[-empyre-] hi from dallas texas

Tue Jan 19 12:19:55 AEDT 2016

hi empyre

this is roger malina lurking into the light-
well lots going on in my neck of the woods which is
now dallas texas- where i am a prof of 'art and technology' and a prof
of physics

i opened and art science lab here http://artscilab.utdallas.edu/
where we are doing projects with artists and scientists on
data exploration and sonification on astronomy, geology and
neurosciences

another project as part of Leonardo , where i still serve
as executive editor of the leonardo pubs at mit pres
is that this spring we are opening the ARTECA art sci
tech aggregator - where as a first step hundreds of
books and thousands of articles will be available from
anythin mit press has ever published in art/sci./tech=
the next step will be research and development in
collaborative filtering of grey literature and its archiving

meawhile still have the YASMIN mediterranean region
lists, and also creativedisturbance.org art/scit/tech
podcast platform- if you would like to publish a podcast
contact me

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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2016 23:00:49 +0000
From: "Hamilton, Kevin" <kham at illinois.edu>
To: "empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au"
        <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] Kevin Hamilton
Message-ID: <D2C1793A.CAB09%kham at illinois.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

Hello all

I?m still here with an ear to the wire, and glad for the listserv form
even if including it in current flows takes a little more intention.
Empyre continues to usefully connect and prompt, and I?m regularly
happy and surprised to see who stops in to say hello.

It?s Martin Luther King Jr., weekend here in the States, when many
gather to re-center on the collective through service and song. As a
white American academic, I look through doubly-thick, even
triply-thick glass, and like many of you perhaps struggle to maintain
the humbly empathetic posture and attentive senses called for by the
world's present crises, and my role within them. Certainly an
international list like this has been a help to that for me,
especially when we risk the time to read closely and write clearly.

Here in Illinois, though some shifts in leadership on our campus left
me holding a fuller plate of administrative responsibilities, I
continue to proceed (slowly) with work on a few fronts:

- Ned O?Gorman and I are finishing up a book on the role of film in
America?s rise to nuclear hegemony, with an emphasis on the story of
an Air Force film studio based in Hollywood.
- I?ve been contributing to another larger collaboration that tilts
more toward the social-scientific, on perception of algorithms at work
in newsfeeds such as those on Facebook.
- More in the realm of New Media Art, Katja Kwastek and I have been
doing some thought and writing on slowness in new media aesthetics.

Of interest to this list from my recent travels might be an
overview<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULTa42QCYL8> of the Digital
Humanities from a theory perspective I gave here at Illinois, or a
first step<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lf8KZpotc-M> into some new
work with Orit Halpern presented last Fall at MediaArtHistories in
Montreal.

I?ll also be taking a turn soon as Editor-in-Chief of the journal
Media-N, where hopefully I?ll also be hearing from some of you through
proposals for issues and articles.

Wishing you all a good year, and looking forward to what empyre brings.

Kevin Hamilton
Professor and Associate Director, School of Art and Design
Senior Associate Dean, College of Fine and Applied Arts
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2016 09:37:30 -0700
From: "B. Bogart" <ben at ekran.org>
To: "empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au"
        <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] Ben Bogart
Message-ID: <569D14CA.3030706 at ekran.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

Hello all,

I continue to be following the list, but not with as much consistency as
I would like. I wanted to post a little update as I'm currently at the
Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada (www.banffcentre.ca/) one week into a
five week self-directed residency.

I am developing software and presentation strategies for Watching and
Dreaming (Blade Runner) in order to contextualize the work in visual
art. Watching and Dreaming is a series of generative video installations
that inherit the conceptual basis of my PhD work
(http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2014/a-machine-that-dreams-an-artistic-enquiry-leading-to-an-integrative-theory-and-computational-artwork/)
where I attempted to make a Dreaming Machine.

The argument presented in the PhD work is that dreaming, mind wandering
and external perception are contiguous and depend on shared mechanisms
of internal simulation. What we experience of the world is the result of
massive amounts of implicit learning where much of what we 'perceive' is
actually the result of unconscious imagination rather than the result of
direct access to sensation. External perception resembles reality
because of the constraints on those mechanisms of simulation imposed by
sensory information. In the absence of, or shift of attention away from,
sensory information (for example during sleep or mind wandering) those
processes continue on. No longer constrained by embodied physical
reality they are free to diverge and converge away and toward
plausibility. For more information see my TEDx talk
(https://youtu.be/xYtt8qSwJws).

Whereas the Dreaming Machines learn structure from a live camera in the
installation context, Watching and Dreaming learns from the contrived
worlds presented in popular cinematic depictions of AI, such as Stanley
Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The
system uses machine learning methods (specifically clustering and
prediction) to break film frames into millions of components and
producing abstractions of visual information. The system 'imagines'
perceptions by reconstructing frames using these abstractions or dreams
by predicting which abstractions should be present in this 'train of
thought'.

I'm blogging my learning and development process on my website
(http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/category/production/wd/), and you can use
the "RSS Feed" link under "About" on the left panel if you would like to
to subscribe to updates. I've also posted some early work in progress
showing perceptual reconstructions on YouTube
(https://youtu.be/AIUWu08qM2o). I expect to post more quite soon!

Beyond this I'm waiting for word on council funding to continue
supporting this project, and I should also hear soon about my research
council application for a postdoc in a cognitive neuroscience lab.

Thanks all for reading!
Ben Bogart

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End of empyre Digest, Vol 133, Issue 11
***************************************

-- 
Roger F Malina
is in  Dallas
510-853-2007