Abstracts of DRHA Dublin 2015

Digital World. Digital Responses.

List of Abstracts.

1

Academic Presentations

What is the role of the information professional in the development and promotion of the Digital Content in for teaching and learning applications?

Jane Burns My presentation will examine in Case Study format findings from my MPhil (TCD) dissertation research which sought to determine the level of awareness of Digital Humanities in Irish Libraries and the perception of the Librarians role in promoting the uptake and development of related approaches.

In particular the research project The Mary Martin Diary will be highlighted. The case study will deal with the project involved in developing the contextualized website http://dh.tcd.ie/martindiary it will describe project development steps involved in taking the handwritten diary of a broken hearted mother in 1916 and creating a useful and relevant online resource for a range of end users. These users include Military historians, women’s studies scholars, digital humanists, sociologists, researchers and the general public.

The use of freely available resources such as census records, newspaper articles and other related ephemera allowed for the full development of the contextualised resources.

The case study will offer practical advice on how to embark on a project of this nature, and what project management , digital humanities and online tools that can be applied

Category Academic Presentation

200.104.200.2: relational materialities, bodies and memories CĂŠcile Chevalier and Andrew Duff This paper introduces 200.104.200.2, a kinetic sound installation as a displaced reenactment of both contemporary digital social practice and the Internet as a memory palace in which 2

sonifications of memory traces are provoked, created, stored and replayed as digital data.

200.104.200.2 is presented as a PostInternet (Rhizome, 2013; Olsen, 2004) artefact (or collection of artefacts - both physical and audible) – inviting the user/participant, once again, to listen to the communication process, just as we used to ‘hear’ the Internet before the ‘always on broadband’ we are used to today. With the proliferation of ‘calm’ technology, many of the sounds of digital connectivity and communication have disappeared, although through techniques such as circuit sniffing (Collins, 2004) these electronic connections and protocols still be tapped into and sonified. The piece itself is formed of over 3000 copper threads which collide as the participants or performers’ individual movements are extended from one thread to another, it then merges through contact microphones and bespoke audio software to form a digital soundscape and a new memory trace, that then loops back to the participant, the performer, the audience, creating a tactile audible feedback experience. The real-time processing of the captured movement is translated as audio data through storage/delay, pitch shifting and bitreduction/compression capturing the dynamism between material time and embodied duration (Bergson, 1939). The work situates itself within the art of memory (Yates, 1966), post-digital aesthetics, and the materialisation of ‘connective memory’ (Hoskins, 2011), while, sonically, it explores space between John Cage’s 4’33, Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises and Tanaka’s interpretation of Jaques Attali’s future potential of musical forms as an unfinished work, generated at the time of listening, or in this case, interaction. It explores simulacrum (Edmonds, 2007) and relationships between space, time and sound as embodied experiences and ‘bodiless’ digital memory objects – questioning how this process might be technologised or automated, and how it alters connective memory production where bodies and social technologies merge.

Category Academic Presentation

Multi-disciplinary student co-production of a University Heritage Centre and its exhibits Alan Brine and Douglas Cawthorne This paper describes an innovative project which produced a highly professional, permanent, heritage centre in a UK university, open to the public and designed by its students. In March of 2013 a business case was prepared to develop a new heritage centre at De Montfort University in an underutilised area of one of the main buildings containing standing remains of the important fourteenth century Collegiate Church of St Mary of the Annunciation part of medieval Leicester. Grounded in De Montfort University’s central objectives of serving the community and the public good, the proposals were developed to bring the University’s 145+ year history to a wider audience and to present the history of 3

this important part of Leicester to the public in a rigorously researched and engaging way. A central tenant of the enterprise was that the exhibition and its content should be generated

by DMU students. An innovative project with Interior Design students to develop footprint designs for the centre as part of their formal studies and degree assessment in 2013-14 was undertaken. Students were also central to developing key aspects of the exhibition content in relation to the medieval arches from the Collegiate Church which exist in the space. It was closely related to another church in Leicester, Greyfriars. The Digital Building Heritage Group (DBHG) at De Montfort University had produced a digital reconstruction of Greyfriars for Leicester City Council’s King Richard III exhibition centre and a joint project with the DBHG’s MA Architecture students as part of their formal studies in 2014 to digitally recreate the Collegiate Church was initiated. As well as being a new public resource for Leicester the De Montfort University Heritage Centre has become a valuable academic and research asset for the institution, and a test bed for developing future innovative digital heritage projects.

Category Academic Presentation

The “Provability” and the Creative Distinctiveness of Hybrid Artwork Raivo Kelomees If we examine the category of ArtScience, hybrid art, questions about verifiability arise. How true are they, aside from being compelling artworks?

The problem is that artists create works that are so complex and technically opaque that it is not possible to evaluate the work’s technical structure without specialized skills or technical instruments. An artist’s work as an artistic statement cannot be refuted without an expert analysis.

An artist’s experiment is distinct from a scientific experiment in the sense that provability is not the main consideration in art. The finding of the artist’s work is presented as a visualized, digitized or objectified position.

If the work is declared “false," fraudulent, this could have the same significance than were it to be deemed true. In the case of art the most important thing is whether it “works” – does it generate a response and interest, and not leave viewers ambivalent. If projects in science can be distinguished as either true or false, in art truth can mean that it functions in terms of art communication. On the other hand, a work that does not generate feedback, and as a result is invisible – even if the assertion it makes is scientifically true and correct – may be false.

4

I would highlight one more parameter encountered in art: creative distinctiveness and creation of a “trademark”, "personal style". This is the use of a common visual element or theme that makes the artist and the art recognizable, distinguishable. A “trademark” can also be created for substantive or commercial reasons. The question is: to what extent do we see this "trademark" in technological art and hybrid art approaches? Works by Eduardo Kac, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Thomas Feuerstein, Paul Vanouse, Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch, Julius Popp, Timo Toots are discussed.

Category Academic Presentation

Bringing practice closer to research - seeking integrity, sincerity and authenticity Franziska Schroeder This talk ties into the DRHA 2015 conference theme of Arts/Science engagement, in that it contributes to the DRHA”s vision of seeing our real world as an environment, to which the humanities and arts respond. I aim to respond to the discussion surrounding what constitutes creative practice and what constitutes research, and how we understand the concept of ‘practice as research’. In order to do this, I will look briefly at he abundance of inconsistent terminologies that surround the discourse on practice and research. I will build on recent debates on creative practice and education, sparked through the EU funded project SHARE. In the talk I will argue that a shift in contemporary continental philosophy in the 1970s, which nudged the body into a more central position, allowed for creative practice and with it ‘embodied knowing’ to slowly push open the doors of the academies. I will show that practice today is already well embedded in some UK institutions, and I put forward that rather than thinking of an apologetic Practice as..., Performance as .., we should refer more resolutely to what I term ‘Practice Research’. In brining practice and research closer together I want to demystify notions of academic validation of creative practice. I am hoping to achieve this by re-emphasising the artistic qualities of ‘integrity, sincerity and authenticity’, borrowed from the 2013 BBC Reith lecturer and artist/potter Grayson Perry.

Category Academic Presentation

5

Artist’s Books, Ebooks, and the Post-Postmedia World: A Night in the Book Museum Dennis Moser One of the concepts floating around in the recent past, as libraries and archives have been battered by budget cuts, is the idea of the library as a book museum. I contend that the artist’s book is the quintessential object to reside there. Consider: The changes in the concept of “media” in art has been noticeably articulated in artistic terms by Lev Manovitch (2001: “Post-media Aesthetics”), couching the differences in terms of mass media versus art media (his “Duchamp-Land” versus “Turing-Land” as expressed in his “Death of Computer Art”of 1996); he places the evolution as starting in the 1960’s. Others have discussed this trend extensively in subsequent years (Domenico Quaranta, 2011: “Media, New Media, Postmedia” and 2014: “Beyond Media Art”). Drawing & painting were supplanted as the “news media” the printed page in book form, the printed page in newspaper was supplanted by photography, itself replaced by film and video. These formats did not disappear—they are collected in museums. While debatable, “digital media” or “post-media technology” —the Internet and “The Net/work” — appear to have assumed the previous role of film and video as “news media.” Each new media also incorporates aspects of its predecessor. Each iteration of this socio-technological shift has allowed old media to become the playground of the artist. The artist’s book has long been such an object and it adapting to the application of digital technology with the emergence of digital artist’s books, themselves being hybrids of the digital objects of the post-media era and the preceding ones. I submit that Manovitch et alia’s evolution began earlier, with the development of moveable type. The evolution of the book thusly, and the repositories that collect them, will one of the foci here.

Category Academic Presentation

What Killed the Scientific Voice in Actor Training: the Cartesian Split and Performance Training Today Royce Sparks Fewer incidents in history impacted the sciences more than Descartes' dualism argument, which freed the natural sciences to progress unhindered to this day, and destroyed the studies of the mind in any empirical fashion until the anatomical-behavioural discoveries of the early 20th century. Despite being several hundred years behind the other natural 6

sciences, the behavioural sciences have made immense strides towards integrating claims about the mind and behaviour with reliable testing methods and accurate predictions that add validity to their potential to answer back to reality in reliable, discernible ways. In the arts, however, the ripple effect of the Cartestian split is still being felt and continues, to this day, inaccurately inform many of our views about the mind and the performer. As such, many models of behaviour, influenced by either Freudian psychology or pre-Freudian claims about the mind, are outdated and are incapable of making accurate predictions regarding claims about the effectiveness of these theories. Using the lens of actor training today, this paper explores the effects of the Cartesian ripple, from pre-Stanislavsky, to Stanislavsky, and then the Freudian influences on the Group Theatre and finally ends with the contemporary and supposed “scientific” and “evidence-based” approaches to training performers, which are little more than pseudoscientific justifications of outdated claims. This paper examines how the Cartesian ripple has not only influenced claims about the mind in the field of performance but crippled the possibility of scientific testing of claims about actor training. It concludes that recognizing the ripple and beginning to import the testing methods that set the behavioural sciences back on track is the first key step towards solving these problems.

Category Academic Presentation

Letter to an Unknown Soldier: a participatory media project Kate Pullinger

LETTER TO AN UNKNOWN SOLDIER is a new kind of war memorial, made of words. Created by writers Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger, the project was commissioned by Britain’s 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the outbreak of WW1. Inspired by Charles Jagger’s 1922 bronze statue of a soldier, who stands on Platform One of Paddington Station, London, reading a letter, the digital artwork invited everyone in the country to write his or her own letter to the soldier. http://http://www.1418now.org.uk/letter/ LTAUS opened to the public for submissions on 28 June, 2014 (the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo). The website remained open for submissions for five weeks, until 4 August, 2014 (the centenary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany). By its close, more than 21,400 people around the world had written letters to the soldier.

In this creative practice research paper, Kate Pullinger will discuss how LTAUS was created and what it achieved. This digital war memorial is an extraordinary example of a crowdsourced participatory media artwork written by thousands of people who don’t think of 7

themselves as writers. It was a transmedia event, spread across many platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Wattpad, Figment, Tumblr, YouTube and Storify – as well as the project’s own website. Simultaneously, the project used person-to person participatory routes (eg workshops/BBC roadshows) to introduce less experienced online users to the possibility of participation in a digital artwork. The diversity of responses to the project was both unusual and inspiring, including submissions from schoolchildren, serving soldiers, a huge range of the public from the very young to the very old, as well as the British Prime Minister.

This proposal meets the DRHA themes of: Histories and Archives; Virtual and Physical Spaces; Social Media; Literary and Visual Narratives

Category Academic Presentation

How Does Scholarly Bible Software 'Mean'?

Joshua L Mann In light of the fact that most scholars of biblical texts use Bible software in their research, this paper attempts to answer the question, How does scholarly Bible software mean? That is, how does Bible software affect the meaning of its biblical texts? An examination of the assumptions, priorities, capabilities, and textual presentation of a commonly used program will reveal a number of ways the software produces meaning, some of which are peculiar to digital media (as opposed to analogue tools that perform many of the same tasks as Bible software). Taking account of the meaning production of software used to display and interrogate texts is an important (if neglected) step towards critical self-awareness in the practice of humanities scholarship.

Category Academic Presentation

Engaging youth from challenging backgrounds through music, electronics, and free and open source technology Enrico Bertelli and Emily Robertson

8

Our purpose is to deliver employability skills for the creative industries to students from challenging backgrounds, making an impact on their learning patterns. Our social impact research into learning outcomes and engagement has uncovered best-practice recommendations for arts-led STEM education. Conductive Music is a social enterprise which designs workshops, based on accelerated and simultaneous learning techniques.

During our projects, young people learn STEM-specific skills, such as soldering and coding, and apply them to create a digital musical instrument. The creative process unravels through the design phase and develops through music-based modules, dedicated to sounddesign, composition and performance. During the past two years, our progressive twostage, four-day session was presented in London and Bristol schools, to 300 students aged 11 - 14 (Key Stage 3). We target students from challenging backgrounds, who could be experiencing economic difficulties (Free School Meals), behavioural ones (Pupil Referral Unit), learning impairment (Special Educational Needs) or linguistic struggles (English as an Acquired Languages). We provide students, who are failing mainstream education, with tools and techniques to design, develop, compose and perform with a new digital interface for musical expression. We encourage progression by using Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS), which can be used in the comfort of their homes, by awarding hardware prizes, through a peer-voting system which boosts the students’ self-esteem, career talks and by backing this all up with online tutorials and learning resources. Throughout our projects, we gather feedback from young people about what they value or reject in their arts and technology education experience. We are incorporating this data into our workshop delivery in a continuous process of responsive workshop structure and content. Key areas of development and impact have included peer feedback and self-assessment skills, confidence in creative design and performance, and transferring learned information into active participation.

Category Academic Presentation

gestalt Ulrich Gehmann, Michael Johansson and Martin Reiche Many disciplines have the culture and nurturing to explore, create, and tell stories about worlds. Therefore, our contribution is about the re-discovery of an idea that has been crucial in occidental thinking and which became underestimated: the notion of gestalt. To conceive real-world (and other) phenomena in terms of gestalt helps to gain a holistic understanding of them, and the aim of our paper therefore is to promote a method to rediscover the world in a less analytical fashion than it has been done in the last 400 years, after an analytical-based perception of reality gained ground with the scientific method developed in the 17th century and later. At the same time, a gestalt-approach helps to 9

reframe (and better understand) recent technological developments as outcomes of an analytical way of thinking. Because analysis and the shaping of processes and entities according to functionalities is not the only or most suitable way to generate understanding, despite we got used to such a general state of mind. To conceive the world primarily in analytical terms or as a set of functions became culturally accepted. A gestalt-approach can be a promising complement to the prevalent analytical approaches, and the general benefit of such an approach lies in the use of comparative methods to create knowledge or design processes. Also borrowing ideas from Design Theory where Gestalt is analogous to a design process, we can view it as a process of knowledge acquisition and learning from the previously unknown. Gestalt perception as well as -conception helps to develop another kind of epistemology than the prevalent analytical/functional one, as for instance cybernetics, system theories and bioengineering already demonstrated. It transcends the border between real and virtual towards envisioning a complete reality, and out of that proves to be a method of working with unknown phenomena.

Category Academic Presentation

Becoming-Earth becoming-machine: a posthumanist perspective on the body of an art producer.

Alev Adil and Sasha Burkhanova This paper engages with the contemporary relationship between artist and curator. Artist Alev Adil and curator Sasha Burkhanova are exploring this territory using a practice-based methodology through a virtual and physical exhibition in London in autumn 2015.

In art discourse, the positions of artist and curator are usually conceived on the basis of a humanist duality, separated in respect to authorship, agency and power distribution. In response to this, the collaborative practice-based project between artist Alev Adil and curator Sasha Burkhanova suggests an alternative approach, from a posthumanist perspective. This is an expanded ‘body multiple’: a reactive, unstable, mutable entity, capable of perpetual extension via interaction with other bodies (Mol, Blackman, Braidotti), conceptualised as a ‘third’ entity which emerges from a creative collaboration between artist and curator.

The love for art in the most profound sense is constituted by the desire for creation, where the intensity of love appears as a tool for an immanent (as opposed to transcendent) conception of the universal truth. Hence, through the application of love, this expanded ‘body multiple’ becomes a technology for reconceptualising the body of ‘art producer’ — rejecting the humanist self that “prefers identity to difference”, and chooses “to impose its worlds against the world re-constructed through the filter of difference” (Badiou, 2009:59).

10

In their research, Adil and Burkhanova work to facilitate the ‘becoming-undone’ of the identity categories artist/curator. Thus, the proposed project examines the relationship that arises in joint knowledge production, and rejects the division of artistic and curatorial subjects - towards artist-becoming-curator and curator-becoming-artist movements. The proposition for the conference is a performative dialogue, where artist and curator will present the methods and technologies employed in 'learning to inhabit' the expanded body, and explore possibilities for the construction of its new ethics.

Category Academic Presentation

DIGITAL DIVIDE - DIGITAL INEQUALITY - EDUCATION : Information poverty in an Information age Annemarie Borg "The same places that are characterised by economic poverty also tend to suffer from information poverty; a pattern has developed in which inequalities in physical and electronic spaces mutually reinforce one another." Lisa Servon Definitions: Digital divide: gap between the people who have internet access and those who don't (Collins) Digital inequality: differences amongst users in regards to the amount of benefit received from the use of Internet technology. (DiMaggio et al) Both are consequences of economic and social disparities.

These aspects of technology have a push-pull relationship with each other. It seems probable that as we eliminate the divide (Greater Internet spread) we will be widening the threat of a greater inequality.

Context: EU and Global contexts EU: 75% of individuals use the Internet In the developed world : 77 users per 100 inhabitants World wide : 39/100 Developing world: 31/100 We observe that the Digital divide is gradually narrowing…(ITU) Main issue: Information poverty in an information age, the impact on social/economical development 11

We live in a 24h news cycle pushing information constantly out onto the web. Digital Inequality issue is concerned with the ability of individuals to sort out this flood of information and have access to vital knowledge Giving the developing world and poorer members of societies access to the Internet is not by itself sufficient. We face unequal access and differentiated use.

Possible resolutions: Support, Education To avoid replacing Digital divide by more Digital inequality additional support is imperative... Skills, equipment, autonomy, scope of use, education... These mechanisms are far from obvious in less fortunate groups or countries whose economy is failing, where priorities are more immediate than digital literacy… The question remains: what will improved digital literacy bring to underdeveloped countries?

Category Academic Presentation

States of Mind: Representational tools for audience engagement around well-being Benjamin Koslowski, Karen Ingham and Roberto Bottazzi This paper and accompanying material will outline processes and practices that have informed a collaborative design research project within the context of a public arts organisation as a tool to engage gallery audiences in a ‘feedback loop’ that elicits nuanced audience response.

‘States of Mind’ (https://vimeo.com/122330273) is a collaborative project between design practitioners, academic contributors and a cultural organisation, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project forms part of FACT Liverpool’s 'Group Therapy' exhibition.

As a new commission for FACT Liverpool, the project offers a hybrid analog-digital platform that allows visitors to the gallery to represent and share their individual states-of-mind in response to the question “What does your mental health look like right now?” It provides a new way of engaging gallery visitors with the exhibition subject matter on mental distress in a digital age. A creative framework allows individual visitors to reflect on their personal experience of the exhibition through a manipulable digital object that acts as an abstract visual ‘language’ to externalise this process. Contributions are shared and publicly displayed 12

on screens within the public areas of the building, allowing them to be understood not just as individual states-of-mind, but as ‘prompts’ to establish a dialogue between spectator and artwork. Ways of visualising the range of embodied emotions test this dialogue and potential cross-readings of the virtual objects as introspective artefacts. Further, workshops with 3D-printed states-of-mind have been used to expand on individual contributions and to extend the conversation to the city of Liverpool. The project interrogates the notion of ‘digital phenomenology’, pushing boundaries between physical and virtual representational languages - in this instance a language of mental health.

Rapid-prototyped artefacts, data visualisations and film documentation will accompany the paper presentation to illustrate the design elements of the project.

Categories Academic Presentation

Walking Code(working title) Conor McGarrigle This paper describes an early stage research project that seeks to programmatically apply neo-Situationist concepts of psychogeography to urban walking as artistic and activist practice. The project seeks to ultimately create a structured language that can be used to describe and codify the spatial and subjective practice of walking in the city. This process is both a conceptual and discursive exercise to generate new knowledge about urban space as data space and a practical open framework which can be used to algorithmically generate walking experiences tailored toward specific desires and activities.

This will be achieved through the development of algorithmic methods to analyze, comprehensively describe and codify urban walking movements, developing a granular understanding of spatial movements, the footsteps Michel deCerteau claimed as one of the real systems that in fact make up the city. Walking in this project is understood as being situated within urban systems based on data and algorithmic processes. As urban space is increasingly determined and defined by these processes this effort seeks to propose a counter-movement building a language of urban walking to appropriate these processes. to create rich crowdsourced walking experiences that suggest alternative user-centric modes of reclaiming the right to the city.

This paper will outline the project structure, methods and ambitions detailing how the concepts have derived from previous technologically enabled walking projects that leveraged multiple data-sources to highlight specific aspects of the urban experience such as cultural mappings, the geography of the Irish IMF bailout, infrastructural analysis and economic inequality.

13

Category Academic Presentation

Intermedial Performance and Improvisation Richard Brown Keywords: Intermediality, improvisation, performance, digital scenography, projection mapping, gaming, natural HCI (body, gesture and voice).

In this paper I describe my practice based PhD research investigating the nature of improvisation and its effectiveness on an intermedial stage.

Rather than being specifically about the nature of media or in-between media types, intermediality in a performance context concerns itself with the interdependent relationship and interaction between performer and media. Issues concerning the nature of improvisation and liveness on an intermedial stage are also interrogated.

The practise based research involves the creation of experimental intermedial stages using a combination of projection, games engine technologies and natural interfaces (body, gesture and voice). Ethnographic studies of performers are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the intermedial stages and the testing of theoretical hypotheses.

The practise is iterative and informed by a combination of research questions underpinned by theory. This practise imbricated in theory - praxis, is used as a method for evaluating theory through practise and the generation of new research.

The ‘iMorphia’ project, an experimental performance system using projective body mapping, is cited as a case study and includes a summary of the research findings from the ethnographic study and an exposition of a praxis informed by notions of the Uncanny and the Double.

The paper concludes with a description of the current phase of the research, future directions and an outline of its potential impact.

The website kinectic.net documents the research and includes a research blog as a means of recording the unfolding of the research process.

Category Academic Presentation

14

Grammatical Evolution for the Composition of Piano Melodies Roisin Loughran and Michael O'Neill Evolutionary Computation (EC) uses the principles of Darwinian evolution to solve a given computational problem. Over the past few decades such methods have been applied to creative practices such as art and music. In this paper we discuss a compositional tool for creating piano melodies with Grammatical Evolution, a grammar based EC algorithm. The system employs a context free grammar to create a variety of compositions without any a priori musical information in regards to key or time signature. We evolve melodies by allowing them to survive or die out according to their fitness - a user defined measure of how successful each melody is. This results in the emergence of a tonality in the evolved melody which is in turn used in creating a grammar for an accompanying bass part. In this way we dynamically create two-part compositions with the one tonality. We present a selection of pieces evolved demonstrating that our method is capable of creating interesting and unique musical compositions.

We consider the importance of the grammar and representation used and the combination of the final individuals in relation to the fitness measurements taken to drive the evolution.

Although traditional applications of EC methods focus on fitness measurements, we find that in this creative domain the design of the algorithm and the way in which the population is used is of more influence to the success of the final result. This highlights the need to reassess our computational priorities when using EC for creative, perceptual tasks such as algorithmic composition. We conclude that the relevance of computational versus perceptual assessment is paramount in the evaluation of digital research when applied to the arts.

Category Academic Presentation

Managing the Digitisation of the Irish National Folklore Collection: Balancing User Needs and Digital Preservation Úna Bhreathnach, Conchúr Mag Eacháin, Gearóid Ó Cleircín and Brian Ó Raghallaigh The aim of the Dúchas project, a collaboration between Fiontar in Dublin City University and the National Folklore Collection (NFC) in University College Dublin, is the digitisation and 15

online dissemination of Ireland’s National Folklore Collection. This case-study contextualises the NFC, describes the digitisation process in detail and addresses the twin priorities of the preservation of the digital images and the provision of a high-quality resource to facilitate public access to the material.

The current phase of digitisation involves the Schools’ Collection (1937-39), a vast collection of folklore collected through the Irish primary school network that provides a unique and comprehensive insight to the cultural and economic life of Ireland at that time. From a linguistic perspective, the School’s Collection contains a wealth of dialectical material in both Irish and English making it of considerable interest as a source for sociolinguistic research. Care has therefore been taken to link stories to their points of origin, by geocoding the placenames to logainm.ie, the Placenames Database of Ireland, as well as to the individuals who related and collected them.

Fiontar has extensive experience in putting humanities data online, having developed and managed national databases for terminology, placenames and biographies. In addition to digitising and remodelling these national datasets, and making them freely available to the public via user-friendly websites, Fiontar developed the databases and web-based applications now used to manage and edit them. One such database and web-application, Léacslann, was reused and configured to house the Dúchas.ie catalogue, and integrated with a purpose-built public website and database. A recently launched community transcription project allows members of the public to transcribe selected stories. Future plans include the addition of other NFC collections, richer placename integration, and keyword- and topic-based searching.

Category Academic Presentation

Song Series Animacy Julie watkins Song Series Animacy is a practice-based research project exploring the relationship between motion with intention (1) created in response to the emotion of song and embodied in speed (2), vocal quality (3) and mode. Animacy, the phenomenon of the pattern of movement of 2-D geometric shapes giving the subjective impression that the shape is alive, has long been studied by both animators (4) and neuroscientists (5).

The paper will discuss the development of this investigation through the production of a series of Animacies in response to multiple, wordless, sung variations of two songs. The musical parameters have been chosen that elicit emotional, physiological and psychological responses: the mode, percussive quality and tempo (6). To encapsulate the main emotive

16

triggers these will be delineated: mode major or minor, percussive quality; smooth, aspirated or articulated and tempo; fast, medium or slow based on a resting heart rate (7).

The aim is to extend expressive languages and communication and give the viewer a profound sense of the emotion and physicality, even in wider sense, the breath of song, through animacy; by visualising specific variations, emphasizing both the macro aspects, such as tempo, and the micro nuances of performance. This involves interrogating vocal song as impetus for time-based media and the clarity of intention embodied in changing shape, position, light and colour, over time.

Category Academic Presentation

Augmenting the Visitor Experience in the Atlantic Wall Exhibition Fiona McDermott, Gabriela Avram and Laura Maye Augmenting the visitor experience in museums and heritage sites through the use of modern information and communication technologies is becoming more and more popular, as these technologies become more affordable, more robust and more user-friendly. What constitutes a major problem is the fact that these installations need to be maintained and their content needs to be updated, activities that currently need specialised technical assistance. Empowering cultural heritage professionals themselves to be able to create, install, maintain and alter interactive installations for their institutions is the main goal of a large scale collaborative research project titled Material EncounterS with digital Cultural Heritage (meSch).

The team behind meSch aims to support cultural heritage professionals to bring materiality and physical interaction to the forefront of visitors’ experience, while simultaneously expressing the values of the cultural institution (Petrelli et al. 2013). The team is currently working on designing, developing and deploying tools for the creation of tangible interactive experiences to be used in cultural heritage settings. The approach to the project is grounded on principles of co-design, the broad participation of curators, designers, developers and stakeholders into the process, and on a Do-It-Yourself philosophy to making and experimentation.

This paper sets out firstly to outline the principles that underpin the meSch platform and secondly to introduce the first exhibition designed and built with integrated meSch technology - ‘The Hague and the Atlantic Wall – War in the City of Peace’. The paper details 17

how technology has been used in this public exhibition which utilises replicas of museum objects that have been augmented with sensors to create a smart interactive environment.

Category Academic Presentation

Performance capture and social cognition Darren Tunstall In this presentation I consider the influence of motion capture technologies upon paradigms of the performing body. I draw upon my experience as movement consultant for the cult zombie computer game ‘Contagion’ in 2014. The process of producing 900 image files calibrated to fit the demands of this multiplayer online game are described and placed into the context of an increasingly pervasive use of sophisticated 3D motion data in the entertainment industry.

I then move on to larger issues of how motion capture is transforming the concept of the performing body. Using new data from psychologist Marco Brambilla and colleagues evidencing the influence of moral components of social cognition upon non-verbal behaviour, I advance an idea of behavioural synchronicity as cue to intuitive evaluations.

Brambilla’s work, in line with classic studies on synchronic behaviour from Bernieri, Reznick and Rosenthal and others, is then related to previous research of my own in collaboration with colleagues working in clinical biomechanics and physiotherapy, which was conducted using motion capture with DCD (‘dyspraxic’) subjects, research that further reveals the moral component behind immediate evaluations of physical competence. Thus, I argue that motion capture technologies can be used to offer further evidential support for research into social cognition.

I reflect finally upon self-control in relation to the technical demands of performance capture to reveal the uncanny aesthetics of the digital actor’s body, an aesthetics that I will attempt to make manifest in my forthcoming motion capture/performance project ‘Interview with a Zombie’.

Category Academic Presentation

18

'Visual Correspondences': The use of Data Visualisation in the Analysis of Letters Corpora Niall O'Leary This paper will discuss data visualisation as applied to online letter collections and the opportunities it offers for historical research. While profiling current online resources and what they offer, it will specifically deal with the project ‘Visual Correspondences’ (http://development.nialloleary.ie/letters/), describing the aims of this site, its development and the functionality it provides. The website, ‘Visual Correspondences’, is a project currently in development with the aim of aggregating and visualising historical letter collections from around the world. The site will allow researchers to study the correspondence, interactions, and movements of letter writers from the last five centuries.

Using a large corpus of letters (over 140,000 letters at present), the project will explore the possibilities of data visualisation for analysing historical Big Data. It will also bridge the divide between individual online projects, using a simple data model to harmonise a range of different data sources. By harvesting letters in this format, it presents a holistic vision of historical correspondence and allows for further development of tools to analyse it. The project builds on work done with Coventry University, the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies, and others on the project, “Digitising Experiences of Migration” (http://lettersofmigration.blogspot.ie). ‘Visual Correspondences’ includes that project’s collection of letters, and many of the tools built, but extends its functionality and breadth.

Letters from Early Modern Letters Online, the Mark Twain Project, and other online sources, as well as new data collections compiled especially for the project (e.g. the Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell), can all brought together behind one interactive interface. Through a standardised approach it aims to achieve the goals of larger projects such as Stanford’s ‘Republic of Letters Project’, but for a more heterogeneous data set. A discussion of this project will be used to contextualise larger questions of data access, analysis, and digital humanities research.

Category Academic Presentation

A potential postalphabetic literature?: Digital materiality of Chinese graphemes Yue-Jin Ho This paper concerns with digital materiality of Chinese graphemes. As a logosyllabic language, Chinese is fundamentally different from alphabetic ones regarding the nature 19

possible literatures. Simanowski (2011) suggests a work can no longer be considered as literature when the letters it contains can no longer be read as words with linguistic meaning. These kinds of works he refers to as “postalphabetic”, which can be defined only as digital art, rather than literature. In these, latters are pure materials to construct the work.

While works making use of European languages can play with this question by challenging the audiences to make sense of their postalphabetic nature as pure sensual experience, as visual symbols, or by tracing the fleeting semantics of the letters, the issue is further complicated when dealing with Chinese characters. The ideogrammatic nature of Chinese questions the possibility of stripping off all the meanings on the “letter level” even if the character has been transformed or disintegrated . Interestingly, this issue has been addressed in the re-digital era by the concrete poetry artist Seiichi Niikuni, who disintegrated and juxtaposed Kanji characters. Likewise, in the late 80s, Xu Bing addressed similar themes by carving hundreds of fake Chinese characters. In both cases, graphemes are dismembered into strokes and lines but their aesthetic values are obviously semantic in related to the language.

Using Kedzior’s (2014) idea of digital objects as “material” but simultaneously “unstable and transfigurable”, this paper will look at contemporary Chinese ‘postalphabetic’ works, including those by the author, to examine the questions pertaining to the post/alphabetic distinction: is the notion of post/alphabetic applicable in the critique of Chinese digital art/literature? In an interactive and/or algorithmic environment, is it possible to atomize the elements in Chinese grapheme to “pure blocks” of no linguistic meaning, while still maintaining the aesthetic function?

Category Academic Presentation

The Contextual Experience: Socially Engaged Interactive Installation Design Ian Willcock The abuses of technologies are always worth worrying about regardless of happy endings...”

(Morozov, 2012:325) Creative applications of ‘Big Data’, dynamic fields of information reflecting activity and opinion across large samples of populations, have become an accepted part of digital practice over recent years (Stanza, Shardcore, Lund) as practitioners have sought to integrate concepts of liveness and provenance with the user’s experience of digital artwork.

The rise in the availability of large, freely available, metadata sources and the ongoing 20

implementation of the Semantic Web enable the creation of digital art which can use data in ways that are more sophisticated than simply modelling physical world situations; dealing with issues of significance and interpretation becomes part of the affordances of digital networked art.

Starting from the ideas of Benjamin concerning an artefact’s ‘Aura’, the paper explores in detail the structure, use and persistence of metadata, particularly as applied to digital images. This discussion is then extended to outline the use of image material scraped (automatically retrieved) from sources such as news and campaigning organisations which are then automatically tagged with additional metadata based on their network location and surrounding textual context.

The paper then considers how such an image library (itself a dynamic object) can form the basis of an ideological ‘frame’; a set of image materials which, having been pre-selected (by their original publishers) to be consonant with particular narratives of interpretation and agency and then subsequently provided with metadata recording these associations and origins, can be used to produce ideologically ‘activated’ user experiences. The use of these ideas in a project aiming to produce an awareness of different views on urban conflict is then described.

Category Academic Presentation

Perspectives from Research IT Support on DHA Projects Paddy Doyle, Dermot Frost and Juliusz Filipowski Collaboration between Digital Humanities and Arts (DHA) researchers and Research IT Support can bring many benefits to DHA projects. The Research IT unit at Trinity College Dublin has worked on a number of DHA projects of various sizes and with differing levels of involvement. Examples include Digital Repository of Ireland, Letters of 1916, Mary Martin Diaries, Battle of Clontarf, Early English Church Music, 1641 Depositions.

In this paper, we outline two key advantages to working with Research IT Support. Firstly, engagement with IT specialists can be of huge benefit to DHA projects, particularly when this happens early in the project. Secondly, even projects with a small IT investment can have a high societal impact.

By engaging with IT professionals at the project start, researchers can benefit from early consideration of the digital aspects of the project, IT infrastructure and IT solutions available. This can help avoid situations where the IT aspects of the project are either left as an after-thought or are not fit-for-purpose. These early engagements can range from 21

informal chats through to taking on a leadership role within the project. With Research IT Support input it is easier to be clear about how much IT investment, in terms of both infrastructure and development time or support, may be required.

Additionally, many of the projects that we have been involved in have not required large IT investment. By use of 'off the shelf' solutions and commodity hardware, it reduces cost and time-to-delivery of the project. This allows more time for the project team to work on the primary research, perform outreach activities and engage with the community. Many of the above-mentioned projects featured on national print and broadcast media, and raised the profile of the DHA projects and the university.

Category Academic Presentation

Preserving Ireland’s digital heritage Dermot Frost and Jenny O'Neill There has been a lot of media coverage recently of the perceived fragility of our digital heritage. This was largely prompted by comments made by Google’s Vint Cerf who warned that we could be facing a “digital dark age”. In response to these comments and subsequent media coverage the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) organised a Twitter campaign using the hashtag #nodigitaldarkage.

The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is the national trusted digital repository for Ireland's social and cultural data and as such is heavily involved in the preservation of our digital heritage. While Mr. Cerf is right that obsolescence of hardware and software are important issues DRI is working to ensure that the “digital dark age” will not become a reality.

DRI provides digital preservation services for both historical and contemporary data held by Irish institutions, as well as acting as a focal point for the development of national guidelines and policy for digital preservation and access.

This paper outlines the three pronged approach to digital preservation employed by DRI. First, technical solutions include an infrastructure which is designed to both preserve and provide access to the rich data held in the Repository. This includes ingest of digital objects, data management and archival storage as well as an interface to provide access to the digital objects. Secondly, this technical infrastructure is supported by policies that cover file formats, metadata, copyright and sensitive data, for example. And finally as part of its remit DRI provides education and outreach to other organisations in Ireland concerned about digital preservation through the publication of guidelines and training.

Category 22

Academic Presentation

Digital Tools, Literary History, and Visual Data Christian Riegel and Katherine Robinson In this paper we examine how using an eye tracker to measure the eye movements of individuals as they read poetry can provide visual non-narrative perspectives on issues of literary history. We had participants read poems from pre-1900 and post-1950 in the English tradition. The pre-1900 poetry emphasizes conventional forms (e.g., sonnet), language as a medium for communication and understanding of ideas, and contains poetic devices that convey aesthetic effects. The post-1950 poetry we examine breaks from tradition, emphasizes language itself as its own subject, breaks formal conventions, and the poems often function conceptually rather than aesthetically.

Eye-movement data illuminates the radical changes in form and language that occur in the two eras. We demonstrated that the poetry of these two eras is understood differently intellectually and also that it is read differently in the physical sense: eyes move with varying patterns across the page. We are interested the non-narrative perspective on issues of literary history that eye movements provide. Eye movement data was aggregated into heat maps and bee-swarms. Heat maps provide static visualizations of what aspect readers focus on, and bee-swarms are a fluid representation of how readers read an entire poem and how reading patterns differ between eras of poetry.

Our findings extend to current concerns about the intersection of the visual and narrative in the dissemination of ideas in the Humanities. Visualization of data has the potential to provide new possibilities for interpretive understanding that moves beyond conventional narrative-oriented prose (Straley 2014; Kasunic & Sweetapple 2014). By using advanced digital tools to study literary history we have the potential to further understand how visual media can provide new possibilities for understanding of data; further, the visual outputs themselves serve as aesthetic objects in their own right.

Category Academic Presentation

FeMMusetech; a series of Civic Events in East London exploring Composition ; Music Technology and Leadership 23

Jo Thomas I would like present a paper about construction and delivery of project FeMM use Tech which has been funded by UELAthena Swan and the Civil Engagement fund from the University of East London. FeMM use Tech is project which is based on six community interventions centred at St Johns Church Stratford during April and May 2015. The project has been inspired the work of Georgina Born and Patrick Valiquet in digital technology and gender[2013]The aim of the project was to increase visibility of women working with music and technology in East London and to increase our extremely low female student ratio in music technology. We have provided female composer’s and leadership to the local church sunday school creating gospel music projects.The have composed songs, worked with mobile phone technology and have also shared knowledge on equipment set up. In May there will be two discussion workshops around music ,technology and composition based in the church. The interventions are enabled and supported by a team of female music students and a female research assistant. Combining the project with the gender equality charter UEL Athena Swan seemed the best way to address equality in respects to further education of young women in music/music projection. I have invited speakers National Music Organisations, Researchers,Composers,Disabled Artists and Artists specifically working with music technology and community. The discussion groups are open to the general public and aim to create safe space for discussion around music. Social media , film and radio have been our tools of communication accessing women’s groups , mums groups , disabled groups ,LBGT Groups I hope to developed FeMMusetech in to a University wide initiative involving women and technology and would aim for the project to be able to commission new art from female digital artists in the university.

Category Academic Presentation

Digital Technology and Museums: Democratising Interpretation Laura Maye and Dominique Bouchard The mid-twentieth century saw increased attention and emphasis placed on audience diversification and accessibility in curatorial approaches to museums and galleries. Digital technologies are becoming increasingly accessible and available for museums and galleries, both large and small. Furthermore, they have long been viewed as an important tool for driving access agendas. However, the desire to reach new audiences through the use of such technologies has far-reaching implications for the cultural heritage sector; in particular, it has implications on how historical artefacts can be interpreted by visitors.

24

This paper explores the introduction and implementation process of The Loupe –a magnifying glass-shaped device designed for augmenting artefacts and revealing stories- at The Hunt Museum, Limerick, Ireland. While The Loupe has been re-appropriated to complement the interpretation goals of The Hunt Museum, it was originally created in partnership with the Material EncounterS with digital Cultural Heritage (meSch) project to support a particular participating European museum. This paper also aims to highlight the opportunities and challenges that surfaced throughout the development process.

This implementation was the result of a collaboration between The Hunt Museum, and the Interaction Design Centre at the University of Limerick, Ireland. The project is supported by two initiatives: the meSch project (described above), a pan-European research programme (Petrelli et. al 2013), and Irish Design 2015, an initiative for exploring, promoting, and celebrating Irish Design.

Category Academic Presentation

Digital cultures of health: Our collective obsession Stacey Pitsillides and Isil Onol Health is a notion that is expressed everywhere we go. Terms like healthy eating, health care, mental health, healthy living, healthy cities, healthy economy, healthy relationships, and so on have become common place but what do these phrases mean for us as a society, what systems do they enact and perhaps most poignantly does this obsession with health actually make us more healthy? The English origin of the word 'health' referred predominantly to 'wholeness' of a complete body, or a matter that is unspoiled. The broadening of the term 'health' in Middle English brings us closer to the contemporary definition in which it can be considered to mean prosperity, happiness, welfare, preservation and safety. Today, healthiness can be seen as a state of mind, a goal or objective, a framework, a label (something to be approved by), a confirmation for individuals or a community, or even systems.

Technology has played a role in this new obsession with health. Body health, for example, has become a focus of self-monitoring technology through wearable tech. Food is now shared online, separated into categories, divided into calories and measured through apps and other online services. Economies (micro and macro) are constantly available as our banking moves to our phone and travel is automatically transferred to our credit cards, mapping out our offline journeys, actions and transactions as well as our online ones. The level of detail we can obtain about every aspect of our lives is now immense; we can monitor it and look for any inconsistencies that could make either us, or our lives less healthy – but how does this anxiety of always being on the lookout for inconsistency affect 25

us? Does the segregation of the human being, pulled into a range of parts or collections of data push again the notion of the posthuman? And does design have a role to play in considering the way health and data may be constructed as a deeper self-reflection rather than anxiety-driven monitoring? We posit that in contemporary society we are not 'being' healthy, we are buying healthy, consuming healthy, printing healthy, travelling healthy and displaying other acts of healthiness.

Within this paper, we seek new ways to unravel this collective obsession with 'being healthy' and question fears and norms attached to the formation of this notion. By considering the work of Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Katherine Hayles we begin to see health as a complex system of interwoven factors, which can never achieve full wholeness.

Category Academic Presentation

#plot #character: Literary narrative and the impact of social media Nicola Presley This paper will examine the impact of social media on researching and teaching literature with reference to the production, process and reception of a literary text. It will focus on Twitter as a platform because of its effect on contemporary digital storytelling and events such as the Twitter Fiction Festival, and for the increasing number of fan-based Twitter adaptations. The particular features of Twitter – mentions; replies; retweets and hashtags – make it an ideal site for the dissemination of research and for creating a multi-voiced and interactive crowd-sourced project.

Twitter has a number of effects on literary narratives: the disruption of linearity; potential for a multitude of voices; audience participation and creation; and transmediality. Twitter allows for contraction, expansion, omission and re-creation; culminating in a narrative that is fluid, reactive, and unstable.

Transposing works of fiction onto Twitter can take a variety of forms; there are numerous examples of adaptations which transport the action of a ‘classic’ novel into the present day.

Some literary narratives are ‘born’ on Twitter, thus creating a whole new genre (#twitterfiction). But what happens to literature when it moves from the page to the tweet?

How does the reading experience change? In this paper, I will explore this questions with reference to Twitter adaptations, the notion of ‘social reading’, and digital narrative theory.

26

Category Academic Presentation

Reflective Silk — Behaviour change through better selfknowledge Veronica Ranner and Dan Lockton The Quantified Self is an increasingly wide-spread phenomenon, primarily—at present— manifested in the usage of wearable self-tracking devices. However, the limits of resolution and largely numerical data presentation, while presenting an air of authority, potentially tie us into cycles of focusing on the numbers, and self-documentation (Beckerman, 2012), at the expense of deeper understanding. In consequence, perhaps, we construct artificial, strange and false images of ourselves over time. Self-tracking, however, wasn’t always mediated by digital devices: early forms of self-experimentation of scientists date back to the late 16th century (Neuringer, 1981).

Biomaterials, such as reverse engineered silk, have in contrast the capacity to facilitate greater understanding of an individual's bodily functions, due to an increasingly seamless interfacing quality between human tissue and digital readability (Tao, 2014, Hwang et al., 2012). As such, transient silk not only enables us to think of novel applications for transient electronics in the classic functionalist sense — it also affords us to rethink current modes of introspection and reflection, as well as mapping out a novel terrain for designers (Ranner, 2013).

Collection and reflection (Li et al, 2010) are two key practices of engagement with the Quantified Self, but a deeper form of reflection—“self knowledge through numbers” (Elsden et al, 2015), or personal informatics—afforded by much more intimate sensing, offers a new approach. Self-directed, adaptive behaviour change (Oinas-Kukkonen & Harjumaa, 2008) based around deeper insight into one’s own physiology, habits, and emotions, would bring a tighter set of reflective feedback loops (Argyris & Schön, 1974).

The cultural value of silken biosensing and -interfacing (Tang-Schomer et al., 2014), offers a much wider spectrum for potentially non-numerical accounts of ‘conversation with the self’ (Glanville, 2008); could behaviour change through reflection in this way perhaps even allow us to extend Schön’s (1983) notion of the reflective practitioner towards a more holistic practice of everyday life?

Category Academic Presentation

27

Expressing soft skills: Mapping employers' requirements through content analysis Gauti Sigthorsson What do employers want from graduates? This is an important question for all disciplines, but it carries a particular weight for graduates entering the creative and cultural industries.

Graduates from disciplines that often put a greater emphasis on complex "soft skills" such as creativity, rather than specifically technical skills, may not find a straightforward match between their training and the job market. For example, this is important for how creative graduates represent themselves professionally in social media (e.g., LinkedIn) and online portfolio-sites (e.g., Behance).

This presentation reports on a pilot study of advertisements for internships and entry-level jobs. Conducted at the University of Greenwich, in partnership with Enternships, this study aims to find out which "soft skills" (Butcher et al. 2011) are identified by employers themselves in their advertising. Using a corpus of advertisements, this study attempts a data-driven "bottom-up" analysis of soft skills in practice - using Enternships' data to map the key terms found to relate to soft skills. We will introduce the dataset, the methods of analysis, and share preliminary findings for discussion.

At the same time, we put the concept itself under pressure: Does the category of soft skills provide an adequate frame for analysis, or is it a “Humpty Dumpty term� (Hurrell et al.

2013) meaning whatever the user wants it to mean under the circumstances? This pilot study indicates that there is a consistent pattern of soft-skills-demand in entry-level roles, particularly in sectors reliant on the use of digital technologies.

Category Academic Presentation

Recovering the spatial element of digitised online archives: three key challenges Jonathan Cherry and Susan Hegarty The existence of digitised databases which are online and accessible to the general public has led to an increased awareness of archives, and led many members of the public to explore these databases. The spatial element of these databases, however, has at times not 28

been fully exploited. Indeed, the means of interrogating these databases at times does not lend itself easily to the spatial element being at the forefront. The purpose of this paper is to highlight three key challenges that we have faced in mapping existing databases – such as the 1901 and 1911 Census and the Ulster Covenant – which contain historical geographical data relating to Ireland and in presenting the finished maps. The first challenge that we will address relates to the prior digitisation of the material within the original databases and the errors contained within these, such as misspelling, which compounds errors in maps.

Secondly, while the databases that we use are grounded in spatial information most are without accompanying maps which would facilitate their accurate use within a GIS. Thus, the challenge of spatial accuracy is one that we have been grappling with. With maps produced, we are faced with the broader challenge of presenting them in more innovative and interactive ways. The presentation of information within a GIS frees us in moving beyond our previous two-dimensional concept of cartography, facilitating deeper public engagement, more in keeping with the original idea behind the publicly accessible, digitised online products. The paper will be illustrated with examples drawn from a number of GIS projects that we are currently involved in including explorations of digitisation of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas; ‘Silent Geographies’ – including workhouse and asylum inmates - from the early twentieth century Irish censuses and a project concerned with a GIS mapping of the Ulster Covenant.

Category Academic Presentation

States of mind: The creation of a Digital Performance Lab (Phase 1) Olu Taiwo The aim of this Paper called 'States of mind: The creation of a Digital Performance Lab' (Phase 1), is to investigate, how to create interactive exhibits that will evoke various states of mind in the audience. The context for this investigation will take place within a concept of a digital performance laboratory. This is a creation of a space to play and experiment; a practice as research lab. The examples of being in different states of mind include states that are: Meditative, in rumination, pensive, apprehensive, fearful, confused, happy, at peace etc. The Lab will explore the performative relationship between: The body, sound, space, audience, and movement interactively; in order to create simple exhibits that gentle seduce the audience into various states of mind. Initially I will work with, video and sound with interactive platforms like; motion capture, conducttr and Isadora; with a view to play and research different possibilities that interrogate the very nature of interactivity with reference to our subjectivity. The team is a collection of Tech staff, academic staff and research students. We will work during the month of June 2015, then report our findings back to the conference in Aug. The concept of performing avatars will part of the theme in 29

the Phase 1 exhibits, others will be where the audience will at times be guided by an audio walk. The results of this phase 1, will be a showing of our initial findings as model for a final piece of work.

Category Academic Presentation

Typed Semiotics Anthony Durity Semiotics, the theory of signs, currently treats the things under investigation as implicitly, what computer scientists would call, “untyped”. Untyped means that the things under consideration do not fall into distinct categories. This restricts what can be said of them (or done to them) by virtue of their “type”.

My research proposes a move from untyped semiotics to typed semiotics. That is to say, when considering signs and signification, the type of the thing under investigation is indivisible from the thing itself, at least philosophically speaking.

I show how the logical terms[#Peirce1932] of the philosopher and semiotician C.S. Peirce, his universal categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness display a remarkable similarity to the syntactic form of the untyped lambda calculus[#Church1935] of Alonzo Church. Pointing out that Kant's account of making determinative judgements[#Kant1914], that of subsuming a particular under the universal that contains it, is to say no more than that a measurable value inhabits a certain type.

I conclude by establishing how this field is already, in fact, located under the heading of knowledge representation[#Sowa2000] and can draw philosophy, computer science, logic and semiotics together into a coherent whole under the umbrella of the digital humanities.

Category Academic Presentation

Memorializing the Self: Death and the Digital Jessica Jones 30

Mortality and the shadow it casts over how we live is a topic that has concerned philosophers since the pre-Socratics. We see the influence of the inescapable fact of our finitude take form, in religion, in public policy, in art & literature, as well as in medicine, and in business – indeed, in every facet of society.

Death is big business. Now more than ever. As the increasing medicalization of death, so the increasing professionalization of it. Funeral planners and announcement and memorialization services have been moving online since the 1990s. From the conventional use of digital tools, like the Irish web portal rip.ie, to the utopian/distopian US based eterni.me, the consumer is being sold a notion of immortality.

The common refrain is that the online environment and the digital tools we use are democratising and liberating. Many of these are commercially driven. I argue, that we are, in fact, being led like placid animals through a Temple Grandin style slaughterhouse(Grandin), with only a limited awareness of the path we are taking.

I consider: 1. Philosophies of Death/Culture 2. Materiality & the potency of objects that aid memory 3. Ways of thinking about Time 4. What of our bodies?

5. Digital Traces

Category Academic Presentation

A Digital Humanities GIS Ontology: Tweetflickertubing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) This Digital Humanities GIS (DHGSI) model cross-pollinates literary and social media practices to engage in a participatory, performative and augmented reality survey of the relations between James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) and digital eco-system productions of dialogical and social space. Joyce famously boasted that the aim of Ulysses (which kaleidoscopically relates the urban journeys of student Stephen Dadelus and advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on June 16th 1904) was “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book” (Budgen, 1972, 69). The model integrates a Ulysses schema outline with live geo31

spatially enabled Twitter, Flickr and YouTube posts to map the language operating in a Bloomsday generated digital eco-system to recreate the discourse of a virtual Joycean Dublin during the annual celebration of the novel. Consequently the ‘Joycean’ neologism tweetflickertubing was coined to describe the ontological shift indicated by the HGIS model’s methodology. This paper will conceptualize Ulysses as a Big Data Novel, and discuss contemporary redesigns of literary, cultural and historical narratives in social media space, and their impacts on social production and performance.

Category Academic Presentation

The Purdue Paleography Project: An Interactive Stroll Through the Ancient Archives Elizabeth Mercier I would like the opportunity to contribute to a roundtable or panel discussion regarding a project I have recently launched at Purdue University. The Purdue Paleography Project provides select, advanced undergraduate Latin students the unique opportunity to serve as research assistants in the transcription, translation, and digitization of the single leaf medieval Latin manuscripts that are part of the Archives and Special Collections Department here at Purdue. The students will assist in designing and implementing an interactive website where the digitized Latin manuscripts and our work with them will serve as a learning tool for Latin students everywhere. This project brings our very valuable and rare single leaf manuscripts out of storage and into the classroom, providing our most promising undergraduates the opportunity to study and translate real, unadapted, and as yet untranslated material. The website, once fully launched, will serve as a virtual collective for paleographic study as well as a lasting display of our libraries most precious holdings. Along the way, my students are learning about variations in Latin orthography and grammatical constructs throughout the centuries. They are learning about the various abbreviations employed by medieval scribes. They are learning about archival studies and the manuscripts themselves: methods of preparation and care, the process of illumination, and issues of modern preservation. The Paleography Project brings Purdue’s outstanding STEM students into a partnership with their humanities peers, providing undergraduate programmers the opportunity to work with other academic departments on a collaborative and scholarly endeavor. Our project more meaningfully preserves these Latin manuscripts, inspires other departments to explore the instructional opportunities of our Archives Department , and helps students to see that the manuscripts are not merely acquisitions to be prized but pieces of written history to be actively studied and shared.

Category

32

Academic Presentation

Growing Cities: a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project between an architect and a game designer Marie-Claire Isaaman and Anthony Hudson What do computer games, architecture and urban planning have in common? How can these fields collaborate in exciting and inventive ways to form new approaches for public participation and engagement with city planning? How can digital technology be used to democratise urban planning and engage communities away from the failures of top down planning?

These questions are the focus of a real world, practice based, research proposition currently in development, encompassing the areas of urban planning and ‘serious games’. Our aim is to encourage public engagement with the urban planning process through developing and designing an interactive experience, which connects virtual world actions to the physical one.

Architects design their buildings top-down making assumptions as to how people want to live. Our game ‘Growing Cities’ will turn this notion on its head, replacing current top-down design practice with bottom-up collaboration. All interested parties help shape and design the environment they wish to live in, bottom up. Instead of a blue print set by the ‘professional team’ and their promoters those who wish to live, work, play, rent, own or invest can communicate their desires in a virtual world, informing decision making for planning in the real world representing a radical departure from the dominant approach to city planning of the past 400 years.

Our game is based on principles of self-organised growth seen in human artefacts such as vernacular buildings and cities whose forms emerge directly from the desires, actions and knowledge of individuals and inspired by the computer based algorithms of John Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ and the popular MMORPG’s such as Minecraft.

Category Academic Presentation

33

The Camera and the Selfie: Narcissism, Self-regulation and Feminist Performance Art practice Katherine Nolan This paper discusses the production of gender in the age of the selfie, and looks to feminist performance art practices as a means of raising debate, critique, and resistance. In particular the paper examines how narcissism both drives and disavows the self-regulation of gender through an over-determined relationship to the image, and how the naturalisation of a kind of narcissism can affect the perception of women's authorship of their own image.

Our relationship to the camera and the image, continues to be radically altered through the ongoing advancement of digital technologies. Over the last 15 years the prevalence of (self) image production and consumption has accelerated; its normalisation is signalled by the entry of the term 'selfie' into the OED in 2014. Whilst the subject may experience an ostensible feeling of control of their image in this context, examined through Butler's concept of performativity these practices can be interpreted as self-regulatory in relation to gender norms and hierarchies (Butler 1990). The paper analyses cultural concepts of women’s self-love and narcissistic pleasure in the selfimage, relating them to Orbach's (2009) assertion of the normalisation of body anxiety which she attributes to the increasing mediatisation of culture and society.

Methodologies emerging from Feminist performance art of practices of the 70's, 80's and 90’s included deploying self-imaging as a critical tool. For instance Wilke, Chadwick and Stehli sought to seize the camera from male authorship, deploying self-objectification subversively to recuperate the art historical female body. These artworks and their strategies, seminal to feminist practice, might now be recontextualised amongst prolific selfimaging. This paper looks at knowledge that arose from these practices around women’s use of the camera and their own bodies, and how cultural notions of femininity as narcissistic have affected women’s self-representation, via Lippard (1976) and Jones (1996 &1998). This paper proposes that such practices, whilst not unproblematised by the prevalence of self-imaging, might offer strategies of critique and resistance to the normalising function of an endless stream of images that demand a becoming.

Category Academic Presentation

HAMLET'S MEMORY PALACE - TO BE OR NOT TO BE... A DIGITAL 'ACT OF RESISTANCE' 34

West Connolly HAMLET'S MEMORY PALACE - TO BE OR NOT TO BE... A DIGITAL 'ACT OF RESISTANCE' How do we interpret aesthetic value in digitally created (or enhanced) works of art, and what differentiates digital forms of expression from 'non-art' objects, encounters and the notion of 'everyday aesthetics'? Practice based research takes form in a composite digital and 'non-digital' hybrid art installation that evolves from the concept of a 'memory palace' (– a mnemonic device attached to a visual cue, opening links into a situated narrative that explores a space, in order to retrieve stored memories). The conceptual framework for the actions draw inspiration from methods established by Heiner Müller's 'memory theatre' project, together with elements of Gilles Deleuze's 1987 discourse on "What is the Creative Act?" and the underpinning Bergsonian-Deleuzian notions of perception, affection, 'action distinction' and the deconstruction of these variants of the 'movement-image', in a complex layering of pictorial elements that brings difference to the fore and offers the potential to forge a 'time-image': a visual composition that captures an image of change (or difference) interlaced with duration (or continuity) in its unique framing of a passage of time, and in 'becoming' so, offers evidence for an understanding of our relationship with the virtual, as an interaction between the past (and memory) and the future (and fantasy) by means of the present.

Overlapping spectral projections of film, theatre and visuals onto panels of a suspended structure – a floating labyrinth defined by fabric, latticework and optical illusions of positive/negative spaces – aim to evoke an understanding of 'synthetic fragments' of memory co-existing in the present. The presentation recycles visual, sculptural and performance materials from preceding works of film, theatre and visual arts practice. The new work employs digital media components (image/sound capture and manipulation) to delineate thematic concerns, conflicts and connections, in a reanimated drive to unpack hidden meaning and evolve new lines of inquiry.

Category Academic Presentation

The Origin of the Work of Art (in Digital Culture) Matthew Causey The phenomena of electronic information distribution and its availability in digital culture does not simply reorganize the functions of the work of the artist but requires fundamental shifts in the understanding, theory and practices of how art comes into being. Digital technology and computational interactivity at use in the creation of the work of art brings the possibility of entirely new models of creativity and challenging constructions of what we might consider new paths for the ‘event of truth’ as Martin Heidegger defined art. I will 35

question what are these new models of art and artist, process and product, training and practice-based research in a post-internet age. Are the origins of the work of art and its fundamental essence within a digital culture context the same ‘thing’ or phenomenon as within previous epochs? If we agree that the world is fundamentally different because of the experiences of being within the spaces of technology, be they hybrid or virtual, surely the function of art shifts as well. Martin Heidegger in his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935/6) argues for a process in art which he calls ‘worlding’. The noun ‘world’ used as an active verb ‘worlding’ suggests an event that undiscloses the complex web of interrelations that make up any situation. As subjects within digital culture experience a new worlding of the world so is the ontology of art resituated and reconfigured. What art is, and what art’s function is, and what its origin is, may resemble its former essence, function and origin, but the manners of its production

Category Academic Presentation

Creating Intense Interactive Theatre: Offering cultural freedom or consumer control?

Mari Thynne Interactive performance commenced within early religious ritual (Machon 2013) and yet today we may experience an interactive performance with an intense violent content to offer a liminal space for the participating audience. Theatre performance makers encourage participant embodied sensemaking, and as Broadhurst (1999) found, in interdisciplinary and highly experimental types of performance the technological and the primordial may be include. As audience participant, you experience another’s view of the world through eyes of theatre makers. The experience can be transformative, offering individuals whole body experiences where embodiment is paramount (Machon 2013; White 2012;2013). Audiences as participants are asked to enter the ritual of theatre in unfamiliar spaces, arguably, undergoing a ‘rites of passage’. Turner (1987) saw a continuous, dynamic process linking performative behavior as in theatre ritual and play with social and ethical structure, encouraging people to consider individual and group values (ibid). Creating intense experimental performance encouraging ‘liminal’ spaces of ‘betwixt and between’ for paying audiences to experience is the focus of this study.

This exploration asks theatre makers how much they expect participants to be willing to commit to ‘experience’. Do they expect participants to give themselves in freedom or are they controlling them via the invitation to be ‘all you can be’ (White 2013). Interactive theatre, based on ‘invitations’ to participate, encourages participants to become manipulable material (ibid). As theatre makers deliberately initiate this process, inviting the 36

public into shared creative processes. This work questions if this is offering audiences artistic and cultural freedom or demonstrating a form of control over a ‘consumer’.

This cross-disciplinary study combines elements of organizational studies and theatre studies. The work identifies drivers and dynamic processes within the creating of interactive performances from three leading theatre companies; organisations that specifically aim at satisfying a consumer craving for intense, liminal embodied experiences.

Category Academic Presentation

Main Street? Creating a digital oral history of urban decline.

Penny Johnston North and South Main Street are the “historic spine” of Cork city. In the medieval period these streets were the main thoroughfare in this urban centre, connected to other parts of the city via an extensive network of lanes, many of which have since disappeared. Despite the fact that the main shopping area of the city shifted elsewhere after developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, North and South Main Streets sustained, until very recently, a busy cohort of small businesses and local shoppers. However, over the past two decades the streets have witnessed a marked decline; the footpaths are quiet, several buildings are not being maintained, remaining traders are struggling.

The Cork Folklore Project (an oral history archive based in Cork city) set out to record an audio testament to these streets as they were in the past, and to talk to current residents, traders and planners about how they feel about the area, where policy could be improved and where it has gone wrong in the past. The result is a richly textured collection of stories about a very small part of Cork city, with many funny, poignant and insightful contributions that laud the community spirit of the place, yet lament the contrast between the busy streets of the past and the quiet ones of today.

My research is centred on gathering excerpts from this collection of interviews (and from other archives) to build an interactive online map of the area, with embedded audio, video, photographs and texts. My questions, in this paper, will focus on whether initiatives such as the creation of a digital oral history project can help to combat symptoms of decline. Or are such projects merely a lament for times past on the net?

Category Academic Presentation

37

Vibrotactile feedback in immersive environments TYCHONAS MICHAILIDIS, Jamie Bullock and Doros Polydorou Despite current advances in digital technologies, performing in mixed reality and immersive environments is a challenging task. Many such performances focus largely on exploring relationships where audiences experience the integration of the real and the digital as it occurs before them on stage. In these situations, performers must recalibrate and adjust their performing approach in order to retain normal expressive and communicative nuances. Such limitations are accutely apparent to performers, which suggests an unnatural barrier between the technology and the performer. Tactile experience is absent when the performer is interacting with virtual objects or virtual environments and they are often required to focus on other senses such as aural and visual to experience immersion.

We propose how and in what ways the use of vibrotactile feedback can support the performer in such an immersive environment. In this preliminary research we have examined, through a series of experiments and tests, ways in which vibrotactile feedback can be applied to enhance and immerse the performer (dancer in this case) within a digitally created system. Through the digital augmentation of vibrotactile feedback, the system is able to communicate, inform and interact with the dancer in a more intimate way. As a result, the dancer becomes aware of the technology in a physical and visceral way that can significantly improve the interaction and the experience between the two. Furthermore, with ability to communicate through vibrations we were able to identify and propose creative pathways and approaches between dancers and digital environments.

Category Academic Presentation

Creating a LGBT Digital Archive: Challenges and Possibilities Orla Egan This paper will explore some of the challenges and potential impacts of creating a LGBT Digital Archive. LGBT History in Ireland is a largely hidden history and access to historical and archival materials has been limited. Digital History and Digital Archives open up new possibilities for the preservation, storage and display of historical data which can help to democratise access to LGBT history. Digital History can also facilitate a more open and collaborative approach to the creation of history and enable a range of voices and narratives to be heard. However the development of such an archive is not without challenges, 38

including access to materials, exploration of copyright issues, digitisation processes and equipment and finding the best digital tools to use to create the Digital Archive. I will discuss these challenges and possibilities in relation to my own work in creating a Cork LGBT Digital Archive which aims to enable greater access to, and engagement with, the rich history of the Cork LGBT community. I will display some of the sites I am working on, including corklgbthistory.com

Category Academic Presentation

Digital games as phenomenological research environments: A case study in educational research Gearoid O Suilleabhain Learning transfer, as traditionally conceived, refers to way in which past learning can directly help us to learn or perform better in the future. As a concept learning transfer has been the subject of extensive research and debate since the time at least of the publication of seminal articles by Thorndike and Woodworth (1901) with regard to the specificity of its effects. Despite such attention, however, it seems “…most research on transfer has been bad news for educators. It gives the impression that transfer usually doesn’t happen…”

(Bereiter, 1995, p. 26). This paper suggests that the dominant quantitative experimental research approach which, e.g., sequesters participants and offers them a “one shot only” chance at producing learning transfer, is part of the reason for its apparent empirical elusiveness. An alternative approach to the study of learning transfer is presented, involving the use of digital games as a research environment, an environment argued for as one offering a sort of middle road between the kinds of laboratory-based traditionally used to investigate transfer and a more ecologically valid everyday setting. Other advantages and affordances of digital games as research environment are argued for with regard to recruitment/sampling, data generation and collection, with these arguments being underscored with reference to a phenomenological study undertaken by the author which finds, in the face of traditional learning transfer research, rich data with regard to the interplay of old learning and new in participants navigating a series of novel game-based challenges. Some discussion is offered in conclusion with regard to the way in which digital games as research environments resemble but go well beyond the antecedent use of the game chess for cognitivist research.

Category Academic Presentation

39

Sounding my Day - Soundwalks of Student Life Declan Tuite This paper examines digital audio work produced by 3rd level media students over 3 years.

The students were asked to produce soundwalks of their everyday. Hildegard Westerkamp proposes the soundwalk as ‘any excursion whose main purpose is listened to the environment. It is exposing our ear to every sound around us no matter where we are’, so that the soundwalk is intended to make listening the object of scrutiny. Yet through these exercises, and the final fifty, 8 – 10 minute audio productions, the students express their experiences and also their voice.

The works provide interest on how these supposedly digital natives, while a term questioned scholar e.g. Herring (2008), is still useful in identifying young adults who have most of their lives ben surrounded by and engaged with digital media, represent their day without use of words written or spoken. Throughout the pieces, human voices function as backdrop and hubbub, texture and accent, not preforming instructional or narration roles.

The students have access to broadcast quality EFP equipment and editing facilities. While the creators had free reign in how much editing and overlaying of sounds they produced they express through length of time, position and level in the mix, amount of processing of the sounds.

A certain element of quantitative analysis yields intimation on how the sound pieces are constructed. Noted are the times allotted to various common elements of the students’ days, studies and lectures, social time, travel, eating and leisure time. More is revealed through further study of the purposeful use of multiple layering, mix positioning or choices on whether elements of these field recordings are processed or left unprocessed. Combined with more qualitative analysis themes such as, the intrusion or embeddedness of technology are presented, their representations of study and purposeful self-care and reflective time, offer mindful and astute representations of contemporary life, solely through sound. Gender provides a useful overarching framework to further refine this analysis. .

Category Academic Presentation

Bridging Boundaries through the Scholarship of Intergenerational Learning in Higher Education 40

Trudy Corrigan The DCU Intergenerational Learning Programme (DCUILP) was founded in 2008 to explore the scholarship of the wisdom, lived experience and tacit knowledge which older people aged sixty five years and older could bring to third level learning. The aim of this programme was to provide both a formal and informal learning space on campus where older people would be visible and where they could share their knowledge and experience with younger third level students.This was with the aim of the shared dialogue and learning been reciprocal and beneficial to both generations.The programme provided the opportunity for older people from the wider community to engage in arts and science in Higher Education through introductory modules and to engage in Social Media and the digital society.

Universities are well-placed to support this role through their access to state-of-the-art technologies,research and through the student body who have have already acquired the necessary skills.The findings demonstrate how participation in this programme is very beneficial for both the older and younger students who have participated to date. This is highlighted in helping to develop confidence building and effective communication skills for the younger students. For the older students this has been in supporting them to keep their mind active through reflection, learning and engagement.This has been achieved through new learning opportunities provided for them on a third level campus.It also recognises the benefits of engagement between the old and the young in helping to break down generational and digital divides.The research highlights the need to value the role of older people in Higher Education not just in gerontological studies but in the broader context of an interdisciplinary model which is inclusive of the humanities and the sciences.The research highlights the potential of bridging boundaries between the old and the young through the scholarship of teaching and learning in Higher Education. It provides recommendations for the use of more Intergenerational Learning practices for the greater good of society.

Category Academic Presentation

Social Network Analysis and the Novel: Nation, Gender, Genre Gerardine Meaney The ‘Nation, Genre and Gender: A Comparative Social Network Analysis of Irish and English Fiction, 1800-1922’ project is currently creating an electronic corpus of approximately 200 Irish and English novels from the period 1800-1922. It will use this corpus to identify key representative and influential texts for social network analysis, generate visualisations of 41

networks and their development, apply intersectional (gender, class, ethnicity) analysis to network components, and engage in intensive critical analysis. The objective of the project is to compare gender, genre and the nationality of the author (or setting) in shaping social networks in fiction. Do the social networks mapped out by cumulative interactions between characters in Irish and English fiction differ from one another? Do the social networks represented in fiction differ substantially on the basis of genre or gender? How does this change across the time period? The historical range offers the opportunity for a longitudinal, transhistorical analysis which can identify consistencies and changes. The aim of the project is not to substitute a quantitative, computational approach for a critical and interpretative one, but, appropriately for the conference theme, to explore ways in which these two approaches can be reconciled. This combination of digital and critical methodologies also offers a way of researching Irish and English Fiction and their relationship which can realistically and judiciously reconcile the demands of a radically extended canon of fiction, with its diversity of voices, genres and perspectives, and intense textual engagement. This paper will outline the approach to these questions adopted to date and present a social network analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1869) as a case study. Phineas Finn is acutely concerned with the difficulties of reconciling conflicting identities and allegiances and is also selected to mark Trollope’s bicentenary year.

Category Academic Presentation

Twitter: an ego boosting echo chamber or a learning tool?

Muireann O’Keeffe Twitter, a popular social networking service with 236 million active users, is argued to be a ‘Top Tool for Learning’ for professionals. Twitter is said to keep professionals up-to-date; enables virtual connections across the globe; supports sharing of practice; collaboration and learning. Despite these claims research evidence regarding genuine benefits of Twitter to professionals are sparse and Twitter has been criticized as a self-promoting, ego-boosting echo chamber. This raises the questions: Are these egotistic motivations offsetting the social and democratic aspects of online social networking? How can we guard open online cultural freedom while propagating healthy participation in a digital society?

This presentation reports the research findings of an exploratory case study investigating the activities of a group of Irish higher education professionals on Twitter. This research sought to answer (1) What activities do these higher education professionals engage in on Twitter? (2) What influence do Twitter activities have on the professional learning? (3) What barriers and enablers exist in using Twitter for professional purposes?

A cross-section of tweeting professionals were invited to participate in this research, some were highly engaged tweeters and some less actively involved in the social network. Data 42

harvested from Twitter and follow-up interviews with higher education professionals provided insight into how Twitter activities influenced professional learning. Data analysis revealed enablers and barriers for professionals in using Twitter as a learning tool.

This study found that professionals engaged in activities such as information gathering, connecting and interacting with other professionals. However, while some participants used Twitter for information gathering, the study found that certain barriers prevented use of the ‘social’ features of Twitter to the full extent. This study claims that those who engaged more interactively on Twitter showed evidence of deeper learning and effects to professional practice.

This research has occurred at a time when opportunities for informal professional learning have been called for in Irish higher education. This research strengthens the evidence towards encouraging use of Twitter as a tool informal professional learning within higher education but urges for suitable supports and guidelines to lessen barriers and difficulties experienced by professionals.

Category Academic Presentation

43

Panel Sessions Growing Cities: a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project between an architect and a game designer Marie-Claire Isaaman and Anthony Hudson Both computer games and urban planning deal with ‘inhabiting’ places, the former virtual the latter physical, yet little has been done to explore the synergies between these worlds and to learn from each other. Urban planning tends to be top down excluding involvement from those on the ground whilst virtual spaces of computer games emerge from the bottom up. Our aim is to encourage public engagement with the urban planning process through developing and designing an interactive experience, which connects virtual world actions to the physical one in a democratised urban planning process.

The roundtable will involve multidisciplinary discussions on the theme of such virtual and physical spaces exploring the following questions; How can digital technology be used to democratise urban planning and engage communities away from the failures of top down planning? What does the design of the virtual world in computer games and the physical space in architecture and urban planning have in common? Can a computer game that we are developing, ‘Growing Cities’, replace current top-down design practice with bottom-up collaboration? How can the public help shape and design the environment they wish to live in, bottom up instead of abiding by a blueprint set by the ‘professional team’? How can these fields collaborate in exciting and inventive ways to form new approaches for public participation and engagement in city planning?

Our development research is based on principles of self-organised growth seen in human artefacts such as vernacular buildings and cities whose forms emerge directly from the desires, actions and knowledge of individuals and inspired by the computer based algorithms of John Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ and the popular MMORPG’s such as Minecraft.

Category Panel Session

Materialness, Consumer Technology and Electronic Waste Daniel Ploeger, Neil Maycroft, Irini Papadimitriou and Chris Williams 44

This round table session will engage with practice-based methodologies in digital arts, science and cultural studies that address the materialness of consumer technology, and electronic waste (e-waste) associated with it. Drawing from methodologies in anthropology, the session will focus on the application and development of arts and crafts-based approaches in the realm of science and cultural studies. The contributors will build on their participation in recycling labour at e-waste dumps in Nigeria and China as part of the research project ‘Bodies of Planned Obsolescence: Digital performance and the global politics of electronic waste’.

Category Panel Session

45

Installations & Performances Keen Skin, an installation based on haptic sensations.

Anna Troisi "Keen-skin" is an installation based on haptic sensations by combined tactile and kinesthetic feedback measured through electroencephalography. Streamed data create a sound experience generated by real emotions of involved users. Keen-Skin consists in an immersive interactive installation that intends to create an augmented reality of human tactile senses.

Humans haptic interaction relates to all aspects of touch and body movement but also to the application of human senses to the digital interactive language. This involves not only sensation and perception, but also emotional response. French novelist Michel Houellebecq (1998) envisioned a future in which all contact between people is mediated by technology.

This installation aims rather to demonstrate that technology can help to explore the tactile dimension of social life and emotions that can derive from a social contact. An installation where the space-time perception is decompressed and tactile senses are augmented by a virtual sound experience can represent a challenging liberatory space where people can reconfigure their sense of selves and their social relations through a digital media installation.

Note of the author: This project is a multidisciplinary project where the major aim is to integrate neuroscience, technology and human behaviour in order to create awareness of the possibility to use technology with the aim of rebuilt a social interaction. The installation is based on sonification of brain data and no data will be recorded or mapped to recognise the real emotion of each person involved. The interconnection of use of data, biological natural system and human response to physical interaction will be topic of the next research paper of the author who is available to give a talk on the topic if the installation will be accepted.

Category Installation

if-notNow, if-then-when-else Alinta Krauth

46

if-notNow, if-then-when-else is an interactive 3D html5 piece that looks at the theme of climate change as an environmental disruption, through the lens of glitch art and code poetry. The piece opens on a page of movable squares, purposefully reminiscent of digital pixels, but all moving and visually squirming, much like watching people move through a city from above. Many of these boxes can be clicked on to zoom in and back out again, in order to read the coded and glitched poetry. Both glitch and code are clear visual examples of what goes on behind the scenes in a digital world, and here this is juxtaposed with realworld human-made disruption. In the artist’s native home country of Australia, where the glitched footage is taken, this constant tug between too little and too much rain is now experienced on a yearly basis, and the poetry within this piece reflects that sense of too little vs. too much through the cause and affect relationship of ‘if-then statements’ – a particular cause and affect coding statement. Visually, it is stimulation overload – flashing colours and fast-moving text that simultaneously shows disorder within order, and order within disorder. It is, at times, difficult to read, as it purposely forces the reader to stay on each box for some time in order to read each line and de-code the glitch, making for a more intimate and longer-lived experience. It includes metatextual and self-referential layers – the code that shows itself through text and image. This piece includes a glitched spoken word soundtrack. This largely improvised piece compliments the rest of the work by glitching poetry about climate change, and building to constant stimulation. In this way, this piece explores ideas of meditation within over-stimulation and synesthesia, and how this relates to our changing environment.

Category Installation

The Infinite Power of Vibrations Technology - Music Nature - Communication Annemarie Borg Art is “ a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity” Leo Tolstoy Live performance with Oceanic visuals/films For the past four years I have been working on creating and performing Music that combines field recordings of the sounds of Nature and the human “voice” in it’s many forms of expression.

47

I have been travelling since last year from Helsinki to Hawaii, UK to Alaska performing with a prototype keyboard: The Seaboard made by ROLI in the UK. I combine: Music and voice with the songs of whales and dolphins and the Ocean itself. Adding technology and real instruments. In Nomine Cetus This combination of Ocean voices and Music seems to touch audiences deeply.

Communication: I focus on the idea that in this fragmented Digital World of ours, beyond what we expect today from known communication processes exist other languages and forms of expression.

The fundamental precept of the Artistic process is often seen as based on intuition and a sense of creative flow. The scientific research in ways of communicating fascinates me as it dwells further into the field of our extrasensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind”.

We are at the edge of this research and no definite conclusions have been reached.

If we choose to agree with Leo Tolstoy writing about Art, is it not also a method of communication on a higher level that also brings into its sphere Nature it self…? There is no consensus about these aspects of Creativity and expression, but I intend to let Music and Visuals speak. This is the purpose and essence of my performance and my work, it is what I have to offer.

Category Performance

U - Modified Gareth Young, Siobhan Mannion and Sara Wentworth Evoking the Narrative: A Brief Description of “U-Modified” Experimentation and transformation are facets of the dream-like narrative evoked from this fixed tape performance. “U” is further modified by the addition of advanced vocal techniques by Mannion and visual footage provided by Wentworth. Sound operates within this arrangement to construct a surreal plateau of looped and tangential narratives that serve to mix reality with dream. It is the sonic overlapping of these two themes that operate to inform the listener’s own construct and evaluation of a sonic storyline. The movement of this narrative through diegetic, extradiegetic, and metadiegetic motifs, the manipulation of the spatiotemporal experience, and the evocation of memory are all represented through metaphoric audio and visual events. The vocalist, by imitating, developing, and distorting sonorities from the tape, assists the listener on their journey to the great unknown. A subtle pattern to guide and inspire listeners is presented, one that summons memories of reality 48

and dream, a fictitious spatiotemporal experience that forms a complex warren of thoughts.

The journey of the listener is unclear and unresolved by the end, a mysterious excursion that is ultimately unfathomable. We intentionally produce vagaries between realism, recollection, and insentient thoughts. The role of this joint project is not simply to present a story, but to summon one from within the listener, to embody this, and to affect its outcome.

A stereo preview of the work is available here: https://youtu.be/wG2K_CKD__c

Category Installation

Places I've Never Been Conor McGarrigle Places I’ve Never Been is a data project that mines four years worth of personal location data to generate a locative data portrait of my movements and activities to highlight glitches and anomalies in location information reported from my mobile phone.

Since 2011 I have recorded and tracked the locations that my phone reports it has been. I say reports because while this data is on the most part reasonably accurate it contains anomalies. Major anomalies. In fact it sporadically reports my location in places I've never been. Countries I've never visited, cities I've never explored, country lanes that I've never had the pleasure of, as well as streets, avenues and buildings that are new to me.

At a time when our data shadows provide a portrait in data that describes and defines our digital existence, not to mention providing locational evidence in court, what do these glitches mean and in what way can they highlight and problematize ubiquitous data collection regimes that define out digital everyday.

This proposal is for an exhibition of prints of images captured from Google Street View of places I've never been to but my phone thinks I have. These will be accompanied by an interactive time-based animated map -using cartodb torque mapping techniques and displayed either on a screen or projected - of my complete locational history since 2011. The number of prints and size will vary between 10-30 depending on venue and in consultation with the curators.

Category Installation

49

iMorphia - a prototype performance system Richard Brown Using a combination of body projection and real time motion tracking, iMorphia creates the illusion of an embodied three dimensional character simultaneously visible to both performer and audience.

By donning a white boiler-suit and video glasses, participants can experience the transformational effect of the iMorphia system. There are a range of virtual bodymaps available and the system can support two participants performing together.

The installation requires a dark space of sufficient size for a small audience and a projector capable of projecting an image of approximately 2.5m high on the back wall.

I would supply the rest of the equipment (Laptop, Kinect, video camera, tripod, video glasses, boiler suits, cables) A diagram of the installation and a short video can be seen here: http://kinectic.net/mikumorphia-experimental-performance/

Category Installation

Movement-Becoming Ken Byers KEN BYERS The concept: disrupting the bodies ‘proprioceptive’ movement, cultural, and social inscriptions of the body can be brought to awareness, and transformed into a creative aesthetic. Interruptions of body-movement in the interactive digital environment cause a momentary aesthetic re-consideration of pre-formed movement in relation to the interactive virtual imagery and surround sound. The bodies’ inscriptions are brought to 50

awareness during this brief moment. The technological framework for this full bodymovement-interactive installation consists of sensors technology, Kinect v2, 3-D imagery and surround sound. The quasi-non-cartesian (as opposed to normal space perception) 3-D imagery refuses cognitive interpretation of visual perception. Whilst the surround sound zooming in and out, figure and ground, between visual and audio perception, reacting to body-movement. Body node orientations, and quaternion rotations are tracked on full body joints, and are connected to the quasi-non-cartesian imageries. The body’s movement has a displaced embodiment with the visual imagery. The algorithmic interruptions of bodymovement interact with the quasi-non-cartesian environment. The unconscious inscriptions of the body brought to awareness by the interruption of body-movement, are connected by synaesthesia perception of the audio-visual.

The bodies’ proprioception, body-brain memory, stores images of not just space, as the bodies extension on space, but non-photographic images, are activated at certain points in the interaction between embodied body-memory perception and the and interactive environment in the installation. The interactive designs in the installations are informed by body-perception theory, exploring perception and consciousness in interactive digital.

The installations explore disruption of proprioception, from an embodied psychological perspective. The interactive installations concentrate on aspects of the body in the way it moves to achieve perception, imagination, and consciousness. Our bodies are affected and evolve alongside technologies. Bodies steer our emotional and intellectual reactions, and they subtly mirror, embody and even abstract social, cultural and intellectual concepts in the body.

Category Installation

Mimesis and Technology Amber Scoon and Jen Olvera This is a video of Scoon and Olvera performing a 35 minute long piece, in which they make a series of short drawings from direct observation. The performance follows the history of mimesis and technology in the arts: Looking, Drawing, Painting and Printing, Photography, Projection, Oral Mimicry, Written Mimicry.

Set: Video Camera Set Directly in Front of Scoon and Olvera.

1. Scoon presses play. Scoon: Draws a simple still life (A) with her eyes by simply looking.

Olvera: Draws the same simple still life (A) with her eyes by simply looking.

51

2. Scoon: Draws still life on stone with charcoal. (resulting in Drawing A) Olvera: Draws still life on stone with charcoal. (resulting in Drawing B) 3. Scoon: Draws Olvera’s Drawing (B) on paper with pen and ink. (resulting in drawing: C) Olvera: Draws Scoon’s Drawing (A) on paper with pen and ink. (resulting in drawing D) 4. Scoon: Draws D with Black Paint on Plexi Glass for 5 Minutes and then makes a mono print on paper. (resulting in drawing: E) Olvera: Draws C with Black Paint on Plexi Glass for 5 Minutes and then makes a mono print on paper. (resulting in drawing: F) 5. Scoon: Photographs F, Downloads to Computer, Saves and Projects (Resulting in Drawing G) Olvera: Photographs E, Downloads to Computer, Saves and Projects (Resulting in Drawing H) 6. Scoon: Describes H (projection) in words. Olvera transcribes the description onto paper, with pencil (resulting in drawing I) Olvera: Describes G (projection) in words. Scoon Transcribes the description onto paper, with pencil (resulting in drawing J ).

7. Scoon collects Drawings. Olvera presses stop on the video camera and collects the video camera. Scoon and Olvera exit with drawings and video camera.

Category Installation

Joan Karlen - Interaction Design Installation Joan Karlen In this interaction design installation choreographer and media artist Joan Karlen juxtaposes large-scale public projection with private, reflective content to create a meditation on nature, the elements and generation.

19 moving, layered video scenes are composed to unfold quietly over time, revealing a new array of stories altered by audience participation and interaction. Users interact with a Kinect to make editing decisions in real time – drawing cursive and block text, changing video dimensions and generating animated leaves from their fingertips. During each 16minute installation cycle the video scenes appear in a new randomized order; the work is never the same twice.

Created while in residence at the Banff Centre, surrounded by the majesty of the Canadian Rockies, Karlen became more keenly and specifically aware of her profound connection to nature. “Looking out of the dining room window on the first evening of my stay I was taken 52

with both the immense scale of nature and by four small, distant aspen trees whose leaves were turning yellow. I began to think about the idea of turning – in terms of seasons changing, and turning as a poignant metaphor for how we're continually turning to the next moment, turning into and becoming new selves, on the earth, which is also turning.”

The interactive poetry text that appears in cursive is Rumi's “The Flap of the Wallet”, and the block text Simon F. Ortiz's “My Father's Song”. Banff Centre Film & Media Interaction Software Developer Kenny Lozowski and Karlen designed code for the Kinect.

Conception, Direction and Choreography Video, Photography and Editing: Joan Karlen Interaction design video and photos: http://www.joankarlen.com/interaction-design/ Highresolution images available upon request.

Category Installation

Empathy with the Flesh Series Katherine Nolan Borrowing from ‘youtube tutorials’ and other viewer generated content, these video works seem to take the format of instructional videos - instead offering material related ‘pointless’ sensory experiences. The work refers to compulsive viewing, that like ‘peeling a scab’ might elicit visceral experiences of disgust or satisfaction and relief. Employing affect, visual pleasure and displeasure the work aims to raise questions around how and why we invest our time, emotion and attention in the digital age.

The referenced format of user generated content has more recently been co-opted for advertising purposes, particularly aimed towards children - for instance the highest youtube earner of 2014 reportedly earned $5million ‘just by opening toy packages’. This video installation aims to raise questions such as how are our experiences constructed through the type of imagery produced in hyper-mediatised late-capitalism? Is authentic expression/identification possible in this context, or are our emotions constantly co-opted in the digital economy?

Category Installation

53

Insights: Past, Present and Future Self through Photography Cathy Fowley and Trudy Corrigan The Insights Past, Present and Future Self through Photography is a project that was designed by the DCU Intergenerational Learning Programme (DCU ILP) and awarded an overall prize through the AshokaU and Photowings Photography Awards in 2013. This was one of nine universities worldwide to receive this award. The award was presented to provide a visual understanding of the valuable concepts related to visual literacy related to empathy, communication, resilience, ethics, critical thinking, context, photography preservation and legacy. In this project, participants from the programme selected photos from photo albums,iphones and ipads and brought these to the campus to be shared with staff and students from DCU. Through these shared meetings together, older people from the wider community together with DCU students and staff shared a narrative that was rich in social and cultural contexts and which was evoked through the sharing of past and current photographs. The sharing of stories was published on the project blog and in this way these stories were shared with a wider online community.

Through this creative engagement together an understanding was fostered of the power of photography and its ability to bring older and younger people together to share stories that have the potential to forge new relationship- building between the wider community and the university. The photographs provided the opportunity to marry past historical contexts with current socio-economic contexts and in the process to provide an understanding of resilience, tenacity,empathy and critical thinking relevant not only in the past but to present and future contexts.This experience engaged older and younger students in discussions on the power of photography preservation and legacy. In addition it engaged both cohorts of students in discussions on the use of digital photography and digital media as a means to capture the present as a legacy for future generations. This video demonstrates the learning engaged by both cohorts of students through the medium of visual literacy and photography shared in this project together.

Category Installation

Song Series Animacy Julie watkins

54

Song Series Animacy is a practice-based research project exploring the relationship between motion with intention (1) created in response to the emotion of song and embodied in speed (2), vocal quality (3) and mode. Animacy, the phenomenon of the pattern of movement of 2-D geometric shapes giving the subjective impression that the shape is alive, has long been studied by both animators (4) and neuroscientists (5).

The paper will discuss the development of this investigation through the production of a series of Animacies in response to multiple, wordless, sung variations of two songs. The musical parameters have been chosen that elicit emotional, physiological and psychological responses: the mode, percussive quality and tempo (6). To encapsulate the main emotive triggers these will be delineated: mode major or minor, percussive quality; smooth, aspirated or articulated and tempo; fast, medium or slow based on a resting heart rate (7).

The aim is to extend expressive languages and communication and give the viewer a profound sense of the emotion and physicality, even in wider sense, the breath of song, through animacy; by visualising specific variations, emphasizing both the macro aspects, such as tempo, and the micro nuances of performance. This involves interrogating vocal song as impetus for time-based media and the clarity of intention embodied in changing shape, position, light and colour, over time.

Category Installation

NAMA Requiem – Installation Declan Tuite NAMA* requiem consists of both a linear mixed sound piece and a responsive sound installation. The pieces are composed of longitudinal field recordings, from 2009 – 2014, of key iconic and more mundane sites related to the property crash and subsequent recovery around Dublin.

The piece took inspiration from the singing buildings along the lower quays along the river Liffey in Dublin. Initially these abruptly unfinished buildings produced tones and textures which resounded like low horns, droning reeds and the whistle of faltering pipes within a mostly still environment. As recovery began to take hold, these changed to more closed and muted sounds brought on through construction clatter embedded in streets beginning to move and pulse gain.

The linear piece mixes longitudinal field recordings of the same key locations, which with each step nearer completion, morph and transform across time, change tone and aural shape, offering new reconstituted sound palettes. The sounds are mixed and processed, to 55

produce a piece that leans on as much Truax and Fontana as Tavener and Adams to build, chronicle and resolve.

The interactive installation takes parts of the recording and breaks them apart again to allow listeners and engage with the sounds in a different manner. This piece uses the water flow, both above and below, to advance time. Using proximity sensors, the work can be experienced beneath, through and above the water which flows through and past the key sites, revealing more familiar sounds. A small matrix of six speakers offers depth and accuracy to the space created by the field recordings and the changes in their mix and timbre due to visitors interactions. (*National Asset Management Agency)

Category Installation

Ways of Seeing: Interactive Installation Ian Willcock ‘Ways of Seeing’ (working title) is an installation designed to make viewers aware of the ideological gaze; narratives of causation and interpretation that underlie the construction of meaning.

The work draws on a longstanding project using metadata and dynamically sourced image materials to produce a dynamic library of contextualising materials. In the proposed installation, images will be collected from news stories about a contemporary urban conflict.

This collection will be deliberately focused on news and campaigning organisations from a range of positions and images will be tagged by the collection system with information about their context which will include the organisation they are sources from as well as other tags suggested by surrounding textual content.

This image library then forms the basis of a set of ideological ‘lenses’; visual materials with explicit bias which are cut up and used in fragments to ‘paint’ live webcam images of the conflict zone itself (in the same way that image fragments drawn from media sites were used to ‘paint’ users’ portraits in the author’s previous work, ‘You. Here. Now.’). Images are sectioned into fragments which are stored together with their metadata and average colour value, individual pixels from the webcam are then replaced with an image fragment with the same average colour value.

Two, three or four ‘alternative mediations’ of the same live webcam stream are presented next to each other on monitors, each employing a different bias selection criterion. The 56

viewer, acknowledging the ostensible content (the area in view) is thus encouraged to examine the specific detail in each re-visioning; to look closely at the fragments of ideologically charged material in which the different versions of the overall image are expressed - a metaphor for the ways a given situation can be presented from different ideological viewpoints.

Category Installation

P100 Claire Burke I operate in the interdisciplinary area of art and technology. In my current art practice I explore the links between technology and visual perception. I am interested in exploring the idea of the aesthetics of the image. My main concern is how different technologies can affect the image. Analog signals of Broadcast TV signals, VHS video tapes and photographic film are not as clean as digital; it is this unique property that I am interested in. Irregularities and glitches show up in the forgotten technology of analog media; highlighting these errors and mistakes can show the hidden aesthetics of video and film and tape Aspects such as flickering, vertical rolls and RGB colour can intensify the viewer’s perception. Failure of the technology and the machine become a prominent aesthetic. Glitches can be visually quite complex; they follow patterns, have repetition and please the eye with harmonious colours.

Superseded technologies become appreciated not for their actual function but for the pleasure of experiencing them. Claire Burke P100 This work deals with the unseen and unrealised aesthetic elements of analogue television signals and redundant technologies that we have discarded. The piece highlights the trapped activity inside an old CRT monitor. It reveals aspects of a time when they were functional. We should embrace the eradicated; it can be aesthetically pleasing in contrast to the aesthetics in today’s digital world where it is perfection that is often sought after.

Category Installation

57

Posters

Let’s Go Europeana! A Visitor’s Guide Niall O'Leary This poster will present the functionality available in the website Let’s Go Europeana! (http://europeana.nialloleary.ie/), a site aimed at exploring new ways to discover cultural data. It will outline the technologies used and describe the process by which the system queries and gathers results from Europeana, using the Europeana API, and other Open Data resources, such as DBPedia. It will show how metadata is re-used to leverage added functionality.

Category Poster

The Power of 3: Collaborative creation of an Irish online, open access, digital humanities research resource to support professional training in archives management Padraic Stack, Meadhbh Murphy, Cathal McCauley, Kate Kelly, Orla Nic Aodha and Liam O'Dwyer Digital Poster or Exhibition Introduction The 3U Partnership of Dublin City Univerity (DCU), Maynooth University (MU) and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) is a convergent forum for complementary expertise from the three institutions to catalyse research and innovation in the belief that the opportunities for knowledge creation are enhanced at the intersections between disciplines.

Overview In the Humanities, a unique collaboration involving the History department at Maynooth University and the Libraries in each of the three institutions will result in a restructured MA in History and Archives by building upon on a joint archives digitisation project that incorporates significant interpretation of the archival content by professional historians. A collaborative effort enabled sharing of expertise in digitization, system building, academic connections and a broader humanities project than any institution could achieve alone.

58

Results and Discussion This digital poster will • describe the collaboration between the 3U libraries to develop an open access digital humanities research resource using Omeka, a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions • illustrate the contribution of academics from Maynooth University, St Patrick’s College (DCU) and University of Strathclyde in synthesizing, contextualizing and interpreting the scholarly content of the online collections collectively and individually • show case the outcome of the collaboration: three separate online, open access archives collections connected by a common thread “Outsider Women” accessible and discoverable to all via the 3U website and at each institution • show case the template approach used and its application to future collaborative digitisation projects for the humanities

Category Poster

59