Enactive Virtuality Research Group, Tallinn University
Activities related to XR, AR, VR related topics in, art-science, academic and popular events, including related industry engagement and participation in media festivals
#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/
26.10 at Niguliste Museum, Tallinn
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.
Zoom Meeting
VIDEO recording (t.b.a.)
To be confirmed
Ighoyota Ben Ajenaghughrure (t.b.c.) 30 min + Q&A (Vistiting lecturer of Software Engineering @ DT)
Symbiosis in information society
Join Zoom Meeting
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Passcode: 019362
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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/
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
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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.
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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.
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
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/
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
VIDEO recording (not edited) Passcode: &%10sVN$
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)
http://bit.ly/ux-xr-everyday-vrscifest
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.
| 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. |
| Abstract Text |
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
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