"Fix My Code – Presentation of the e-book"
Tuesday, March 23, 2021 / 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Cornelia Sollfrank, artwarez, Aarhus University, cornelia[at]artwarez[dot]org
Winnie Soon, artwarez, Aarhus University, wsoon[at]cc.au[dot]dk

Two artist researchers from different generations, different cultural backgrounds and different skill sets engage in a dialogue about code as material, affective and other infrastructures, the need for collaboration, the productive side of dysfunctionality and gender aspects of technopolitics. The good thing, they do not just talk but actually also work together on this project: net.art generator [net.art-generator.com]. The net.art generator (nag) is a computer program that interactively collects and recombined material from the internet to create collages. The easy-to-use program requires the user to enter a title which then functions as the search term, and to enter a name as author. The resulting images are stored online in an archive from where recent results can be downloaded. Conceived by Cornelia Sollfrank in 1998, the nag has created endless texts, websites, and images, and in parallel also generated a number of discourses – most notable in the context of authorship, copyright, and open source, which is why the piece has also been conceptualized as a “conceptual tool” or a “thinking tool.” Eventually, after a change in policy (Google) in 2015, the nag could no longer generate new images. Therefore, Cornelia reached out to artist-coder Winnie Soon to collaborate on fixing the broken code. As both combine their artistic practice with a research perspective, the collaboration expanded beyond solving the technical problem to a discussion about broader cultural and techno-political issues. The process of troubleshooting, discussing, decision-making, and amending that followed produced a new discourse, which the two artist-researchers decided to be the next episode in the nag narrative and to serve as the basis for a new publication: Fix My Code.

Demonstration session is dedicated to presentations and discussions with the authors. Demonstrated works will be accessible online throughout the conference.
 

"Materialism of Things"
Tuesday, March 23, 2021 / 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Franziska Andrea Seehausen, ELISAVA University School of Design and Engineering & ISEC Lisboa Polytechnic, hello[at]franziseehausen[dot]de

The project thesis "Materialism of Things" is a study of material behaviour, exploring its importance for future interface design and technology. At current, Interaction Designers face various challenges when designing human-centred interfaces, making available technology navigable and intuitive for the human. Material Designers in turn hold tremendous influence on society regarding sustainability and more within product design. Both fields strongly influence the functionality, perception and lifespan of an object when creating or choosing a material for a design. Through a material-driven approach that merges both fields we can examine existing electronic devices and their challenges in regards to sustainability and perception and explore “simpler” material-driven solutions. The project thesis Materialism of Things (MoT), to be understood as an enhancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), is a new philosophical and theoretical outlook. It suggests that any simple and renewable material can be smart, responding to its environment depending on how it is understood, designed and how one interacts with it. It builds on latest activities and applications of smart and active materials and combines it with the theoretical principles of the philosophical discourse New Materialism, which states that material has agency and is intrinsically behaving and vital (Barad, 2003). Through the development of the applied design project Paper Gestures, that was developed in the context of the Master in Design through New Materials (ELISAVA), the principles of the approach are introduced and exemplified. Paper Gestures is a series of three responsive interfaces made out of paper that react to, and intra-act with, human behaviour and their direct environment. By doing so we can transform the ancient, previously passive and low-tech material into a dynamic, active and responding medium, serving as an example for material-driven interaction design.

Demonstration session is dedicated to presentations and discussions with the authors. Demonstrated works will be accessible online throughout the conference.

"Colonization Mechanism: Autogenerative Design Ecologies"
Tuesday, March 23, 2021 / 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Yota Passia, Panagiotis Roupas, School of Architecture, NTUAthens, Greece, studioentropia[at]gmail[dot]com

Colonization Mechanism is a decision-making and planning-support tool for the transition of former lignite mining areas to urban agroecosystems. The programming strategy actively connects local communities - the socioeconomic environment, its actors and processes - with the physical environment - its developmental patterns and life cycles. Modeling them into an ecosystemic continuum generates more resilient, dynamic and adaptive urban agroecosystems from planning to management to construction. A machine-learning algorithm recursively selects, allocates and shapes the cropping system while at the same time constantly retrofitting its communication and transport network. Colonization Mechanism’s innovation lies in the monitoring, visualizing and utilizing the environment’s productive dynamics, pointing both to the local communities (biotic) and the physical environment (abiotic). By simulating environmental, economic and social dynamics in real-time, the mechanism algorithmically generates the optimal spatial and material organizations of urban agroecosystems. Colonization Mechanism explains how and why space changes while visualising the spatio-temporal dynamisms that produce social relations and design ecologies. http://studioentropia.com/competitions/colonisation-mechanism/

Demonstration session is dedicated to presentations and discussions with the authors. Demonstrated works will be accessible online throughout the conference.

"NOWARE"
Tuesday, March 23, 2021 / 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Malin Kuht, Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany, malin[at]kuht[dot]de

NOWARE as Artwork lives online and displays the poetic result of artistic research in the field of material(ist) informatics. NOWARE explores the relationship between software and hardware. Within the work the question, if software knows how hardware looks like? is raised and followed. The research was conducted with machine learning tools in order to question if they could know about their own material conditions, which eventually consist of hardware components. AI Image generators were used to find images to firstly represent the limits of machine learning epistemology and secondly to further destabilise the imagined binary between software and hardware. From their perspective one can not live without the other. Their entanglement is compared to relationship of body and mind. The text is written from the position of the software, which allows for speculative fiction and creates a different subject(-ive) point of view. This is related to its existence in the digital and networked realm. This is a way to think about the actual connections our devices are making, while also being bound to the physical location of the networked sphere.This shift enables a setting, which invites viewer to reflect on their habits and experience, while have to scroll on their device to engage with the work. malinkuht.com

Demonstration session is dedicated to presentations and discussions with the authors. Demonstrated works will be accessible online throughout the conference.
 

"Hacking concrete"
Wednesday, March 24, 2021 / 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Loren Britton, Isabel Paehr, MELT, Germany, mail[at]meltionary[dot]com

For New Materialist Informatics we propose to make a meltry on "hacking concrete" that sits at the intersection of crip technoscience and material instability. In the crip technoscience manifesto, access is defined as both related to attack and contact. Instead of the "integration" of disabled body-minds into normative space, Hamraie and Fritsch (2019) point to the various ways in which disabled makers hack or make otherwise trans*feminist presents. We are picking up the technofeminist practice of hacking by intervening in technosolutionism (Morozov 2013), by resisting the consolidation of worldmakings (Muñoz 1999, 195) that don't suit us. When making concrete, a powder is mixed with water and poured into structures in which it hardens into curbs, sidewalks, stairs, walls, streets and foundations. We will work with the moment of formlessness before the hardening to discover access potentials within something that ontologically, metaphorically and physically is not yet stable. By keeping concrete "open" by adding more water, and churning/stirring, we will uphold the moments of reformation and keep different pathways available that resist hardening on a material level. "Hacking concrete" will be shared as images, .gifs, videos and language experiments on our website. Crip technoscience works with frictional ways of making access in socio-technical worlds. By studying friction as heat, we are researching how to pursue softness towards forming differently and making access practices that continuously churn. This speculative design project throws a hot critique towards ableist structures and melts assumptions of stability.

Demonstration session is dedicated to presentations and discussions with the authors. Demonstrated works will be accessible online throughout the conference.

"Stones that calculate"
Wednesday, March 24, 2021 / 7:00pm - 8:00pm
Paul Heinicker, University of Potsdam, paul-heinicker[at]online[dot]de
Jonas Parnow, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

Information technologies consist of minerals, of metals, and other natural materials. Their origin is thus the stone and they are therefore fundamentally geological. We process stones and put them under electricity to comprehend the world and rock-hard realities around us. Stones that calculate are at the center of the problem-solving strategies of the complex issues of the present. By stones that calculate, we mean the assemblage of all information processing devices or infrastructures and their socio-political impact on our automated society. From smartphones, Internet cables to data centers, we look at the material complexity, cycles and dependencies it takes to provide the enormous data and energy resources needed for our daily Netflix consumption, climate models and algorithmic governance. We propose the category of stoniness to make the connections between ecology, power and information technology visible. In order to structure the extended notion of stones, we developed an appealing online collection of resources that maps academic as well as artistic perspectives which reflect digital conditions within materialist discourses. Under the label of post-digital materiality, we combine historical classifications, critical analyses and speculative interventions from both established voices as well as young researchers. In detail, we have examined the research field on the basis of three topics from which we derived sixteen perspectives. The topics will therefore propose three material dimensions, we ought to be relevant but are aware do not cover all perspectives. We begin with the actual material conditions of digital infrastructures asking what is a stone? We then scale up to power and geopolitical questions of the digital asking where is the stone? In the last step, we ask for moments of corporeality in the seemingly dematerialized digital space under the theme of who holds the stone? https://stones.computer