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 imaterial, entropy and negentropy, self and other.
Editor: Adriana Sá
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.
Keywords: computational art; media; computational aesthetics; hermeneutics; ergodic reading; dematerialisation
Reviewers: Kate Sicchio || Silvia Coelho || Carolina Martins
by Michelle Lewis-King
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 investigate 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.
Keywords: art-medicine studies; Chinese medicine; cosmotechnics; cross-disciplinary research; biomusic; performance of medicine; spatial sound; transcultural imaginaries
Reviewers: Atau Tanaka || Silvia Coelho || Anonymous
by Rosemary Lee
This essay examines how data-based practices contribute to new perspectives on the empirical value of images. Recent methods employing machine learning enable visualizations 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.
Keywords: data-based aesthetics; generative; machine learning; visual epistemology; operationally real
Reviewers: Jonas Runa || Rui Antunes
by Alexandros Drymonitis
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.
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, methods and modes 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
by David Rothenberg
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.
Keywords: iPad, improvisation; pond music; nature; clarinet; touch screen; hydrophone; bioacoustics; electronic music; interspecies music
Reviewers: Jo Scott || Rajele Jain
by Marie-Eve Morissette
& Louis-Philippe Rondeau
& Yan Breuleux
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.
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.
Keywords: automatic video editing; video sequencing; transformer models; cognitive architecture; video montage
Reviewers: Kate Sicchio || Nuno Correia
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.
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This journal is 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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