We had the pleasure to take part of the xCoAx conference again this year. Before the conference we had time to meet Kate Downie who we learned to know during the Red Gate Gallery residency in Beijing in 2011. Kate and her partner Michael hosted us in Edinburgh for a great weekend over the sun solstice. The midsummer eve we celebrated at a beach grilling and building fire sculptures of cardboard. We were not the only ones celebrating the longest day of the year, we also witnessed (possibly) 3 druids engaging in a mystical celebration on Arthur’s Seat a hill in Edinburgh. We also had time to visit the old town, Kate’s studio and see the huge Amorphophallus titanum flower (means miss shaped penis in Latin) at the Royal Botanic garden.
EDINBURGH
After the extended weekend in Edinburgh we got to Glasgow and had a couple of sunny days time to orientate us in the city. Among other things we visited Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum where Glasgow International Exhibition was organized in 1888 and 1901 when the art gallery and museum was opened. The xCoAx conference was organized in the CCA (Centre for Contemporary Arts) and The Art School (the image in which the old part is renovated due to a fire last year). Just some days prior to our conference there was a ACM conference on Creativity and Cognition, so we took a look at their exhibition as well in the City Collage and there we found a familiar project: an iteration of Lucid Peninsula by FoAM and Time’s Up.
GLASGOW
24th of June was the opening of the xCoAx conference and the Art exhibition where we were exhibiting our new work Let’s Talk Business. (The last image is the collection of spam exhibited in the local Tesco)
Following is a selection of other projects and artworks hosted in the exhibition:
Image 1: Raul Pinto, Paul Atkinson, Joaquim Vieira & Miguel Carvalhais:
Growing Objects: Testing with biological generative systems
Image 2-3: Alena Mésarošová & Ricardo Climent:
AR/VR_Putney 1.0 Interactive media composition as the language and grammar for Extended Realities
Image 4: Mathias Müller, Thomas Gründer & Rainer Groh:
Data Exploration with Physical Metaphors using Elastic Displays
Image 3: Brad Tober:
Colorigins: Algorithmically Transforming Subtractive Color Theory Pedagogy
During 25th and 26th of June we had two intensive days with paper talks, artist presentations, performances and the whole amazing two days ended with a Algorave.
The conference was opened by our the conference chair the local organizer Alison Clifford from University of the West of Scotland (img 1) Andreas was presenting his paper (‘Let’s talk business’ – Narratives used in email and phone scams
, img 5&6) in the first session together with Alessandro Ludovico (Printed radicality, img 2), Gabriella Arrigoni & Tom Schofield (Understanding artistic prototypes between activism and research, img 4) Alessio Chierico (Interpretation, representation, material properties: three arguments about aesthetic qualities of computational media img 3). Among other interesting papers where also:
Mathias Müller, Thomas Gründer & Rainer Groh: Data Exploration with Physical Metaphors using Elastic Displays (img 8)
Hanna K. Schraffenberger & Edwin van der Heide: Sonically Tangible Objects (img 9)
Christian Faubel: ZoOHPraxiscope, turning the overhead projector into a cinematographic device (img 10)
Sofia Romualdo: Videogame Art and the Legitimation of Videogames by the Art World (img 11)
William Latham (img 12) performed the keynote speak and talked about his body of work in his presentation titled “Evolution Art and Computers Now”.
PRESENTATIONS
PERFORMANCES
Included among others:
Thor Magnusson & Pete Furniss:Fermata: Live Coding Performance, (image 1)
Ricardo Climent & Mark Pilkington: Putney for game-audio (image 2)
Christoph Theiler, Renate Pittroff: Fluid Control (image 3)
ALGORAVE
And last but not least the performers at the Algorave: Christian Faubel, Martin Zeilinger, Alex McLean, Shelly Knotts and Sam Aaron.
