at 5 pm

dr. Narvika Bovcon: Game models as sustainable conceptual records of new media artworks

In this presentation we hypothesize that new media artworks can be described using the theory of videogames as developed by Alexander Galloway in his book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), where he proposes two axes for the videogame action analysis: the diegetic or nondiegetic actions (on the first axes) that are performed by the player or the machine (on the second axes), forming thus four quadrants for four action types. Second, as a case study, we will identify recurrent methods and motives in Srečo Dragan’s new media artworks and combine them with Galloway’s action types in gaming. The results of interaction, such as elocutions, selections, connections, coincidences etc., are usually written in the database of his new media art projects and will be interpreted as the records of art-induced socialization of the interactors or art users. Furthermore, the specificities of different media involved in the interactive installations will be focused upon, e.g. bodily interventions in augmented reality, semanticization acts in linguistic corpuses, narrativization of image databases, computer vision guided techno performances, conceptual games, etc. Finally, we will propose a viable solution that offers the script for recreation of an unstable-media artwork by describing its logic, characteristics, functions and attributes on various levels (conceptual, contextual, algorithmic, technological, historical). (ARIS J7-3158, Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art)

Narvika Bovcon is a professor of video and new media art, she teaches at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science and at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include user interfaces for exhibitions on interactive online platforms, as well as virtual- and augmented-reality environments. Since 2016, she has been the editor-in-chief of the journal Art Words.

at 5.20 pm

dr. Aleš Vaupotič: Genre rules as the framework for preservation and study of new media literature

At its core, human epistemology is based on two pillars: sense experience (consider the Humean empiricism, or phenomenology) and set-theory based logic. Quine in “Epistemology Naturalized” understands a human as a natural transformer of a meager input from senses into a torrential output of descriptions. For him also Carnap’s rational reconstruction (a logical reconstruction of the world from sense data) can be construed as creative and imaginative mechanical simulations, of the transformations from the world of experiential implications into various languages. Such a detached and rule-governed idea of games as playful alternative worlds, possibly in a reduced state as argued by Huizinga, can provide an important perspective on algorithms of new media literature, as well as its other features. Rules for particular works are summarized in genre-constructs, which will be considered for the domain where new media and literature intersect. The genres can be derived form literary traditions, and from the basic aspects of new media art that encompass the algorithmic building of communication artifacts from (more or less vast) archives of utterances in various media, and of other data. Espen Aarseth’s theory considered cybertext a perspective for the study of literature, and not a particular genre (Cybertext, 5). Finally, there is an important problem that needs to be addressed: today, several generations of work by digital media artists are firmly in the past, while media art remains synonymous with “new” and “emergent,” and the growing vastness of the loss consequently goes unacknowledged. The genre-rules based approach attempts to tackle the preservation issue by identifying the key elements of individual works that need to be recorded and preserved. The descriptions are already interpretations with an intrinsic goal of making the works re-enactable and accessible to the audiences of the future. The pilot project of preserving the Nation – Culture project by Vuk Ćosić (2000) will be outlined in the conclusion. (ARIS J7-3158, Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art)

Aleš Vaupotič is a literary comparatist, media theorist, and new-media artist. He works at the Research Centre for Humanities at the University of Nova Gorica. Between 2021 and 2023 he was the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, and in 2022 the commissioner for the Slovenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial. He is currently the project leader in an interdisciplinary research project Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art. Among his research foci are the theory of discourse, semiotics, comparative art studies, new-media theory, methodology of digital humanities and realism in the arts. His monograph Vprašanje realizma (The Question of Realism, 2019) explores the continuities and shifts between traditional and new media.

at 5.40 pm

dr. Eszter Polonyi: Teaching media archaeology: un-learning and reimagining the historical self

The media archaeologist has been called an experimenter (Fickers and van den Oever), a circuit-bender (G Hertz and Jussi Parikka), a “thinkerer” (Ted Nelson, Lori Emerson, Erkki Huhtamo). With reluctance, sometimes media archaeologists self-designate as a “media/historians.” Rarely does the media archaeologist refer to themselves as “students” of media. However, several texts have appeared recently that suggest that media archaeology as a field is inherently pedagogic, in the sense that it presumes experiential, speculative, and embodied forms of knowledge acquisition (Fickers and van den Oever; Patrick Ellis and Colin Williamson, Wanda Strauven). This paper follows on the call by recent media archaeologists like Andreas Fickers and Annie van den Oever for a sensorially-engaged encounter with media artifacts. It suggests that, through such methods of experiment and re-enactment, media archaeology might represent a kind of un-learning of toxic subject positions embedded in media technologies themselves. Making the historical self into the field’s most important, but repressed, medium, the paper argues that media archaeology might be indispensable to historical writing because it presents historians and students of history with an opportunity to radically reimagine the self (Michel Foucault, Peter Galison, Claudia Rankine). (ARIS J7-3158, Sustainable Digital Preservation of the Slovenian New Media Art)

Eszter Polonyi is an assistant professor at the Cultural History program of the University of Nova Gorica (PhD, Columbia University). She has published her work on media archaeology in Apertura, The New Review for Film and Television, Found Footage Magazine, and has three further essays under review for the journal Apparatus & Artifact: Journal for Media Archaeology, the Routledge Reader in Art and Artifice in Visual Culture: Eighteenth Century to the Present,and the Routledge Reader in Media Archaeology.

at 6 pm

dr. Uroš Ocepek: AI and Artistic Creation

One of the 50 best European teachers of 2023 will delve into the question of how artificial intelligence performs as an artistic creator, especially for the Speculum Artium festival. He will address the dilemma of whether it has already become competitive with humans, whether it can replace them and where the artist still has an advantage over them. It will be interesting to hear where he sees artistic creation in 5 years’ time.