Network for research in art and philosophy, 2014
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Network for research in art and philosophy
Sciences of the Sensible is a network of researchers that explore intersections between philosophy and the arts. Sciences of the Sensible examine powers of thought between and across disciplines and includes members from a variety of areas such as philosophy, art history, visual culture, architecture, design, urban studies, digital aesthetics, performance studies, literature, anthropology, psychology and economics.
A particular attention is given to the work of thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault and other philosophers where aesthetic sensation plays a vital role for the becoming of concepts and new modes of thought.
The network coordinate seminars and text readings and does - among other things - contribute with panels to international conferences such as the annual Deleuze Studies Conference in cities as New Orleans, Lisbon and Istanbul.
Book will be launched in 2014
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Book will be launched in 2014
Emil has begun a collaborating with the Danish art and design group Oncotype on a publications series with critical perspectives on art and design in relation to interactive technology. The publications will be produced in parallel to Oncotypes distinctive work with interaction design for cultural museums and art institutions. Each publication will explore aesthetics, tools and theories in a critical interplay between Oncotypes work and a vital growing field of interactive art, film and design.
Oncotype is a cross disciplinary group that combine expertise in film narration, graphic design and digital coding. Oncotype, established in 1998, was early to explore the interactive potentials – but also the dilemmas, loops and repetitions - that might be seen as characteristics of digital mediation. Oncotype has a distinct and critical style and the design group has won a number of international awards in categories as interactive film, interaction design and museum education.
The first volume – that will be published in the 2014 - is a small anthology that discus Oncotypes design language as a play between multiple media montages and a looping narrative and/or interactive experience. The anthology will primarily focus on earlier projects as the interactive love story “Swithing” and “The Virtual Extension” that Oncotype has designed for Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen. The anthology include texts by design researcher Mads Nygaard Folkmann, author and film narrator Lars Movin and curator Emil Bach Sørensen.
The project is supported by the Danish Arts Council Committee for Craft and Design
Theoretical work: In-between Oncotypes aesthetics and Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy, 2013
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Theoretical work: In-between Oncotypes aesthetics and Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy, 2013
“The noodeling of thought” was presented as a paper at The Sixth International Deleuze Studies Conference at Lisbon University in Portugal. The paper presents a theoretical work developed in continuation of the publications that Artencounter do in collaboration with the Danish art and design group Oncotype.
Resume of conference abstract:
"My paper is looking at loops and noodles in order to tentatively outline a field between the Danish art and design group Oncotype and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattaris philosophy. My claim is that loops and noodles are common figures in both Oncotypes interactive aesthetics and in Deleuze and Guattaris major philosophical book A Thousand Plateaus. In my paper I will excavate some of the principles and qualities of ‘noodeling’ as I believe that this might tell something important about contemporary interactive culture as well as the ‘becoming of concepts’ in Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy.
My methodology is to seek a vital encounter between aesthetics and philosophy as different but related practises. I try not to apply one practise to the other but to think in a zone in-between, where aesthetics and philosophical concepts co-emerge."
Image Courtesy, Oncotype
Conference participation sponsered by the Danish Arts Council Committee for International Visual Arts
Festival for digital art and culture at the Danish Architecture Center 6-16th November 2007
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Festival for digital art and culture at the Danish Architecture 6-16th November 2007
Digital technology is everywhere. Objects are becoming intelligent and the different spaces that we live in or relate to in daily life are increasingly mediated by computational systems and networks. But how does this state of pervasive computing influence our perception of space and our ability to create and inhabit architecture? Have our capacities to conceive spatial phenomena and events radically changed?
ARCHITRONIC: PEOPLE ENTER SPACE examines some of these fundamental questions from different perspectives. The festival programme includes a wide range of related activities - an exhibition, an international conference, workshops, talks and events.
The complete festival programme can be downloaded here
Emil Bach Sørensen // Maskinstorm has curated the exhibition and collaborated with the Danish Architecture Centre and partners in the planning of the festival. Art adviser: Elise Lorentsen. Support: Thomas Petersen and Maskinstorms advisory board.
The digitalisation in contemporary culture has profoundly influenced our experience of architecture and spatial phenomena. Technology extends human agency and open our minds for new opportunities, but it also raises fundamental questions concerning the status of the human users: the way we perceive, the role of our bodies, notions of consciousness, cultural conventions for social life etc.
At this exhibition Maskinstorm displayed four installations by internationally acknowledged artists and groups. The pieces are all generative artworks, which mean that they can not be understood independently from the agency of the human users. The artworks consist of an open field of aesthetic scenarios which unfold in the interplay between algorithms and the presence of the visitors in the exhibition space.
Image Courtesy, Lærke Posselt
New work by CITA, Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (Denmark). Collaborators: Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, Chiron Mottram, Martin Tamke, Kristine Agergaard Jensen, Karin Bech and Norbert Palz.
Visitors are met by red wine glasses and a decanter on a table. The interactive table is framing a social situation as it develops but it also frames a meeting between human beings and artificial intelligent agents. The results of these meetings are reflected in the imagery projected on the table, as the glasses are filled, moved and emptied. The social and cultural rituals connected to the sharing of wine are visualised as events that develops and slowly erodes over time – like a process of calcification.
Calcifications
Camille Utterback (USA)
An ingoing painterly process is projected on a translucent screen hanging in the central stairwell at the Danish Architecture Centre. The aesthetics of "Untitled 5" is open and evocative and it unfolds live in response to the presence of people in the exhibition space. Visitors feel encouraged to examine the rules, layers and momentum of this kinetic piece by the movements of their bodies. Visitors thereby transform the situated space through the creation of new aesthetic experiences.
Camille Utterback
Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg (USA)
Visitors are confronted with a blinking cursor. As they type words and sentences in English rooms begin to take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan projected on a drawing table. The plan is constantly morphing and restructuring as new words are added. Typing words and generating apartments is an act of playful exploration, but it is also an invitation to critical reflection about the spatial organisation of everyday language.
Apartment
Stanza (England)
Urban sounds from Istanbul and live images from CCTV cameras in London. Stanza use material stored as data from cities around the world in his generative artworks. "The Central City" invites us on an aesthetic journey in an online urban environment where grids and plans are deconstructed as new and often organic compositions of sound and images are created.
The Central City
ARCHITRONIC: PEOPLE ENTER SPACE lasted for two weeks. The first week of the festival programme included the opening of the exhibition, the related academic conference "Erlebnis and Erfahrung: Aesthetics of Pervasiveness" and the two workshops; "Temporal Interactions" and "Creative Partnership". In the second week of the festival the Danish Architecture Centre presented talks and events that focused on the interplay between digital technology, art and architecture in contemporary culture.
Image Courtesy, Lærke Posselt
"Erlebnis and Erfahrung: Aesthetics of Pervasiveness" was a two day conference organised by the academic network "Digital Art and Culture in the Age of Pervasive Computing".
Lev Manovich (US), N. Katherine Hayles (US), Mark B. N. Hansen (US) and John Johnston (US) were invited as international keynote speakers. The theme of the conference was pervasive computing’s influence on aesthetic experiences in contemporary art and culture.
In collaboration with the conference partners the festival ARCHITRONIC // PEOPLE ENTER SPACE aimed to bridge academic reflection with concrete art experiences and specific case studies presented by Camille Utterback and Mette Ramsgard Thomsen at the conference. The bridge between festival and conference also included the panel discussion "Creation and Experience of Contemporary Installation Art – Panel Polylogue" and several network activities.
Workshop for students and art practitioners by Mette Ramsgard Thomsen and Camille Utterback at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - School of Architecture. The theme of the workshop was "temporal landscapes of interfaced environments".
A collaborative project by four Copenhagen based institutions: Diginet Øresund, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, LinkUp and the Danish Architecture Centre. At this workshop Camille Utterback taught young architects, designers and industry partners about digital art as innovation strategy. Camille Utterback was in 2002 nominated by MIT’s magazine Technology Review as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under 35 years.
Presentation of the young architectural office MAPT by partner Mads Møller
Professor Carsten Thau talked about different concepts of interactive spaces and the way these have influenced films throughout the 20th century.
Architect and researcher Tina Henriette talked about augmented reality and her experiences at NASA with design of dwellings for space.
Event where the audience were invited to play the Hitman computer game, while two classical musicians were playing live music. DJ Rumpistol was afterwards playing electronic music.
The Danish Architecture Centre
Københavns Billedkunstudvalg
Calamus Danmark
The Danish Architecture Centre
CITA: Centre for Information Technology and Architecture
University of Copenhagen
Diginet Øresund
Theoretical work: Sketch to an aesthetic concept for interactive installation art, 2011
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Theoretical work: Sketch to an aesthetic concept for interactive installation art, 2011
“A diagonal plane of composition” is the titled of Emils master thesis for Department of Visual Culture at University of Copenhagen, and of a related paper presented at “The 5th International Deleuze Studies Conference” at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA.
Emils master thesis can be downloaded here (pdf)
The thesis is written in Danish, but there is an English summary at the end (p 56).
Resume of paper presented at “The 5th International Deleuze Studies Conference”:
“In continuation of my curatorial work with ARCHITRONIC: PEOPLE ENTER SPACE for the Danish Architecture Centre the paper examines the deterritorialising force of art. More to the point, I take the aesthetic experience of Untitled 5 – an interactive installation from 2004 by the American artist Camille Utterback – as the point of departure in order to think an artistic plane, or diagram, which I tentatively call “A diagonal plane of composition”.
Untitled 5 - and many other interactive art installations – can be experienced as a play between a composition framed by the artist and an open system where movements and aesthetic effects are generated/emerge spontaneously while interacting. Encountering Untitled 5 I will argue that this type of ‘composed but still open field’ calls for a philosophical work that address the question of aesthetic consistency. I will further outline how such a philosophical work could be thought as a deterritorialising/reterritorialising interference between two slightly different planes: “The plane of composition” as it is defined in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? and “the plane of consistency” as it is thought in Mille Plateaux.”
Image Courtesy, Lærke Posselt and Camille Utterback
The project is supported by the Danish Arts Council Committee for International Visual Arts
Exhibition with 10 artistic games displayed at the festival MINE06 28-29th October 2006
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Exhibition with 10 artistic games displayed at the festival MINE06 28-29th October 2006
The exhibition ARCADE was part of the digital art festival MINE06 that took place in the limestone mines of Thingbæk situated in the northern part of Jutland, Denmark, in October 2006.
Can computer games be considered as art? Can computer games be used as political tools? Can computer games go beyond the screen? ARCADE showed 10 experimental, artistic, modified and political game works that challenge the audience’s view of computer games and open the field of art for new experiences.
The official programme for MINE06 can be downloaded here: www.oneo.dk
Project coordinator: Emil Bach Sørensen
Idea: Thomas Petersen
Concept development: Eva Friis, Kristine Ploug, Tatiana Lyng Pedersen, Sonja Thomsen, Thomas Petersen, Emil Bach Sørensen
The exhibition ARCADE is produced within the frame of the former curatorial group Maskinstorm.
Image Courtesy, Thomas Petersen
Susigames (Germany)
"Edge Bomber" goes beyond the digital space of the computer game by utilizing physical elements. The audience can build a platform game by putting duct tape on a white background. The tape pieces are scanned by a camera and the game is played in the augmented environment.
Susigames
Amanita Design (Czech Republic)
The special mix of digital folklore and organic aesthetics of Amanita Design was examined through a selection of three works. Complete versions of the games "Samorost 1" and "Samorost 2" were shown as well as the music video "Plantage" made for the Danish band Under Byen.
Amanita Design
Jodi (Holland/Belgium)
What happens when a computer game is ripped apart and the rubble is reassembled to abstract, eerie and barely functional digital universes. Jodi twists our views on computer games and challenges our need for control.
Untitled Game
Alison Mealey (England)
In Alison Mealey's installation a computer game develops independently of the audience in a closed circuit. The game is monitored and the data is used to generate poetic and ever-changing images. These images were projected directly on the mine wall.
Unrealart
Gonzalo Frasca (Uruguay/Denmark)
The rules are deadly simple. Either you shoot or you don’t shoot. As the title implies "September 12th" is an examination of the nature of terrorism staged as a game. "September 12th" has been played by more then 3 million people on the internet, but is it a harsh political comment or a game?
Gonzalo Frasca
Molleindustria (Italy)
"McDonalds Videogame" is a sharp parody of McDonald’s international activities. It is a controversial game forcing the player to make money at the expense of the consumers and the environment. McDonalds Videogame is a computer game used as a tool for activism.
McDonalds Videogame
Prize Budget for Boys (Canada)
A classic computer game meets modern art when Pacman eats his way though Piet Mondrians iconic painting “Broadway Boogie Woogie” from 1942-43. It doesn’t get any more blasphemous than this.
Pac-Mondrian
Kulturministeriets Provinspulje
Rebild Kommune
Spar Nord
Combine
Theme consisting of 7 articles for the online magazine Artificial dk. January 2007.
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Theme consisting of 7 artivles for the online magazine Artificial dk. January 2007.
Emil Bach Sørensen has been visiting a number of the major international festivals and exhibitions for art, media and technology in Europe in order to produce this theme for the online magazine Artificial.dk.
Embodiment in Digital Art is a collection of 7 articles about and interviews with award winning artists that have exhibited at Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie and Hamburger Bahnhof. Inspired by current trends in media art and theory, the theme examines the expanded notion of "the digital image" in order to have a closer look at the role of the body in contemporary culture.
The articles can be read at: www.artificial.dk/articles/embodiment.htm
Image workshop for kids at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, April 2009
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Image workshop for kids at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, April 2009
At this two day workshop we examined the surreal universes of the artist Max Ernst and the Czech game artist Jakub Dvorsky. Using Photoshop and a digital camera we invited kids (8-12 years old) to create their own fantastic and surreal universes out of found objects from the scenic park surrounding the art museum Louisiana.
Max Ernst is famous for his organic and almost fantasy like expression. Like other Dadaist and Surrealist artists Ernst is experimenting with found objects brought together and framed in montages with surprising effects. Ernst is also exploring a number of new techniques such as frottage, grattage and decalcomania in order to create a tactile organic expression in his paintings.
The montage and painting techniques that Ernst employs in his art are often based on interplay and transparency between different compositional layers. In this sense Max Ernst and his Dadaist and Surrealist colleagues can be seen as an artistic avant-garde that explore some of the fundamental principles that characterize todays digital media culture. The Czech game artist Jakub Dvorsky is an example of a contemporary media artist that is inspired by Max Ernst and his compositional techniques.
In the workshop at Louisiana we took the point of departure in the surreal and organic art of Max Ernst in order to experiment with basic artistic principles as montage, framing and manipulation of layers across analog and digital media. The images created by the kinds were surprising, poetic and surreal like in the historical avant-garde.
Organizers: Elisabeth Bodin & Sidsel Kirk from Louisiana, Thomas Petersen (Crossover.dk) and Emil Bach Sørensen.
Image Courtesy, workshop participants and Amanita Design
Pilot project for Designuseum Danmark, 2004
Open or ClosePilot project for Designmuseum Danmark, 2004
The Virtual Design Studio is an early prototype developed for Designmuseum Danmark. It is an online counterpart to the learning activities taking place at the physical museum.
Denmark has a rich design tradition, and Designmuseum Danmark has an extraordinary collection of art, craft and design. The museum exhibitions are telling compelling stories about the production as well as the values, culture and everyday use of design. A visit to Designmuseum Danmark is appealing to the senses and stimulates the visitors to think and work creatively with the potentials of craft and design. Yet nobody is allowed to touch the displayed design icons.
With The Virtual Design Studio we tried to use the interactive potentials of digital technology as a supplement to a museum visit. Paired with workshops for school children about design process, design materials, sustainability etc. The Virtual Design Studio is conceptualized as a hands-on site where some of the major design icons displayed at the museum becomes “alive”.
Inspired by pioneering internet-artists as Marc Napier - that create generative digital artworks where seemingly solid architectural structures are deconstructed and becomes fluid ‘material’ matter - we prototyped The Virtual Design Studio as a number of morphing objects. Silhouettes that might be recognized as iconic chairs, lamps and jars from the museum collection can be manipulated by the computers mouse and keyboard. Despite the fragility of the digital media forces inherent in craft and design becomes tangible when you explore the morphing objects in The Virtual Design Studio.
Prototype for The Virtual Design Studio is developed by Thomas Petersen (Crossover.dk) and Emil Bach Sørensen in collaboration with Designmuseum Danmark.
Image Courtesy, The Virtual Design Studio and Mark Napier
The project is sponsored by the Danish Agency for Culture
