Programme for THURSDAY 26.01

10:00
Nicolas Nova
Talk
Nicolas Nova is a researcher, writer and design researcher. He is an anthropologist of technology active in the field of contemporary cultures, interaction design and futures research. His work is focused on observing and documenting digital and new media practices, as well as environmental changes. Using ethnographic approaches, Nicolas investigates everyday cultures to tell stories, and employs design techniques such as Design Fiction to explore the implications of social or technological changes.
He is both co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, a research agency based in Europe and California, and Professor at the Geneva University of Arts and Design (HEAD – Genève), where he teaches digital anthropology, ethnography and design research. He is also associate researcher at medialab SciencesPo in Paris.
Nicolas holds a PhD in Social Sciences (University of Geneva), and another PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland). He was previously visiting professor at ENSCI - Les Ateliers (Paris) and Politecnico di Milano, visiting researcher at the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, CA), the Institute of Sociological Research at the University of Geneva, and co-founder/curator of the Lift Conferences, a series of international events about digital culture, design and innovation. He has given talks and exhibited his work on the intersections of design, technology and the near-future in venues such SXSW, EPIC, the AAAS conference, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, PICNIC, NEXT, the design week in Milano, and the Institute for the Future.

11:00
Regine Debatty
Talk
Régine Debatty is a Belgian curator, blogger and art critic who lives in Turin, Italy. In 2004, she created we make money not art, a blog that has received numerous distinctions over the years, including two Webby awards and an honorary mention at the STARTS Prize, a competition launched by the European Commission to acknowledge “innovative projects at the interface of science, technology and art”.
Régine writes and lectures internationally about the way artists, hackers and designers use science and technology as a medium for critical discussion. She created A.I.L. (Artists in Laboratories), a weekly program about the connections between art and science for Resonance104.4fm, London’s legendary art radio station (2012–14.) She has collaborated on numerous publications, most notably co-authoring the “sprint book” New Art/Science Affinities, published by Carnegie Mellon University (2011), co-editing E-Relevance· The Role of Arts & Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence for the Council of Europe (2021) and she is now co-writing a book about art and digital labour.

13:00
PLAYING THE MEDIA, PLAYING THE SENSES
In an online streaming event, Eric and Isjtar present CREWs work past and future in the form of a lecture performance. Participants are guided through the CREW studio. Historical hardware artefacts developed by CREW are combined with XR techniques to draw a complex picture of CREW’s work, and how it relates to past, present and future forms of XR performance. After the lecture, participants are invited to an open discussion online.
Eric Joris, founder of CREW, is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher that pioneered immersive VR performances. Since 2003 CREW and Eric have realized fully embodied performances using in-house developed Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).
Isjtar works as a media artist, electronic music composer and performer. A first-generation native digital artist, he uses the computer as chisel, stone and looking glass. His work is transdisciplinary, as such he excels in collaborations and art-science-technology crossovers.
Since 2019, Eric and Isjtar form the artistic heart of CREW together to plot and fill out CREW's artistic trajectory. As an experimental company, CREW seeks to make visible the ways technology changes us. The playground for sharing this immersive work with the public includes theatre, installations, and performances. These real-time creations anchor immersion in the here and now as the point of contact between humans and technology.
Participants requirements: up to date computer with good enough internet connection

15:00
THE EXTENDED MUSICAL SPACE – PARTICIPATORY AND CREATIVE MUSIC MAKING IN DIGITALLY AUGMENTED MUSICAL ENVIRONMENTS
Talk by Bavo van Kerrebroek
XR technology, as the latest instantiation of our escape into the virtual, has now reached a point from which we are no longer bound to our physical bodies, substituting conscious experience of our physical environments for experimentally controlled, simulated, and multisensorial contexts. With its capacity to immerse its users while offering an embodied sense of presence, it has great potential to simulate existing, or create new musical contexts enriching for embodied and collective music making. This presentation will give an overview of scientific and artistic research into the dynamic and coregulatory processes underlying music making, to answer fundamental questions regarding the technologically-mediated nature of musical expression and experience in XR. It aims to provide a basis for the extended musical space, in which composers, performers, spectators, and participants can explore, discover, and co-create the fertile dynamics and meaningful engagements of making music in XR.
Bavo Van Kerrebroeck is a researcher in the fields of embodied (musical) interaction, extended reality and human-computer interaction. He works with extended reality and audio spatialization technologies to enable and investigate the dynamical processes underlying coordination between musical players. For this purpose, he develops enriched and mediated musical contexts in which people and machines interact and can meaningfully express themselves. He is currently finalizing his PhD at the Institute of Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music (IPEM). His work has been published in the Frontiers and Computer-Human Interaction journals and has been presented at ISMIR, ICMC and Expanded Animation at Ars Electronica.

16:00
ANIMA - THE USE OF AI FOR IDENTITY MODELS
ALEXANDER SCHUBERT
Talk
AI can be used to create, alter and deceive identities. Using this technology as a metaphor for questions of agency, constructivism and personality models is a continued interest of Alexander Schubert - leading to the current music theatre work ANIMA™
BIO
Alexander Schubert (1979) studied bioinformatics, multimedia composition. He’s a professor at the Musikhochschule Hamburg. Schubert’s interest explores the border between the acoustic and electronic world. In music composition, immersive installation and staged pieces he examines the interplay between the digital and the analogue. He creates pieces that realize test settings or interaction spaces that question modes of perception and representation. Continuing topics in this field are authenticity and virtuality. The influence and framing of digital media on aesthetic views and communication is researched in a post-digital perspective. Recent research topics in his works were virtual reality, artificial intelligence and online-mediated artworks.
Schubert is a founding member of ensembles such as “Decoder“.
His works have been performed more than 700 times in the last few years by numerous ensembles in over 30 countries.

17:00
RIT EXPERT PANEL
Roundtable
The growth of XR (Extended Reality) scenarios (Augmented & Virtual Realities, Metaverse...), raises serious social and cultural issues.
The Realities in Transition project aims at addressing these by thinking and promoting a common, open and sustainable XR, at a European level.
To do so, the activation of an active, thinking Creative and Activist European XR community is needed.
The 7 members of the consortium (Seconde Nature - France - Aix en Provence; LEV - Spain - Gijon and Madrid; Kontejner - Croatia – Zagreb; Ars Electronica - Austria – Linz; Dark Euphoria - France – Marseille; V2 - Netherland – Rotterdam and iMal - Belgium – Brussels) will animate the Creative and Activist European XR community composed of the following contributors and beneficiaries, from diverse sectors, at various levels of implication: The cultural and creative sector, Students and academia, Economic sector, Government and policy makers, Civil society.

FRIDAY 27.01
17:00 / Talk: Fari (ULB - VUB)
The popularity of using artificial intelligence to generate art is growing. However, ethical concerns arise about making art with models that have been trained using other people’s artwork. What does that mean for creativity? How is generative AI changing creative work? When is art really art? Who is the real author of the work? These are all questions that will be addressed.
Session Moderator: Lea Rogliano
Participants: Hugues Bersini, FARI AI Institute for Common Good Lead Scientific Advisor / Head, IRIDIA (ULB), Carl Mörch, Manager, FARI AI Institute for Common Good, Université Libre de Bruxelles & more TBC

SATURDAY 28.01
17:00 / Talk: Benjamin Gaulon
Benjamin Gaulon is an artist, researcher, educator and cultural producer. He has previously released work under the name "recyclism". His research focuses on the limits and failures of information and communication technologies; planned obsolescence, consumerism and disposable society; ownership and privacy; through the exploration of détournement, hacking and recycling. His projects can be softwares, installations, pieces of hardware, web based projects, interactive works, street art interventions and are, when applicable, open source.