Adnan Hadzi presented the Immersive Lab University of Malta (ILUM) project at the ELIA Biennial. In the Immersive Laboratory University of Malta (ILUM), as well as in the Visual Narratives Laboratory (VNLAB) of Lodz Film School, researchers, artists, and filmmakers investigate and create different kinds of immersion. Researchers from Malta will focus on the insights with state-of-the-art immersive experience (IX). After the presentation, participants will be invited to join the walk-through of Lost in a garden of clouds, virtual show of works that are engaging with aspects of the climate emergency and its negationism, with the places where natural or urban ecosystems connect with the digital ones and with the exploitation of natural resources and chemical pollution.
Expanding the Arts
An online extravaganza that will energise, inspire and kindle connections throughout the entire arts education community. In partnership with Zurich University of the Arts, thought leaders from the arts and academia, producers and practitioners, will explore the brightest, boldest transdisciplinary ideas, question the art of the possible and where boundaries lie. Be part of a rich tapestry of provocation, interrogation and co-creation crossing over 40 presentations, walk-shops, workshops and a myriad of opportunities to connect with collaborators. Together let’s re-imagine Arts Education as a catalyst for change in the post-COVID world.
In this webinar i-Docs Co-director, Judith Aston, and Stefano Odorico, Director of the International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling (IRIS), will present their ongoing work on i-docs and multi-perspectival thinking. Central to this work is their research into polyphony, as a means through which to promote intercultural dialogue and exchange in a context of increasing polarization.
The aims of the webinar are: to introduce the main issues and debates that this research is bringing up, to provide some examples which point towards ‘polyphonic documentary’, and to open up a channel within the i-docs community for ongoing discussion on the application and relevance of polyphony to documentary practice.
This event will address a series of questions as follows:
What is polyphony and how has it been playing out to date within documentary practice?
How does this relate to ongoing debates about documentary authorship and co-creation?
What do Bakhtin’s ideas on polyphony bring to the party and what is their relevance?
How is the relationship between thinking and feeling being negotiated in this research?
What is the role of i-docs in a polyphonic context and how can this inform our practice?
The premise of this research is that multi-perspectival thinking is a necessary and urgent skill to be promoting, in order to create a solid base from which to address the many challenges that we are facing in these complex and uncertain times.
Observers and active participants are equally welcome!
More on the convenors:
Dr Judith Aston is Co-founder of i-Docs and an Associate Professor in Immersive Media at the University of the West of England in Bristol. She has an interdisciplinary background in anthropology, geography, interaction design and media practice. As an active member of the University’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, she is also an experienced tutor and PhD supervisor. At the heart of her work is the desire to put evolving media technologies into the service of promoting multi-perspectival thinking and understanding. She has published widely on this and her current collaboration with Dr Stefano Odorico on ‘The Poetics and Politics of Polyphony’ is the latest manifestation of this ongoing endeavour.
Dr Stefano Odorico is a Reader in Contemporary Screen Media at Leeds Trinity University where he is the director of IRIS (International Research Centre for Interactive Storytelling). He has published numerous works on film and media theory and practice, documentary studies, and interactive documentaries. He is the vice-chair of the MeCCSA (Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association) practice network and he is a co-founder and member of the editorial team of Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. He is currently collaborating with Dr Judith Aston on a project focusing on polyphonic documentary theory and practice.
Adnan Hadzi presented Machine Learning and Environmental Justice at the the RIXC Art and Science festival: ECODATA.
The RIXC Art-Science Festival: ECODATA aim is to explore the ‘ecosystematic perspective’. More than just rising awareness that living organisms are highly interdependent on each other and their environments, this year’s festival edition aims to reveal a web of connections that interweaves biological, social and techno-scientific systems, living and digital data, artistic and scientific approaches.
ECODATA exhibition is the central axis of the festival, which forms the rest of the program, made in collaboration with Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics” research group led by researcher and theorist Yvonne VOLKART, (Basel, Switzerland). The purpose of this exhibition is to bridge the gap between technological and ecological as well as to incorporate technological issues into ecological art. This year’s exhibition will feature twenty artworks by internationally acknowledged artists working in the field of media art, science and ecology.
ECODATA Exhibition
Guided Tour Through the Exhibition
ECODATA Opening Keynote Session: Art and Science Discussion
ECODATA Artist Talks
CODATA and A/I (artistic intelligence): Opening Performance by the Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared
ECODATA Exhibition Opening
Session 1: Technologies of Ecological
Session 3: BioSensing and Ecosystematic Perspective (1)
Session 4: EcoAesthetics
Thematic Session 5: Atmospheric Experience
ECODATA Thematic Keynote Talk
Session 6: BioPolitcs and BioDigital Poetics
Session 8: EcoAesthetics and Data
Session 9: Living Data and AI
Closing Session 10: GREEN REVISITED – Encountering Emerging Naturecultures
Closing Keynote Talk
Closing Program (Part 2): PLA(N)Tform Online Exhibition
Closing Program (Part 1): FOREST GARDEN GREENHOUSE Concert
PLA(N)Tform is a virtual ‘organism’ in which digital and biological actors grow and evolve in ‘ecosystemic’ relations. It is a speculative experiment of ‘terrestrial co-existence’ transforming biological, techno-scientific and atmospheric processes into a space-time of ‘planthropocene’ – gardens for human-plant ‘involution’.
The PLA(N)Tform at Ars Electronica will evolve into a virtual garden connecting live video concert from the Forest Garden Greenhouse in Riga and Virtual BioSensing exhibition as well as ‘growing, sensing and making kin-ship’ performances in Karlsruhe.
PLA(N)Tform
The PLA(N)Tform is a virtual organism in which both natural and artificial actors grow and evolve together, in the darkness of an infinite space of potentialities. The PLA(N)Tform grows in Deleuzian and Guattarian “rhizomatic” proliferations while it is nourished by luminous seeds, each containing their own “naturally artificial” worlds. By juxtaposing the different realities in a heterogeneous plurality, the PLA(N)Tform is understood as a speculative experiment of Latour’s “terrestrial co-existence.” Epistemological and aesthetic practices, far removed from hierarchical mechanisms, merge into a space-time of planthropocene” – Natasha’s Myers envisioned gardens for plant-people “involution.”
The PLA(N)Tform at Ars Electronica will evolve into a virtual garden connecting the live video concert from the Forest Garden Greenhouse in Riga and Virtual BioSensing exhibition in Karlsruhe, featuring the artworks that eco-systematically explore the forests and underwater world creating Reversed gardens, Forest stories and Floating woodlands; grow telegraph-plants and mimosa to explore devices for tracking and visualizing the plant-movement; use photogrammetry to create virtual Nature nostalgia environments in the times of isolation; make sensing experiments to explore human-plant kin-ship; investigate herbal tea making traditions, and engage in Home-Sick Farming activities that manifest in plant-growing and sharing, and cooking performances.
Adnan Hadzi presented ‘Immersive Laboratory University of Malta: Artistic Doctorate Visual Pedagogies’ at the Eleventh International Conference on the Image.
As communicative landscapes are increasingly driven by the visual, there is a demand to put ‘the image’ at the center of research practices and educational methodologies. In turn, there is a call for a focus on new approaches to making sense of location, use, and analysis of the image in pedagogical contexts. The 2020 special focus attempts to provoke thinking through the image by: encounters – the personal, social and inter-connectedness of experience to the viewer; place – the where and how of transmission, situatedness and reception; ecologies – appearing within the image, systems, cultures, and context; design – the nature of action in experience and interpretation, from the historical, contemporary, to imaging future worlds. What creative ecologies can be re-imagined in the shared practices of image makers and educators that leads to the development of critical thinking to transform visual experience?
