Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2011

Re-thinking methods for Museums, Galleries and Institutions to Archive their most vital images and documents as resized hard copy ink jet artefacts to increase likelihood of their survival into the 23rd Century in a format that is easy and inexpensive to achieve.

Museums and galleries have in recent years spent considerable time and effort in digitisation projects, yet the software resources available to fully explore their collections are still largely unsatisfactory. In a joint project between the new media company Deep Visuals, the Scott Polar Research Institute, and Anglia Ruskin University we are developing a new browsing system aimed at enabling museum visitors to experience more fully the museum's digital assets beyond the exhibited artefacts.

Extensive research in colour naming has been more focused on a small number of consensual colour categories than towards the development of more subtle colour identifications (Gage 1993, Berlin & Kay 1969) but how can we communicate "basic" and more "delicate" colour names within and between different cultures in an agreeable way?

In their pioneering paper "The Creative Process Where the Artist is Amplified or Superseded by the Computer" (1973) Cornock and Edmonds describe a model for the classification of artworks according to their systemic behaviour. In this presentation I revisit this model, discuss its subsequent development (Edmonds, Turner & Candy, 2004) and present an extension to it that incorporates my own research into the use of the theory of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1987) as basis for an expanded description of the 'interactive art system'.

Having been granted access to the archive and to objects that are seldom seen outside their acid free boxes, this presentation explores ways in which phenomenological approaches to the process of filming and editing can capture the experience of perception as a springboard for the creative impetus.

Given the state of modern technical applications and the advance of the game industry, it is only a matter of time until interactive application will completely control all levels of entertainment and mass media. Also social interactions in general are subject to change. Usually these changes are only considered within in the digital context of the internet. Nevertheless the basic human need for direct communication and interaction remain.

With the help of an experimental artistic approach and in reference to positions from semiotics and linguistics, I investigate under which conditions visualisations are experienced as interesting and charming. After extensive research in the semiotic fundamentals of the visualisation of theoretical texts (Reichl, 2008; Reichl, 2009), this research project is concerned with what makes visualisations of theoretical concepts interesting and enjoyable. A special focus lies in this context on the designs of visual metaphors.

The objective of this text is to analyze the awarded artwork Sensitive Rose as a model to discuss and reflect about the potentialities of using mobile tags as tools for augmented reality and cross-media.

Dance is increasingly a site of research for experts within the discipline and beyond. With the development of digital technologies, artists and researchers are exploring ways to develop new dance events, to engage with audiences and in doing so, to shed more light on the art form itself whilst expanding its boundaries and limitations. Building on these developments the presentation will share problems and challenges faced when motion capture technology tries to capture dance movement which emerges through somatic movement practices, in particular, an established practice, Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT).

Visual communicators, authors, publishers and their audiences are now feeling the cultural and economic effects of technological convergence on the transmission and reception of ideas. In January 2011 Amazon.com claimed to be selling more Kindle ebooks than traditional paperbacks in the USA. This suggests a shift in reading habits towards a more blended transmedia experience and a shift in buying habits away from printed publications.

Emmanouil Kanellos and Anastasios Maragiannis, PhD researchers, are co-founders of TERASlab; an online virtual project that demonstrates how the amalgamation of virtual typography and visual sound, influences the process of design communication, within creative media practices. One of the key roles of typography is to visually communicate spoken language. In this project letterforms are employed as visual elements to represent the sounds. The sounds that are utilized for the experimental projects are mainly real world recordings, electro-acoustic or vocal.

This paper looks at the possibilities of re-engaging with imagery and symbolism from earlier cultures through the medium of 3D digital environments. It examines three of the author's digital artworks - Oculus, Lux Nova and Music of the Spheres - as vehicles for this process, and the means by which this engagement with the past can also generate new ideas within the area of art and technology. The recreation of an architectural sense of space and position is of particular importance, as is the development of particular approach to 3D software.

Birdsong for Prisoners explores the ways in which we interpret sound, recalling memories of chords and phrases that trigger new stories and challenge our perception of a world where sound is only available with accompanying still and moving images. Created from a variety of sources including birdsong, improvised jazz and the creative use of piezo mics to record the rarely heard sounds of the human smile, Birdsong for Prisoners presents an opportunity to explore how listeners react to, and interpret, an original composition that places sound at the centre of an audience response.

In recent years, the number of data collections that are publicly available via the Internet has dramatically increased. Web based semantic databases like Wikipedia derivate DbPedia extend the functionality of Wikipedia by allowing semantic annotations to the information that is usually in form of free text. Since these data collections also cover broad topics related to the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain, they might be well suited to serve as data sources for Cultural Information Systems. Besides the mentioned community based knowledge bases, a number of dedicated Web galleries, for example the Web Gallery of Art (WGA), offer huge digital collections of artworks and relevant metadata. Moreover, renowned institutions like the Getty Foundation provide rich vocabularies of CH related terms that are rather aimed at professional users. We believe that a combination of such different sources might provide interesting insights that would not be available when using each source alone. We therefore propose a system that combines these sources and displays them by using methods from Information Visualisation. We apply the metaphor of 3D Information Landscapes, based on a graph visualisation showing artists and their artworks as nodes and their mutual relationships such as teacher/student, parent/child etc. as edges. The resulting network is drawn in chronological order, thus allowing users to explore art history in a new way.

This paper looks at the online presence of the exhibition 'Things' by artist Keith Wilson that took place at Wellcome Collection in October 2010. It examines the process by which objects were temporarily acquired from members of the public for an exhibition, and the way in which those images were digitised and managed to form the online element of the exhibition, using the photo sharing website Flickr. It looks at the role of student volunteers and their reaction to the use of technology, as well as the reactions of the public to the use of images online to represent their donated objects, and some alternatives to the conventional 'object' photography that museums employ. It draws the conclusion that images, and digital images in particular, form an increasingly important part of the museum paradigm at all levels.

When the eccentric and reclusive connoisseur William Beckford (1760-1844), having exhausted the largest inherited fortune in England, finally abandoned his doomed architectural extravaganza at Fonthill Abbey, he retired to Bath. His enthusiasm for tower-building soon revived, and with the help of his trusted gardener Vincent and an able young architect Henry Goodrich he set about making a linear landscape garden stretching from his home in Lansdown Crescent to the hilltop 100m above. Though the Crescent house he lived in, and the tower he built on the hill, survive with little change, everything in between is now lost beneath more recent development.

This practice-led research project seeks to address the use of New Media in contemporary artistic productions in the field of Performance Art in relation to the current "consumption" of Media in everyday life contexts. The research will be carried out through the analysis of works and the practical exercise of performances that include pre-recorded image and / or live image, as well as video performances, covering theoretical aspects of Media and Visual Culture, in a critical study supported by ideas from existing discourses on the common "language" and "gestures" that are being produced by the current consumption and contact with the Media. The project will allow establishing points of contact between contemporary social and cultural perspectives on image and sound, and performative notions of space and time, considering the latter as two formally interrelated poles where issues of visuality, aurality, spectatorship, site-specificity and kinaesthetic qualities lay upon.

Mobile devices have become an integral part of 21st century lifestyle. From social networking and business to day-to-day scheduling and multimedia applications, smartphones and other portable handsets are now the go-to devices for interaction in the digital world. Currently, mobile devices typically utilise direct user interfaces such as touch screens, where interactions are performed directly by controlling graphical elements or controls on the interface. This project looks to bring device interaction out of the virtual world and into the physical world. With a 'free-gesture' approach, portable applications can break away from the virtual world, enabling the mobile platform to be harnessed as a physical augmented interface for musical performance, education, medical research and beyond.

The paper presents an on-going process to digitally reconstruct the Imperial Gates of the old Romanian orthodox churches scattered on a large geographical area in Transylvania. Due to the locations of the churches and to the indestructible character of the iconostasis, the 3D scanning had to be contact-free. The actual chosen method is a low cost method, based upon free software that allows scanning of three-dimensional objects and does not rely on specific hardware. The intended final result is to provide a collection of 3D models of the Imperial Gates that could be further integrated in other projects of the Art and Design University and of the Faculty of Orthodox Theology, "Babe? Bolyai" University, from Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

In this paper, we propose visualization for mass information in the social network with a holistic view, which focused on representing the effect of user communication. With the Rapid Expansion of social network, it is necessary to provide a holistic view to the users and researchers to understand the effect of information communicated in the network. The social network users will be visualized in 3-dimension space, with 2-dimension graph layouts delivering various characteristic of the network. The layout is mainly based on user's role in the network, but not the relationship of users in the traditional way. By visualizing the disseminating and stop of information flow among users, we can distinguish users by their effect and contribution in communication among the network. The visualization combines technology, content and expression. We can then study the social network by the performance of the network structure situation and information flow.