Metaverse Creativity (new title: Virtual Creativity) - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2015

We present the mobile art project VIA, which combined mobile technology, video-dance and computer-assisted music composition. Its main goal was to endow specific locations of Rio de Janeiro with video-dance and computer music performances, accessed through locative media. Summarily, any user equipped with a tablet or smartphone with an Internet connection had free access to multimedia pieces while moving through specific points of Rio de Janeiro. Two technologies were applied: QR code and HiperGeo. The music accompanying the videos derived from Computer-Assisted Composition (CAC), Computer-Generated Assistance (CGA) and ‘Sonification’-related approaches. The music can be interpreted as a sound iconization, based on a computational methodology and assisted by the software OpenMusic, of topological properties of the landscape used as background for the dance. At the end, we speculate on the consequences of a responsive mobile technology applied to art projects of investigative mapping of urban space.

In this article, the relation between art and space will be examined in detail, through my personal output – artistic installation – in order to find an answer to that question: How can boundaries between an artwork and space disappear? I will discuss a series of works that have been produced within the scope of their relation with space and social engagement. According to Marc Augé’s definition of ‘non-place’, chosen non-places of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in Sabancı University will be evaluated and their characteristics as non-places will be reversed via artworks which are the result of the concept that Nicolas Bourriaud called ‘relational aesthetics’. As a conclusion, how and why these works relate to space, how medium affects that relation and the results of these relations will be reviewed.

Despite originating as practical aides for the design of real-world architecture, Computer-Aided Design and Draughting (CADD) software tools initially encountered a great deal of resistance, in part because of their initial expense and apparent technical complexity, but also because they were seen as blunt tools, crude instrumentation inadequate for the artistic expression of place. In March 2004, at an informal seminar hosted at the University of Melbourne in Australia, the eminent scholar Professor Marco Frascari argued that computer reconstructions of architecture were far too exact and thus too limited in conveying the mood and atmosphere of architecture. With all due respect to Professor Frascari, this article will argue the converse: that recent developments in interactive technology offer new and exciting ways of conveying ‘lived’ and experientially deepened notions of architectural place-making.

This paper addresses the specificity of digital technology in relation to the history of painting and viral a-life techniques as they are used to revolutionize our habits of artistic thinking in exhilarating ways. It explores how digital technology facilitates changes in cultural consciousness by primarily allowing artists to operate differently through methods of ‘viractuality’.

Although some other cognitive approaches in creativity have argued that creativity development happens only in disembodied minds, a creative learning environment plays an essential role in facilitating the creative thinking process of learners. This article studied the use of virtual reality and multi-user domains for higher creativity education, particularly with regard to creative thinking. It reports the establishment of a virtual environment, ‘Learners’ Café’, and an educational web blog for tertiary learners in Hong Kong. The importance of constructing a virtual community for hyper-learning is also explored in this article.