Keynotes
Joana Chicau
What Moves You? Hacking the Web with Counter-Choreography
Credits: Ana Caria Leonor Fonseca
This talk presents a practice-based research that uses choreography to critique the often-concealed algorithms operating in the background of everyday web environments. By harnessing choreographic practices, researchers can both reinforce existing forms of control over people's movements or catalyse critical investigation into movement, thereby offering a multifaceted and nuanced perspective on this issue. Joana Chicau will showcase a series of projects that integrate elements of artistic research, critical design, choreography, and embodied sense-making to render hidden algorithmic processes visible and experiential. Her approach seeks more intimate and visceral forms of algorithmic resistance, exploring how embodiment can empower and emancipate users.
Joana Chicau is a designer and researcher — with a background in dance. Chicau's research seeks to increase public understanding of computational processes through embodied and choreographic approaches. Her practice interweaves web design and programming with choreography — from the making of online platforms to performances and workshops. She participates in and curates events focused on computational arts and community roundtables about digital activism. Including Mesh Festival (Basel), Fiber Festival (Amsterdam), Piksel (Bergen), Transmediale Vorspiel (Berlin), Art Meets Radical Openness (Linz), Radical Networks (NYC), to name a few. She is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Creative Institute at the University of the Arts London.
Thor Magnusson
https://thormagnusson.github.io/
Thinking with Technology: Hacking, Making and Improvisation
Design is not exclusively about a marketable end product. Design is also a process that might be less about solving problems and more about improvisatory and speculative thinking. To de-sign is to sketch, mark out, experiment. In this talk I will present a method of improvisatory design thinking that is based on a technical library we call the Organium. The library consists of technical elements and work processes that support quick and agile design processes, brainstorming and hacking. Drawing from examples in creative coding, networked performance, and experimental instrument design, I argue that hacking is not just a technical activity but a mode of thinking through improvisation—an engagement with the affordances and constraints of technology that reshapes our technical imaginaries and opens new creative possibilities for Web Audio.
Thor Magnusson is a research professor at the University of Iceland and a professor of future music in the Music Department at the University of Sussex. His research interests include musical performance, improvisation, new technologies for musical expression, live coding, musical notation, artificial intelligence and computational creativity. He runs the Intelligent Instruments Lab (<www.iil.is>) at the University of Iceland. His research has roots equally in practice and theory and recent books include 'Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscription' and 'Live Coding: A User's Manual', published by Bloomsbury Academic and MIT Press respectively.