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ZHANG Ga is an internationally recognized media art curator. He is Distinguished Professor at China Central Academy of Fine Arts. He has also had appointments as Consulting Curator of Media Art at the National Art Museum of China, and Senior Researcher at the Media + Design Lab of EPFL | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Associate Professor of Media Art at Parsons The New School for Design and was a Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab and a Visiting Scholar at the Art and Art History Department of Stanford University, currently also a Senior Fellow at University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his numerous curatorial works, widely acclaimed projects include as Artistic Director and Curator Synthetic Times: Media Art China 2008, a Beijing Olympics Cultural Project, Translife: International Triennial of New Media Art 2011 and thingworld: International Triennial of New Media Art 2014, all organized by the National Art Museum of China. These large-scale exhibitions critically investigated and examined global media art trends, generated intellectual discourses about art, technology and culture, and have received wide acclaim including the New York Times, China Daily, Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, and The Art Newspaper, among others.

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Composing computer music for large numbers of speakers is a daunting process, but it is becoming increasingly practicable. This paper argues for increased attention to the possibilities for this mode of computer music on the part of both creative artists and institutions that support advanced aesthetic research. We first consider the large role that timbre composition has played in computer music, and posit that this research direction may be showing signs of diminishing returns. We next propose spatial computer music for large numbers of speakers as a relatively unexplored area with significant potential, considering reasons for the relative preponderance of timbre composition over spatial composition. We present a case study of a computer music composition that focuses on the orchestration of spatial effects. Finally we propose some steps to be taken in order to promote exploration of the full potential of spatial computer music.

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Research Institute for Electronic Science, Hokkaido University - After receiving a Ph.D. in engineering, Masashi Nakatani is pursuing the way how sense of touch can serve our emotional reality. He severs as the founder of TECHTILE, the TECHnology based tacTILE design. Currently he works on basic study on touch neuroscience and prevailing haptic content in education for understanding human's ability to realize the world.

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Electronic technology has liberated musical time and changed musical aesthetics. In the past, musical time was considered as a linear medium that was subdivided according to ratios and intervals of a more-or-less steady meter. However, the possibilities of envelope control and the creation of liquid or cloud-like sound morphologies suggests a view of rhythm not as a fixed set of intervals on a time grid, but rather as a continuously flowing, undulating, and malleable temporal substrate upon which events can be scattered, sprinkled, sprayed, scrambled, or stirred (scrubbed) at will. In this view, composition is not a matter of filling or dividing time, but rather of generating time. The core of this paper introduces aspects of rhythmic discourse that appear in my electronic music. These include: the design of phrases and figures, exploring a particle-based rhythmic discourse, deploying polyrhythmic processes, the shaping of streams and clouds, using fields of attraction and repulsion, creating pulsation and pitched tones by particle replication, using reverberant space as a cadence, contrasting ostinato and intermittency, using echoes as rhythmic elements, and composing with tape echo feedback. The lecture is accompanied by sound examples.

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Momeni will discuss several current projects at the intersection of performance art, design and engineering. These projects include a human-robot collaborative theatrical performance based on Ferdowsi's epic poem Shahnameh, a participatory public projection work about disease and healthcare, a investigation of the sounds of the gut as indicators for activities in the mind, and a mobile augmented reality application for creative engagement with works of art in museums and galleries.

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In the domain of large-scale visualization instruments, Hybrid Reality Environments (HREs) are a recent innovation that combines the best-in-class capabilities of immersive environments, with the best-in-class capabilities of ultra-high-resolution display walls. Co-located research groups in HREs tend to work on a variety of tasks during a research session (sometimes in parallel), and these tasks require 2D data views, 3D views, linking between them and the ability to bring in (or hide) data quickly as needed. Addressing these needs requires a matching software infrastructure that fully leverages the technological affordances offered by these new instruments. I detail the requirements of such infrastructure and outline the model of an operating system for Hybrid Reality Environments: I present an implementation of core components of this model, called Omegalib. Omegalib is designed to support dynamic reconfigurability of the display environment: areas of the display can be interactively allocated to 2D or 3D workspaces as needed.

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"Das verflixte 7te Jahr"
It has now been 7 years since the foundation of hackteria.org envisioning an idea to build a large knowledge base of instructions for artists, (bio-)hackers, educators and activists to work creatively with living media and contemporary life sciences. Through our acitivities a wide range of playful workshops have been developed, regular gatherings for collaboration and a global network "community of practice" established, with a common enthusiasm on sharing of knowledge, art/science collaboration and an embracing of an "amateur" and do-it-yourself approach to go beyond and disciplinary thinking. How can we apply the open source culture to modern biotechnological practices?
What kind of collaborative methodologies have we been developing to work together (DIWO, Do-It-With-Others) in a radically transdisciplinary way?
How does access to DIY and open source laboratory equipment change the way we will do sciene in the future?

During my talk I will give an overview of various projects that have been developed within the growing international hackteria network, ranging from building temporary DIWO labs in the djungles of Indonesia to open source hardware designed for manufacturing, from developing new bio-commons governance models in synthetic biology to hunting rabbits in Helsinki.

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This seminar investigates a range of Australian Research Council funded projects recently exhibited at venues such as the Sydney Film Festival, ISEA and Chronus Shanghai. Realized through interdisciplinary collaborative research, involving the domains of media aesthetics, interactive narrative and machine learning, these projects create integrated 360-degree 3D immersive environments in which the user interacts with an intelligent digital world. Through its discussion of the aesthetics and AI architecture underpinning these environments, the paper enters into an explanation of what is termed ‘parallel’ aesthetics, a function of the mutually interdependent relationship between human users and autonomous machine images and characters. Understanding interaction as a parallel aesthetic or co-evolutionary narrative, the paper explores parallel aesthetics and co-evolutionary narrative as a dynamic two-way process between human and machine intelligence.

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Curator & Producer; Lecturer & Publisher; Author & Editor; occasional exhibitions, installations and performances. He has been running the audio-visual label Touch for 30 years and in this period has acquired much experience and information on disseminating cultural sounds to a wider audience. Since 1982: Touch, with Jon Wozencroft [senior lecturer in the Department of Communication & Design at the Royal College of Art, London].

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Born in 1945, Clarence Barlow obtained a science degree at Calcutta University in 1965 and a pianist diploma from Trinity College of Music London the same year. He studied acoustic and electronic composition from 1968-73 at Cologne Music University as well as sonology from 1971-72 at Utrecht University. His use of a computer as an algorithmic music tool dates from 1971. He initiated and in 1986 co-founded GIMIK: Initiative Music and Informatics Cologne, chairing it for thirteen years. He was in charge of computer music from 1982-1994 at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music and from 1984-2005 at Cologne Music University. In 1988 he was Director of Music of the XIVth International Computer Music Conference, held that year in Cologne. From 1990-94 he was Artistic Director of the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where from 1994-2006 he was Professor of Composition and Sonology. At UCSB he functions as professor at the Music Department (as Corwin Endowed Chair and Head of Composition), Media Arts and Technology and the College of Creative Studies. His interests are the algorithmic composition of instrumental, electronic and computer music, music software development as well as interdisciplinary activities e.g. between music and language and the visual.

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music.ucsb.edu/people/clarence-barlow

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Kristin Grace Erickson performs, composes and records under the name Kevin Blechdom and in her band Blectum from Blechdom. She received her Doctorate of Musical Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts and both her B.A. and M.F.A. degrees in electronic music from Mills College. Kristin is the Technical Coordinator for the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.