Conflict / Resolution

Harvestworks x Flux Factory

Oct 16, 2022

Nolan Park - Nolan Park - Building 10A

An event focus­ing on sound art and new media works-in-progress from the Flux Fac­to­ry com­mu­ni­ty. Atten­dees will con­sid­er how being part of a group of social­ly engaged artists work­ing as a col­lec­tive con­tributes to the devel­op­ment of cre­ative tech­nol­o­gy practices.

Co-pre­sent­ed by Har­vest­works and Flux Factory. 

FEA­TUR­ING
Roopa Vasude­van: ​“Slow Response is an ongo­ing series in which I labo­ri­ous­ly attempt to ren­der work­ing quick response (QR) codes through a vari­ety of mate­ri­als, meth­ods, and con­fig­u­ra­tions. In each code, I attempt to re-cre­ate a process that is typ­i­cal­ly done with­in mil­lisec­onds by com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tems; the tech­niques I use take much, much longer than that. Unlike com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed codes — and maybe con­trary to the intent of the for­mat — the QR codes I cre­ate are fick­le, incon­sis­tent and do not always scan. They also often con­tain tech­ni­cal imper­fec­tions due to dis­trac­tions, miscounting/​miscalculating, and oth­er errors that can only be described as human. The series, as a whole, address­es the ubiq­ui­ty of these dig­i­tal arti­facts that nev­er quite seem to fit with­in every­day life or appeal to our aes­thet­ic stan­dards, yet have so quick­ly engen­dered auto­mat­ic respons­es and expec­ta­tions from those who reg­u­lar­ly use mobile devices.”

Dario Mohr: ​“This is a record­ed con­ver­sa­tion regard­ing the spir­i­tu­al prac­tices of West Africa that I had with broth­ers from Nige­ria that I trav­eled across West Africa with. This took place dur­ing a per­son­al­ized tour with Ucomeafrik tour com­pa­ny. It was an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion I had as a First Gen­er­a­tion Grena­di­an, U.S. cit­i­zen, vis­it­ing West Africa (Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nige­ria) to learn about my Akan and Ga trib­al ances­try. I would con­sid­er myself agnos­tic with pan­the­ist beliefs, and they (Con­fi­dence and Evans) prac­tice a ver­sion of Chris­tian­i­ty with some Vodun beliefs. I strug­gled to find videos, pod­casts and arti­cles online answer­ing the ques­tions that I had regard­ing ances­tral West African spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and found this to be an impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion. My hopes are that it answers some ques­tions and that peo­ple of African descent may have but don’t have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to ask about. I was blessed to have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet these men and hope that it expands other’s under­stand­ing of West African spir­i­tu­al practices.”

Lee Tus­man: ​“Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic I have been cre­at­ing exper­i­men­tal inter­ac­tive auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sto­ries pre­sent­ed with­in game engines, web­sites or com­put­er oper­at­ing sys­tems. These works use my own draw­ings, audio record­ings and writ­ing, stitched togeth­er with cus­tom soft­ware I write that makes them ​‘playable’ in a man­ner sim­i­lar to a video game in an attempt to cre­ate new forms of poe­sis and per­son­al nar­ra­tive. Despite my empha­sis on writ­ing code, my back­ground in zine­mak­ing, col­lage and elec­tron­ic music pro­duc­tion dri­ve the aes­thet­ic in ways that feel more behold­en to DIY arts cul­tures than the cur­rent crop of Machine Learn­ing-dri­ven art­works. In my cur­rent body of work I am design­ing autonomous gen­er­a­tive sys­tems to present abstract nar­ra­tives, dream diaries, and new unfold­ing sim­u­la­tions. In these works, a sto­ry is pre­sent­ed non-lin­ear­ly. They appear as abstract ani­mat­ed sto­ries where even I the cre­ator are uncer­tain what may hap­pen next. There is a ten­sion in these two dif­fer­ent ways of work­ing between find­ing new and sur­pris­ing nar­ra­tives and the ​‘authen­tic’ and per­son­al, and a risk of algo­rithms to pro­duce ​‘same­ness’ that per­me­ates most AI-dri­ven artworks.”

Amelia Marzec: ​“All That Is Seen And Unseen exam­ines the rela­tion­ship of queer­ness and Catholi­cism with­in the Central/​Eastern Euro­pean dias­po­ra. It includes a series of sculp­tures based on road­side shrines, such that one would find in lim­i­nal spaces where peo­ple need to feel pro­tect­ed, like at the edge of a marsh. Iron­i­cal­ly, these are often sit­u­at­ed in rur­al areas of Poland that are present-day LGBT-free zones. The sculp­tures con­tain an elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem which broad­casts sto­ries col­lect­ed from the com­mu­ni­ty. I also include soft­ware for pro­jec­tion map­ping, where imagery based on tra­di­tion­al Slav­ic paper­cut­ting tech­niques is gen­er­at­ed and pro­ject­ed onto church­es. The images depict wom­en’s bod­ies, weapons, and pre-Chris­t­ian symbols.”

Hei­di Neil­son: ​“Remote Mag­ne­tome­ter is a qua­si-repli­ca of an actu­al mag­ne­tome­ter sci­en­tif­ic instru­ment on the NOAA-NASA geo­sta­tion­ary weath­er satel­lite GOES-16. Remote Mag­ne­tome­ter is in a sense paired with the actu­al mag­ne­tome­ter instru­ment in near-real time, express­ing here on earth the data col­lect­ed by the satel­lite instru­ment in orbit.The satel­lites we place in Earth­’s orbit are in essence our robot avatars — we expe­ri­ence alien, dead­ly, dis­tant orbital space through their sen­sor-based eyes, ears, and skin. This project is intend­ed to con­vey the real­i­ty and activ­i­ty of a par­tic­u­lar sen­sor instru­ment aboard an oper­a­tional satel­lite to have a way of direct­ly sens­ing-by-proxy what it detects: the ener­gy of the Sun and its inter­ac­tion with the Earth’s pro­tec­tive mag­ne­tos­phere. The project mis­sion is to inspire an appre­ci­a­tion for infra­struc­ture sys­tems we rely on and the pro­tec­tive nature of Earth as a whole for life.”