Diedrich Diederichsen – Guest Lecture

Here’s the detail of the 2nd Guest Lecture in Creative Media Colloquium this semester  by Diedrich Diederichsen .

Date: 23rd September, 2014  (Tuesday)
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30pm
Venue : M6094 Future Cinema Studio   (6/F, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre)

Talk Abstract:

There have been plenty of debates around the question whether there is a difference—and what is the difference—between Modern Art and Contemporary Art, and when Contemporary Art begins. This debate has often focused on historical/political events or technological shifts, and has often developed a perspective that contemporary art is also over and will be replaced by new formats or a new perspective on historical shifts and successions. In this talk I will propose that we consider the year 1960 (+/- 5 years) as the beginning not so much of new times but of new forms. To see these new forms one would first have to step back from the usual paradigm according to which formats and their contents are closely connected to social processes and societal developments and look at them rather from a formalistic point of view. But then secondly one would have to realize that these forms were only possible due to a major social and cultural shift: the reconfiguration of the social hierarchies of art and a reformulation of what was once the popular. New experimental “high art” formats and youth-cultural “popular” formats follow the same aesthetic rules and decisions and will establish in the 50+ years since then a new vocabulary in almost all art forms (music, moving images, performative arts etc.). What does this mean for critical concepts like “the cultural industry”?

Bio: Diedrich Diederichsen (born 1957) is one of Germany’s most renowned intellectual writers at the crossroads of the arts, politics, and pop culture. He is a prolific writer and contributes frequently to journals like Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, and Frieze. A main topic of his writing is the tension between subjectivity, identity politics, and culture industry in Post-Fordist society. He is Professor for Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Institute for Art History & Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Art, Vienna.

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Guest Lecture – Jeffrey Koh & Roshan Peiris

1st Guest Lecture with  Jeffrey Koh & Roshan Peiris

Date:Friday, 5th SEPTEMBER, 2014
Time: 5:00PM – 6:00PM
Venue: 6/F M6094 FUTURE CINEMA STUDIO

Jeffrey’s talk abstract:

The roles that robots play in human society are becoming increasingly more complex. From industrial robots that do our manufacturing, to service robots like Roomba cleaning people’s homes, robots have permeated into the social and even therapeutic spaces, as evident with the success of the Paro robot during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. Commercially available robots such as Paro have commoditised social and therapeutic robots, much like service robots have been assimilitated and commoditised in the past. Multidisciplinary robotics research has also led to novel, although not commercially available robotic applications, among them examples such as Cooky, a robot that actively participates in the preparation of food in collaboration with a human partner. As robots slowly permeate human society, an increasing number of examples where robots are taking active roles in the development of material culture have emerged. Many of these robots are being programmed with rudimentary affordances that consider human-robot interaction at the cultural level. Such affordances have allowed for novel applications of robotics that consider affective robot-human interaction. These applications include robots that help human partners collaborate with AI to generate poetry, robot-crafted typography, and even robot-human music co-creation. As such our interactions with robots are becoming increasingly complex. This paper questions current definitions of interaction and asks how will our future collaborations with robots manifest. It takes an exploratory approach to a potential shift in application within social robotics towards cultural collaboration, and outlines the potential conditions and considerations for the development of robots intended for cultural mediation, participation, and creation.

http://www.ambiaware.com

Roshan’s talk Abstract:

In this talk I will talk mainly about my core work on PaperPixels. PaperPixels is a toolkit for animating drawings on a regular paper in a subtle and ambient manner. This toolkit consists of two main components: (1) a modularized plug and play type modules (PaperPixels elements) that can be attached on the back of a regular paper; (2) a GUI (graphical user interface) that allows users to stage the animation in a time line format. A user would simply draw on a regular paper, attach PaperPixels elements behind the regions that need to be animated, and specify the sequence of animation by arranging icons on a simple GUI. The advantage of this work is that, with its provisionally patented technology, PaperPixels creates a new application space where any regular paper could potentially become a display. In this talk, I will be discussing some of the initial feedback from the users of the maker community where we tested PaperPixels.
http://www.roshanpeiris.com/