media art | studio any

Cybersyn 1973/2023

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 12:55:44 +0300

Project Cybersyn was an experiment in instituting a socialist networked economy embraced by the short-lived Salvador Allende government of Chile (1970 – 1973) and developed together with the British cybernetician Stafford Beer. For the past decade, Project Cybersyn has been a recurrent reference – a best practice from the past – in discussions around the repurposing of hegemonic technological infrastructures and their redirection towards more equitable economic and social practices. The iconic image of Project Cybersyn’s control room – with its sci-fi appearance – represents a technical and aesthetic object that alludes to negotiation, democratic decision making, and stability. The allure of this image is the starting point for the video which proposes that desires for post-scarcity and postcapitalist economics must grapple with the shifts in the political, economic, and technological conditions of possibility that have transpired since Project Cybersyn. To this end the control room image itself becomes a platform for alien mutations, philosophical speculations, and social commitments. What would it take to reimagine the artefactual Cybersyn for our hyper-financialized day and age? For this work, curator and researcher Bassam El Baroni and transdisciplinary architect Constantinos Miltiadis collaborated with multidisciplinary artist and animator Georgios Cherouvim, and composer and sound artist Gerriet K. Sharma to bring this question to life.

Project trailer.

Premiered on July 7 2021 at Edit Russ Haus, Oldenbourg, part of the exhibition “Infrahauntologies” curated by Bassam El Baroni.

Infrahauntologies on e-flux

Credits

Concept, Research, Screenplay: Bassam El Baroni and Constantinos Miltiadis
Animation Director: Georgios Cherouvim;
Music and Sound Spatialisation: Gerriet K. Sharma.
Modelling: Katerina Lakovaki;
Illustration: Ino Zavvou and Andreas Kelemen.
Render Support: Dimitris Liatsos.
Special thanks: Agelos Christopoulos, Omer Shapira, Liz Ran Yang.
Voice actors: Bassam El Baroni, Andreas Kelemen, Constantinos Miltiadis, and Edel O’Reilly.

The screenplay is composed of original writing, inspirations, and reconfigured fragments from essays and historical research by a host of philosophers, theorists, and historians: David Chandler, Bob Hughes, Anna Longo, Suhail Malik, Eden Medina, Andrew Pickering, Matthew Poole, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

Exhibitions

Peer reviewed participation in the screening section of ISEA 2022: Possibles – The 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art. Barcelona June 10-16 2022.
“Infrahauntologies” (Part 1), galerie La Box; Ecole nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges, October 21 – November 20 2021.
“Infrahauntologies” Edith Russ Haus, Oldenburg, July 8 – October 3 2021.

Decoded Language

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 18:18:58 +0300

Decoded language is a multi-user interactive sound installation for Supercollider and Kinect V2. The installation uses real-time body (skeleton) tracking as interface for controlling a virtual granular synthesis instrument. This way, the installation produces an entanglement of the spatial domain of bodily movement with the temporal domain of sound. Therefore, the installation invites the audience to create spatiotemporal choreographies and experiece how spatial movement correlates to temporal manipulations of the originally linear dimension of listening.
The interaction interface was designed to be intrinsic and relative to one’s body rather than absolute. Therefore absolute positions are irrelevant, only body configurations, relative displacements and rotations matter. Finally, all interaction data are recorded and are visualized geometrically at the end of each session, offering a visual-spatial representation of the temporal manipulations of the listening timeline (see images below).
The installation uses audio sampled from Saul Williams’ spoken word performance of coded language at Def Poetry Jam (2004).

Project information

decoded language was developed between late-2018 and early-2019 at the Institute of Electronic Music (IEM), University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, with the support of Prof. Marko Ciciliani and Prof. Daniel Mayer.

The installation consists of an algorithmic synthesizer developed in Supercollider, and a 3D tracking and visualization software written in Processing, synchronized with each other via OSC.

The work was first presented at the IEM CUBE Concert on January 24, 2019.
A previous version of the installation, developed with Pure Data and Kinect V1, was presented in December 2017 at the Institute of Architecture and Media, TU Graz.

3D visualizations of audience performances

reset.discover

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 12:55:55 +0300

The piece reset.discover is an artistic research collaboration of composer Antonia Manhartsberger and computational designer Constantinos Miltiadis, pursued to explore possibilities of uniting spatial-visual and spatial-sonic elements into one consistent spatiotemporal whole.

The piece consists two counterparts: an electronic music composition for spatial audio, and a interactive virtual environment for VR. The composition features abstract sonic environments and moving sound objects organized in three categories: ambient-environmental, sound-object-events, and gestures. These are correlated to physical-visual objects in the spatial simulation of the 3D virtual environment, sequenced to follow the behavior of their sonic doubles. Participants enter the piece using a VR headset which allows to experience the piece interactively by exploring different perspectives into its spatial-visual (interactive stereoscopic VR) and spatial-aural (interactive binaural audio) dimensions.

The piece is discussed further in the thesis of Antonia Manhartsberger titled “Das soziopolitische Potential von Raummusik im Angesicht zeitgenössischer Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten”, presented at IEM in June 2018.

Exhibitions

First presented at the CUBE Concert, Institute of Electronic Music (IEM), University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. January 31 2018.
Exhibited at the Orpheum Extra, part of the Arts Programme, at Elevate 2019 festival. March 2 2019.

Credits

Antonia Manhartsberger: Concept and spatial audio composition
Constantinos Miltiadis: Concept and virtual environment programming

Sonic Rug Hackathon - Vienna Design Week 2017

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 18:00:00 +0000

Invited single-day hackathon project with Antonia Manhatsberger, for the production of an interactive audiovisual installation for the Sonic Rug, developed by Selina Reiterer and Oliver Maklott.

“Sonic Rug is the result of an artistic approach to smart textiles. The project is exploring the possibilities of connecting soft material to the digital space, manifesting the results within an interactive installation, that creates sounds by touch. […] In this Hackathon data from the touch-sensitive installation will be open to be translated into different media.”¹

Credits

Antonia Manhartsberger: sound programming
Constantinos Miltiadis: visuals programming
Hosted by Oliver Maklott, Matthias Gassner, Selina Reiterer
Photo documentation: Daniela Jakob (Vienna Design Week)

Images

https://sonicrug.com/no01-hackathon-vienna-design-week/ ↩︎

Open Lecture Series (2015-2019)

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 19:00:04 +0300

The IAM Open Lecture Series was founded in late 2015 at the Institute of Architecture and Media (IAM), TU Graz. The project slowly formalised as a mapping of the research ecology concerning computation and related discourse in the wider field of architecture and media. The series hosts talks by younger academic researchers and practitioners aiming to present and promote experimental, interdisciplinary and ongoing research. All sessions are hosted at the New Media Lab of IAM, Kronesgasse 5/III, Graz.

Open lectures archive

For the documentation of sessions 1-30 see the IAM Open Lectures Archive on this website. For the complete catalog of the series see IAM Open lectures at iam.tugraz.at.

Video documentation of the IAM Open Lectures is archived at: TU Graz Tube and on Vimeo.

Credits

The IAM Open Lecture series was founded in late 2015 by Constantinos Miltiadis who curated and produced the first 30 sessions of the series until mid 2019–except lectures #1 and #15 organized by Urs Hirschberg, and #10 organized by Florian Fend.
Since late 2019, the Open Lectures Series is carried out by current members of IAM.

Filming & Production

Department of Educational Technology, TU Graz

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Ypatios Grigoriades (TU Graz Educational Technology Unit) for supporting the lecture series throughout the years; to Antonia Manhatsberger and Alexis Kalaitzopoulos who filmed and edited most of the lecture sessions; and to IAM student assistants Nora Hoti, Julian Jauk, Ludwig Grimm, and Martin Schrotz for their help in producing lecture sessions.

Shifting perspectives

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 11:03:03 +0300

Shifting perspectives is an interactive kinetic installation prototype for projection mapping developed in 2014 between Zurich and Delft with Demetris Shammas, Achilleas Xydis, and Mariana Popescu (as PUNCH Collective).

The installation is a kinetic 6×4 grid structure used as a canvas for interactive projection mapping. The structure consists of 24 square panels assembled with rotary joints, so that when pulled appart the panels rotate individually and the whole structure expands. The movement of the structure is controlled by stepper motors that pull the structure from 2 external points. The three custom software developed for the installation were: a Processing-Java program for real-time sound analysis (FFT); an Arduino-based software for controlling the stepper motors; and a Unity program for projection mapping, all synchronized with each other via OSC. Using real-time sound analysis the installation projected audio-responsive graphics mapped on the continuous movements of the grid structure.

Shifting perspectives was developed in Zurich, fabricated and assembled in Delft for the event 7 Sins, in November 2014.