Message in the Sky is an online crowd-sourced public participatory project that pools together the hopes and dreams of our time. The goal of the project is to map the landscape of collective human aspiration from people in different geographic locations living with different circumstances. The scale and time span of the project significantly expands research in emerging fields of design that integrates big data to engage social change. In the presence of increasing global challenges in conflict resolution, this project represents a forward-thinking engine that generates a time capsule of the evolution of aspirations globally.
This project, with its multiple phases, transforms the 2016 United States Presidential Election Twitter data into a large-scale installation to probe the question of how social media assumes form and transforms the shaping of the future of a nation. The installation recounts Twitter hashtag activity on the topic from February 2016 through the election date of November 8, 2016. By identifying major Twitter influencers in this election period, uncovering the propagation patterns within the data, and differentiating human tweets from AI tweets, the installation exposes the inner mechanisms of a world where true human tweets and tweets generated by Twitter Bots mutually influence each other and propagate inseparably as a combined voice.
Wallace Lages, Pablo Gobira, Francisco Marinho / Brazil Center for HCI, Virginia Tech (USA); School of Fine Arts, UFMG (Brazil) and Guignard School, State University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) pa.gobira@gmail.com, http://labfront.tk
“Better Hands” is an interactive installation that explores the limits and the role of tools in the creative process. It questions the authority by bringing the interface closer to the body, while giving to it its own agency. This work invites us to reflect on the effect of modern technology on the basic act of creation and whether we control or are defined by it.
The artist talk, Translational Spaces, by Santiago Tavera presents his latest creative-research on the construction of interactive and immersive digital architectural environments. The use of digital media presents the potential to simulate a state of disembodiment (elasticity, alteration, translation) for viewers and participants. Tavera investigates the potential of digital technologies to create virtual environments that alter our thresholds of perception.
"We—The Common Body" project is created as a collective of Elvin Flamingo + Infer. The project is comprised of three parts: A.) "This view has potential", B.) "Vanitasity" and C.) "Virtual Phenotype".
Object A.) is an incubator inhabited by thousands of earthworms - the oldest group of invertebrates on Earth (Aristotle and later Darwin recognized them as the bowels of the Earth. Darwin devoted nearly 30 years of his life to studying them). Vermicompost which is produced by the earthworms moves to the respectively arranged sensors and the signals captured are transferred to other objects.
Research synthesizes the explorations and processes developed from the research—artistic creation and its link with design through a common theme: the phenomenon of audio-visual creation in real time and its connection with the body. This theme will be approached through visual autobiographies and the intimacy with objects as carriers of memories, sensations, and atmospheres that not only constitute or form part of an epoch, but also configure individual forms of inhabiting the world.
SoundMind is a virtual environment in which, through the power of technology in combination with the mysterious phenomenon of creativity, sound becomes visual. Participants can relax, observe, and participate in unified creative expressions. The goal is twofold: First to explore and understand the ways in which the technological environment affects the individual and the individual's interactions, and Secondly, with these understandings, to develop an environment that will build participant's empathy, curiosity, interpersonal understanding and soundness of mind via the sharing and receiving of audio and visuals.
Using photography as capturing and evidencing tool, the Siga Bien Pueda project has been developed since 2011, reaching an extensive body of graphic work, consisting of more than 2000 pictures from three different countries, with the purpose of describing and analyzing the galleries or market places. , fruit stores and similar spaces, to identify common and differential factors, based on its aesthetic, chromatic and objective characteristics, understanding its importance for our cultural expression and folklore, as a reflection for the beliefs, activities, identity, costumes, These traditional spaces , with their fruits, vegetables, flowers, pottery, craftwork, religious American identity; Each city embraces and preserves those places that survive as a picture of who we are and where we are.