About • Exhibition • Performances • Talks

Live streams are available on our YouTube Channel

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About This Exhibit

The year 2020 has seen the unfolding of a pandemic and a global response that is unprecedented in its scale and scope at any time in history. It has been a time of great loss, including the loss of life, the loss of financial and personal security, the loss of opportunity, and the loss of human connectivity. As artists, thinkers, and creative practitioners, this is an essential moment for us to engage the world and use our unique perspective to confront the urgent matters of our time. The computational approach to making provides us with a unique standpoint in this conversation where we bridge the domains of art, science, and technology to critically engage the world through a discourse on technology at its roots. By using code and signals as an expressive medium we can reimagine past, current, and future technologies, steering technological impact and influencing our mutual prosperity and collective futures.It is in this spirit that Digital Media and the Department of Computational Arts at York University presents our December 2020 Online exhibition: Invisibility :: Complexity :: Resistance :: Intentionality. As part of this exhibition, we will be hosting a series of events that include an exhibition launch, guest speakers, a workshop, and performances from students and faculty.

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Online Exhibition

Digital Media Graduate and Undergraduate Artworks

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Performances

Digital Media Graduate and Undergraduate Performances

Wednesday, December 16th, 4pm – 6pm EST

A live stream is available on our YouTube Channel

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Quarantine: A Telematic nO(t)pera
(pocket edition)

Doug Van Nort
Monday, December 21st, time 7pm EST

Quarantine: A Telematic nO(t)pera is a piece by Doug Van Nort, created for the Electro-Acoustic Orchestra (EAO), for the virtual space of connected isolation, for Casper the cat, and for self-sanity. It is not an Opera, but it is not not an Opera. It is a composition for musical, visual and virtual engagement. The music consists of six movements that span disparate sonic landscapes. It is organized by pre-composed palettes that integrate text, graphics, Soundpainting and software instruments, and are augmented with additional real-time composition via EAO’s unique Soundpainting conducting. This content is a crystallization of ideas that have emerged from months of regular online rehearsals that date back to the beginning of the pandemic, bringing together performers from three continents and numerous time zones. As a meditation on (and a product of) our network-mediated present, the nO(t)pera also introduces diverse networks of improvised collaboration: cross performer-machine collaboration, performer-animal collaboration and audience-machine-performer collaboration.

This first performance, created for the Winter Solstice, is a “pocket edition” in that it is the first performance of musical and dramaturgical content that will be performed again, in an expanded fashion, in 2021.

Please note!: In one movement of the piece, the audience will be invited to improvise drawing input that will be interpreted by machine learning algorithms, and in turn will determine the overall structure and sonic content of the music.

Streaming is free and all are welcome to join. That said, there will be a virtual tip jar, with all proceeds split evenly amongst all musicians. Support the arts!

Time/Date: December 21st, 7:00-8:00pm ET
Streaming Location: DisPerSion Lab Youtube page
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbUA4qmnwlGn9CqixAnBkXA… (Will also be linked on the lab Facebook page and at dispersionlab.org)

Credits:

Composition and Direction:
Doug Van Nort

Electro-Acoustic Orchestra:
Tom Bickley (EWI+electronics), Lo Bill (voice), Viv Corringhan (voice+electronics ), Björn Eriksson (feedback boxes), Faadhi Fauzi (synths), Colin James Gibson (guitar), Yuanfen Gu (notpera granular patch), Rory Hoy (bass+electronics), Melanie Jagmohan (guitar+legos), Kathy Kennedy (voice+electronics), Aida Khorsandi (notpera FM patch), Nicholas Lina (bass), Kieran Maraj (kin/electronics), Diane Roblin (inside piano/synths), Omar Shabbar (guitar+electronics), Danny Sheahan (violin+electronics), Peter Vukosavljevic (percussion), Doug Van Nort (conducting/composing).

Live action-or-lack-thereof:
Casper, the cat

Cat-herding and video work:
Stacy Denton

Virtual Staging and visuals:
Rory Hoy

Deep Machine Learning (conducting and drawing recognition):
Kieran Maraj

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Talks

Suzanne Kite & Devin Ronneberg

Talk and Workshop
Co-Presented by Digital Media and the Department of Computational Arts and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology.
Thursday, December 17th, 4pm – 6pm EST

A live stream is available on our YouTube Channel

Kite aka Suzanne Kite (http://kitekitekitekite.com/) is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Kite has also published in several journals and magazines, including in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award winning article, “Making Kin with Machines,” co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Women at Sundance x Adobe Fellow.

Devin Ronneberg, a multidisciplinary artist of mixed Okinawan, Kanaka Maoli, and European heritage, works primarily in sound and sculpture. He received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts, Santa Clarita, California. Through sculpture, sound art, computational media, and design, his practice is currently concerned with emergent technologies and their unseen implications. He is an experimental aircraft designer with Berkut Engineering and co-runs the imprint Private Selection Records. He has recently exhibited at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and received a Sundance Institute Nonfiction Storytelling grant through the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

This event is part of the Regeneration: All Our Relations series organized through Sensorium: The Centre for Digital Art and Technology and is supported by the the Indigeneity in Teaching and Learning Fund at York University.

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Alexander Martin (Droqen)

Talk: Designing Levels That Don’t Have a Right Answer
Friday, December 18th, 4pm – 5pm EST

A live stream is available on our YouTube Channel

I’m going to give a talk about how focusing on simple axes of uncertainty and player choice can provide a clarity of intent that is both motivating to a level designer as well as satisfying to a player.
Throughout 2019 I experimented with designing “playables,” which I described as “games without gamification.” The process of making these basically involved me avoiding any type of design feature intended to cause a player to play with the system in any particular way. It was an interesting but largely unsuccessful experiment, in terms of creating a new “medium” for myself.

I had some trouble resolving the differences between these two axioms:

1. Having a clear “intended experience” makes game design easy! If someone isn’t doing what you expect or want, you can apply various tactics to keep players on the “right path”. This is the focus of many practical game design texts and talks: how can I deliver the experience I want to deliver?

2. An individual player is their own person with agency, however, and I believe that games should be played by players according to their personality. This is the nature of games – they must be played.

I will discuss how I’ve found that designing for two different but related “intended experiences” (and the space in between) is a great way to reap the benefits of both viewpoints.

Some examples:

– In HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0, a game I released this October, I designed each room so that the player could “fight” every enemy or “flee” past the encounter. This provided a very practical, measurable way to ensure that the game experience had a broad spectrum of experiences.

– The idea of “risk / reward” can be recontextualized as an axis of player choice: “low risk play / high risk play.” I’ll talk about the benefits of this perspective.

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droqen (https://www.droqen.com/) has been an independent game designer, creator, and artist for 10+ years. His work explores the nature of play and games. In 2013 droqen’s best-known videogame, Starseed Pilgrim, was nominated for the IGF’s Excellence in Design award, and he continues to experiment with the medium to this day and into the foreseeable future.

droqen’s latest commercial release was HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0

) has been an independent game designer, creator, and artist for 10+ years. His work explores the nature of play and games. In 2013 droqen’s best-known videogame, Starseed Pilgrim, was nominated for the IGF’s Excellence in Design award, and he continues to experiment with the medium to this day and into the foreseeable future.

droqen’s latest commercial release was HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0

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Follow us: @DMYorkU

This event is part of a series of events taking place during the 2020-2021 school year, for more details see:
The Department of Computational Arts Curatorial Theme, 2020-2021

For inquiries regarding this initiative, please contact: Mark-David Hosale, Ph.D.  – mdhosale@yorku.ca
Associate Professor and Chair, Computational Arts/Digital Media Program
School of Art, Media, Performance and Design, York University, Toronto
4700 Keele Street .:. 228 Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts .:. Toronto ON, M3J 1P3 Canada
http://digitalmedia.ampd.yorku.ca/