As 2018 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular machines, intricate tools and mesmerising performances and installations to the new mediums for artistic enquiry – so many great new projects have been added to the CAN archive! With your help we selected some favourites.
Created at ECAL during a one week workshop led by Thibault Brevet, The Center for Counter-Productive Robotics is a collection of experiments where a robot was programmed to perform counter-productive tasks, with intention to develop a more human-centric approach to robotics.
Created by Jessica In, Machinic Doodles is a live, interactive drawing installation that facilitates collaboration between a human and a robot named NORAA – a machine that is learning how to draw. The work explores how we communicate ideas through the strokes of a drawing, and how might a machine also be taught to draw through learning, instead of via explicit instruction
Created by Marta Revuelta, AI Facial Profiling, Levels of Paranoia is a project exploring the potential and implication of AI technologies by proposing a machine that recognises the ability of an individual to handle firearms and predicts their potential to cause harm from a biometric analysis of their face.
Created bu Jonghong Park at the University of the Arts Bremen (Digital Media Program), the installation ‘bit’ represents a natural random process based on the principle of a Markov chain.
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Created by Madeline Gannon for the 2018 Annual Meeting of New Champions at the The World Economic Forum, in Tianjin, China, Manus is a set of ten industrial robots that are programmed to behave like a pack of animals.
Questioning our notions of wellbeing to develop innovative tools in the intersection of medical and social sciences, Giulia Tomasello investigates the potential of biotechnology and living materials, proposing a biological and sustainable alternative for electronic textiles and more.
Created by Ralf Baecker, Putting The Pieces Back Together Again is an artistic investigation and meditation about complex systems and scientific methodology. Consisting of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a two dimensional grid, each motor in the installation moves in a random direction, sometimes intersecting and reversing direction, producing emergent constellations and behaviours.
Created by André Andrade at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), 300000 km/s is a data visualisation project to highlight the consequential delay in communication in the probable future (interplanatory) expansion of the territory of Man.
“Shanshui-DaDA” is an interactive installation based on artificial intelligence. When participants scribble lines and sketch the landscape, the AI will help to create a Chinese Shanshui painting. “Shanshui-DaDA” is trained with “CycleGAN” and wrapped with a web-based interface, where participants can sketch on and later see the real-time generated paintings. If the participant sketches the…
Created by Adrien Kaeser at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Weather Thingy is a custom built sound controller that uses real time climate-related events to control and modify the settings of musical instruments.
Created by Neil Mendoza during an artist in residence at Recology SF, House Party is a musical installation that explores prized possessions in their native habitat. All the materials used to create this artwork, from the furniture to the computers, were scavenged from the discarded trash. The music is a mix of mechanical and synthesised sounds.
The immersive space morphs and alters with light and becomes solid, its pressure composing and decomposing the self-awareness of skin. The dancer’s body is extended and manipulated as a conscious entity, exceeding the physiological object. The constant feedback between the body’s trajectory and interaction with the environment changes the nature of the object itself. The…
Created by Pierry Jaquillard at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Prélude in ACGT is collection of tools that explore the relationship between music and biology. The project uses Pierry’s own DNA (chromosome 1 to 22) and converts it into music.
RECIPHER, a group show featuring works generated by students of Selçuk Artut’s “Creative Coding” course at Sabanci University, Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design Program, will be exhibited in two different locations in Istanbul at the same time. One of the exhibitions will open its door at Sabanci University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences…
Created by Giulio Barresi at ECAL (Media and Interaction Design Unit), Connected Tools is a series of objects that explore alternative rituals that could lead to a more reasonable consumption of mobile technologies.
The symbiosis between users and devices allows and encourages personal performance pervasively, and breaks the boundaries between human and non-human action: today’s performance is post-human, quoting Karen Barad. The concept behind the term “live” (de visu) has vastly changed, following the technological evolution and letting a high-performance gradient emerge in everyday habits. With the aim…
Created by the team at MIT Media Lab’s Meditated Matter Group, Fiberbots is a digital fabrication framework fusing cooperative swarm robotic manufacturing with abilities to generate highly sophisticated material structures.
Created by Matteo Zamagni, “Horror Vacui” is a non-narrative film that explores geological formations of Earth and the frenetic hyper-development attained by humankind.
Created by Piet Schmidt during the summer semester at UdK Berlin (New Media / Digital Class), Encounter is a a robotic arm with a mirror that curiously observes its surroundings.
Face Trade is an Art Vending Machine created by Matthias Dörfelt that dispenses unique prints of computer generated face drawings. Instead of paying with money, buyers trade a mugshot that is taken on the spot in order to be permanently stored in the Ethereum Blockchain, consequently turning the transaction into a semi-permanent Face Swap.
Uncanny Rd. is a drawing tool that allows users to interactively synthesise street images with the help of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The project was created as a collaboration between Anastasis Germanidis and Cristobal Valenzuela to explore the new kinds of human-machine collaboration that deep learning can enable.
The chAIr Project is a series of four chairs created using a generative neural network (GAN) trained on a dataset of iconic 20th-century chairs with the goal to “generate a classic”. The results are semi-abstract visual prompts for a human designer who used them as a starting point for actual chair design concepts.
A review, photos, and selection of highlights from the abundant offerings of the 4th edition of the International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN) in Montreal.
Created by panGenerator, “Apparatum” is a custom made apparatus with digital interface that emits purely analogue sound. It is inspired by the heritage of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio – one of the first studios in the world producing electroacoustic music.
Created by Wizard Mode (Ben Porter), MoonQuest is a single-player procedurally-generated adventure game set in a strange nocturnal world. The gameplay is a mix of roguelike and minecraftian genres and sits somewhere between Terraria and Spelunky, with the main aim to search the generated world for moonstones.
For the 7th time now, 600 experience designers and creative technologists will join us this October in Munich to take a close look at all things interactive. As always, we’ll not just feature talks and workshops but also a hands-on exhibition showcasing interactive projects from graduates and design studios all the way to companies like Bosch and BMW.
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Created by Yuri Suzuki Design in collaboration with High Atlanta, Sonic Playground is an outdoor sound installation that features ingenious, colourful sculptures that modify and transmit sound in unusual, engaging and playful ways.
Created by Saurabh Datta, “ChineseWhispers” is an installation comprised of four head figures performing “Chinese Whispers” – a sequence of repetitions of a story, each one differing slightly from the original, so that the final telling bears only a scant resemblance to the original.
Created by Raven Kwok in collaboration with L.A. based producer / music technologist Mike Gao, Zero One is a code-based generative video commissioned by Zero One Technology Festival 2018 in Shenzhen, PR China.
Created as a collaboration between the Game Innovation Lab and the American video artist Bill Viola, The Night Journey is an experimental art game that uses both game and video techniques to tell the story of an individual’s journey towards enlightenment.
Created by Waltz Binaire, Narciss is a robot that uses artificial intelligence to analyse itself, thus reflecting on its own existence. Comprised of Google’s Tensorflow framework and a simple mirror, the experiment translates self-portraits of a digital body into lyrical guesses.
Created by Kimchi and Chips and currently on view at the Somerset House in London, HALO is a new installation in the series of works by the Seoul based Mimi Son and Elliot Woods where light is sculpted to create form that exists between material and immaterial.
A-B-Z-TXT is back—and our favourite summer typography school is looking for international applicants. Apply to join Jürg Lehni, Mindy Seu, Jon Gacnik and others in Toronto Aug 23-26 for four days of masterclasses, workshops, and lectures.
Created by Random International, Zoological is a flock of autonomous, flying spheres that move collectively. Algorithmically driven, the spheres react to their surroundings and, sometimes, to people within their environment.
“Multiverse” is the new audio-visual installation by fuse* that draws inspiration from these concepts and, through the creation of a sequence of digital paintings, generated in real-time, attempts to represent the eternal birth and death of infinite parallel universes.
Created by Mattia Casalegno and presented in collaboration with the chef Flavio Ghignoni Carestia, the Aerobanquets RMX is an immersive, sensorial experience focussed on the perception of taste.
From 24 May to 25 November 2018, in the framework the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program, American artist Ian Cheng’s “Emissary Forks At Perfection” (2015-2016) is on display at the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia.
OPENRNDR is a tool to create tools. It is an open source framework for creative coding for Kotlin that simplifies writing real-time interactive software.
Developed by the team at the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter research group, the following research demonstrates multimaterial voxel-printing method that enables physical visualisation of volumetric data.
Created by Maria Smigieska in collaboration with Pierre Cutellic, Proteus project is an analog digital display that allows for interacting with matter. It is an experiment on the modulation of ferrofluid patterns controlled by both magnetic field and robotic interface.
Created by AnneMarie Maes, Genesis of a Microbial Skin is a mixed media installations and a research project exploring the idea of Intelligent Beehives with a focus on smart materials, in particular microbial skin. The project is about predominantly growing Intelligent Guerilla Beehives from scratch, with living materials – just as nature does.
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Created by Lotta Stöver at HfK Bremen, Mutiertes L-System is the physically grown L-System-Algorithm. From a software origin, it migrates into the physical world. By mutating and developing architectural structures it adapts to its new spatial environment.
Created by Manasse Pinsuwan and René Henrich, Augenblick explores and captures what we miss when we close our eyes thousands of times a day to blink. Developed at the Digital Media Bremen with support from Joachim Hofmann and Prof. Dennis P. Paul, Augenblick is a wearable device that records every single frame that is missed by its wearer.
Since 2008, CAN has been at the forefront of innovation – facilitating and driving the conversations about technology, society and critical making. From online/offline publications to live events, CAN’s initiatives have played an instrumental in shaping the innovative creative practices we know today.
