This exhibition is rooted in the artistic practice and concepts of University of Plymouth Professor, British artist and ‘visionary pioneer of media art’, Roy Ascott that include cybernetics (systems based art), telematics (the art of telecommunications and informatics) and technoetics (the technology of consciousness.). FUTURE HISTORY maps this influence on emerging contemporary art forms, including digital, wearable, immersive, biological and artificial.

Ascott exhibits internationally (including the Biennales of Venice and Shanghai), and is collected by Tate Britain and Arts Council England. He is recognised by Ars Electronica as the “visionary pioneer of media art”, and widely seen as a radical innovator in arts education and research, having occupied leading academic roles in England, Europe, North America, and China, and is currently leading his Technoetic Arts studio in Shanghai, and directing the Planetary Collegium [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Ascott]

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[Image: Plastic Transactions. 1971]

The 2019 ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art is awarded to Donna J. Cox, a recognized pioneer in the art of scientific data visualization. As an artist, she collaborates with scientists and technologists to create insightful presentations of numerical data and scientific concepts… Cox’s work has been internationally pivotal in the convergence of art/science digital research. She’s best known for defining Renaissance Teams, “where specialists provide a broad spectrum of skills in the quest for discovery,” and for her pioneering use of supercomputers in artistic applications, the design and cinematic presentation of numerical data, groundbreaking IMAX science films, popular fulldome planetarium/museum shows, science documentaries and virtual reality software. [https://www.siggraph.org/2019-distinguished-artist-award-for-lifetime-achievement-in-digital-art-donna-cox/]

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[Image: Visualization Of An F3 Tornado Within A Supercell Thunderstorm Simulation]

Denis Roio, also known as Jaromil, is a free software programmer, a media artist and activist. He has made significant contributions to the development of multimedia and streaming applications on the Linux platform. He was born in Pescara, Italy, but now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is author of the dyne: bolic Linux distribution, and of various free software projects, including MuSE and FreeJ. His artistic creations are related to the context of netart and software art; the code :(){ :|:& };: has been said to be ‘the most elegant fork bomb code ever written’. [https://jaromil.dyne.org/]

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[Image: Forkbomb]

Margarete Jahrmann is a media epistemologist and an internationally renowned artist on topics of activism, urbanity and play. She is the designer of numerous game art works, research and play installations, performances as well as exhibition and urban games. She holds a professorship for Game Design since 2006 and was co-director of the New Media and Arts department at University of the Arts Zurich from 2000-2006. 2013-2016 she was lecturer Playful Ludic Interfaces, Institute Interface Cultures, University of Arts Linz and since 2011 is senior lecturer for Digital Arts at University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Jahrmann and Max Moswitzer were awarded a distinction in interactive arts, Prix Ars Electronica 2003 for their Game Art work “Nibble Engine”, published under the label climax.at. 2004 they received the software arts award transmediale Berlin 2004 for a modification of their Nybble-Engine as Anti-war shooter climax.at.

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[Image: Neurospace Art Game, performance, Computerspielemuseum Berlin 2017/ Amaze Festival 2018]

Marcos Novak is an architect, artist, composer, and theorist who employs algorithmic techniques to design actual, virtual and hybrid intelligent environments. The self-described transarchitect is seeking to expand the definition of architecture by including electronic space, and originated the concept of liquid architectures in cyberspace and the study of a dematerialized architecture for the new, virtual public domain, the immersive virtual worlds. He is the founder of the “TransArchitectures” events (conferences and exhibitions). He represented Greece at the Venice Biennale 2000 and has exhibited his work in numerous digital media exhibitions. [https://www.centrifuge.org]

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[Image: B A B E L E 2 0 0 0 ]

Thecla Schiphorst is a member of the original design team that developed Life Forms, the computer compositional tool for choreography, and collaborated with Merce Cunningham from 1990 to 2005 supporting his creation of new dance with the computer.

This interdisciplinary background forms the basis for her research in embodied interaction, focusing on movement knowledge representation, tangible and wearable technologies, media and digital art, and the aesthetics of interaction. She applies body-based somatic models as articulated in systems such as Laban Movement Analysis to technology design processes within an HCI context. Her research goal is to expand the practical application of embodied theory within technology design. [https://www.sfu.ca/siat/people/research-faculty/thecla-schiphorst.html]

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[Image: Composite screen grabs from LifeForms used by Merce Cunningham for ‘Trackers’]

Seaman’s work often explores an expanded media-oriented poetics through various technological means— Recombinant Poetics. Such works often explore the combination and recombination of media elements and processes in interactive and generative works of art. Seaman enfolds image/music/text relations in these works, often creating all of the media elements and articulating the operative media-processes involved. He is self-taught as a musician/composer. Early on he discussed his notion of Structured Improvisation, employing specific fragments of his own improvisations and musical constructions as a compositional method. Initially explored via tape loops and layering processes in the 80’s, he now facilitates this compositional methodology using the computer, in particular using the audio program Ableton Live.

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[Image: The World Generator, 1996-1997. Screen capture; interactive installation]

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are internationally renowned media artists working in the field of interactive computer installation. They are Professors at the University of Art and Design in Linz Austria where they head the Department for Interface Culture at the Institute for Media. Sommerer and Mignonneau previously held positions as Professors at the IAMAS International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan and as Researchers and Artistic Directors at the ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Lab in Kyoto Japan. They also were Visiting Researchers at the MIT CAVS in Cambridge US, the Beckmann Institute in Champaign Urbana, IL, USA and the NTT-InterCommunication Center in Tokyo.

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[Image: A-Volve, 1994]

Eyeborg (Adam Montandon and Neil Harbisson):

In 2003 Adam Montandon developed the Eyeborg for Neil Harbisson who is the world’s first legally recognised cyborg. The Cyborg Antenna is a new sensory device created to extend the human limitations of colour perception. It is implanted and integrated in Harbisson’s head and sprouts from within his occipital bone. It has been permanently attached to Harbisson’s head since 2004 and it allows him to feel and hear colours as audible vibrations inside his head, including colours invisible to the human eye such as infrareds and ultraviolets. The antenna also allows internet connection and therefore the reception of colour from other sensors or from satellites. In 2010 he founded The Cyborg Foundation is a nonprofit organization with cyborg activist and artist Moon Ribas. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Harbisson]

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[Image: Eyeborg, Neil Harbisson and Adam Montandon]

Autoicon is a dynamic internet work and CD-ROM that simulates both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the artist Donald Rodney who died from sickle-cell anaemia. The project builds on Donald Rodney’s artistic practice in his later years, when he increasingly began to delegate key roles in the organisation and production of his artwork. Making reference to this working process, AUTOICON is developed by a close group of friends and artists (his partner Diane Symons, Eddie Chambers, Richard Hylton, Virginia Nimarkoh, and Keith Piper) (ironically described as ‘Donald Rodney plc’ who have acted as an advisory and editorial board in the artist’s absence, and who specified the rules by which the ‘automated’ aspects of the project operate.

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[Image: Autoicon CD-ROM]

Signwave Auto-Illustrator is an experimental, semi-autonomous, generative software artwork and a fully functional vector graphic design application to sit alongside your existing professional graphic design utilities. Use it to explore a wide range of generative and procedural techniques in the production of your own graphic designs. Discover how easy it is to produce complex designs in an exciting and challenging environment that questions how contemporary software should behave.

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[Image: Auto-Illustrator 0.1d]

Chris Speed’s work focuses upon the Network Society, Digital Art and Technology, and The Internet of Things. Chris has sustained a critical enquiry into how network technology can engage with the fields of art, design and social experience through a variety of international digital art exhibitions, funded research projects, books journals and conferences. At present Chris is working on funded projects that engage with the flow of food across cities, an internet of cars, turning printers into clocks and a persistent argument that chickens are actually robots. Chris is a co-organiser and compére for the Edinburgh www.ThisHappened.org events and is co-editor of the journal Ubiquity.

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[Image: Temporal Navigation]

Robert Pepperell studied at the Slade School of Art. He has exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Barbican Gallery, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA, and the Millennium Dome, and published several books, including The Posthuman Condition (1995 and 2003) and The Postdigital Membrane (with Michael Punt, 2000), as well as articles, reviews and papers. He is currently Professor of Fine Art and Head of the Fine Art Department at Cardiff School of Art & Design, where he runs FovoLab (www.fovography.com).

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[Image: Aspects of Gaia]

Victoria Vesna, Ph.D., is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts (North campus) and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) (South campus). Although she was trained early on as a painter (Faculty of Fine arts, University of Belgrade, 1984), her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation (PhD, CAiiA_STAR, University of Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students. Victoria has exhibited her work in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, has been published in 20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade. She is the North American editor of AI & Society journal (Springer Verlag, UK) and in 2007 published an edited volume – Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minnesota Press) and another in 2011 — Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. (co-edited with Christiane Paul and Margot Lovejoy) Intellect Ltd, 2011. Currently she is working on a series Art Science & Technology based on her online lecture class.

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[Image: Bodies INCorporated 1993]

S.T.I. is funded by the SciArt programme (supported by the ACE, the British Council, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, SAC, the Wellcome Trust and NESTA)., and turns the technologies that look to deep space for Alien Intelligence back onto Planet Earth in a quest for ‘evidence’ of Terrestrial Intelligence. Looking at Earth from space the project will develop processing techniques using autonomous computer software agents. S.T.I. moves beyond irony by engaging with our understanding of the ‘real world’ through our senses, whether real or artificially enhanced. Will these autonomous systems ‘know’ the ‘truth’ when they ‘see’ it? The S.T.I. Consortium: STAR, Dr Guido Bugmann, Dr Angelo Cangelosi, Laurent Mignonneau, Christa Sommerer, Dr Nick Veck.

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[Image: Signs of intelligence, 2000]

Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare:

As part of the development of the Vivaria project, Generator hosted a troop of Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys from Paignton Zoo to test Infinite Monkey Theorem. The idea that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters for infinity could eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare was enacted in a monkey cage in Paignton Zoo…

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[Image: The authors of Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare Book]

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking and influential contributions to the development of contemporary art and poetry. In the early 1980s Kac created digital, holographic and online works that were invested in paving the way to the new global culture we live in today, composed of ever-changing information in constant flux. From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, Kac developed radical telepresence works with remote-controlled robots he created specifically for each piece. In 1997 he sent shockwaves across the world by becoming the first human to implant a digital microchip through his work Time Capsule. It was also in 1997, in the context of Time Capsule, that he coined the term Bio Art, thus igniting the widespread development of this new artform. In 1999, he created the artwork Genesis, in which he encoded an English statement into living bacteria, allowed Internet participants to mutate the bacteria, and then decoded the mutant DNA back into altered English. In 2000, Kac made what many consider his most famous work; entitled GFP Bunny, it is comprised of a green fluorescent rabbit called Alba. By splicing jellyfish and rabbit DNA, he originated the first mammal in the history of art. Kac’s 2009 work Natural History of the Enigma, in which he created a new flower with his own DNA, earned him the Golden Nica Award, the most prestigious award in the field of media arts and the highest prize awarded by Ars Electronica. In 2017, the New York Times published a full-page article about Kac’s Inner Telescope, a work he conceived for and realized in outer space with the cooperation of French astronaut Thomas Pesquet. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art of Valencia, Spain; the ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe, Germany; and the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, among others.

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[Image: video grab from GFP Bunny, 2000, Eduardo Kac]

Zero Gravity Robot. Commissioned by The Arts Catalyst. as part of the. MIR Campaign 2003 at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, Russia. MIR Campaign 2003 supported by the European Commission Culture 2000 Fund. ‘Constellation Columbia’ is an autonomous space monument inspired by the writing s of J.G. Ballard. The scale/model/prototype seen on the Culture Show incorporated simple audio/radio recording and transmission, gyroscopes, gravity switches and light sequencers. The work is being developed for inclusion in future zero gravity flights with the aspiration for a full scale release from the International Space Station.

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When I grow up I will live in isolation, work in an office and pretend to like people.

Thom Yorke is a musician, artist and activist. He was a student at Exeter College of Art and developed several interactive computer based art works. This work presents the fragments of a Hypercard stack from 1990.

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[Image: Fragments from a Hypercard stack]

Roy Ascott interviews Brian Eno & David Bowie. [Image: http://www.moredarkthanshark.org/feature_opal_info_26-1995.html#BOWIE]

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Roy Ascott, Brian Eno, Robert Pepperell and others participate in a series of satellite TV productions and Journal publications. A networked telematic comic. The intent of ‘MEDIASPACE’ [1994-98], whether in its ‘dead’ paper-based form, or the ‘live’ digital forms of satellite and internet, is to explore the implications of new media forms and emergent fields of digital practice in art and design. ‘MEDIASPACEÍ is an experimental publishing project that explores the integration of print (‘MEDIASPACE’ is published as part of the CADE (Computers in Art and Design Education) journal Digital Creativity by SWETS & ZEITLINGER.), WWW and interactive satellite transmissions (‘MEDIASPACE’ interactive satellite transmissions were funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), the British National Space Centre (BNSC), and WIRE (Why ISDN Resources in Education) and use Olympus, EUTELSAT and INTELSAT satellites via a TDS-4b satellite uplink. (incorporating live studio broadcasts, ISDN based video conferencing, and asynchronous email/ISDN tutorials). The convergence of these technologies generates a distributed digital ‘space’ (satellite footprint, studio space, screen space, WWW space, location/reception space, and the printed page). There is also a novel and dynamic set of relationships established between the presenters (studio based), the participant/audience (located across Europe), and the reader. As an electronic publishing experiment in real time (‘live’ media) delivery, combined with a backbone of pre-packaged information (‘dead’ media content), the ‘MEDIASPACE’ transmissions provide a provocative model for the convergence of ‘publishing’, ‘networked’, and ‘broadcast’ forms and technologies.

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[Image: MEDIASPACE. 1994]