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Keynote at the syposium “Sci-Arts,Gaming and Cinema session”

Invitation: INTERNATIONAL ONLINE CONGRESS OF EXTENDED REALITY (XR) IN SCIENCES

Keynote speaker for a symposium on “Sci-arts, Gaming and Cinema”.

Following the success of our online conference #XRCOL2020, we are launching the 1st edition of the #DIMENSIONSXR2020; the state of the research and application of XR technology in sciences to be held online from October 28 to October 30, 2020.

ABSTRACT

Enactive virtuality as the common playground of cinema and game narratives

Back in 2010 when I suggested to a roomfull of game students that the relationship between cinema and games could be bidirectionally fruitful, I had to hide from the rotten tomatoes behind the podium. Indeed, cinema and videogames have a long history of mutual love and hate. My talk, however, is not about this battle, but about what is in common. Specifically, I suggest that both can be regarded as mental simulations of the world. I will adopt a cognitive science angle, talking about the sense-making of the idiosyncratic mind, reflected through the enactive mind theory of Francisco Varela and colleagues. The mind is active in the world in an embodied and situated manner, in this sense the mind enacts virtually, or simulates the world’s dynamic phenomena it wants to understand. Drawing from the combination of phenomenological inquiry and scientific evidence, I will argue that narratives are the mind’s essential means of sense-making. This applies equally for games and cinema. This leads further to interpreting the communicative role of narratives as an extension of that sense-making function to the social world. Systemicity is at the core of my enactive virtuality approach. Be it cinema, video games, books, or social media newsfeed, they can be considered as bio-cultural feedback systems continuously mediating between the idiosyncratic minds and the intersubjectively shared worlds. In this endeavour, cinema and games provide a wide range of examples for my arguments. Towards the end of the talk, I hope to engage the audience to the discussion of whether stories told, worlds imagined, and enacted upon, can empower social change for the wellbeing beyond entertainment.

Link to the Swiss Society of Virtual and Augmented Reality https://ssvar.ch

Keynote at NORDICHI2020, Tallinn University 29 Oct 2020

Narrative contextualisation: Overriding the artificiality of Artificial Humane Agents 

Abstract. The recent advancements in creating humane artificial characters with seemingly self-emergent social behavior have reached the technological and artistic level that challenges the argument that bridging the uncanny abyss between the non-human and humane artificial agents is still beyond the possible. A great part of the existing research on the topic has focused on developing the social communication skills related to face-to-face interaction between human and non-human agents, such including combinations of verbal and non-verbal expressiveness. These aspects alone continue requiring extensive efforts from the scientific community, while relatively little attention has been focused on the contextual aspects of such face-to-face settings. This talk argues that the challenge of reaching a sufficient level of human-likeness of humane artificial agents, this is, the point where one would trust an artificial car dealer, or a virtual medical doctor, lies elsewhere than in the technically detailed appearance of the artificial agent. Instead, the believability of such an agent rests in the emotive-cognitive contextualization of the interaction, in order words, taking into account the implicit and explicit psychological dependencies related to the context. To tackle this issue, the research on narratives and storytelling is proposed as a framework to facilitate the endeavor of modeling contextual aspects into the adaptive interaction dynamics of an artificial character designed to elicit trustfulness and confidence in the human agent. A selection of case studies is discussed in the light of cognitive neuroscientific findings on artificial agents and narrative contextualization, particularly from the point of view of societal and medical applications.

https://dl.acm.org/conference/nordichi

The conference website: http://nordichi2020.org/

Keynote at Transdisciplinarity in Science and Arts UFSM, Brazil 22 Oct 2020

Keynote speaker at The Organizing Committee of the Transdisciplinarity in Science and Arts – Capes Print Symposium at  UFSM, Brazil

20 – 22. Oct 2020
Pia Tikka
Virtuality by enaction: Imaginary worlds beyond technology


Humanlikeness is in the eye of the beholder, not in the machine. My argument is that human encounter with an artificial human relies on the mind’s simulation of human-to-human meetings, given similarly meaningful contexts. People have a cognitive drive, or tendency to anthropomorphize intentions and behaviours of humans to beings and things they interact with, be they cats, dogs, vacuum cleaner robots, or abstract geometrical shapes. Reflecting against the human individual’s own experiences, they see emotions, intentions, hidden motivations everywhere. This is the human way to create virtuality, and it comes both via individual bodily experience in life situations as well as evolution of the genre. Thanks to it, human mind is capable of reaching beyond the known physical worlds, to imagine the unimagined, as made obvious, for example, by science fiction. In my creative work of authoring narrative encounters with artificial humane characters, the concept of humanlikeness itself is assumed to be a psychological construct of the human participant. Thus, the tumblestones on the way of implementation of artificial humans may not be the limitations of the technology but rather the characteristics of the bio-cultural humans themselves. My talk concludes with a particular focus on people who are not able to go out, hug trees, play tennis, and people who are tight to their bed. For them, virtuality by enaction means engaging with other humans in technologically augmented worlds. Application of artificial humans in the social and medical fields may provide yet unseen benefits – and dangers – beyond the imaginative powers of human minds.

The symposium is being organized by the Capes-PrInt Project’s researchers belonging to six postgraduate programs1 from the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM, Brazil).

Artistic work in “Transdisciplinaridade Arte, Ciência e Neurociência” (Art Catalog)

The enactive VR project State of Darkness by Tikka and Enactive Team presented in an online art exhibition Transdisciplinaridade Arte, Ciência e Neurociência and published in  Transdisciplinaridade Arte, Ciência e Neurociência (e-Art Catalog), eds. Nara Cristina Santos and Hosana Celeste Oliveira, 33-38. Capes PrInt/UFSM, PPGART Publishing House, 2020.

https://www.ufsm.br/app/uploads/sites/740/2020/12/catalogo_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 GERAL Profa. 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)

 

Invited Artist at at the exhibition of Transdisciplinarity in Science and Arts – Capes Print Symposium at  UFSM, Brazil

Pia Tikka as one of the six  invited international artist at at the exhibition of Transdisciplinarity in Science and Arts – Capes Print Symposium at  UFSM, Brazil

The  VR installation State of Darkness by Pia Tikka and the team presented online exhibition during 20-22. Oct 2020. See art exhibition catalogue at http://enactivevirtuality.tlu.ee/artistic-work-in…ncia-art-catalog/

The platform : the LABART on Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and some channels of UFSM.

See LABART/UFSM links:
https://www.instagram.com/labart.ufsm/
https://www.facebook.com/labart1228
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw274rzHP9t7muJG9zAW_aw

Página inicial

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PPGART

Publicações

 

Panelist at the Neuro 2.0- Futuristic Trends in NeuroTechnology – NeuroTech-X/India

Day 2: Neuro 2.0- Futuristic Trends in NeuroTechnology, organised by NeuroTech-X/India

The Narrative Brain – a Neurocinematic approach
This talk discusses our neurocinematic findings on what might be characterised as the narrative brain, which both narrates and makes sense of narratives. Previous neuroimaging experiments have shown that viewers’ time-locked brain activations correlate when engaged with same narrative. In one of our fMRI studies, we identified specific story-content-related brain networks by comparing data collected from subjects viewing a film and others reading a film’s screenplay. We also studied differences in functional brain connectivity when watching a narrative drama film versus viewing a non-narrative experimental film. In yet another experiment we observed neural fingerprint patterns related to cue-based narrative sense-making during specific moments in a long feature film. Using movies as stimuli in neuroimaging experiments may serve as a practical starting point for understanding how human mind makes sense of complex everyday situations more generally. Challenges and directions for the future neurocinematics are discussed.
When

Sun 18 Oct 2020 5pm – 6pm Eastern European Time – Tallinn

Where

https://us02web.zoom.us/w/85630731547?tk=ATyRPCdFLUuNMltXs7-K4ROsMt-BZw98DpDdd2tmfi8.DQIAAAAT7_1FGxZwbWNpQjJXQVNQQ3B4UWpKUzdLSTFBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA&pwd=S2g4d3R6SDFKcTc2WnFuK0lwcVNyQT09(map)

TALKS for DAY 2 – Oct 18, 7:30pm to 11:00pm IST/ 10:00am to 1:30pm EDT/ 7:00am to 10:30am PDT

[7:45-8:00pm IST/ 10:15-10:30am EDT/ 7:15-7:30am PDT]: Neurotech in Cinema (NeuroCinematics) by Dr. Pia Tikka, Tallinn University

[8:05-8:20 PM IST/ 10:35-10:50 am EDT/ 7:35-7:50 am PDT]: Neurotech in Architecture (NeuroArchitecture) by Dr. Isabella Pasqualini, LeaV / Ecole nationale supérieure d‘architecture de Versailles ; NAAD / IUAV University of Venice.

[8:25-8:40PM IST/ 10:55-11:10am EDT/ 7:55-8:10am PDT]: Neurotech in Cognition (NeuroCog) by Dr. David Eagleman, Stanford University / Founding CEO: NeoSensory and BrainCheck

Q & A

Join us for our grand two-day webinar to explore the magical world of NeuroTechnology through six phenomenal sessions. These exciting sessions will be handled by Global speakers with great expertise in diverse aspects of Neurotechnology.

Details: https://www.meetup.com/NeuroTechX-India/events/273565090/

PhD seminar “Psycho-physiological studies of narrative sensemaking” 13 Oct 2020

An introductory PhD programme course offered to all PhD students across the Tallinn university will take place on Tuesdays between 14:15 and 17:45.

Schedule (may be due to changes) see the Moodle course (https://moodle.hitsa.ee/course/view.php?id=22876)

September 8th – Intro – Indrek Ibrus
September 15th – Innovation in media and film industries – Indrek Ibrus
September 22nd – Core issues of media economics and management studies – Ulrike Rohn
September 29th – Media data interpretation – Andres Kõnno
October 6th – Intercultural communication in public space – Anastassia Zabrodskaja
October 13th – Psycho-physiological studies of narrative sensemaking – Pia Tikka
October 27th – Studies of visual social media – Katrin Tiidenberg
November 3rd – Audiovisual media policy studies – Andres Jõesaar
November 10th – Artistic research in film and audiovisual media – Dirk Hoyer
November 17th – Approaches to film studies – Teet Teinemaa
November 24th – Semiotic studies of media – Indrek Ibrus
December 1st – Digital media research and ethics – Katrin Tiidenberg
December 8th – Revision: Studies of audiovisual arts and media at BFM – Indrek Ibrus

CUDAN talk

Managing narrative complexity within the enactive virtuality framework

 

This talk introduces work conducted at the Enactive Virtuality Lab, specifically focusing on our current task of modelling enactive co-presence between humans and artificial humans within narrative immersive environments. The project builds on the enactive cognitive science approach by Francisco Varela and colleagues (1991), according to which the human body-brain system is inseparably coupled with its environment, the principle I have further adapted for the concept of enactive cinema (Tikka 2008). This approach allows describing narrative sense-making as the core function of human cognition. To open a multidisciplinary inquiry into such experience, I suggest a triadic epistemology of narrative sense-making, which allows exploring and describing the nature of human cognition and experience in a context-relative manner. This implies that while the foundation of human expressiveness lies in private embodied and situated experiences, it extends from there to two-person co-experience and further to intersubjectively shared socio-cultural phenomena. 
With regard to related artistic creativity, I have proposed the concept of second-order authorship, which allows describing the authoring process as higher-level management of interaction between two systems, that of narrative content and the participant. In the current project, second-order authorship translates to the creation and management of the systemic interaction between an artificial character and human participants in varying narrative contexts. Our practice-based experiments explore the dimensions of co-presence using techniques including facial recognition, emotion analysis, machine learning and real-time tracking of human engagement data. Triadic epistemology allows such complex data to be related to narrative sense-making and the experience of co-presence, and the dependence of this mutual relation on narrative contexts. For the purposes of societal applications we explore the experience-generating potential of such dynamics, as well as how it can be controlled by modifying either the behavior of a screen character or its narrative context.



BIO
Dr. Professor Pia Tikka is filmmaker and EU Mobilitas Pluss Top Researcher at the MEDIT Centre of Excellence, Tallinn University. Actively engaged with the film and media industry, she is a voting member of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and European Film Academy. As a filmmaker, she has directed two full-length feature films, several interactive new media works, enactive cinema Installation Obsession (2005), and enactive VR experience The State of Darkness (2018). The author of the monograph “Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense” (2008), Tikka publishes widely on enactive media and neurocinematics studies. She holds the honorary title of Adjunct Professor of New Narrative Media at the University of Lapland. She is the leader of NeuroCine research group (2011-), and a founding member of neuroscience project aivoAALTO at the Aalto University (2010-2014). She has also contributed to the related field of neuroeconomics in the advisory board in NeuroService project at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences, funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (2014–2015). In 2010, she visited as a Fulbright scholar at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, University of Southern California, as well as researcher in residency in Neuroaesthetics at the Minerva Foundation, Berkeley. She has also been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, UK (2009-2011). During 2015-2017 she acted as the director of Crucible Studio at the Aalto University. During fall 2019, she was a visiting professor at the Creative Media and Practice Research Cluster, Hong Kong Baptist University. Currently, she leads her research project “Enactive co-presence in narrative virtual reality – a triadic interaction model” at the Enactive Virtuality Lab, Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School (BFM) & Centre of Excellence in Media Innovation and Digital Culture (MEDIT), Tallinn University.

 

Pia Tikka CV ETIS
Students and researchers, feel free to download “Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense” (Tikka 2008)

Book chapter in EISENSTEIN FOR XXI CENTURY

A great honour to have my essay published in this brand new Russian language collection of texts written by 22 international scholars:
EISENSTEIN FOR XXI CENTURY
by Garage Publishing
Introduction: Naum Kleiman (Russia), Renewed glory of Sergei Eisenstein
Jose Carlos Avellar (Brazil), The three-headed horse
Ada Ackerman (France) , Sergei Eisenstein’s haunting screams: a case of circulations between painting and film
Luka Arsenjuk (USA), “The Notes f o r a General History of Cinema” and the Dialectic of the Eisensteinian Image
Oksana Bulgakova (Germany), Eisenstein as curator
Julia Vassilieva (Australia), Eisenstein, Vygotsky, Luria: Psycotechnic of Art
Michael Kunichika (USA), Eisenstein’s Prehistory
Håkan Lövgren (Sweden), Eisenstein’s “October”: On the Cinematic Allegorizing of History
Pietro Montani (Italy-Lituenia), Eisenstein and Vygotsky. Words and Images in Internal Speech and the Construction of Film
Pierluca Nardoni (Italy), Struggling over Abstraction: Eisenstein and Malevich on Cinema
Joan Neuberger (USA), Picasso and Other Failures: The Politics of Immersion in Eisenstein’s Later Dialectics
Ana Hedberg Olenina (USA), Distorted Echoes: Pedological Ideas in Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Theory
Karla Oeler (USA), Eisenstein’s Shakespeare
Massimo Olivero (France), The Two-Headed Ecstasy: The Philosophical Roots of Late Eisenstein
Natalia Pyabchikova (Russia), Eisenstein, the Detective
Masha Salazkina (Canada), Eisenstein in Latin America
Antonio Somaini (France-Italy), “Ursprüngliche Impulse,” “urge”/ “Triebe”, “besoin fondamental”. Kracauer, Eisenstein, and Bazin on the Media- Anthropological Foundations of Cinema
Pia Tikka (Finnland-Estonia), Simulatorium Eisensteinense: Eisenstein’s legacy in art and science
Hannah Frank (USA), “Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain”: thinking
through Eisenstein’s Macbeth drawings
Arun Khopkar (India), The Flower Bridge and the Archimedean Points
Yuri Tsivian (USA-Latvia), Synthèse: Duality as a Method and a Constructive Principle
Luis Elbert (Uruguay), Meetings with Eisenstein in the River Plate Basin
Dustin Condren (USA), Subjective: Eisenstein and Animation of Objects.
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