Technoetic Arts - Volume 17, Issue 1-2, 2019

Within the context of exploring new electronic arts' aesthetic regions and unexampled connections between generative art, games and mythology, my practical artistic research was led to focus on labyrinthine structures as exquisite legendary spatial gaming devices and as possible pathways to gain deeper humane insights, resulting into discoveries of original methods of labyrinth formation by means other than human. Labyrinths and mazes are inextricable paths, human made millennial structures that provide spatial challenges often connected with feedback, compression, entanglement and hyper complexification of goal oriented displacement. They are perhaps the most ancient example of structure for spatial and serious games. Novel methods for labyrinth creation – non-human methods – are introduced and exemplified through artistic constructs. These new methods utilize non-human bioelectronic techniques and are initially grouped into three distinct sub-categories: the 'open' method, the 'mathematical flower' method, the 'animal' method. Four case examples of artistic non-human labyrinths resorting to the introduced novel methods are explored: k. video games (2007, 2010), Wolfanddotcom video game (2017), 8-bit Maze Gardens vegetable paintings (2018–present), Ant Ennae Labyrinths bio-electronic apparatus (2019–present).

This article investigates the hypothesis of creating non-linear audio-visual narratives, through an unanticipated use of traditional print-based games, enriched with videos, via augmented reality (AR) possibilities. A ludic system has been created and presented. Based on a traditional card game, a non-linear cinematic narrative occurs. We attempt to examine the following questions: in which way can we bring together different forms of visual communication, such as graphic design and video? Can the above forms create a complex narrative whole and what kind of rules will be needed for this? How can we enrich traditional forms of gaming with the potentials of AR? Gaming itself demands a set of rules. Can these rules play the role of algorithms in the combined universe that we have designed and created? In which way can the designer on the one hand and the user on the other influence the overall output of the system? What will the user experience be like? The printed card system chosen for this is Tarot and more precisely the Great Arcana, which makes use of the 22 fundamental Tarot figures.

In Hybrid artwork, whereby the digital and the real are mixed, the artist/creator has to additionally manage interaction. Interaction is seen as an added dimension to narration: the art piece turns from being a means towards a narration (or an understanding) to a path towards an experience. It is argued that strong metaphysical concepts give place to new more fragmented ones. This nihilism and fragmentation can be seen as a cause of concern but also as an opportunity.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, abstraction refers to the cognitive process of isolating, or 'abstracting', a common feature or relationship observed in a number of things, or the product of such a process. New World Encyclopaedia describe abstraction in philosophical terminology as the thought process wherein ideas are distanced from objects. Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification that ignores formerly concrete details or leaves them ambiguous, vague or undefined. Abstract thinking, as opposed to concrete thinking, has no application in 'the real world' unless adapted to certain circumstances. For this reason, abstract thinking can be regarded as limited in capacity to affect change. Yet, abstract thinking can be seen as a basis for major transformation. Problem solving often involves combining abstract and concrete reasoning. This article will reflect on how abstract thinking can be seen as a basis for transformation. Drawing from examples from my own artistic practice, I will look at how repetition, as a means of abstract thinking, can be seen as a tool for bridging and repositioning perspectives.

What can we learn from plants? Which forms of intelligence and knowledge can we discover by dedicating ourselves to understanding the life of a plant, its characteristics, interactions with the environment and cultural narratives? This article aims to bridge recent studies in plant intelligence, Semiotics and creative processes. Departing form the idea that the world arrived at a critical situation and the planet Earth cannot continue being exploited as an infinite source, we argue that it is necessary to promote transformations in our culture, abandoning the anthropocentric framework and looking for new perspectives. In this sense, connecting communication, art, science and education, the purpose of Plant Portraits is to create experiences and propitiate encounters that catalyse the awakening of an expanded and integrated consciousness.

The microbiome has become one of the most recognizable research subjects and presences in the headlines of news and scientific articles published in almost every biological science area in the last few years. The steady decline in the price of DNA sequencing has enabled metagenomics, community analysis and genome sequencing to enter routine research in microbiology and biotechnology laboratories all around the world. The already open access to national and international databases that include nucleotide (including full genomes) and protein sequences such as GenBank or EMBL-Bank and a multitude of free bioinformatic software resources accessible online, along with the international efforts towards open science publication and open data, allow the possibility of the microbiome and microbiota to be envisaged as a potential data and material resource for new media art projects especially for artists interested in biological processes. Recent results on the creation of synthetic life that are already testing the boundaries of life could be another approach for the creative exploration of microbiology and microbial processes from the artistic point of view. This article will attempt to uncover and reflect on the potential for further exploration of this resource.

This article addresses a curatorial position on specific bioart projects dealing with the topic of interspecies relationships of humans and other mammals, insects and plants through three works by Slovenian authors Saša Spačal, Špela Petricˇ and Maja Smrekar. All the artworks are based on a posthumanist perspective, strongly advocating possibilities of equality in interspecies relations and coexistence, and yet also bear a potential for monstrosity. The subjects, modes and procedures of the artworks analysed are compatible with a curatorial practice able to contribute to and facilitate the development of the concepts of life and species. Representing provocative projects is a challenge not only for the artists but also for the curators who are in the position of having to find adequate production, presentation and promotion support for fringe artistic experiments that infiltrate meaningful topics. Curating that involves taking on the responsibility of endorsing risk-taking artistic practices and posthumanist ideas, dealing with ethical, legal and conceptual challenges is referred to as intense curating.

Drawing upon my expertise as an artist and clinical acupuncturist with training in biomedicine, my artistic research adapts Chinese medicine practice into a strategic tool to investigate new synergies between art, medicine, technology, East, West, modernity and pre-modernity. In my performances, I use Chinese pulse diagnosis and acupuncture point location as transdisciplinary artistic technologies (qi / 器) that are capable of measuring and responding to quantum entanglements between individuals and their social, natural and cosmic milieus – or what can be referred to as dao (道). This is achieved by combining the principles of CM with digital (audio software and physical computing) and 'moist' media (the body).

Sameness and difference, seen through the use of the term symbiosis, are tooled for the construction of other, future realities. Two examples from literature will describe how symbiosis is, in science fiction, used as means to propose connections with Otherness, through a return to a nature recovered, and as part of rational human deliberate actions towards the recovery of our present damaged planet. Science fiction is where the methodological approach is formulated, as thought experiments, within Ursula Le Guin's literature, from where to develop the process to create two visual artworks. These visual artworks, both different series of images, depart from the term symbiosis, to reflect on what is different within the same, and on the construction of sameness in what is different.

My researches into 'architecture as music' have led me to investigate how a synchronicity of sound and space, acting together, can enable buildings to become not only smart but also sentient. It was one particular building in the City of London that prompted me to join the patterns of architecture with the rhythms of music in an experimental audio-visual performance called Citirama. Each of the piece's three movements throws some new light on what makes a building 'musical' – i.e. capable of exerting some power over our emotional response. I take a journey back in time to find that architecture is a world of relationships very close to that of the performing musician but, if we are to apply the lessons of music more widely, it will be necessary that we obtain some understanding of how our brains' pathways and neural mechanisms enable us to see and hear through a process of pattern recognition. Only then will the indelible links between architecture and music enable architects to act more as composers in rebalancing the challenges that underpin the future of our cities. I illustrate what I mean by 'musicality' with reference to a specific urban community that is close to home – the Barbican.

In the context of interspecies play involving humans, we find limitations when it comes to understanding most species. One reason for this may be the fact that we tend to anthropomorphize the other to be able to empathize with it. In light of this, how can we infer communication signs of other species so we are able to connect with the nonhuman world? We look for answers to this question by adopting a phenomenological approach that allows us to decentre from the anthropocentric perspective. We highlight animal studies, especially those that extend to them the notion of play, and the studies on interspecies playful interaction conducted in the context of animal–computer interaction. In addition, we propose considering empathy as an interspecies dialogical bridge with nonhumans. Finally, we argue about an expansion of the field of interaction design as an approach to the connection with the nonhuman world.

This article will ask questions that connect the conceptions of Marc Augé's 'place/non-place' and Gaston Bachelard's 'poetic space' to the avatar of real-time, perpetual, online, three-dimensional virtual builder's worlds, also known as the metaverse. Are metaverses 'places' or 'non-places'? Do we actually live in the metaverse or do we just traverse these worlds very much in the sense that Marc Augé defines them as transitional loci that are assigned only to circumscribed and specific positions? The question following from this is whether there are nevertheless three-dimensionally embodied virtual spaces that go beyond being transitional 'non-places' to locations in which an imaginative relationship to architecture in the sense in which Bachelard describes them in his seminal work The Poetics of Space (1958) or that correspond to Marc Augé's definition of 'place' exist.

This article seeks to understand why femininity seems to be often present in artificial intelligence and tackle the questions that arise when this phenomenon is subject to closer inspection. It draws on a previous study on the relationship between gender and AI, complemented by an analysis of digital assistants such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri that reveals how these entities tend to be feminized through their anthropomorphization, the tasks that they perform and their behavioural traits. Furthering this discussion, this article addresses current trends of development of digital assistants and their stance towards gender, considering the functions or features that are being prioritized in AI evolution. It then focuses on the main questions raised by researchers and academics when examining the phenomenon and confronts these views with discussions around the feminization of AI in the context of online media coverage. This debate also highlights how common conceptions of AI and its portrayals of gender are influenced by bodies of fiction. Finally, the project Conversations with ELIZA seeks to comment on this phenomenon by ironically exposing and reinforcing common stereotypes and gender assumptions. In this manner, this study seeks to incite reflection on how artificial intelligence is reflecting our social and cultural views back to us.