News

After 13 years embedded in Portland Square i-DAT has relocated to the Roland Levinsky Building. Co-located with our Digital Studios, the new research lab is located on the 2^nd Floor of RLB in room 204, equipped with seminar room (205) and a prototyping-lab (205A).
Leaving behind the OP-SY projects, Arch-OS, Random Lift Button, Slothbot and Green Screen, the new Lab will host the Quorum research initiative, a world of provocative prototyping and a bright algorhythmic future.
Happy 2017!
Google maps…

Date: Wednesday 14 December
Time: 15.00-17.30
Location: Roland Levinsky Room 205 / IVT.
15.00 – 17.00:
Research Updates and Seminar.
Seminar will be focused on Coral’s PhD research into the cultural knowledge shift from material to digital and with it the disruption off classical hierarchical structures to individual quantum units of knowledge. She will discuss the first treatise on museums Inscriptiones vel Titulti Theatri Amplissimi… considered the first plan for a universal museum housed in amphitheatre capped by a dome. Why the architecture of the dome was chosen to give dimension, meaning and schema to knowledge. Through her research she proposes that the digital dome or Immersive Vision Theatre is the ideal place for understanding systems of digitally distributed cultural knowledge. Coral will also consider the material dome space in relation to ideas of utopia and counterculture relating to Drop City, Buckminster Fuller and Black Mountain College. Then discuss her initial artistic exploration into domes and digital counterculture through AV performance and live coding.
 

Research Workshops

The Market Hall development in Devonport, Plymouth, received a significant funding boost today as Chancellor Philip Hammond announced £1million investment for the new ‘digital creative space’ in his Autumn Statement. The sum comes as part of the Treasury’s ‘Cultural Investments’ championed by Arts Council England.
The £5million Market Hall scheme www.themarkethall.co.uk is led by RIO – the Real Ideas Organisation – working with Plymouth City Council, to create a new world-class space for digital technology, arts, research and education. The Market Hall is scheduled for completion in 2018 and will feature space for learning, skills development, expo and events, research and experimentation as well as a 15m immersive dome theatre – the first of its kind in Europe.
http://themarkethall.co.uk/treasurys-autumn-statement-delivers-major-investment-market-hall/

SHANGHAI 26/27 NOVEMBER 2016
{algo}Rhythm and {data}Base – and other coded behaviours.
Art and Consciousness in the Post-Biological Era
As new media art grows old, is a new art arising? How do competing theories of
the origin and location of consciousness impact on art practice? Was the coupling
of art and science a marriage of convenience or a matter of true love? Could a
new spirituality cause the divorce? Is there a nonlinear online aesthetic? Do survivors
of the digital art era have refugee status in the new world of technological
transmodalities? Is analogue anxiety a symptom of digital depression. Where can
we locate the technological sublime? If Additive Art is solidly object-oriented, can
3D printing become pure process? Will post-personal art be a consequence of the
post-biological? Will the autonomous robot develop an autonomous aesthetics?
http://www.detao-node.com/index.php/Index/news/id/7
 
Professor Mike Philips
Title: {algo}Rhythm and {data}Base – and other coded behaviours.
Synopsis:
{algo}Rhythm and {data}Base explores the impact of the invisible algorithms that manipulate our daily lives. From the timing of traffic lights to the sequencing of our social media feeds our cultural and physical behaviours have never been so scrutinised and composed. Beyond the influence of church and state, we happily share our most intimate details with global corporations, but more importantly, with and through computational systems – untouched by human hands. Our data and our behaviour are at the whim of systems fraught with technical, custodial, ethical and security issues.
Modern integrative, sub-symbolic, computational techniques (Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Self Organising Maps and Deep Learning Networks) are playing with us, as much as we play with them. ANNs offer a more holistic approach to capturing the intangible impacts of social and cultural activity, such as mood, feelings, emotions, sarcasm and innuendo. We are seeing the rise of analytical engines that can innovatively integrate subjective and objective data, considering its temporal and predictive aspects, variety and quality, to the extent that we will need to redesign our Voight-Kampff machines to tell them apart from us.
The 2010 Flash Crash, also known as the Crash of 2.45, marked a point in our evolution when we finally grasped that we had invented something that operated at the limits of human understanding. So fast, so mercurial and so brutal in its casual playfulness. The algorithms that wiped a trillion dollars of the stock market were just limbering up. We must learn to dance to the {algo}Rhythm and {data}Base being played by computational systems that know what we want and when we want it before we do. It may be difficult to keep in step…
 

DIFFRAZIONI MULTIMEDIA FESTIVAL
21-27/11/2016
Honoured to be invited to present at the Diffrazioni Festival
Special Guest Presentation by Mike Phillips: Quorum.
http://www.diffrazionifestival.com/ospitiguest-artists/
The festival is characterized by meetings and discussions on art and contemporaneity, from multimedia, to technology, from philosophical aspects to neuroscience, with major international personalities from leading academic and research institutions.
Diffrazioni – Florence Multimedia Festival is a project dedicated to contemporary art, to explore boundaries between technology and poetic expression, where new tools, new scenarios and deep inner emotions meet and combine. The project bases its strength on a system of synergies between institutions of higher artistic education, public administrations, young artists, cultural associations and non-profit organizations.

‘CREATIVE DATALABs’ – a collaboration between i-DAT and Plymouth School of Creative Arts (PSCA)

The Creative Data Labs are spaces for collaborations, where exciting ideas are created and tested, and collaborative prototypes are developed. The labs bring together a diverse range of people and interests, but with a common intention; to work together to create interventions (often driven by the data we all create), that change people’s perception of spaces, places and people (including themselves).

The Creative DataLabs consists of two labs; the first, ‘DataLab1: Making Ideas’ is all about generating and testing ideas, and the second, DataLab2: Building & Breaking all about realising these into working prototypes. These prototypes may become artworks in a gallery, intervention in the street or in a school, a commercial product, or just exist for the sake of playing. These fit into the ‘Making Weeks’ at the end of each half term.

The intention is that the prototypes from DataLab2 will be further developed beyond the labs through funding applications, partnership development and / or commercial sponsorship.
Prototyping workshops delivered in the IVT, i-DAT’s Digital Labs and the Red House.

Research Workshops

Lee Nutbean is exhibiting:
[su_divider top=”no” size=”1″ margin=”10″] ‘Faux pas’

at a museum (Bank Austria Kunstforum) in Vienna:
paraflows.X1 Identity
photos here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.10153951531913061&type=3
http://www.paraflows.at/index.php?id=653
Paraflows 2016: Ausstellung
www.paraflows.at
Ausstellung IDENTITY. Eröffnung 15. September 2016, 19 Uhr. Ausstellung von 16. September bis 2. Oktober 2016 Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien Freyung 8
and:
[su_divider top=”no” size=”1″ margin=”10″] ‘RACE*’

at AiOP (Art in Odd Places) in New York.
https://www.facebook.com/events/194642694301960/
http://race.artinoddplaces.org
http://race.artinoddplaces.org/artists/nutbean-lee/
AiOP RACE | OCTOBER 6 – 9 | Along 14th Street from Avenue …
An LED window installation that provocatively searches online social media conversations for the word “race” (human categorization).
[su_divider top=”no” size=”1″ margin=”10″] Lee’s recent exhibitions include:
Race* (Exhibition), ‘3459’, Flux Factory, Long Island City, New York, US
Faux pas (Performance) (Exhibition), ‘Does Live Art Have To Be Experienced Live?’, SOIL Gallery, Seattle, US
Faux pas (Performance), ‘Unnoticed Art Festival #2’, Nijmegen, NE
Xenomemory (Exhibition), ‘Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology’, Orlando, Florida, US
Faux pas (Intervention), ‘International Conference on Live Interfaces’, Sussex University, Brighton, UK
Faux pas (Exhibition), ‘Proximties’, Hamilton Artists Inc, Hamilton, Ontario, CA
Faux Pas (Exhibition), ‘DADA LIVES!’, UC Blue Ash Gallery, Cincinnati, US
Faux Pas (Exhibition), ‘FONLAD: Video and Performance Art Festival’, Coimbra, PT
Faux Pas (Performance), ‘Staging Realities’, FOOT16 (Festival of Original Theatre), Toronto, CA
 

Psalms:

Psalms is the Autonomous Wheelchair constructed by Guido Bugmann for Donald Rodney’s “Nine Night in Eldorado” at the South London Gallery, 1997. http://i-dat.org/psalms/

“…Our fear of automata is again harnessed in Psalms, as the empty wheelchair courses through its various trajectories on a sad and lonely journey of life, a journey to nowhere. Its movements repeat like an ever recurring memory, a memory of another life and another journey, that of Donald Rodney’s father…” (Exhibition brochure, Jane Bilton.)
 
Autoicon:

Autoicon is a dynamic internet work and CD-ROM created in 1999 that simulates both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the artist Donald Rodney who died from sickle-cell anaemia. http://i-dat.org/autoicon/

Coral Manton chairs Digital Conversations @ British Library: EThOS & Multimedia PhD Theses.

Thu 29 September 2016
18:00 – 20:00
The British Library Conference Centre
Bronte Room
96 Euston Rd
London
View Map
Booking link through Eventbrite!
The British Library’s Digital Research Team is co-hosting this event with EThOS the national database of UK doctoral theses.
Almost all theses are produced as text-based documents but universities are gradually allowing new forms of thesis to be submitted for the research degree, which might include research outputs such as websites, software, film, creative performance and databases. It would seem that while students often wish to include mutlimedia research outputs with their thesis, the technical, cultural and logistical challenges of doing so are rife.
This Digital Conversation event explores the issues faced by PhD researchers producing innovative work but struggling to get that work into the thesis format. Speakers will share their experiences working in cutting edge research practices.
We are delighted that Coral Manton is chairing the evening.
Coral Manton is PhD candidate, part of the i-DAT research and design collective at Plymouth University. Her research is funded by AHRC thorugh the 3D3 Consortium. Coral’s research brings together her professional background in museums and immersive digital arts practice. She is currently developing an immersive museum collection database, producing data visualisations from the collection in storage for enhanced curatorial and visitor understanding, working with Birmingham Museums Trust. Coral has been employed on a research placement by the British Library investigating multimedia and non-text PhD research outputs and how EThOS might develop to meet the challenge of evolving digital theses.
We have a wonderful panel of speakers, which include:
Craig Hamilton: Craig is an AHRC Midland3Cities-funded PhD research candidate at the School of Media,  Birmingham City University in the UK. His research looks at the experience of contemporary Popular Music listeners, with a particular focus on digital technologies. He is exploring this through the development of The Harkive Project, an online, crowd-sourced method of gathering data from people about the detail of their music listening experience.
Tara Copplestone: Tara is a PhD student at the universities of York and Aarhus. Her research into “archaeogaming” interrogates how creating and communicating through the video-game media form might provide novel methods of constructing arguments about archaeology. Part of her thesis is being produced as a video-game so that the arguments can be played rather than read, and the construction behind them interrogated within the framework of the video-game medium itself. Her research into archaeology sits at the intersection of code, art and narrative and has a particular focus on challenging how academic and creative practices can interpolate with each other through the video-game medium.
Imogen Lesser: Imogen is a PhD candidate at the University of Kent. Imogen’s doctoral research examines Mervyn Peake’s literary language in The Gormenghast Trilogy as a potential spatial design tool. She has created a series of digital and hand-drawn architectural drawings and plaster cast models of a selected number of Peake’s spaces as an integral aspect of her research. This work beyond the written thesis enables Peake’s spaces to be analysed as architecture in potentia and so provides a recognisable architectural foundation from which the analysis of space and language can take place.
Schedule
18.00 Drinks & nibbles
18:15 Welcome by the Digital Research team
18.20 Introduction to multimedia research & EThOS by Coral Manton
18.30 Panel discussion
19.15 Pause for thought and refill glasses
19.25 Open discussion & questions
19:50 Closing remarks 
20.00 Departure
Attendance is free but demand is high and places are strictly limited.
Book your ticket now to avoid disappointment.
#bldigital
British Library Digital Scholarship blog