PUBLICATIONS AND AUTHOR INFO

Welcome to the first edition. It gathers theoretical and media-rich contributions, which interrogate the meanings of ‘liveness’ and ‘mediation’ in quite different ways. In consonance with the cross-disciplinary spirit of the journal, these investigations reveal fuzzy thresholds between material and immaterial, entropy and negentropy, self and other.

Editor: Adriana Sá

Computational Art, Dematerialisation and Embodiment

by Miguel Carvalhais

Computational art often explores dematerialisation and immateriality through works that are more grounded on information and causal processes than on formal features or physical materials. Digital computation is substrate independent and so too tend to be those artworks that centre their aesthetic experience on computation. These artworks share several traits with conceptual art, one of them being the challenging of traditional notions of objecthood. Dematerialisation is therefore a recurring strategy in computational art; however, this paper will argue that the hermeneutical processes triggered by computational artworks conversely lead to an ultimate embodiment of artworks, not in physical artefacts, computers, or computational systems, but rather on the readers’ own minds and in processes that are developed from and by the artworks themselves.

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Keywords: computational art; media; computational aesthetics; hermeneutics; ergodic reading; dematerialisation

Reviewers: Kate Sicchio || Silvia Coelho || Carolina Martins

Qiscapes 氣穴音景 (2022-) and Pulse Project (2011-2017) are cross-disciplinary research series exploring sound, embodiment, medicine, and cross-cultural science. These projects reimagine East Asian medicine in digital performance, crafting immersive audio environments connecting bodies and surroundings. Qiscapes investigates qi 氣 within the body using the ‘acupunctosonocope’, amplifying acupuncture and detecting ‘qi’ flow. It evidences qi, which is thought not to exist.  Pulse Project creates sonic interfaces, translating Chinese pulse diagnosis and acupuncture point location practices into immersive ‘qi’ soundscapes, revealing the Chinese medicine body in all. These interfaces are developed to measure quantum entanglements in individuals and their environments. Through traversing art and medicine, these projects present a cosmological model of body-lifeworld relationship beyond the biomedical model.  

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Keywords: art-medicine studies; Chinese medicine; cosmotechnics; cross-disciplinary research; biomusic; performance of medicine; spatial sound; transcultural imaginaries

Reviewers: Atau Tanaka || Silvia Coelho || Anonymous

This essay examines how data-based practices contribute to new perspectives on the empirical value of images. Recent methods employing machine learning enable visualisations to be produced based on the large-scale analysis of data but that are detached from direct sensorial observation, subverting the forms of visual objectivity traditionally associated with technical and scientific methods of image-making. This research aims to develop insights into the forms of visual knowledge that these methods may give rise to, as well as facilitating critical discourse on the grounding of visual practices in relation to technical and scientific methods.

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Keywords: data-based aesthetics; generative; machine learning; visual epistemology; operationally real

Reviewers: Jonas Runa || Rui Antunes 

LiveLily is a live sequencing and live scoring system through live coding with a subset of the Lilypond language, a textual language for Western music engraving. Being a simple yet versatile language, Lilypond provides a high level of expressiveness in the resulting music score. LiveLily can either be used as a live scoring system with acoustic instruments, or a live sequencer to control audio software. The expressiveness provided by the Lilypond language contains information on notation, dynamics, articulation and arbitrary text. By using a textual language for the score or the sequencer, it is possible to use a character-level AI text generator to produce melodic lines based on a corpus containing LiveLily sessions. During a live coding session, the text generator is seeded with input by the live coder and sends melodic patterns for the music ensemble it is trained on. The live coder can decide whether they will use these suggestions intact, edit them, or discard them.

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Keywords: live coding; live scoring; LiveLily

Reviewers: Kate Sicchio || Jonas Runa

Welcome to the second edition, which features three media-rich contributions focused on sound art performance, interactive installation, and automated video editing. They reveal distinct interpretations of liveness and creativity,  contrasting sharply with one another in terms of motivations, of discussion. Yet, ultimately we can also extract an overarching theme: interfaces that transcend personal control.  

This common ground invites the reader-viewer-listener to reflect on a series of fundamental questions. What defines liveness? How are flow and expression realised? Where do creativity and authorship reside? And what roles do interfaces play in these processes?These are ongoing, open questions, given the wealth of existing approaches and interpretations. Interrogations are Live Interfaces’ reason-to-be.

Editor: Adriana Sá

Although the touch-screen interface on the iPad is often derided as an interface for live music-making, there is something uniquely satisfying about it when played with certain apps designed to take advantage of its unpredictability. This essay emphasises what makes each of those apps favourable to playing live, especially outdoors along with electronic-sounding plants and animals heard underwater in rivers and ponds, suggesting how different species respond to these kinds of indeterminate sounds. It articulates a tentative aesthetics of touch-screen electronic performance in and with the sounds of nature.

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Keywords: iPad; improvisation; pond music; nature; clarinet; touch screen; hydrophone; bioacoustics; electronic music; interspecies music

Reviewers: Jo Scott  || Rajele Jain

In this media-rich article we emphasise the role of the body in aesthetic experience, while using a related conceptual framework to explore interfaces in digital art. We introduce two interactive installations, ON/CONTACT and EN/GLOBE, which invite audiences to experience the interface as a site of encounter. To frame the concept of the interface as a device that transcends functional control, we draw on the theoretical work of David Rokeby, a contemporary Canadian artist. In doing so, we demonstrate how our multimodal installations – which engage vision, audition and haptics – encourage participants to interact and express themselves, highlighting the interface’s potential as an agent of exploration rather than mere functional subordination.

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Keywords: interface; encounter; somatic experience; somaesthetics; interactive art; digital art; aesthetic experience; interaction; research-creation

Reviewers: André Sier || Jo Scott

by Luis Arandas

& Pedro Sarmento

& Mick Grierson

& Miguel Carvalhais

The automation of video editing processes with artificial intelligence (AI) is a flourishing field of research, whether the purpose is to save labour, or motivate the emergence of unexpected ideas. Informed by theories on human-like reasoning, problem-solving and learning, these technologies can produce video sequences without much human intervention. In this article we showcase the design and implementation of a system that sequences video datasets based on semantic correlations with natural language. Our system generates videos automatically with tractable principles for montage, removing the human editor – if and when they want – from the process of individual element selection.

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Keywords: automatic video editing; video sequencing; transformer models; cognitive architecture; video montage

Reviewers: Kate Sicchio || Nuno Correia

With the third edition of Live Interfaces, it seems useful to share some reflections on how its mission motivates iterative experimentation. Of course a media-rich journal presents challenges of preservation and dissemination: digital platforms are ephemeral, and black boxes of code limit our control over the medium. Yet the challenge extends far beyond technical issues. Rather than prescribing subjects and formats, the editorial process keeps interrogating the methods through which creative processes and spherical ways of thinking might advance knowledge. Such openness requires working intensively with the authors: consistency emerges from continuous discovery. It requires a delicate balance between the singularity of each author’s voice, the scientific transparency of their argument, and the clarity needed for a cross-disciplinary readership. It highlights a need for acknowledging grey zones between disciplinary fields, cultural backgrounds and argumentation modes.

This third edition features three contributions. Using speculative coding and AI, one examines how videogame programming can become a creative practice. Bridging Eastern philosophy and Western media history, another considers how personal experience can ground a multifaceted, fluid notion of interface. Drawing from sound art and therapeutic practices, yet another explores how collaborative creation can act as a form of activism and collective resilience.

The reader is now invited to place the notions of ‘liveness’ and ‘interface’ at ground level, so as to vitalise their understanding. The term ‘interface’ may describe a shared boundary, a point of interaction, or a connection between two entities. Whether it refers to the boundary itself or to the mechanisms that enable interaction, the result is greater than the sum of its parts: the in-between becomes something of its own, irreducible to the elements it connects.

Editor: Adriana Sá

This piece introduces a Tiny Learning Model (TLM) that enables Non-Player Characters in a video game (NPCs) to grow, learn, and change behaviours dynamically at run-time. Implemented in C# and Unity, it allows for the replacement of finite state machines and look-up tables. To demonstrate this TLM, I start with the simple game “Rock Paper Scissors”, showing that Paper can beat Scissors provided the network is trained to produce that result. I then expand into more complex situations, such as the Dungeons and Dragons combat rules, and animation blending systems. Indeed, the TLM can change the rules of the game.

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Keywords: non-player character; artificial intelligence; neural network; behavioural science; video game; computer game; interactive media

Reviewers: Rui Penha  || Rui Antunes

This essay is an attempt to formulate and justify a personal definition of interface — with the aim of discovering whether, how, when, and why we are subject to manipulation when encountering other interfaces. In this sense, the interface described here is a project-in-progress: a tool intended to help recognise ‘truthful speech and action’ and to distinguish these from manipulation. To resist the external control of our attention, we must cultivate control over our own intentionality. The objective of this study is to identify the learning conditions and experiences necessary for developing this competence, and to propose a teaching and learning environment that can support its cultivation.

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Keywords: retrospective and prospective logic; art; pioneering; computing; criticism of knowledge; avant-garde; media competence; interactivity; knowledge generation; experimental research; Ayurveda; analog; expanded concept of art; empowered recipient; authority; nature; quantum biology; master; neuroplasticity; re-wiring; attention manipulation; truthful speaking; non-domination communication, criticism ability

Reviewers: Alan Klima ||  Rui Penha

International Drone Day is a global celebration of sonic drone, including intentional listening practices and sound-based community gatherings. We host our own event in the lower Hudson Valley of upstate New York. Through philosophical and ontological inquiry, I will explore how communal sound practices foster connection, presence and shared experience, and illustrate this with the sounds and words of several artists participating in Drone Day. These reflections will underscore the impact of the day as a form of sonic activism and collective resilience – reinforcing the need for a trans-disciplinary perspective over sound studies.

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Keywords: deep listening; drone; ambient; festival; celebration; healing; community; dissent; connection; container

Reviewers: Maile Colbert || Raquel Castro || Joel Ryan

All contributions are published under a Creative Commons licence, which enables re-users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for non-commercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alexandros Drymonitis > Cyprus University of Technology

Sound artist and researcher working with computer music, DIY electronics and robotics, with a practice grounded in experimental sound and performance. His contribution to the journal is titled Creating Music Scores Live Through Interacting with a Character-level Text Generator (VOLUME 1 / 2023).

David Rothenberg > New Jersey Institute of Technology

Musician, composer, philosopher and Distinguished Professor working across sound, ecology and human–nature relationships, he has authored numerous books. His contribution to the journal is titled Touch the Screen, Wild the Sound: Expressive iPad Performance in Nature (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

John Klima > Noroff University

Artist, video game programmer and professor working with custom electronics, software and electro-mechanical systems that link virtual and physical environments. In this journal, he is the author of Tiny Learning Models to Enable NPC Growth and Variability (VOLUME 3 / 2025).

Katie Down > SoundWell Creative Arts Therapy Center

Sound artist, multi-instrumentalist and creative arts therapist specialised in trauma studies, EMDR, mindfulness and Deep Listening. In this journal, she is the author of International Drone Day in the Hudson Valley: Sonic Activism, Deep Listening, and Communal Resonance (VOLUME 3 / 2025).

Louis-Philippe Rondeau > Université du Québec à Chicoutimi

Co-founder the Mimesis laboratory, he creates interactive installations that explore gesture, image and temporal perception. In this journal, he is the second author of The Interface as Artwork: Creating Interactive Installations Based on Encounter and Somatic Experience (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

Luís Arandas > University of Porto

Researcher and designer with a practice centred on algorithmic systems, digital tools and experimental media development. In this journal, he is a co-author of Editing Video Streams Through Natural Language Embeddings: Keyframe Sequencing Using Transformers (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

Marie-Eve Morissette > Université du Québec à Chicoutimi

Creates interactive installations that explore embodied engagement, environmental design, event design and digital design. In this journal, she is the first author of The Interface as Artwork: Creating Interactive Installations Based on Encounter and Somatic Experience (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

Mick Grierson > University of the Arts London

Professor of Computer Science, founder of Creative Computing and co-founder of the UAL Creative Computing Institute, with influential work in AI.  In this journal, he is the third author of Editing Video Streams Through Natural Language Embeddings: Keyframe Sequencing Using Transformers (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

Miguel Carvalhais i2ADS / University of Porto

Designer, musician, book author and director of Fine Arts in University of Porto. In this journal, he is the sole author of Computational Art, Dematerialisation and Embodiment (VOLUME 1 / 2023) and the fourth author of Editing Video Streams Through Natural Language Embeddings: Keyframe Sequencing Using Transformers (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

Michelle Lewis-King > Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts

Artist, acupuncturist and professor whose work brings together performance, sound and Chinese medical practice, often combining pulse-based sensing, spatial sound . Her contribution to the journal is titled Resonant Embodiments: Listening to the Transcultural Body (VOLUME 1 / 2023).

Pedro Sarmento > Queen Mary University of London

Musician and media artist working across  guitar performance and creative coding. His work merges technology, composition and live performance. In this journal, he is a co-author of Editing Video Streams Through Natural Language Embeddings: Keyframe Sequencing Using Transformers (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

Rajele Jain > Vipulamati

Artist working with video, performance, photography, multimedia installation and creative documentary. Co-founder of Vipulamati, director and producer the International Festival for Films on Art. Within this journal, she is the author of Autobiography of an Interface (VOLUME 3 / 2025).

Rosemary Lee  > i2ADS / University of Porto

Artist and media researcher whose work investigates how historical and contemporary discourses around art and technology intersect, often through installations that imagine alternate media futures. Her contribution to the journal is titled Synthetic Images: Data-based Aesthetics (VOLUME 1 / 2023).

Yan Breuleux > Université du Québec à Chicoutimi

Bridges sonic and visual music. Founding member of Artificiel, known for large-scale audiovisual works integrating experimental technologies. In this journal, he is the second author of The Interface as Artwork: Creating Interactive Installations Based on Encounter and Somatic Experience (VOLUME 2 / 2024).

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Volume 1 of this journal was financed by national funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, I.P. under the project UIDB / 05260/2020,
DOI 10.54499/UIDB/05260/2020

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