules. The experience is halfway between an artistic conception based on expressive automatism and a scientific-psychological one based on the need to investigate the relational dynamics in single individuals, groups and in the innermost dynamics present in universal systems. The artistic intervention, conceptually, draws from various sources of inspiration ranging from the famous experiment of the Cadavre exquis (1925), passing through the Stochastic Painting (1980) to land on the more recent Pagliarini's Code (2013), and Parallel Relational Universes (2014). However, it stands out from all these here, by proposing an interpretative crossroads and a modular-relational logic based on the most typical dynamisms of groups. This is due to the fact that, from a psychological point of view, it always winks abundantly at the Baum test (or Tree Test Tool 1952), the Tree Test (1949) and other projective tests used to investigate the personality of preschools’ children. The workshop will be finalized by installing the art piece achieved, where the installation process is not only part of the educational path but, very likely, the most intensive of all.

Bio

Luigi Paglierini is an artist, expert in Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Robotics, with a neuropsychological background. Currently, he is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata (Italy), and Consultant Professor at DTU Center for Playware (Denmark). He is also Member of Art Psychology Experience Association, as well as consultant for the Entertainment Robotics. Luigi has published in different international books, journals, congresses, and conferences proceedings and has been rewarded with international prizes. He has distinguished himself as Coinventor of RoboCup Junior pedagogical competition that is today played and used as a pedagogical tool, basically all over the world. He has been the Founder and Director of the Pescara Electronic Art Meeting and has exhibited his work in different Museums (for example, the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the ICC in Tokyo) and in different Institutions (such as the MIT Medialab in Boston or the Science Museum in Naples). Luigi Pagliarini has also worked for many different Universities as Professor (such as the Mechatronics Department of the Maersk Institute in Odense, or the Playware Lab of the DTU in Copenhagen, the Departments of Psychology in Rome, St. Andrews, Naples and Milan or the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, and etc.). As consultant, he worked with many enterprises and multinational factories (such as LEGO, SONY, Real World Records) and his work has often been reported in the international press. His artistic production is quite vast although quite unknown, since he philosophically does not like public shows, art heroes, and similar. On the other hand, Pagliarini believes and pushes toward a much more direct approach to art pieces and artists to public relationships – either physical or virtual – always trying to build a tight relational set of interactions and perceptions, so as to elicit powerful and embodied changes in both actors. Strong of his large experience on AI, Robotics, and Art, currently Luigi Pagliarini is deeply focused and concentrated on bringing back all his research to Psychology, Biodynamics and Spirituality, to apply it on universal understanding.