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Fourth International Conference on Arts and Technology

November 10–12, 2014 | Istanbul, Turkey

Keynote Speaker 1 - Paul Brown

Abstract

Notes Towards a History of Art, Code and Autonomy

The work of Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat and their contemporaries had a profound influence on the art of the 20th century. Art as a formal analysis of it’s own internal processes became a common theme of several inter-related art movements that, in the 1960’s, overthrew the concept of art as object and replaced it with one of art as process. The systems and conceptual artists embraced and developed these ideas and then, in the 1970’s, a new generation of artists began to encode these concepts using the formal linguistics made possible by the new science of computing. Computer art, as such, was not new: by 1970 it was at least 20 years old and already in 1968 Jasia Reichardt, at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), had curated a major historical survey of the field called Cybernetic Serendipity. But it was the young artists working at the Slade School of Art’s postgraduate Experimental and Computing Department from 1974 to 82 who were specifically applying the ideas from both systems and conceptual art within the context of the emergent computational domain.

Bio

Paul Brown was a member of that group at the Slade School and is an artist and writer who has specialised in art, science & technology since the late-1960s and in computational & generative art since the mid 1970s. His early work included creating large-scale lighting works for musicians and performance groups like Meredith Monk, Music Electronica Viva, Pink Floyd, etc… and he has an international exhibition record that includes the creation of both permanent and temporary public artworks dating from the late 1960s. He has participated in shows at major venues like the TATE, Victoria & Albert and ICA in the UK; the Adelaide Festival; ARCO in Spain, the Substation in Singapore and the Venice Biennale and his work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia, Asia, Europe, Russia and the USA. With Charlie Gere, Nick Lambert and Catherine Mason he was a co-editor of White Heat Cold Logic - British Computer Art 1960 – 1980 (MIT Press, Leonardo Imprint, 2009). Since 2005 he has been honorary visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, School of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Sussex.

https://www.paul-brown.com

https://www.brown-and-son.com

Keynote Speaker 2 - Murat Germen

Abstract

From analog to digital, fictive vs. documentary: An ongoing journey

This talk will focus upon a personal update of my sojourn as an artist/academician - a journey that has led me from the analog to the electronic medium spanning a timeline of 30 odd years. The exploration, still in progress, will start with city planning, architecture and photography where I acquired, and developed my analog skills. Following this, I will focus on my encounter with the digital revolution, right at a time when the foundations were being laid at one of the leading institutions of the world. I will then ponder on the possible common grounds between analog / digital also by bringing in notions such as serendipity, surprise, uncertainty, inadvertence that lie at the heart of my creative practice. These will constitute the grounds upon which I base my computational art experimentations and my academic research on various transformations in contemporary aesthetics that I believe arose out of digital creativity. Since my main visualization area is photography; indispensable conceptual components such as representation, real, surreal, objectivity, subjectivity, construct will be mentioned and linked to an empirical process based practice.

In addition to investigations on possible relations between art and engineering, I will also reveal my cultural, social, political stance in the light of issues like local vs. global and rhizomatic vs. hierarchic. I will then conclude with my recent concentration on documentary work, after numerous fictive constructions in the digital realm. My objective is to emphasize participatory, collective culture and history making by taking advantage of the democratization brought by ubiquitous mobile imaging and social media communication.

Bio

Murat Germen is an artist using photography as an expression / research tool. He has an MArch degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he went as a Fulbright scholar and received AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for academic excellence. Works as a professor of art, photography and new media at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Having many articles / photo series published on architecture / photography / art / new media at various magazines / books; he has been accepted to several symposia / conferences like SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Mutamorphosis, Towards a Science of Consciousness, CAe, CAC2, EVA-London, eCAADe, ASCAAD to lecture on pertinent topics. Has opened over fifty inter/national (Turkey, USA, Italy, Germany, UK, Mexico, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Greece, Japan, Russia, Iran, India, France, Canada, Bahrain, Korea, Dubai, China, Sweden, Switzerland, Egypt) exhibitions. The artist and his artistic work is represented by C.A.M. Gallery in Turkey, ARTITLED! Contemporary Art in the Netherlands-Belgium and Rosier Gallery in San Francisco. More than 300 editions of the artist’s several artworks are in personal collections of eminent art collectors inter/nationally, in addition to a few that are in Istanbul Modern’s and Proje4L Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art (Istanbul) collections.

https://www.muratgermen.com https://www.facebook.com/MuratGermenArtistPhotographer