Panel presentation at the NECS Conference Palermo, June. 2021

NECS Conference Palermo June 2021

Due to the persistent uncertainty caused by the world-wide pandemic, the NECS Steering Committee, in consultation with the NECS 2021 Local Organizing Team, has decided to hold the 2021 Palermo conference entirely online from June 7th to 13th.

PANEL TITLE – NECS, Palermo

Sergei Eisenstein: New Discoveries and Transitions

The panel re-assesses Eisenstein’s legacy in the twenty-first century and the continuing relevance of his theory and practice to contemporary screen studies. The panel comprises four papers, by Ian Christie, Ana Hedberg Olenina, Pia Tikka and Julia Vassilieva that discuss, drawing on recently discovered archival evidence, little-known aspects of Eisenstein’s early work – from his interest in eccentric aesthetics of FEKS group led by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg to his collaboration with Russian psychologists Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky in the areas ranging from hypnosis to psychotechnics. The panel demonstrates not only that contemporary preoccupations with media archaeology, immersive cinema, and neuroscience can open up new interpretations of Eisenstein’s work, but also that nature of Eisenstein’s prescient experimental thought can itself contribute to advancing these fields of contemporary research. It offers imaginative contributions to the study of one of the giants of cinema as it engages with new theoretical perspectives and methodological advances in both film studies and the humanities at large.

  1. Ian Christie: Eisenstein and the early Petrograd avant-garde
  2. Ana Hedberg Olenina: The Spectator’s Sensate Body: Eisenstein’s Plans for Empirical Tests of Film Impact
  3. Julia Vassilieva: Eisenstein and Hypnosis
  4. Pia Tikka: Virtual reality re-enactment of Luria-Eisenstein’s experiment on expressive movement


Abstracts

 

  1. Ian Christie

Eisenstein and the early Petrograd avant-garde

In 1922, Sergei Eisenstein returned to Petrograd, where he had spent the formative years of his youth, and came into contact with the FEKS group led by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. His collaboration with the FEKS member Sergei Yutkevich on a satirical pantomime Columbine’s Garter foreshadowed further experiments with ‘the montage of attractions’ back in Moscow, which have received proportionally greater attention. This paper considers the formative influences of Petrograd’s early 1920s avant-garde on Eisenstein, and particularly the relationship between FEKS’ turn towards film with The Adventures of Oktyabrina in 1924 and Eisenstein’s Glumov’s Diary in 1923, and their common debt to the pre-revolutionary popular cult of movie serials and Fantômas.

References:

Naum Kleiman, Eisenstein on Paper: Graphic Works by the Master of Film (Thames & Hudson, 2017).

BIO: Ian Christie is Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, London University, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written and edited books on Powell and Pressburger, Russian cinema, and Scorsese and Gilliam, and has contributed to exhibitions ranging from Film as Film (Hayward, 1979) and Eisenstein: Life and Art(Hayward, 1988) to Modernism: Designing a New World (V&A, 2006) and Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 (Royal Academy, 2017). He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in 2006, and President of Europa Cinemas 2011-13. His books include Arrows of Desire: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (1985/93), Eisenstein Rediscovered (1993),The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (1994), A Matter of Life and Death (2000). The Art of Film: John Box and Production Design (2009), Audiences (2012), Doctor Zhivago (2015), Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (2019), and a forthcoming collection, co-edited with Julia Vassilieva, The Eisenstein Universe.

 


  1. Ana Hedberg Olenina

The Spectator’s Sensate Body: Eisenstein’s Plans for Empirical Tests of Film Impact

It is a little-known fact of Eisenstein’s biography, but in late 1928 he and his students at the State School of Cinematography were preparing to launch a study of spectator responses in collaboration with the Moscow Polytechnic Museum’s Laboratory for the Study of Masses and Mass Psychotechnics. Eisenstein planned to inquire into the nature of film stimuli (the sensory properties of film sequences, as well as their sociological resonance) in addition to evaluating bodily reactions of audience members. Based on surviving archival materials, this paper examines the proposed methodology and theoretical underpinning of this project. In contextualizing Eisenstein’s use of reflexological terms and his references to reflexology, William James, and Jean D’Udine, I discuss discourses on “collective reflexology,” “emotional contagion,” “dynamogenic” properties of certain visual stimuli, as well as imitative and rhythmical impulses of the body. My overall goal is to trace the roots of Eisenstein’s conceptual framework in turn-of-the-century psychology and psychophysiology, as well as to evaluate the status of the proposed experiments in the filmmaker’s theory of spectatorship as an embodied and enactive experience.

References:

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902).

Jean d’Udine, L’Art et le Geste (in French; Paris: F. Alcan, 1910).

BIO: Ana Hedberg Olenina is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Media Studies at Arizona State University. Her main research focus is the Soviet avant-garde, while her broader interests lie at the juncture of early film history and media theory, with an emphasis on historical configurations of sensory experience, emotional response, embodiment, and immersive environments. Her book “Psychomotor Aesthetics: Movement and Affect in Modern Literature and Film” (Oxford University Press, 2020) explores conceptions of expressive movement and empathy, which emerged within the dialog between psychology and the arts in the first quarter of the 20th century. Her essays on cinematic gestures, Soviet avant-garde performance, modern dance, and Russian Formalism have appeared in Film History, Discourse, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, Apparatus, Frontiers in Psychology: Performance Science, and several anthologies in Russia and the USA.

 


  1. Julia Vassilieva

Eisenstein and Hypnosis

It has often recently realised that Eisenstein learned the skills of montage while re-cutting Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) for its Russian release under the guidance of Esfir Shub in 1924, prior to making his first feature (The Strike) later that same year. His entry into cinema was marked thus by his encounter with hypnosis, as Dr Mabuse reinforced both the representation of hypnosis on screen as one of the key motives in early cinema and the understanding of hypnosis as a metaphor for the cinematic dispositive – a prominent trope in early film theory. In the coming years Eisenstein would be exposed to hypnosis as an experimental and therapeutic method in psychology, through his joint work with Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria and Yuri Kannabich, whose use of hypnosis was informed by the influential research of Vladimir Bekhterev.  Eisenstein’s notes in his diary in the late 1920s demonstrate that he was getting increasingly interested in the possibility of recreating some aspects of hypnotic effects in cinema, as far as they reinforce the physical and sensorial impact of film on the body of the spectator. By the time Eisenstein would come to work on Method, he subsumed hypnosis within his overarching paradigm of sensuous thought. Yet, at the same time the phenomenon of hypnosis was in the background of two crises that Eisenstein experienced in relation to cinema: the early one, when he came to see art as providing a fictive substitute for life, and the later one, when he became horrified of the possibility of regress inherent in art form. Hypnosis therefore represents one of those focal points where tensions in Eisenstein’s theorising are revealed particularly strongly: such as the tension between modern and archaic, human and animal, spectatorial freedom and directorial control. My paper explores the productive and generative character of these tensions by placing Eisenstein’s views on hypnosis into a dialogue with contemporary work by Raymond Bellour, Ruggero Eugeni and Andreas Killen.

References:

Raymond Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals.” Cinema Journal 53, no. 3 (2014): 1-24.

Ruggero Eugeni, “Imaginary screens: the hypnotic gesture and early film” in Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, Francesco Casetti (eds.), Screen Genealogies. From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2019, pp. 269-291).

Andreas Killen, Homo Cinematicus: Science, Motion Pictures, and the Making of Modern Germany (University of Pennsylvania Press 2017).

BIO: Julia Vassilieva is senior research fellow and lecturer at Monash University. Her research interests include the intersection of cinema, psychology and neuroscience; narrative theory; early Russian cinema and film theory; and, specifically, theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein. She is currently completing a monograph Cinema and the Brain: the Eisenstein-Vygotsky-Luria Collaboration. Her two co-edited volumes – The Eisenstein’s Universe (with Ian Christie, Bloomsbury) and Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, Technology (with Deane Williams, Amsterdam UP) are forthcoming. She is an author of Narrative Psychology, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 and co-editor of After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image, Routledge, 2013. Her publications also appeared in Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, Film Criticism, Projections, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Screening the Past, Critical Arts, Kinovedcheskie Zapiski, Rouge, Lola, Senses of Cinema, History of Psychology and a number of edited collections.

 


 

Pia Tikka

Virtual reality re-enactment of Luria-Eisenstein’s experiment on expressive movement.

This talk discusses the re-enactment in a virtual reality (VR) setup of the psychological experiment that Alexander Luria and Sergei Eisenstein conducted almost a century ago, in 1928. In this experiment, as discussed by Julia Vassilieva in the previous paper, hypnosis was applied to subjects in order to study the connection between sensorimotor behavior (expressive movement) and mental states.

The talk has several goals:

(1) To highlight the ‘parachronic’ nature of theoretical discoveries: As proposed in my Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense (2008), theoretical ideas have the tendency to re-emerge in cycles, adapted to the current context. From this perspective, I argue that the embodied mind approach has its roots in the theoretical ideas of historical practitioners in arts and sciences, such as Luria and Eisenstein.

(2) To address significant paradigmatic overlaps: The re-enacted experiment allows identification of common grounds between the psychological ideas in the Luria-Eisenstein’s experiment and the neuro-phenomenological approach introduced by Francisco Varela. Furthermore, it allows to articulate connection between Raymond Bellour’s understanding of the hypnotic nature of cinematic experience and the experience of immersion in virtual reality settings.

(3) To reconfigure the practical set-up of the Luria-Eisenstein experiment by means of VR with a focus on comparing the methodologies of producing immersive experience in the beginning of 20th century and today.

In sum, following the original protocol reported by Luria and Eisenstein, the re-enacted experiment extrapolates the theoretical ideas of Eisenstein-Luria collaboration onto the 21st century art-science context.

References:

Pia Tikka, Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense, (Aalto UP, 2008).

Francisco Varela, (with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, (MIT Press, 1991/2017).

BIO: Pia Tikka is a professional filmmaker and EU Mobilitas Research Professor at the MEDIT Centre of Excellence, Tallinn University. She holds the honorary title of Adjunct Professor of New Narrative Media at the University of Lapland, and is a former Director of Crucible Studio, Department of Media, Aalto University (2014-2017). As a core member of neurocinematics research project aivoAALTO at the Aalto University (2010-2014), she founded her NeuroCine research group to study the neural basis of storytelling. She has published on the topics of enactive media, narrative complex systems, neurocinematics, and written the book “Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense (2008). Her filmography includes international film productions as well as two feature films and interactive films she has directed. A Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and a member of European Film Academy, she currently leads her Enactive Virtuality Lab at Tallinn University.

 

Enactive Virtuality Lab presents April 16

Welcome. Please join us!

Enactive Virtuality Lab presents the on-going work in online seminar.

Date: Friday April 16, 2021 
Time: 09:15 -13:00 Helsinki

Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 947 9465 7125
Passcode: 019362

VIDEO recording (t.b.a.)

Program

To be confirmed

9:15

Pia Tikka (Enactive Virtuality Team leader, MOBTT90)
Introduction

9:20 KEYNOTE

Ighoyota Ben Ajenaghughrure (t.b.c.) 30 min + Q&A  (Vistiting lecturer of Software Engineering @ DT)

Symbiosis in information society  

10:00

Debora Conceição Firmino De Souza (MA Thesis @DTI)
Exploring the affective states of an interviewee during a Q&A session


10:15

Abdallah Sham (doctoral student @DTI)
Facial Expression Recognition in a Human-human dyadic setting


10:30

Ats Kurvet (computer graphics specialist)
Playing  with MetaHuman for “real” in narrative VR environment


10:45-11:00 coffee break (15 min)


11:00

Robert McNamara (doctor in law (US); doctoral student @BFM)
Cinematic Narratives in Gaming Engines to Explore Compassion towards Refugees

11:15

Sampsa Huttunen (doctoral student @Helsinki University)(t.b.a)
Psychophysiological Reactions to Human Face under Different Lighting Conditions: A Pilot Study


11:30

Mehmet Burak Yılmaz (doctoral student @BFM)
Affective functions of camera movements in cinematographic storytelling


11:45 -12:30 
Discussion

 

Open for public!

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/94794657125?pwd=VHhmL0g2UWFTeHFhWkU3enNjZ3NGUT09

Meeting ID: 947 9465 7125
Passcode: 019362
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Biofiction -panel: Neurotechnology and how it will shape our future bodies April 8, 2021

BIO·FICTION

Neurotechnology and how it will shape our future bodies

The BIO·FICTION Science Art Film Festival is one of a kind: It’s a creative and boundary-crossing event with a program filled to the brim with content exploring cutting-edge emerging sciences – in the present, but also in possible futures. https://bio-fiction.com/

BIO·FICTION Panel

8 Apr 2021 19:00 — 21:00

 

BIO·FICTION Panelist (in image)
with Riitta Hari, Pia Tikka, Markus Schmidt and Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka (moderator)
Thursday, April 8, 19–21h (Finnish time, UTC+2)
via Zoom | in English

Neurotechnology and how it will shape our future bodies is the underlying question of the BIO·FICTION Science Art Film Festival. For the kickoff of the Helsinki edition, where we will show a selection of nine films, all of which have been awarded or screened at the festival, we invite you to join the BIO·FICTION online panel. During it, Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka will discuss together with festival director Markus Schmidt, neuroscientist Riitta Hari and artist Pia Tikka neurotechnology and its current and potential impact on society.

Join the panel via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83861833745

– –

Riitta Hari MD PhD is Professor Emerita of Systems Neuroscience and Human Brain Imaging at Aalto University, Finland. She has been developing magnetoencephalography (MEG) for tracking millisecond-scale activation sequences in the human brain, providing fundamental insights into human sensory, motor, cognitive, and social functions in both healthy and diseased individuals. Hari is Academician of Science in Finland since 2010 and member of the National Academy of Sciences USA since 2004. She currently attempts to bridge art and neuroscience without privileging either.

Kasperi Mäki-Reinikka is a Helsinki-based media artist, art educator and researcher working with technological notions of sense. As part of interdisciplinary Brains on Art collective his practice is informed by collaboration with scientists and researchers and the friction between art and science. Mäki-Reinikka is a board member of the Bioart Society, a foil fencer and a teacher of Art and Artificial Intelligence in Aalto University. Mäki-Reinikka is writing an artistic dissertation on interdisciplinary art and its possibilities to discuss changes in human-machine relation. Since August 2020, Mäki-Reinikka has been teaching art in Kallio Upper Secondary School of Performing Arts.

Dr Markus Schmidt founded Biofaction, a technology assessment, science communication and art-science company in Vienna, Austria. With a background in electronic engineering, biology and risk assessment, he carried out environmental risk assessment and public perception studies in various fields, such as GM-crops, nanotechnology, converging technologies, and synthetic biology. He has published over 35 peer-reviewed papers and three edited books about the future of life. In 2010, he helped to chart the field of xenobiology. Schmidt was part of the FUTUREBODY project.

Dr Pia Tikka is a filmmaker and EU Mobilitas Research Professor at the Baltic Film, Media, and Arts School, Tallinn University. She is a founder of NeuroCine research group that studies the neural basis of storytelling. She has published widely on the topics of enactive media, narrative complex systems, and neurocinematics. A Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and a member of European Film Academy, her filmography includes international productions as well as fiction films, interactive films and VR films she has directed. Currently, she leads Enactive Virtuality Lab at Tallinn University.

– –

BIO·FICTION is part of the ERA-NET project FUTUREBODY and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: I 3752-B27). The BIO·FICTION programme at Bioart Society is funded via the Biofriction European collaboration project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European.

Pardinho Sense of Space at EEVR meeting – March 20

 

Estonian Virtual Reality Society EEVR meeting March 20

Enactive Virtuality Lab is happy to have our artistic collaborator and associated start-up CEO Victor Pardinho (Sense of Space) to present at the meeting of Estonian Virtual Reality Society, March 20, 2021

 

Note, the AltSpaceVR space set up about a week before March 20 event.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/858885618011273/

The schedule  (t.b.c)

12:10 Vladimir Kuts – Taltech (Estonia)
“Short intro of XR Research in Estonian Universities”

12:20 Dr. Linda Lancere – Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences (Latvia)
“Augmented Reality and Wearables for Real-Time Physical Therapy guidance”

12:45 Dr. Niall Murray – Athlone Institute of Technology (Ireland)
“Understanding User Perceptual Quality of VR Experiences”

13:10 Victor Pardinho – Sense of Space / Enactive Virtuality Lab (Finland/Netherlands)
“Sense XR Studio: Making a Content Creation Tool for Volumetric Video Experiences”

13:35 Santeri Saarinen – Helsinki XR Center (Finland)
“Helsinki XR Center and Our Research Activities”

 

 

 

Eesti Virtuaal- ja Liitreaalsuse Assotsiatsioon

Estonian Virtual and Augmented Reality Association

Round table at Moscow Neurotechnology and Freedom -conference

Pia Tikka, Panelist at Moscow Neurotechnology and Freedom -conference march 18. 2021,  19-20:30 (GMT+3)

Image: Panelists

Program

Neuroscience & Art

Will be held on March 18, 2021 16:00-22:00 (Moscow Standard Time: GMT+3)

International оnline сonference «Neurotechnology and Freedom».

Organized by the Centre for Cognition & Decision Making, HSE University

Scientists, philosophers, and artists will discuss ethical, social, and legal issues related to the development of neurotechnologies.

Preliminary оnline program сonference:

16:00 — 16:15 Vasily Klucharev, Director of Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, HSE University, PhD in Biology

16:15 — 16:45 Video presentation (opinions of experts on neuroscience and freedom)

16:45 — 17:00 Break

17:00 — 19:00 Talks:

17:00 — 17:25 Prof. Danil Raseev, Saint Petersburg University, Russia, expert of the Russian Science Foundation

17:25 — 17:50 Dr. Suzanne Dikker, NYU Max Planck Center for Language, Music, and Emotion, USA

17:50 — 18:15 Prof. Dr. Gabriel Curio, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany

18:15 — 18:40 Prof. Risto Ilmoniemi, Aalto University, Finland

18:40 — 19:00 Dr. Ksenia Fedorova Leiden University, the Netherlands

19:00 — 20:30 Round table:

Prof. Dr. Gabriel Curio, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, Dr. Suzanne Dikker, NYU Max Planck Center for Language, Music, and Emotion, USA; Prof. Risto Ilmoniemi, Aalto University, Finland, Prof. Mikhail Lebedev, HSE University, Russia and Skoltech Center for Neuroscience and Neurorehabilitation, Russia; Dr. Ippolit Markelov, ITMO University, «18 Apples», Russia, Dr. Maria Nazarova, HSE University, Russia and Centre for Brain Research and Neurotechnologies, FMBA, Russia; Dr. Vadim Nikulin, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany, and HSE University, Russia; Prof. Danil Raseev, Saint Petersburg University, Russia; Dr. Prof. Pia Tikka, Enactive Virtuality Lab, Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM) and Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT), Tallinn University

20:30-21:00 Report: Prof. Patrick Haggard, University College London, UK

moderators: Prof. Vasily Klucharev, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, HSE University, Russia; media art theorist, Dr. Ksenia Fedorova Leiden University, the Netherlands

21:00 -—21:15 Break

21:15 — 22:00 Presentation of art projects: Ippolit Markelov artist, researcher, PhD in Biology, ITMO, «18 Apples»

Chapter in “Transdisciplinaridade nas Ciências e nas Artes” (E-book) 2020

Pia Tikka (2020) “Enactive virtuality: from generative to emergent narrative systems” in Transdisciplinaridade nas Ciências e nas Artes” (E-book), eds. Maria Rosa Chitolina, Nara Cristina Santos , and Hosana Celeste Oliveira, 114-127. Capes PrInt/UFSM, PPGART Publishing House, 2020.

https://www.ufsm.br/app/uploads/sites/740/2020/12/livro_transdisciplinaridade.pdf

SIMPÓSIO TRANSDISCIPLINARIDADE NAS CIÊNCIAS E NAS ARTES– Resultados do Projeto Capes PrInt (2018-2020)
20 a 22 de outubro de 2020, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria

ORGANIZAÇÃO GERALProfa. Dra. Maria Rosa Chitolina (PPGs em Ciências Biológicas: Bioquímica Toxicológica e em Educação em Ciências: Química da Vida e Saúde); Profa. Dra. Nara Cristina Santos (PPG em Artes Visuais);Pós-Doc Dra. Hosana Celeste Oliveira (PPG em Artes Visuais)

Panelist in Moscow Round table The Art of Moving Images Today and Forever – Dec 18

Pia Tikka 
NETWORK PROJECT-FORECAST PRO&CONTRA – three days in Moscow, Dec 16-18
 
«MEDIA ART 2020–2040»
MediaArtLab is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the PRO&CONTRA network project «MEDIA ART 2020–2040», which will bring together the pioneers of the world media art in the format of discussions-forecasts and online exhibition. The Media Forum is a festival consistently exploring contradictions and interconnections of cinema and video art.
DECEMBER 18,  7 PM (GMT+3)
 
Round table The Art of Moving Images Today and Forever 
 
2020 has transferred all cultural activities to the network. Cinema and video are watched the same way now: on a computer sitting on a sofa. We now have the audience from all the corners of the world that we have never been aiming for — together with a tactile hunger and general screen fatigue. It seems that now it is the time to talk about the art of moving images — what it has become and what it will be in the future. 
Moderator: Olga Shishko (Russia), curator, founder of the MediaArtLab.
Participants: Pia Tikka (Estonia), Martin Honzik (Austria), Erkki Huhtamo (Finland/USA), Boris Debackere (Belgium/Netherlands), Olesya Turkina (Russia), Andrey Velikanov (Russia), Miloš Vojtěchovský (Czech Republic), Peter Weibel (Austria), Olia Lialina (Russia), Christa Sommerer (Austria) and Laurent Mignonneau (France), Bjørn Melhus (Germany/Norway), Shelly Silver (USA), Raymond Bellour (France), Kathy Rae Huffman (USA), Alexandra Dementieva (Russia/Belgium).

The event will be held in Zoom in Russian and English with simultaneous translation. If you want to use the translation, please, register via: https://mediaartlab-org.timepad.ru/event/1505852/

 

Attached, please, find the full program of the event, duration up to 2 hours.
The links to the follow the Discussion December 18. 

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/439832857035358

###

 FULL PROGRAM

 

See below

 

NETWORK PROJECT-FORECAST PRO&CONTRA 

«MEDIA ART 2020–2040»

MediaArtLab is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the PRO&CONTRA network project «MEDIA ART 2020–2040», which will bring together the pioneers of the world media art in the format of discussions-forecasts and online exhibition.

FULL PROGRAM

DECEMBER 16, 7 PM (GMT+3)

Round table “Media Art: Communication Shaping the Future”

DECEMBER 16, 9 PM (GMT+3)

Opening of the online exhibition “back forward rewind” on the website mediaartlab.ru

DECEMBER 18, 7 PM (GMT+3)

Round table “The Art of Moving Images Today and Forever”

DECEMBER 18, 9 PM (GMT+3)

Zoom-party in honor of the 20th anniversary of MediaArtLab

DECEMBER 16 /// 7 PM (GMT+3)

Round table

Media Art: Communication Shaping the Future

Together with the growth of the Internet, the end of the 20th century brought us new forms of art that explore how technologies changed our world and, more importantly, how a man changed. It is only logical that this new art could exist in the digital sphere only and use most experimental developments as its instruments.MediaArtLab came to be as a platform that started to look for a way to communicate with such art, to explain it to the audience, to help professionals speak the same language with artists, who use radically different aesthetic criteria. Now that digitalization of culture has become a common place, it seems symbolic to celebrate the anniversary of the MediaArtLab with a discussion on the subject that was topical the year it was born and became pretty much the most crucial for art today.What impact does the media have on our ability to communicate without distortion of a meaning? What limitations can we never overcome neither in virtual reality nor in imaginative spaces? What is going to happen to freedom of speech on the Internet of late capitalism in five or more years?

Moderators: Anna Bouali (Russia), curator, producer for MediaArtLab; Arjon Dunnewind (The Netherlands), artist, researcher, founder of the IMPAKT festival.

Participants: Luchezar Boyadjiev (Bulgaria), Dmitry Bulatov (Russia), George Drivas (Greece), Marina Gržinić (Slovenia), JODI (Belgium), Almagul Menlibayeva (Kazakhstan), Alexey Shulgin (Russia), Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits (Latvia), Olga Shishko (Russia), Andrey Velikanov (Russia).

The event will be held in Zoom in Russian and English with simultaneous translation. If you want to use the translation, please, register via: https://mediaartlab-org.timepad.ru/event/1505842/. If you do not need the translation, please, join the broadcast on the website of the project.

MEDIAARTLAB.RU

«MEDIA ART 2020–2040»

DECEMBER 18 /// 7 PM (GMT+3)

Round table The Art of Moving Images Today and Forever 

The most important project of the MediaArtLab is the Media Forum, a festival consistently exploring contradictions and interconnections of cinema and video art which have undergone a serious revision in 2020 with the transfer of all cultural activity to the network. It turned out that both cinema and video are watched the same way now: on a computer sitting on a sofa. We now have the audience from all the corners of the world that we have never been aiming for — together with a tactile hunger and general screen fatigue. It seems that now it is the time to talk about the art of moving images — what it has become and what it will be in the future. How do we re-define our cultural life in isolation in the light of restrictions? Will there appear new online-cinemas that expand our experience of the moving image and bring us back the experience of care and touch? Great epidemics, pandemics and wars have always come together with dramatic changes in art, what changes can we expect due to COVID-19? What representations of isolated body and sickness can be found in the moving image? What are the formal and imagined strategies adopted by the artists of the past and present to reflect the conditions of the pandemic? Will we succeed in slowing down the flow of images that overwhelms us? 

Moderator: Olga Shishko (Russia), curator, founder of the MediaArtLab.

Participants: Martin Honzik (Austria), Erkki Huhtamo (Finland/USA), Boris Debackere (Belgium/Netherlands), Olesya Turkina (Russia), Andrey Velikanov (Russia), Miloš Vojtěchovský (Czech Republic), Peter Weibel (Austria), Olia Lialina (Russia), Christa Sommerer (Austria) and Laurent Mignonneau (France), Bjørn Melhus (Germany/Norway), Shelly Silver (USA), Raymond Bellour (France), Kathy Rae Huffman (USA), Alexandra Dementieva (Russia/Belgium), Pia Tikka (Finland).

The event will be held in Zoom in Russian and English with simultaneous translation. If you want to use the translation, please, register via: https://mediaartlab-org.timepad.ru/event/1505852/. If you do not need the translation, please, join the broadcast on the website of the project.

NETWORK PROJECT-FORECAST PRO&CONTRA

Online-exhibiiton “back forward rewind”

It is quite symbolic that—due to obvious reasons—the anniversary exhibition of MediaArtLab takes place online, in the virtual space. After all, the lab was established in the 1990s precisely for exploring and conceptualizing the digital environment, which has been engulfing humanity deeper and deeper. As an open platform, MediaArtLab has built an international community of artists and invites them to reflect on the new reality today. “back forward rewind” is an in-depth review of themes and artistic methods developed by MediaArtLab over twenty years of its work, a lens to convey the artists’ view of the past, the future, and back to the present. Among them are utopias, environmental problems, anxiety, and dreams. The exhibition title suggests a free surfing through artworks—as if they were frames of an elusive fluid world,—and through imagination of the artists, each of them having contributed to the image of contemporary media art.

Participants: Tanya Akhmetgalieva (Russia), The Blue Soup (Russia), Alexandra Dementieva (Russia/Belgium), George Drivas (Greece), Omer Fast (Israel), William Hooker and Phill Niblock (USA), JODI (Belgium/The Netherlands), Sergey Kishchenko (Russia), Olia Lialina (Russia), Katherine Liberovskaya (Canada/USA), Bjørn Melhus (Germany/Norway), Almagul Menlibayeva (Kazakhstan), Csaba Nemes (Hungary), Marnix de Nijs (The Netherlands), Kenji Ouellet (Canada/Germany), Shelly Silver (USA), Rasa Šmite and Raitis Šmits (Latvia), Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (Austria/France), Eve Sussman and Simon Lee (USA), Miloš Vojtěchovský (Czech Republic), Martin Zet (Czech Republic).

The exhibition will be available on the website mediaartlab.ru from 21:00 (GMT + 3) December 16, 2020 to January 10, 2021

MEDIAARTLAB.RU

«MEDIA ART 2020–2040»

DECEMBER 18 /// 9 PM (GMT+3)

Zoom-party

Right after the end of the round table, Zoom will become a venue to congratulate MediaArtLab on its anniversary, to exchange memories, hopes and greetings from different parts of the world. The central theme of the party is a reunion of old friends and partners. There will be no strict regulations and rules, but there will be live interventions of people united by art and the network. Master of Ceremonies: Olesya Turkina (Russia). Among the special projects of the party are:

Olia Lialina /// Best Effort Network (2015/2020)

The piece reveals the process of sending and receiving datasets over computer networks. In her work, Olia is riding a carousel, and if the vision disappears, it means that the site (best.effort.network) is loaded on another browser. Olia will appear again when it is your device’s turn to receive the dataset. Zoom-performance will make the process of migration of information, images, and viewer’s attention visible. Each partier can offer his/her window to the artist to wander around…

Tanya Akhmetgalieva /// Masks (2020)

Creative thinking is like a filter an artist uses to perceive the reality. This is the way Van Gogh’s famous coloristic vision worked, and the same way new media artists use media as a lens to refract and reflect digital images. Tanya’s works create a distinctive psychedelic universe that one can try on during the party. Her masks can be put on and took off during the party, or they can be exchanged and used to distinguish like-minded people and push the limits of ordinary… Was not it the main reason for inventing the parties?

Andrei Silvestrov /// Jubilee Romance (2020)

Music by Iraida Yusupova with lyrics by Mirkakson (Russian for Life as a Dream)

A musical tribute to the anniversary of the MediaArtLab and to the memory of Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe.“Jubilee is the main word to define the late Soviet times. When we were kids, everything was “jubilee”—avenues, restaurants, gastronomes, cookies. But it was usually unclear whose and what’s jubilee it was. The piece combines different states of mind: nostalgia for the childhood, horrors of the diluted consciousness of the late Soviet era and acute feeling of inconsistency between a vibrant institution that is the MediaArtLab and a charnel notion of Jubilee”. Andrei Silvestrov

Vladislava Berezina, Marina Blinova, Anastasia Korotkova, Evgeny Kruglov, Svyatoslav Oleinik, Maria Romanova, Alexey Shulgin /// Discrete Therapy (2020)

Under new circumstances, we are looking for a language of safe cooperation. Having reconsidered musical improvisation, Alexei Shulgin and a team of musicians exposed therapeutic aspects of an improvisational act, in which the image of a musician (composer) finally dissolves into the stream of network sound. Interaction based on the intuition—established in the process of music-making—calls into question the notion of authorship and audience participation: each participant of the sessions is invited to take on the role of both a musician and a sensitive listener.

All the instructions for online-performances will be shared with the registered participants shortly before the party.

NETWORK PROJECT-FORECAST PRO&CONTRA

MEDIAARTLAB.RU

The project is supported by Trust For Mutual Understanding 

Contact: mediaartlab@mediaartlab.ru

Enactive Virtuality Lab presents Dec 1, 2020 

Welcome. Please join us!

Enactive Virtuality Lab presents the on-going work in online seminar.

Date: Tuesday Dec 1, 2020 
Time: 09:30 -12:00 Helsinki
Zoom Meeting

VIDEO recording (not edited) Passcode: &%10sVN$

Program

9:30

Pia Tikka (Enactive Virtuality Team leader, MOBTT90)
Introduction

9:45

Mehmet Burak Yılmaz (doctoral student @BFM)
Emotional impacts of camera movements
Exploring the emotional effects of different camera movement techniques (dolly, Steadicam, handheld) and the direction of the movement. Conducting psychophysiological experiments where the viewers watch cinematographic scenes.

10:00

Robert McNamara (doctor in law; doctoral student @BFM)
The creative potential of cinematic game narratives for evoking empathy for asylum seekers.
Exploring machine learning in the asylum seeker narratives in the “Refugee Status Determinations”. Measuring types of empathy response in depicting child separation by immigration enforcement officers in game engine-based cinematic narratives.

10:15

Debora Conceição Firmino De Souza (MA Thesis @DTI)
Humanizing interactions at the Border Control 
Drawing upon topics of HCI and game development, the study investigates the emotional states elicited by interactions with anthropomorphic Virtual Agents at the Border Control.

10:30

Ats Kurvet (computer graphics specialist)
Creating digital humans on a budget
The challenges and options when creating the visual component for avatars/digital humans.

10:45  

Valentin Siltsenko (research assistant)
Real-time text to speech synthesis 
Synthesizing natural sounding human speech with ability to set the emotion of the speaker.

11:00  

Abdallah Sham (doctoral student @DTI)
Machine learning in dyadic human – artificial agent interaction
Exploring the implementation of machine learning to training virtual human behaviour.

 11:15

Ermo Säks (doctoral student @BFM)
Storytelling in Cinematic Virtual Reality: The role of cinematographic techniques in evoking immersion in virtual environments
Using practical research methods this doctoral project seeks the cinematic techniques feasible to increase the perceived immersion in Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) where the user’s main agency is to look around in a narrative story-based CVR drama experience that features a beginning, middle, and end.

11:30-12:00

Discussion
 

Open for public!