Author Archives: Lily Diaz-Kommonen

Yrjö Tuunanen (1964–2021)

Yrjö Tuunanen's memorial at Väre

Yrjö Tuunanen’s memorial at Väre, 25 January 2021

In memoriam

It is with deep regret and sadness that we must inform you of the passing of our long-time colleague and friend, Yrjö Tuunanen who passed away at home last week. Here at Aalto University School of Arts, Design & Architecture Yrjö was a doctoral candidate within the Department of Media.

Yrjö Tuunanen graduated with an MA from the Department of Photography at TaiK in the early 1990s and his early professional career included work as a photographer and photojournalist. Later he served as a researcher at Aalto Media Factory and the Aalto ARTS’ Department of Media.

Yrjö’s MA thesis work, which included the photo art book, ‘Viljelijän sopimus’ – ‘Hay on the Highway’, produced with his student colleague, Henrik Duncker, won the highly prestigious European Photography Award in 1993.

Yrjö was a very smart and kind person, a great presenter and a person who was devoted to his artistic and intellectual pursuits. His thesis, “Narrative Transparency in News Discourse, Uncovering the Discursive Functions of Narrative Assets in News”, included a proposal for a new method advocating narrative transparency as a guideline in online journalism. He had recently completed the first draft of his dissertation.

Yrjö’s passing has come as a great shock to all of us who knew him and had worked with him. We offer our sincere condolences to Yrjö’s family and loved ones for their tragic loss.

Prof. Philip Dean Prof. Lily Diaz
Head of Department of Media Head of Research, Department of Media

Finnish Association for Media and Communication Studies (Media- ja viestintätieteellinen seura/Mevi ry) winter webinar 27-29 January 2021

Department of Media maintains a membership with the Finnish Association for Media and Communication Studies (Media- ja viestintätieteellinen seura/Mevi ry).

This membership facilitates our faculty’s (as well as our student’s) participation in different activities of the group, including national and international conferences and seminars. It also helps support the journal of the society, Mediaviestinta, https://journal.fi/mediaviestinta.

Mevi’s 2021 winter webinar is scheduled for the days of 27.–29.1.2021. Attendance to the webinar is free of charge. For more information about the event please visit MEVI’s 2021 WINTER WEBINAR BLOG.

Mevi ry

Finnish Association for Media and Communication Studies

8-9 November, Digital Humanities workshop at University of Helsinki

Do what you can with what you have. How to build capacity and community for DH teaching and research.

A workshop with Anneli Rugg and Anthony Caldwell, from UCLA’s Center from Digital Humanities

In this two-day workshop, we will share what we have done at UCLA to build real capacity and community for digital humanities teaching and research. Drawing from our experience creating the Scholarly Innovation Lab (SIL), on Day 1 we will share our story and offer guidance and best practices for building a DH lab with modest investment. On Day 2 we will introduce and discuss two of our more successful areas of practice – 3-D modelling for cultural heritage, and Zoom pedagogy for course sharing. The format will be conversational.

More INFORMATION AVAILABLE HERE.

RENEWABLE FUTURES CONFERENCE 2017 – ECONOMIA

OPEN CALL RENEWABLE FUTURES CONFERENCE 2017 – ECONOMIA
Second edition of art and science conference series in Europe and the Baltic Sea region.

Baltan Laboratories, Eindhoven (NL) – January 20 – 22, 2017.

Renewable Futures aims to invent new avenues for more sustainable and imaginative future developments. The first conference took place in Riga (LV) exploring the transformative potential of art. The second Renewables Futures conference will take place in Eindhoven, aiming to push the boundaries of our thinking about economy. The conference will be a part of Economia festival organized by Baltan Laboratories in Natlab, former physics lab of Philips. Economia is a three-day festival in which we collectively explore new ideas and thinking about our economy. The event is a laboratory for ideas, a place where we can step out of the existing frame. We will use unexpected and playful approaches looking at the essentials of economy, thus establishing a fresh point of view on the economic system and our society.

About Economia:

In the eighties economics transformed more and more into a so called hard science. Economics reduced its various approaches of our complex and unpredictable economic behavior, to one comprehensive theory known as the neoclassical or neoliberal model. This model captured economic behavior in mathematical formulas. It had the beauty of simplicity, the predictability of a formula and sounded too logical not to be true.

Like most powerful technologies dating from after the Second World War, economics has influenced the world of our ideas, how we define ourselves, and how we organize our society. Just as the discovery of DNA forced us to look differently at life, and the developments in ICT made our world smaller in unprecedented ways, the neoliberal model caused a huge shift from common interest to individual interest, and from a long term view to a short term view.

It is striking how little imagination this hard economic approach generates. Economics has no equivalent of multiple universes, singularity or space-travelling. No strange life forms in the depths of the ocean or on other planets, no artificial or eternal life. Economics is astoundingly prosaic and, rather than to explore and push the boundaries of its own domain, it seems to move inward, in precisely the opposite direction.

Since the outbreak of the financial crises in 2007/2008, uncertainty about the effectiveness and validity of the neoliberal model has grown considerably. Economics, as a social technology in its present form, provides no solution to issues of climate change and social inequality. It cannot help us organize social alliances, public interests or develop long-term prospects. Its results no longer appeal. The added value of efficiency and productivity are outweighed by the numerous disadvantages of reducing all values to market value.

Although critique on the neo-liberal model grows, no new answers or alternatives have been proposed yet. In the search for new economic insights and alternatives to the current model, why not start by treating economics like any other technology? Playing with it, hacking it, using input from other disciplines, unleashing science fiction on it, approach it in an artistic manner. In short, taking ownership so that we can reshape and rework economics as we see fit. Because however meaningful, criticizing the current model won’t rid us of it. And we aim to do precisely that.

The aim of the festival and conference is to approach economics in new ways and look at our economic system and society with the detached view of the visitor, researcher, gamer, alien and artist. We want to reclaim economy as a social/cultural structure that we created, ridding us of the idea of economics as an inevitable law of nature.

More information www.thinkeconomia.nl

OPEN CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS AND ARTWORKS
We welcome presentations by academic researchers, designers, artists, scientists, students, social entrepreneurs, visionaries and other creative thinkers and practitioners to submit proposals with regards to the following themes:

Economy as evolution: economics is about development and evolution. Societies develop and the direction they take is determined partly by the type of economic relationships they develop. Parallels are often drawn between these developments in culture and those in nature.

Economics as a game: economics is about rules and laws. Just like other types of relationships in the edifice of a society, an existing system of economic relationships adheres to certain laws and regulations. Gaming is about learning the laws and rules of a game so that you can play it better and better.

Economics as a fiction: economics is about ideas and faith. Credit has existed right from the start of societies, in the form of trust that A would pay B. Just as today, you would do a task for future reward in whatever form. Every form of economic relationship is an idea, or to put it better perhaps a prejudice. Which means it can change.

Economics as a market: economics is about supply and demand. The greatest and most misunderstood cliché. Demand and supply is a way to describe life. Each influences the other in an unpredictable and complex ways.

Economics as magic: economy is both tangible and invisible. We are familiar with two forms of trade, goods and money. The one that you can handle and the other that exists only in the form of ones and zeros. The latter seems like pure magic. It is with good reason that some of these ‘financial wizards’ call themselves ‘Master of the universe’.

Format papers
Proposals should explore at least one of the 5 proposed themes, which are at the heart of this conference. Selected speakers are invited to present their papers as part of the conference and are encouraged to engage within lively discussions amongst peers, experts, and the general audience.

Paper requirements: Length of abstract: 250 words max. + short biography: 100 words.

Deadline for submitting your proposal is 30 September, 2016. Notification for acceptance will be sent before 15 of November.

Submit your proposal to: http://openconf.rixc.lv/
More information conference series: http://renewablefutures.net

Format artworks:
proposals for developing or showcasing art projects (installations, performances, video based work, etc.) should contain a description of the art project (max 1 A4), with a minimum of 2 photo’s and/or a link to website referring to previously developed works. Selection of artworks will be based on quality, feasibility and the connection to the overall theme.

Deadline for submitting your proposal is 30 September, 2016. Notification for acceptance will be sent before 15 November.

Send your proposal to Olga Mink, info@baltanlaboratories.org, subject: Artwork proposal Renewable Futures Conference 2017.

Festival curators: Wiepko Oosterhuis, Olga Mink
Conference chairs: Rasa Smite (RIXC), Olga Mink (Baltan Laboratories), Wiepko Oosterhuis.

Conference International Scientific Board:

– Katja Kwastek. Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

– Armin Medosch. Professor of theory of art and media, Singidunum University, Belgrade.

– Gediminas Urbonas. Associate Professor and Director at MIT program in art, culture and technology, MIT Boston.

– Misko Suvakovic. Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Art, Belgrade University.

– Jussi Parikka, Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics, University of Southampton.

– Dieter Daniels, Professor of Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig.

– Douglas Kahn, Professor of Media and Innovation, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

– Lev Manovich, Professor of Computer Science, City University of New York.

– Laura Beloff, Associate Professor and Head of Section, IT University Copenhagen.

Local board:

– Katja Kwastek. Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

– Daniëlle Arets, lector Strategic Creativity, Design Academy Eindhoven.

– Annie Fletcher, Chief curator exhibitions Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

– Dan Diojdescu (MBA). Teacher Economics at Avans School of International Studies (ASIS).

– Ingrid van der Wacht, independent project manager and concept developer

– Alain Heureux, Your Own Lab and The Egg Brussels

– CeesJan Mol, Venturespring

Contact: info@baltanlaboratories.org, rixc@rixc.lv

Organizers: Baltan Laboratories in collaboration with RIXC and Renewable Future European network.
http://baltanlaboratories.org

Participation Fee / Travel / Accommodation

Conference Registration Fee:
Early Bird €50,- until December 1, 2016 / Full Price: €65,-
Student fee: Early Bird €25,- / Full Price: €35,-
Early Bird registration will open autumn 2016.
Conference tickets will also grant access to the Economia festival.

The conference participants will be asked to take care about covering their own travel and accommodation costs. We will provide you with official invitation letters, encouraging to apply for travel support at your home universities. Selected exhibition artists will be asked to cover all the artwork production costs by themselves – we only will cover the costs related to the exhibiting the works in Eindhoven.

We have limited funding to support travel and accommodation for independent artists and researchers from Europe. Also, as we welcome proposals from countries outside of the EU, we are offering a possibility to apply for covering either your European part of travel, or accommodation costs.

* For academic scholars and PhD students – after the notification (November 15, 2016), we will provide you with an official letter of invitation, addressed to your university (upon request).
* For independent artists and/or researchers – who are not able to cover their travel costs, there will be possibility to apply for travel support.
* For artists and/or representatives from art/culture organizations – partial support (i.e. accommodation) can be considered upon the individual request.

A Miniature Portrait of Storytelling Aesthetics and Ethics in Young Media –

Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola
from 17:00 – 19:00
At Media Lab facilities in Miestentie 3, Room 429, from 17:00-19:00.

A Miniature Portrait of Storytelling Aesthetics and Ethics in Young Media
Extended abstract for the Doctor of Arts in New Media seminar 9 April 2015, Aalto University ARTS

An edited version to be published in the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability) Philosophy Talk #2.2 book: Storytelling & Social Innovation, June 2015 (http://cumulusmilan2015.org)

Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola
Supervisors: Susanna Helke (Aalto University ARTS, Department of Film, Television and Scenography) & Maureen Thomas (University of Cambridge DIGIS [Digital Studio for Research in Design, Visualisation and Communication], Martin Centre, Department of Architecture, UK)

“…your deeds can outlive you, and sometimes influence people even after you yourself are forgotten – but, in the end, I suppose even deeds must surely die some day.” (Daisy’s Amazing Discoveries, 1996)

“Have you ever thought that you couldn’t relate with something if you were absolutely different from it?” (Shift, 2001)

“It would be cruel to demand a perfect composure of the heart. What are we but bits of meat moving in time and space?” (Accidental Lovers, 2006-7)

The quoted narrative experimental work I’ve produced in 1996-2006 has largely been motivated by existentialist drama (e.g. Camus, 1943, Sartre, 1944, Harold and Maude, 1971) and deals with the significance of choice, chance and destiny in human existence. In interactive media, narrative content database elements and the rules of their structural organization, in relationship to participant interaction, can be considered as destined elements that may be enhanced by chance operations of
storytelling system, including participant within it. All the elements and operations become activated by the choices of interactive participant. As an existentialist act, the choice element in interactive storytelling and drama requires a discussion on the ethics of the interactive aesthetics.

Walter Benjamin (1986) defines storytelling as one of the oldest forms of communication. It does not convey information as such, but provides it with a storyteller’s point-of-view, so that information becomes an experience – and the storyteller’s handprint a part of the story like that of a potter’s on a pot.

In the Aristotelian (1999 & Laurel, 1991) understanding of the poetics of tragedy, the purpose of the structured points-of-view is to produce catharsis, a pleasurable release of emotion, which Aristotle believes to be pity: we are feeling for characters and the dramatic presentation of their points-of-view.
Considering the desired emotional outcome, Brecht (1964) would certainly disagree: the release of emotion should not take place. If people are released of it, the didactic purpose of the story is wasted. They should be estranged during the storytelling experience and have the emotion after in order to be motivated to change the world accordingly, informed of the nature of things, as conveyed by the points-of-view in epic drama. Thus the purposes of storytelling may vary, for instance, from the antiquity’s release of emotion to the story being actually informative and providing us with points-of-view that make us feel those feelings that are needed to make change in society. We can move on to the purpose of storytelling in providing us with the sense of absurdity of all existence.

Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola: A Miniature Portrait of Storytelling Aesthetics and Ethics in Young Media – 6 April 2015 2
The sense of absurd allows us the gift of laughter, coming together within our shared circumstance – destined or accidental, as you will: “The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh. Not good! Not true! Well well. But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout — Haw! – so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please — at that which is unhappy.” (Beckett, 1953) The laugh of laughs may provide us with the purest pointof- view to storytelling itself. Let me ruminate: The moment we introduce feelings in storytelling – whether pity or laughter or desire to learn about the world – we have to start to deal with the ethics of the aesthetics of storytelling. In the words of his
alter ego Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce (1916) presents my own favourite take on the issue in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There he suggests that storytelling – which is nowadays typically, but erroneously e.g. in advertising business, thought merely as rhetoric means of pursuing people to think or do something – as a vehicle of producing desire, or loathing, produces mere kinetic emotions: story-listener is manipulated to want, or to stay away from something (up to the level of letting others
obliterate the undesirable and loathsome something or -ones, as history unfortunately shows us).

From Dedalus’ point-of-view, the kinetic emotions result from a kind of second order art of storytelling, improper practice, that is uninterested of the ethics of its aesthetics and does not reach towards its own full potential and spectrum. In other words, kinetic emotions conceive from poor storytelling that practically reduces itself to pornography and propaganda. “The esthetic emotion… is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

—You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?” No doubt, Lynch, but let Praxiteles and The Modern Prometheus be aware of what they decide to design:

“…with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain
our inquiries.” (Shelley, 2008)

As an ethical storytelling aesthetic, Dedalus proposes that it should reach towards static emotion and Aquinas’ claritas: “radiance” (Joyce, 1916), clear, sharp, fair, and thus true and beautiful observation of subject phenomena, including their intricate, complex and arresting layers in storytelling. In that kind of an emotion aroused we do not learn things from one point-of-view – whether certain things are good or bad, or true or untrue – but we are rather introduced to choral points-of-view. We
understand the introduced phenomena better, through storytelling, and are able to make judgements by ourselves, leading life that has been helped to see itself (in more radiant light, if you will) as a part of the great cycle we all participate.

If we take this interpretation of Dedalus’ point-of-view seriously in the ethics of the aesthetics of storytelling, we can unite stories’ capability to both awake feelings and, at the same time, inform us on the complexity of phenomena, and – based on these two – arrive to our own, personally arresting conclusions in our own thinking and action in the world. To go further, the static emotions awoken by proper storytelling that arrests our imagination with both the senses and the intellect, we arrive to forms that storytelling takes.

Since we investigate storytelling form now in participatory media, it’s good to remind ourselves that while a story is told in a novel or television program, drama is always acted out (e.g. in theatre, like a ritual or mystery in shared space, where both actors and audience unfold and partake the story in the same exciting atmosphere). It naturally follows that interactive storytelling and drama, e.g. storybased computer games, ought to be (inter)acted out by their participants/users/players within the
story system, producing “another life” for them, “a shift from one reality to another.” (Tuomola, Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola: A Miniature Portrait of Storytelling Aesthetics and Ethics in Young Media – 6 April 2015 3 1999). ”The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (Joyce, 1916) The storytelling designer becomes a framework creator for this choral, communal experience of making the story unfold.

As the story in interactive drama is told by the choices of its participant, the ethics of design naturally mostly concern the consequences of participant action that makes the story unfold. The ethics are present, except in story logics, also in the whole system logic and behaviour that defines the rules of participation – to be brutally honest: the participants are our design objects. In such storytelling systems, designer’s roles as the participants’ story-listener and the vision-keeping storyteller are intricately woven together. Ursula Le Guin (1989), like Benjamin, insists on the design of the experience in our endeavour: “The writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp.

The reader, reading it, makes it alive: a live thing, a story.” Figure: The Flammarion Engraving Model* (image by Katrin Olina) of the key concepts discussed: outer ring deals with user/Participant, inner ring with her presentation in story system.

STORYTELLING SYSTEMS DESIGN takes place via Culture dependent MEDIA, techniques and technologies we have available for us in trying to learn about the
Nature of things and to give shape to our experiences between largely unknown factors within and out of us (naturally our MEDIA/tech is also a result of Nature, of what we are biologically able to perceive and convey). Claritas/radiance, on the edge of the inner unknown, can really only be circulated about by giving it a whole form (INTEGRITAS) and rhythm/harmony (Consonantia) e.g. via arts and storytelling (Joyce, 1916). Storytelling systems designer provides Participant with agency/Character, possible actions and chance/predetermined consequences for them; ideally, Participant’s interactions, and what she thinks of wanting to do within the system, provide her with appropriate enactments/DRAMA (Laurel, 1991). Depending on the chosen GENRE of the system, only six major EMOTIONs are available to us, of which terror is not discussed within the abstract: “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.” (Joyce, 1916)

In attempt to situate my own artistic work during the decade in the turn of the millennium (1996-2006) in reference to the “Flammarion Engraving Model” presented in this abstract, let me conclude with Le Guin’s Earth-Sea (2012) story-world, where magic can be read as a metaphor for storytelling. There the highest and most powerful form of magic is to learn to know the true name, the utmost descriptive word, of any existing thing. True naming is the greatest storytelling fantasy dream, “which is not to suggest, as is too often done, that [historical] truth is never to be attained, in any of its aspects. With this kind of truth, as with all others, the problem is the same: one errs more, or less.” (Yourcenar, 1963)
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving, retrieved 6 April 2015.
Mika ‘Lumi’ Tuomola: A Miniature Portrait of Storytelling Aesthetics and Ethics in Young Media – 6 April 2015

References
Accidental Lovers (2006-7). Sydän kierroksella. Interactive black musical comedy for television (M. L. Tuomola, Dir. & Script, L. Saarinen, Script, R. Aaltonen, Trans.). Finland: Yle National Broadcasting Company Channel 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTpcS-jHFiA,
retrieved 6 April 2015.

Aristotle (1999). Poetics. Illinois, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Beckett, S. (1953). Watt. Paris, France: Olympia Press.

Benjamin, W. (1986). Silmä väkijoukossa: Huomioita eräistä motiiveista Baudelairen tuotannossa (Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire (1939), A. Alanen, Trans.). Helsinki, Finland: Odessa.

Brecht, B. (1964). Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (J. Willett, Ed. & Trans.). London, UK: Methuen Publishing.

Camus, A. (1943). Le Malentendu play. Paris, France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Misunderstanding, retrieved 6 April 2015.

Daisy’s Amazing Discoveries (1996). Online drama series (M. Tuomola, Dir. & Script, A. Hulkkonen & M. Erwe, Trans.). http://daisy.uiah.fi/en5/city/circus/sdiary/sdiary06.html, retrieved 6
April 2015.

Harold and Maude (1971). Movie (H. Ashby, Dir.). USA: Paramount Pictures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_and_Maude, retrieved 6 April 2015.

Joyce, J.(1916). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London, UK: The Egoist.
Laurel, B. (1991). Computers as Theatre. Boston, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing.

Le Guin, U. (1989) Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York, USA: Grove Press.

Le Guin, U. (2012). The Earthsea Quartet (Earthsea Cycle #1-4). London, UK: Penquin.

Sartre, P. (1944). Huis Clos play. Paris, France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Exit, retrieved 6 April 2015.

Shelley, M. (2008). Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg ebook (http://www.gutenberg.org) publication date 17 June 2008 (J. Boss, C. Phillips, L. Hanninen, D. Meltzer, A. Heines, Prod.), retrieved 21 January 2015
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm).

Shift (2001). Moving image installation (M. Tuomola, Dir.). Media Lab Helsinki, Aalto University ARTS, study & research production (available in the Media Lab library), http://mlab.taik.fi/myth/, retrieved 6 April 2015.

Tuomola, M. (1999). Drama in the Digital Domain: Commedia dell’Arte, Characterisation, Collaboration and Computers. Digital Creativity Vol. 10 No 3, Lisse, Netherlands: Swets and Zeitlinger.

Also in

Digital Creativity: A Reader (2002, C. Beardon & L. Malmborg, Eds.). UK: Taylor &
Francis.)

Yourcenar, M. (1963). Memoirs of Hadrian: Reflections on the Composition (G. Frick, Trans.). New York, USA: Farrar, Straus & Co.

On Affect: from Deleuze to Bergson

Hung-Han Chen
Doctor of Arts seminar at Media Lab
Thursday, Feb 26, 2015, Miestentie 3, Room 429, from 17:00-19:00

From the phenomenological point of view, the relationships between body and world are considered in various ways including perception, affection and action. Bergson(1908) suggested that affect is a motor tendency on a sensitive nerve. In addition, the affect which occupies the gap between an action and a reaction, absorbs an external action and reacts on the inside.According to the interpretation by Deleuze, affect plays a role in cinemas as the affection-image. The affection-image is one type of signs in the non-linguistic sign system of cinemas. The affection-image is designated to affect as expressed by a face or a facial equivalent.

Deleuze’s interpretation of affect in 1980s has been taken into contemporary studies on media art. His semiotic taxonomy on cinemas is essential for film philosophy, which seeks to understand the most basic questions regarding films. Manovich adopts concepts from film philosophy to offer the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. In addition, Hansen believes that Deleuze effectively dissolves the constitutive link of affect to the body and appropriates it to the movement-image. Hansen adopts the concept of affection-image to interpret the aesthetics of interactive art.However, these studies have only investigated new understanding of Bergson’s concepts. This has led to an overemphasis of interpretation in modern paradigm. To fill this gap, with the context of Deleuze’s interpretation of Bergson, the author tries to return to Bergson’s own texts and other related studies on affect in 1900s, examines the similar or different points of attitudes toward affect between Deleuze’s interpretation, Bergson himself, and other scholars who have a close relationship with Bergson.

This article manifests the theoretical characteristics and meanings of Bergson, Deleuze and other related researches ontologies in affect.

Slides: link

Keywords: Affect theory, Bergson, Deleuze, Phenomenology

Title of my research plan: In-Between-Ness: A Practice-led Study Rooted in the Concept of Affect in Bergsonian Metaphysics

This research derives concepts from affect theories in support of art ideas centered on digital representations in New Media Art. The research subject elaborates affect concepts created by French philosopher Henri Bergson in the 1900s and explains the conjunctions between affect and medium by a series of hypothesis. The art practices concentrate on transcoding Bergsonian metaphysics’s poetic logic into rational computer code and digital representations.

Keywords: Affect, Henri Bergson, Medium, Digital Representation, New Media Art, Software Art, Internet Art.

Embodied Cognition – Mark Johnson

Welcome to a lecture by Mark Johnson 

Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon

TOPIC:
Embodied cognition: how we make and experience meaning through our sensory, motor, and affective processes.

TIME: Monday March 9, 2015 at 10-11
LOCATION: Room 215, Building 008 (Konetekniikka 1), Otakaari 4, Otaniemi, Espoo (number 8 at the campus map)

http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/profile/markj/

Mark writes” My interest in embodiment originally grew out of my work with George Lakoff on the nature of conceptual metaphors that define virtually all of our abstract concepts. We found that the source domains of these systematic metaphors typically involved aspects of our sensory-motor experience, such as the coactivation of our perception of changing in verticality correlated with judgments about changes in quantity, giving rise to the MORE IS UP metaphor. Considerations of this sort led me to think about the role of the body in the constitution of human meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. Lakoff and I hypothesized that what we called “image schemas” – such as VERTICALITY, SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, BALANCE, CONTAINMENT, FORCE, INTENSITY, and so forth, play a key role in the structuring of our concrete and abstract concepts. I published some of this work in my book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1987) and later with Lakoff in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999). In this latter book, we surveyed empirical evidence for the body bases of meaning and concepts, and we began to explore some of the emerging neuroscience evidence for this embodied cognition view” (http://pages.uoregon.edu/markj/topic1.html)

Books:

The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (co-author George Lakoff), Basic Books, 1999

The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, University of Chicago Press, 1987.

This event is organised by Crucible Studio, Department of Media @Aalto School of ARTS, and ABC Aalto Brain Centre @Aalto School of Science.

Pia Tikka
Dr. Researcher, Filmmaker
NeuroCine @ Crucible Studio
aivoAALTO research project
Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
– Department of Media
Finland mobile phone +358 50 4461184
Skype: piatikka
e-mail: pia.tikka@aalto.fi
crucible.mlog.taik.fi
www.neurocine.net

Recontextualizing Audiovisual Archives: Immigrants and Remixing practices

Thursday, 5 February 2015
17:00 – 19:00
Aalto Media Factory, Arabia
Dr. Mariana Salgado

How could immigrants interpret and enrich audiovisual cultural heritage through remix practices? How could new media design strategies support social inclusion? Guided by these two questions, I set up a series of participatory design explorations with immigrant groups living in Finland. The participants told stories reusing online audiovisual archive material. The analysis of these cases reveals that there is a need for new media design strategies for including the voices of immigrants in the archive.  I argue that social inclusion is seldom part of the new media design strategies for the development of these online archives.
Who could appropriate the archive for reuse? Who could add their own content and organize it? Design decisions are in the core of  current limitations of the online archives regarding their future development. The challenge for inclusive archives is to lift the barriers hindering the input of the general public, not only in regard to the content but also considering the design initiatives. This is a challenge because most of the efforts are devoted to conserve the material, while it could be also relevant to think about how and by whom the archives could be used in the future. In remixing online archival material, most often than not, priority is given to archivists and researchers. I demonstrate that planning and intentionality are required concerning the engagement of amateur practices and inputs for more inclusive audiovisual archives.

Bibliography
Amerika, M. Remix the book. (2011). University of Minnesota Press, London.
Barthel, R.; Ainsworth, S.& Sharples, M. (2013). Collaborative knowledge building with shared video representations
Bhabha, H.K. (2004) The location of culture. Routledge. London.
Dowmunt, T.; Dunford, M.; and van Hemert, N. (2007). Inclusion through Media. Goldsmiths, University of London.
Fry, T. (2011).  Design as politics. Berg Publishers, London.
Jenkins, H. (2013). Textual Poaches. Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge, London.
Kindon, S. (2003), Participatory video in geographic research: a feminist practice of looking?. Area, 35: 142–153. doi: 10.1111/1475-4762.00236
Lessig, L. (2008) Remix. Making art and commerce thrive the hybrid economy. Penguin Group. USA.
Löwgren, J. and Remer, B. Collaborative Media. Production, compsumption, and design interventions. (2013). MIT Press. USA.
Mehrabov, I. (2010) Video Activism in Turkey: Empowerment of oppressed or another kind of surveillance?  Thesis work. Graduate School of Social Sciences of Middle East Technical University.
Navas, E. Remix Theory. The Aesthetics of Sampling. (2012). Springer-Verlag. Germany.
Sennett, R. Together. The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. Yale University Press, London.

Researching Gamification: Strategies, Opportunities, Challenges, Ethics

CHI 2015 Workshop

From social sciences to biology, gamified applications and games are being increasingly used as contexts and tools of research: as “petri dishes” for observing behavioral dynamics; as sources of ecologically valid and/or “big” data on user behavior; as crowdsourcing tools for research tasks; or as means to motivate participation. However, their use also entails many open questions and deep ethical ramifications. This one-day workshop, co-located with CHI 2015 in Seoul, Korea, invites HCI and game researchers as well as industry practitioners and ethicists to advance the practice of using gamified systems and games as research contexts and tools in an ethical manner.

 

Deadline for submissions is January 19, 2015

– See more at: http://gamification-research.org/chi2015/#sthash.LdQScsAH.dpuf

 

 

Critical, Expanded, Material: Re-thinking the Digital Humanities

A Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies/Sussex Humanities Lab Symposium

Monday, January 12th, 2015
Time: 1:30 – 5:30
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Fabiankatu 24 A, Seminar Room 136, Ground Floor.

Speakers:
Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Digital History
‘Voices of Authority: recreating the trial experience using the Old Bailey Online’
Sally Jane Norman, Professor of Performance Studies
‘Performance and Live Data’
Dr. David Berry, Reader in Digital Media
Digital Humanities and the Post Digital (title to be confirmed)
Professor Caroline Bassett, Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Fellow, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
‘A lateral theory of time travel: digital humanities, SF and influence’

Digital transformation is transforming cultural forms and practices as well as ways of researching and publishing. The objects as well as the tools and methods of humanist study are changing. In this context there is a growing realization of the need to re-invent digital humanities, to expand its reach, to develop critical modes of analysis, and explore new forms of cultural production. The Sussex Humanities Lab (SHL), a four year research programme based at the University of Sussex in the UK, is exploring these issues and the symposium is intended to develop a dialogue between the SHL and academics engaged with digital humanities in Finland.

Convenor/organizer Mikko Tolonen, HCAS.
Registration for this event is required but free of charge. Please register online.
Holding page for registration is:
http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/events/rethinking-digital-humanities/index.html