Author: Pia Tikka

State of Darkness II – drafting the co-presence experience in narrative VR

VR Experience – draft April 2021, Pia
An updated version of feelings and experience of co-presence with a stranger as inner early state of darkness, but with upgraded functions and meta human char and perhaps participant may move in the space (t.b.d.)
The story
You (as a participant) put the head set on.
You hear warlike sound from somewhere above around suggesting you are below the ground, maybe a cellar.
You find yourself at the doorway of a cellar room. It is dark. Maybe some light streaming through the window crack to the street level…
You may be able to move around (or then the installation is experienced seated).
You are inside the room. Not sure if you are alone.
Then you realise there is some movement around you.
A flashlight is turned on.
You see a person sharing the room with you.
That person is a stranger for you (three different versions of meta human).
From this onwards, you need to hide in this cellar with a stranger.
External sound scape of the warlike situation outside.
The soundscape of the cellar.
The behaviors of the stranger (and the plausible hidden motivations) and events in the cellar will be written in more detail by Eeva, who will join the enactive team starting May 1.
Tasks:
  • Eeva: responsible of create the situation (story), behavioural motivations for the “stranger” and choreograph the movements and default facial behavior. This includes working with Ats with motion capture.
  • Tanja:performative environment elements.
  • Ats: UE environment,  the characters, visuals, sound scape, etc. all UE related functions, including motion capture.
  • Abdallah: tracking of user behavior and interpreting that into UE environment, finding the suitable way to measure facial expressions, eyetrakcing, etc. inside headsets (you proposed one option) – we should check that in more detail.

XR BioSense — Invited speaker Marie-Laure Cazin, Round table

‘Envisioning an XR Biosense future’

#UseCases #Ethics #Design #neurotech #biosensing

Exploring the frontiers between academic and industrial world and discuss how to push the (right) boundaries with curated lectures and roundtables

Image: Round table – Christina Lavallee, Brain Products – Marie-Laure Cazin, Enactive Virtuality Lab – Kavya Pearlman, XRSI

https://xrbiosense.org/

https://xrbiosense.org/program/feb21_part1/

ICON conference submission

Dear Pia Tikka,

Thank you for submitting a symposium abstract for the ICON Conference.
Your symposium abstract has been automatically transferred to ICON 2022 Conference, to be held 18.-22.5.2022.
Note that ICON is not able to provide a full hybrid experience and the focus will be on on-site conference.

If you do not wish to withdraw your abstract, or make any changes to it, you do not have to do anything to your abstract.
You can see your submitted symposium abstract HERE (changes not possible on-line).

Do you wish to update your abstract?
You may update the abstract text, if needed.
Please note you may only change the abstract text itself only, but you cannot change, add or remove authors.
If you wish to make changes to your symposium abstract, please reply to this e-mail and send us the renewed abstract text.
Deadline for updates is March 7, 2022.

All updated abstracts will undergo a short review and acceptance will be confirmed by March 15, 2022 (subject to changes).

Do you wish to withdraw your abstract?
If you wish to withdraw your symposium abstract, please reply to this e-mail soonest convenient, latest on March 15, 2022, and inform you wish to withdraw your abstract. Please mention the abstract title and abstract number (if available) in the message.

Kind regards,
ICON 2022 Participant services
icon2022@confedent.fi

Robotitieater by Liina Keevalik with Enactive Virtuality Lab contribution on A.I. Checkov

Image: The artificial A.I. Checkov  created by Enactive Virtuality Lab, Ats Kurvet.
The trailer we used before the performances is here: https://youtu.be/Uyu7aN3AFr0
The trailer that uses material of the actual performances is here: https://youtu.be/rxjJ0Otoj04
For media some more photographs of the rehearsals or of the performance https://robotiteater.ee/gallery/
The full credits are as follows (also on our web page: https://robotiteater.ee/repertoire/

Panelist: “Beyond Matter” at Tallinn Art Hall Nov 19

 

Invited panelist: “Beyond Matter” at Tallinn Art Hall Nov 19

A panel session organised in the connection of an installation within the framework of the international project Beyond Matter – “Summoning Ghosts – Past Exhibitions as Digital Experiences.” The installation is created at ZKM by Commonplace Studio and will be on display in the main building of the Tallinn Art Hall, between November 10 – January 15th.

The discussion will be recorded and made available on the Beyond Matter website.

Unio Mystica by Helen Kaplinsky at Tallinn Art Hall Oct 26

26.10 at Niguliste Museum, Tallinn

Unio Mystica: Medieval women’s visions and the virtual imagination

Still from ‘Tragodia’ VR play (2019) by Tai Shani. 30 minutes, with original soundtrack by Maxwell Sterling. Commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Jindřich Chalupecký society, and Graz Kunstverein.

The storytelling event ‘Unio Mystica’ concludes the two-month residency research of contemporary art curator Helen Kaplinsky at Tallinn Art Hall for international project Beyond Matter, exploring the virtual technological and mystical visions of women.

17.00 – Intro by curator Helen Kaplinsky at St Catherine’s Friary
17.10 – Anu Mänd is an Art Historian focusing on gender, death, and animal symbolism in the late medieval Baltic region. She will begin by taking us on a tour of the oldest known Estonian woman’s gravestone. At Niguliste museum we will discuss the experiences of poor women and their children – how could the underprivileged prepare their souls for death?
17.45 – Artist Dominika Trapp will read from a hand-written scroll providing an over-view of ten years of her art practice against a backdrop of autobiographical ruminations – coming of age as a young woman in the Hungarian countryside, discomforts with contemporary feminism and her commitment to somatic intelligence, influenced of mystic and philosopher Simone Weil.
18.00 – Artist and conservationist Olesja Katšanovskaja-Münd will present her reconstruction of a rare and deteriorated 15th century painting – ‘The vision of St. Emerentia’. This will be followed by a somatic exercise, guiding a connection between the trinity of visual stimuli, inner feelings and bodily expression.
18.30 – VR screening of ‘Tragodía’ (2019) by artist Tai Shani. Tragodía is a VR play written about three generations of women in the artist’s family and their nonhuman kin. The viewer embodies the avatar of the Ghost Child with each family members’ colossal head orbiting just out of reach. The work could be understood as a mystical vision of undefinable states of being that emerge during grief.

The residency is part of the large-scale cooperation project BEYOND MATTER – Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. It is dedicated to novel, digital approaches to exhibition revival, documentation, and dissemination, as well as the artistic, curatorial and museological development of the opportunities presented by virtual representation.

More information behind this link

The 8th ECREA conference – talk “Addressing loneliness by means of enacted co-presence in XR”, 6-9 September 2021

New dates for the 8th ECREA conference: 6-9 September 2021

Dear ECC 2020 conference applicants, dear ECREA members,

We would like to inform you that in consultation with the Local Organising Committee, the ECREA Executive Board has approved new dates for the 8th European Communication Conference: 6-9 September 2021. The conference was scheduled for 2-5 October 2020 but we had to make the uneasy decision to postpone. The different timelines and strategies of gradual withdrawal of pandemic prevention measures adopted by individual European countries have made it impossible to organise the event according to our standards of academic quality and hospitality.

The conference calendar will be revised and new important dates will be announced in the conference website.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Braga from the 6 to 9 September 2021.

The submission: ECC20-1152 title Addressing loneliness by means of enacted co-presence in XR  has been accepted to the 8th European Communication Conference to be held in Braga, Portugal, October 2-5, 2020.

Braga, Portugal ECC Abstract submitted tikka et al.

https://www.ecrea2020braga.eu

TITLE: Addressing loneliness by means of enacted co-presence in XR 

Authors:

Pia Tikka1, Gholamreza Anbarjafari Shahab2, Doron Friedman3, Sergio Escalera4, Mauri Kaipainen5.
1University of Tallinn / BFM / MEDIT, Enactive Virtuality Lab, Tallinn, Estonia.
2University of Tartu, Intelligent Computer Vision iCV Lab, Tartu, Estonia.
3The Interdsiciplinary Center Herzliya, Sammy Ofer School of Communications / Advanced Reality Lab, Herzliya, Israel.
4University of Barcelona, Dept. Mathematics and Informatics / Computer Vision Center, Barcelona, Spain.
5Perspicamus Ltd, Company, Helsinki, Finland.

The very nature of the human species is social. Loneliness correlates with mental and physical ill-being within, for instance, the elderly, or people with disabilities, or other conditions causing reduced life-environment. Simultaneously, an increasing trend in the European lifestyle is to outsource taking care of such members of family into the hands of professional social and medical care. Yet, in the light of recent studies, loneliness can be considered a fatal condition. Loneliness reduces the ability to improve one’s life-conditions, motivation of taking care of one’s health, and affects negatively the functions of society. As an indication of the urgency of the matter, UK has even appointed a Minister of Loneliness. The issue dictates the need to figure out all plausible ways to fight loneliness. While human company must be the primary solution, other solutions must be considered to provide socio-emotional comfort to those who suffer of the lack of human accompaniment.We propose storytelling and narratives as the key component of satisfactory social interaction. Stories told provide supportive structures for maintaining one’s identity and connectivity as part of the world. This talk takes a look at the intriguing question, whether advanced audiovisual technologies which allow immersive interactive experiences within virtual narratives, in some form, might contribute to relieve this sore issue. To emphasize, immersive technologies, here, VR/AR/XR, cannot as such provide fully satisfactory solutions for complex human issue of loneliness. However, as a range of solutions for socially assistive robot technologies have already been proposed by others, it may be appropriate to balance the so far technology-dominated discussion with the deeply human approach of storytelling. The talk outlines efforts to combine the art of interactive audiovisual storytelling with already existing advanced technologies to explore the interconnections between loneliness and technology. It discusses empowering solutions to loneliness, while being mindful of technological determinism.

ECREA’s Executive Board and the Local Organizing Committee of the 2020 ECC in Braga are closely monitoring the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic as we are concerned about the health and well-being of our members and conference attendees. The conference dates (2-5 October, 2020) remain unchanged at the present time but we wish to announce changes to the deadline for the acceptance of invitations and the registration period to take account of this period of uncertainty and give you more time to make decisions about attendance. We would greatly appreciate it if you could log in through the link below and confirm or decline the presentation of your paper at the conference. The new deadline for your decision is June 15, 2020. Registration will open on June 15, 2020 and the early bird registration will be correspondingly extended. To reiterate, our intention at present is to go ahead with the physical conference in October but we will review this on an ongoing basis as well as engaging in contingency planning. We are not contemplating a virtual conference as an alternative to the physical conference.

Please take care of yourself, your family and your loved ones. Further updates will follow in due course.

ABSTRACT REVIEW RESULTS:

Link: https://www.czech-in.org/cmPortalV15/Portal/ECC20/normal

 

A talk at SCSMI conference June 9-12, 2021

Title: Dialogue between neuro- and pheno-dynamics of film viewing experience

https://scsmi-online.org/conference

Tikka, Pia and Rosic, Jelena

One of the main questions put forward by neuro-phenomenology (Varela 1996) is how to bring into a frui\ul dialogue the two to allegedly incommensurable domains of science, namely the one unraveling neural functions of being-human in the world (neuro-dynamics), and that describing the experience of being-human in the world (pheno-dynamics). As it seems in the light of current literature, the main challenge lies in the identification of the mutual constraints (ibid.), this is, the domain-specific conditions on both fields that would allow for reciprocally fruitul dialogue. By discussing phenomenologically informed reflections and corresponding findings of a neurocinematic study we aim to apply such an interdisciplinary dialogue in the domain of film studies. We argue that neurocinematic methods can be optimised with specifications provided by phenomenological inquiry.

References
1. Greene, B. (1999). The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
2. Kauttonen, J., Hlushchuk, Y., Jääskeläinen, I. P., & Tikka, P. (2018). Brain mechanisms underlying cue-based memorizing during free viewing of movie Memento. NeuroImage, 172, 313–325.
3. Memento (2000). Directed by Christopher Nolan. US: Summit Entertainment & Team Todd.
4. Petitmengin C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5(3-4), 229–269.
5. Varela, Francisco J. (1996). Neurophenomenology. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4), 330–349.

 

Accepted to be presented. Cancelled by PT.