Fabrizio Lamoncha, Interface Sculptors, Kunstuniversitat Linz My name is Fabrizio Lamoncha, I'm a University Assistant at Interface Sculptors at Kunstuniversitat Linz and we are here presenting you our yearly exhibition or yearly contribution to Ars Electronica Festival. Our exhibition is called Crossing the Bridge that not only stands for crossing the bridge from Linz to Urfa but also from the Kunstuniversitat to the Jotka U and also like getting a little bit out of the comfort zone of the Kunstuniversitat and getting into a different environment where people are talking also different languages. So we are very happy, thank you very much Dorf de Vau to be here and to make this tour again with us. And I would like to introduce you to Professor Krista Sommerer, the head of our department of interface cultures or master at the Kunsthune. Thank you Krista. Thank you, Krista. Thank you so much, Fabrizio, for introducing me. And I'm also very happy to be here. It's, I think, about our 18th exhibition with interface sculpture at the Ars Electronica. And for us, it's a really very important venue because the whole year our students are preparing for this event. They are coming up with ideas in the winter semester and then during the summer semester they are starting to prepare the works, they are producing it with the help of the faculty like Manuela Navo but also some other professors and Romino of course. So the whole team is preparing for the event, the graphics is also made by the students, the program is made by the students, so it's really a big group effort and for us it's always very nice to see you know also how people react to these projects and of course it's always something different and if you only make it for getting some ECTS points then if you really show a finished product to the public and what better place than the AS Electronica where really all these international people are coming here to look at the works to maybe also critique it to get new ideas and also for our students to get new ideas as well because they are interacting with all the international experts from the whole world so it's a fantastic opportunity and as Fabrizio said this year we are at the campus here at the JKU campus we are exchanging here with the community around and it's a big privilege for us that we also can be part of this huge festival which is extremely exciting. that we also can be part of this huge festival, which is extremely exciting. Thank you Krista. So let's start the tour, right? Okay, so let's begin. We have here Catherine Romero, our first student or artist from Colombia, who is going to introduce us to her project Checkpoint. Catherine, would you like to say something about your project? Hello, the Checkpoint is an artwork about memory and the Checkpoint is also the name of my family farm in Colombia. So the machine that you can see is a machine to explore these memories in this farm. And the idea is that there is an interface that you can walk, but you can walk with your hand. So you are walking this interface made of ceramic, and you are finding these memories and synchronizing these memories. So what you're seeing here is the surface that I talk about. So the idea is when you touch, you start to synchronize images. So for example, here, it's all blur, but in the moment I touch, I start to see an image. And these images are memories that are related to this place and you can hear hear the sounds and also you can feel some noise that is like vibrating in the table and our next artist is a Pepe Reyes Caballero. Pepe es de España, de Cádiz, pero estudia en la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Él es estudiante de intercambio, vino como generasmo, quedó con nosotros aquí en Linz y ahora está presentando un trabajo con nosotros. Me ama, me ama no. Pepe, could you tell us something about your project, please? Yes. Hi, I am Pepe, and I am from Spain, and I am presenting here my artwork called He Loved Me, He Loved Me Not. And so it's about AI pictures and love, and I used to have a very bad relationship. So I was wondering what happened in that time. And I took all the pictures that I made with my phone all over those three years. And I trained an AI to cut the patterns of these pictures and also I generated text by another AI to work with all the these WhatsApp messages that I have like kept and so yeah there's this daisy flower where you can plug the petals like this traditional game of he loves me he loves me not when in this case it's about past and you're asking these AI algorithms and our next artist is Maria Konstantinova our student from Russia who is presenting an outdoor project a project, that is a soup kitchen. And she's going to be all over the festival, not only here on our exhibition space. So, Maria, would you like to explain to us what your project consists of? Yes, sure. Thank you. I'll need to put my spoon here. So, a soup kitchen is a tangible interface, a really playful tangible interface that appeared from... Me wanted to try to use some activity, kinetic activities of daily scenarios in life. You know, some things that we are doing constantly, how to put it into interface, how to tell the stories just for the action that we're doing on daily basics. So here you can see a movable, tangible game that consists of three steps. On every step of the story you're supposed to make a choice between two products and by doing it you're moving your character through different nice and pleasant and very daily events of life and the idea is here is to invite you for a few seconds just to stop thinking about complicated and global issues that we kind of have quite a lot these days and just to concentrate on some you know something very stable some daily activities that doesn't require a deep emotional connection to and that's why I also choose the food topic because somehow you know there are three things that all humans do and or will do it's be born eat and die and so it's this kind of experience that everybody can relate to so that's the game and you are very welcome to come join and to try some Candice if you like. Next? Where are we? Noor? Noor? Would you like to go next? Would you like to go next? Go next. Would you like to go next? Okay, and our next project is by Noor. And her project is called Fading Colors. Please, Noor, would you like to tell us a little bit about your colorful project? Yes, of course. So the project behind me is indeed called Fading Colors and it consists of five living sculptures with algae. These algae are telling the story of the corals under the sea because corals live in symbiosis with algae and these algae are connected to the data of coral bleaching. So that means that every day we get an update from NOAA how the corals are doing. And these are five corals all over the world. So this is the northern Bahamas, the western Persian Gulf, central Great Barrier Reef, Wake Atoll, and the main Hawaiian islands. And depending on how it goes with the corals the sculptures change. So the environment of the algae changes and when it is good the algae get enough light and movement so they stay green and happy just like how it with the corals works. And if the corals are bleaching also the sculptures bleach. And people cannot change the environment of the algaes here, because that would be too much of a change. But they can explore all the other coral reefs on the screen. So by turning the wheel, you go basically all over the world to see how right now the coral reefs are doing. So our next artist is Kristina Tica from Serbia and her project Prompt War Stories. Please Kristina would you like to tell us a little bit about your project? Absolutely thank you Fabrizio. So my project Prompt War Stories has been developed over the course of several months now, starting from January this year in exploring different online tools, but also codes and algorithms for text generating and text to image generating through tools that fit under a term of artificial intelligence. While trying to explore the affordances and possibilities on natural language processing with these tools, I was starting with very vague sentences like I remember, I feel, and soon after the AI was generating sentences and stories that were dwelling and slipping into topics of violence. In a way, that was the point when I realized that the shadow of ourselves, the databases that these systems have been trained on, really keep our collective unconsciousness, whether it's about traumas, because it's been extracted from Twitter, media, Reddit, and so on. And I started exploring the depths and possibilities of that, making, giving to these tools requests to generate more content, which is like military strategy, news reports, military poems, or memories of war. After that, I also used a different set of tools, from Dali's OpenAI, which is very much censored and kind of limited in scope, to other tools that I could find online, which were in a way less censored, to generate imagery on top of these texts. So I was using text prompts to generate images and in the end there were kind of two leitmotifs that are presented in this work. They're both on the topics of war. One stream is more of a fantasy of war, fantasy of conquest, more of a cyber spatial oddity kind of fantasy video game character, while the other one is kind of simulated reality, more grounded, more kind of trying to resemble front line and so on. All of that kind of packed into an aesthetics of teleprompter with the text that I've previously generated going, floating around these images. So that is what you can see on these two screens, and there is also part with the sound of sirens. And our next artist, Barbara Jasbeck from Slovenia, and her project, The Uncanny TV. Please, Barbara, would you like to explain us your project? Yes. Hi, my project is called The Uncanny TV. Please, Barbara, would you like to explain us your project? Yes. Hi. My project is called the Uncanny TV. And it's this old school TV installation in which I created for it five channels because I'm researching kind of the world of uncanniness and how does uncanny feel. So I built for it a special custom-made remote control. When you sit down and enjoy, you have to be forced to push the tongue to switch the channels. And mostly the channels are AI-generated animation, text-to-image, and some live TV, and some robots conversation and etc. Yeah. Hello. Okay, so our next artist is called Jelena Munch from Deutschland and her project is called externalization. Please, Elena, could you show us a little bit about your project? Hi, so my project is mainly about intrusive thoughts or obsessive thoughts. And these thoughts are something that everyone has or at least 94% of people in the world and especially people with OCD like me really suffer from them. And my project is about trying to have a confrontation with these thoughts and still be able to have a safe space around it. And it's called externalization because you put your fear in this interface or your thought and then it starts to grow visuals and these visuals are dependent on the category of your obsessive thought as well of the percentage of it and you can sit down there and a voice will start saying the thought that you typed in loud and you have to listen to it and you see your thought externalized from yourself growing around you and after a while it starts disappearing and there are some keys like a meditation that you can hear depending on how the visuals grow and this is like a tool like the repetition that you have to listen to your own thought is a tool that is also used in therapy and the surrounding of watching the visuals and hearing these tone and sitting down there having the space of just listening to your own voice and looking at the visuals is a way I try to have a tool that is also kind of nice to use if you have problems with your intrusive thoughts. Okay, and our next interface sculptors artist is Maria Orcioli from Italy and she's going to introduce her project, very personal project. Please, Maria. Thank you very much. So I'm going to start from the title. It's a pretty long title and it's called Art that Patience is an Insatiable Ether of Worlds. The title is a reference to like an isoplanet, like a star that is is supposed, I mean, supposed, like the founder, that is basically eating its own offsprings, like planets, like dust around it. So it's destroying those planets around, and then attracting them and then eating them, sort of like absorbing them. What you see there, so it's an interactive video installation. What you see there is a speeded up version, footage of performance that took place in the south of Italy, where I'm from. It's on a construction site. I use that as a space because construction sites for me are really much like liminal spaces where everything can be destroyed, but also constructed constructed and that also comes with what is the core of the project. It speaks about accelerationism and also consumer culture. Accelerationism intended us as we are seeing in life force in the technological space so this idea of like to destroy capitalism or like to make the change we should kind of like accelerate everything and my question is is this really the way how to we can make a change or not and I'm trying to analyze this from the point of view of the body and the mind so the performance footage is also very much tied to my experience from recovering from eating disorder and therefore you see there like images of this like character sort of like trickster figure starting like to encourage like a lot of waste material until the closing purging ceremony the interactive part so you see here is like a custom sensor seat I I used, I hacked a car seat occupancy sensor. So it's the one that is used in cars for like alarm systems. And this also ties into the concept of like serrations. So I'm using a device that is used to protect from us like going too fast in a car and avoid like cat crashes. So it works in the way that you, when you sit, for you to be able to consume the artwork you will have to sit and stay still and be present. So the moment you sit you will see the video, the performance footage in its original speed. And there is no way for you to go back, like the moment you see it, it's not starting all over. So if you don't see it, you miss out part of the film. It's also this idea of like, if we go too fast, there are important things that we might miss in life. Here I also placed like candies. The candies are not just to mimic what the character is doing there, so this idea of chewing, but also like an invitation to chew over, ruminate over issues such as carbon consumption and so forth. And that is so far. Our last but not least artist, we have many more projects but we unfortunately don't have time. So our last artist is Indiara Di Benedetto from Italy, interface sculptor student who is presenting a project that has been evolving all the time and the last materialization is this Future Memories of Deep Water in the Arab. Would you like to explain us a little bit what your project or what we're seeing around? Hi, thank you Fabrizio for introducing me. So my project is called Future Memories of Deep Water and basically is built upon a speculation concerning how to use artificial intelligence to predict new relations in between plastic, natural organisms and arden water archaeology. The main idea behind my project is basically to create awareness about what is going on in the underwater environment also reflecting on new phenomena related to plastic pollution affecting this underwater environment. So basically the idea is through this installation to represent those concepts. And the installation is made in three parts, consists in three parts. One video, which basically shows the results of the algorithm where basically we can see the archaeology of the future made with this new incrustation that see this new entanglements between plastic and natural organism and then like I collaborated with young sculptures called Giulia Berrettoni in order to basically materialize and make more concrete those results and that's why we have also the sculpture that you can see behind me and I also decided to place the poster presentation where basically there is all the research that is behind my project. Thank you. Okay, and we finished where we started at the introduction of our exhibition. Thank you very much for being around. We have many more projects outdoors from lina pulido barragan and from maria diana there we also have the workshop from vanessa i think she explained it happening like every day actually from today until sunday twice a day 10 30 and then at 4 30 again and then we have a lot of like student performance also from Interfasculture students at the Sound Campus back in Linz but yeah hope you come by pass by the Yotka U we are here we miss you and have a good time and have a good festival.