Jugando con Números is a creative laboratory and interdisciplinary investigation of the connections between mathematics, juggling and programming.

One of the traditional objects used in juggling are hoops or rings. One group of jugglers that use an uncommon variation of this instrument are dolphins. They create rings with bubbles, and push and shape them with their nose like glass hoops until they break or dilute. The project Nahuac is inspired by this and aims to recreate it by building and artifact that makes a toroidal vortex in the water to create a digitally controlled interactive and sound water sculpture. This piece will be settled inside a cylinder or transparent tank controlled by  an Arduino micro-controller, airing systems (compressors) for a fish tank, and some devices such a joystick or monome to allow interaction.

Jugando con números supported by the Grants for Contemporary Creation of Matadero Madrid 2010 and Medialab-Prado.

Jugando con Números is a creative laboratory and interdisciplinary investigation of the connections between mathematics, juggling and programming. It materializes as a series of creative, theoretical and practical workshops and seminars including a production workshop aimed at the development of new creative or artistic works.

This exhibition showcasts the prototypes and documentation obtained through collaborative work in the two workshops held as part of the series Interactivos? in the Medialab Prado.

The following are the works which conformed the exhibition, they were selected amongst hundreds in an open call:

SEMA 2.0
Azucena Giganto
Guillermo Casado
Beatriz Rodríguez Hornero

NUMBERS, TIME & SPACE MACHINE
Philippe Chatelain
Álvaro Cassinelli

MARES Y MALABARES
Mariana Carranza

MALABARES DE 8 BITS
César García Saez

LA HABITACIÓN DE FERMAT
F. Javier Martin Ortiz
José María Gallego Alonso Colmenares

NAHUAC
Lilia Pérez

For more information on Jugando con Números:
http://jugandoconnumeros.com
http://medialab-prado.es/article/jugando_con_numeros_convocatoria_para_proyectos

For more information on the workshop structure:
http://jugandoconnumeros.com/info

For more information on relationships between mathematics, programming and juggling:
http://jugandoconnumeros.com/antecedentes

Lilia Pérez participated with a presentation with the title “Frontera.The technological Mirror” about the transformations of the traditional notion of the cinematic, and “cinematic dispositif” in the light of the analysis of interactive installations and other similar contemporary artistic and non-artistic cultural manifestations.

This presentation was part of a panel formed by Lilia, Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki representing the Imagined Futures /ifut (imaginedfutures.org) research project and the University of Amsterdam.

SEMINAR’S INTRODUCTION
The first network seminar in Copenhagen takes as its main task to see to the initial moments of the actual organization a research network of a size and with the interdisciplinary competence to address a problem not yet solved in the Nordic countries: the articulation of a conceptual apparatus in cultural theory and technology studies which affords an analysis and evaluation of ubiquitous computing as a contemporary development increasingly making itself felt socio-culturally. This first seminar, and the research network generally, is motivated by the question as regards how this third epoch of computing, as a geopolitical phenomenon, is being and should be installed in the Nordic region as such, and in the individual countries, with a due view to the regionally and nationally specific differences in political constitutions, sets of values, existing practices, and the commonsensical traits of our everyday cultures and forms of life.

In broad terms, this seminar starts up the exchanges in a research network with a view to responding, in seminar papers as well as research publications, to the wider set of transformations, underexposed in existing research and research training, which no longer concern distinct forms of computing or a tendency towards transcendental abstraction (VR). We will begin to describe, analyze, and critically evaluate the broad distribution, mobility, and dynamic networking of ICT with a concrete presence everywhere, discussing if and how the reach and speed of the current interplay between dataspaces, socio cultural and individual activities come to challenge our notions of reality with a different gravity. If the events of daily life, leisure, art, work, and the public sphere take place quite as much in dataspaces as in physical spaces, we will inquire as to how their mediatory separations and relations are to be experienced, perceived, understood, and evaluated.

The general context for the seminar is thus the unfolding of new types of technics, mediatory distributions, and ad hoc integrations of units in networks becoming sufficiently extensive and complex to generate ubiquity effects and so perhaps influence our notions of reality. Along with the increase in distribution and mobility of computational units, the generation of this contextual change is not least due to the implementation of new sensor networks and actuators displaying an intelligent operational autonomy. Historically, this bespeaks a notable physical turn: today one encounters a complementarity of culture and technics in our concrete life form. Our seminar thus finds itself historically situated within a development that can be sketched in three phases of actual expansion: from virtual reality through telepresence to the mixed realities of ubicomp.

The complementarity or co-implication of culture and embedded technics raises a very comprehensive set of research questions as regards its technical modes and the ramifications of cultural pervasiveness. It concerns the implications for: (i) notions of reality, realism, and representation; (ii) articulation of environmental, anthropological, cultural, and sociological positions in a technically pervaded life world; (iii) development of a recognizable paradigm for interaction design in media and communicational productions, including sensor networks and intelligent agents; (iv) concepts of the lived experience of the art and culture of ubiquity, qua installations delimiting our psychic and perceptual capacities; (v) epistemological and critical positions once knowledge gathering and production involve ubiquitous databases, applications, and prostheses that sense and act autonomously.

In this very broad research context, the seminar serves to focus and delimit the activities of our research network quite sharply. This seminar will begin the critical examination of one first actual development that has made its socio-cultural significance very evident, namely, the ubiquitous digitalization of urban life and auditory culture.

We will thus meet for this first network event in order to discuss how an urban environmental context and lifeworld may find itself undergoing changes today via a more or less ubiquitous digitalization, and how this affects our auditory culture specifically (e.g., in public spheres with complex computational infrastructures, large installations, and multitudes of individual mobile devices). The seminar will begin to address changes in notions of our spatial and temporal situatedness, location, and place in an urban setting, Nordic ones not least, once our movements concern a number of mixed realities involving ubicomp. We will ask what is critically at stake for existing public media and journalism, for urban interaction designs, as well as for a new media art in the city and its relations of interactivity with a passing public and its citizens. How are our Nordic cities lived differently today – do multitudes of ubicomp entities imply that the urban is remade, feels different, sounds different, looks different, and how, then?

Science and technology as agents for the artistic production/International Seminar
Mexico City August 23-27 2010

http://cmm.cenart.gob.mx/seminario10/seminario10.html

Hosted and organized by the Center for Multimedia, National Center for the Arts, Mexico

Lilia Pérez participated as chair of the first discussion panel entitled “Laboratories, art and science” between Jennifer Willet - INCUBATOR University of Windsor (Canada) and Oron Catts - SymbioticA (Australia).

SEMINAR’S INTRODUCTION

The interconnection and mutual feedback between art, science and technology are increasingly evident in the context of the twenty-first century societies. Today, most of the artistic production relies in hybrid processes and involve the inter and the trans-disciplinary. This already consolidated scenario of creative developments involving artists, scientists, technologists, theorists and curators creates a kind of collective intelligence that reorganizes the practice of art making.

Since the times of the Cold War, and as part of a techno-scientific project, laboratories become working models in many disciplines including art. The creation of spaces to theorize and criticize this models becomes urgent. Curators emerge as important mediators between the art field and other apparently unrelated domains that require an interdisciplinary framework in which dialogue can be built outlining questions and answers that can show what is not so easy to decipher at first sight.

With this panorama in mind he second International Seminar on Art and Technology organized by the Multimedia Center of the National Arts Centre in collaboration with Fundación Televisa, aims to open a reflection on the modes of production in the artistic practices that use science and technology as key players. It also seeks to consider the role played by the curatorial work in setting up exhibitions, whose meaning must be considered at the problematic boundaries between art and science. The discussion will emphasize then, the question of how the laboratories and research institutes devoted to science and technology, and centers of experimentation in art-technology are linked together, and affect the construction of artistic discourse.

Presentation of Sawubona – I see you by Lilia Pérez and Doung Jahangeer in “Amsterdam Global City 2: Mexico” August 14, 2010 Cinema Rialto, Amsterdam

http://www.worldcinemaamsterdam.nl/

Amsterdam is the most multicultural city in the world. With 178 different nationalities, we can rightfully speak of Amsterdam as a global city. For this reason Rialto will conduct a series of programs that will place each one of these cultures under the spotlight.Saturday, August 14 is Mexico’s turn.
In Amsterdam Global City #2: Mexico Rialto and the film festival Cinemaztlán present a full day with films, video art, live music, discussion, food and a party that brings together an inspiring combination of contemporary Mexican culture in Holland. Seeing Amsterdam as a unique stopover for creativity, the day pays attention to the Mexican creative diaspora and the cultural exchange in its art practice.

01.00 PM – Animasivo
The best Mexican animated short films of Animasivo, a platform for the diffusion of animation in Mexico. The shorts are divided in two themes.
- Astronomy: Black Rain, Semiconductor, 2009, 3’02”; The Astronomer’s Land, Malcom Sutherland, 2009, 8’04”; Nebulous, Luis Felipe Hernandez, 2009, 2’35”;  Invasión, Alberto Mar, 2009, 4’; The Big Bang, Llamarada de Petate, 2009, 3’; Velocidad luz, Jorge Carrera, Miriam Matus, 2009, 2’17”; Shot 22, Lcoturbina, 2009, 2’58”; Supernova, Nuria Manchaca, 2009, 2’45”;Orión Argonáutica, 2009, Lorena Lizette Muñoz, 2’34”
- 2110: projecting the future: The Noctitlán, Nuria Menchaca, 2010, 2’58”; El gato con Botox, Pedro González y Hectór Dávila, 2010, 3’15”; Sin juicio, Llamarada de Petate, 2010, 4’03”; Origen, Papelito Habla, I colectivo, Y. Rojas, M. Méndez, G. Escobar, E. Campos, G. Hiriart, E. Nagashima, J. Zetina, 2010, 2’59”; Love and Strange Place, Lucette Braune, 2010, 3’56”;Media Archeology 2110, Eric Dyer, 2010, 3’41” ; Transitorio, René Castillo, 2010, 1’; Business as Usual, Kevin D.A. Kurytnik & Carol Beecher, 2010, 4’03”

04.00 PM – Shooting Diasporas
- Quijada de burro, Juan López Maas, 2010, 7’ (work in progress). It reveals the philosophy of two families linked by a donkey: the Ballumbrosio, which uses the jaw of the animal as a percussion instrument, and the Lara Acuña, which sees the donkey as a sacred animal because it took Jesus to Jerusalem.
- 18 Karat: New Cuban Jazz, Rodrigo Abascal, 2010, 6’ (work in progress) This is a musical portray of Cuban and European jazz musicians that tells the difficult circumstances in which Cubans are developed, the encounter of styles between them and their musical ideas.
- Muftah, the Name of the Goat, Diego Gutierrez in collaboration with Chaib Massaoudi, 2010, 52’ (Dutch Première). This is one of six independent but connected documentaries around the issue of three diary meals made during the documentary workshop “Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner” organized by El Despacho with visual artists from Mexico, The Netherlands and Morocco to collectively reformulate their knowledge. In the film the framer is framed: a group of filmmakers is portrayed in their trip to the Rif mountains in northern Morocco, leaded by a special teacher…. and a goat.

The discussion with the screened guest Mexican artists and Hans Maarten van den Brink (Media Fonds) will address how the artist’ transit has transformed their audiovisual arts practice and how this city can be understood as a “save heaven”. The program closes with traditional Mexican food and cocktails by Los Pilones.

06.00 PM – Live music,  video art and documentation
Rialto cafe and entresol Enter the night with the live music of Nomad Coalescence, a Latin, Flamenco and Indian fusion of uplifting energy. This is a group by Mexican flutist Aura Rascón, (traverse flute and bansuri), Slovenian guitarist Vito Marence and Peruvian percussionist Matias Recharte. You can also watch two ongoing video art projections and documentation of art installations of the Mexican diaspora.
- De diefstal van het jaar, Ulises Carrión, 1982, 8’04”; Solitario, Carlos Amorales, 1998, 15’; Una Mirada informal, Ilana Boltvinik, 2009, 14’; Sawubona, I see you, Lilia Pérez & Doung Anwar Jahangeer, 2010, 2’34” (documentation of interactive installation);
- Urban Screens in the Westergasfabriek, Lilia Pérez & the Media City Workshop participants, 2010, 3’ 52” (documentation of projected interventions in public space). Screening cafe: Bullet swing, Ulises Carrión, 1980,  4’;
- A book, Ulises Carrión, 1978, 7’52; Panorámica I & II, Galia Eibenschutz, 2006/2007, animation, 12’ 19”; Time zero, Iván García Romero, 2009, 3’;  Mechanical installations, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, 1994-2010, 6‘ (video documentation); LINKS. Stories from the border, Rebeca Sánchez Aguilar, 2005, 7’ (video documentation).

09.45 PM - Norteado
Norteado, Rigoberto Perezcano, 2010, 94’. This is a subtle and intimate film debut that tells the story of Andrés and his surprising situation at the US-Mexico border. The film won the FIPRECI prize at Rotterdam Film Festival.

11.30 PM – Late Night: Seguir siendo: Café Tacvba
Rialto Late Night screens the rockcumentary Seguir siendo: Café Tacvba, Ernesto Contreras and José Cravioto, 2010, 80’. This is the story of one of the most talented contemporary Mexican music bands on its 20 anniversary. The film shows the band’s creative process, problems and friendship.

Close Amsterdam Global City with an adventurous night with Latin, electro beats courtesy of DJ  Mulat.

Banothando Lilia Pérez and Rike Sitas, Durban, 2010

With the kind support of  the FONDS BKVB

Created during the workshop in Durban in the context of Time_Frame with the support of Dala (ZA), NIMK(NL) and the Mondrian Foundation(NL)

http://timeframe.nimk.nl/?p=190

“Banothando” is the isZulu word for the shared loving feeling of a community. The title for this work came from one of the project participants when describing what links the people of the Early Morning market with each other. “banothando” is a follow up of the collaboration between Mexican artist Lilia Pérez and dala that started with the interactive installation, Sawubona, produced in Amsterdam. It constitutes a series of interactive portraits that use physical contact between people and images of people as an interface to the stories gathered by Rike and Lilia during the world cup and immediately after it when the general enthusiasm mixed with uncertainty about the future of the market traders’ livelihoods.

When the spectator approaches “banothando”, she will be confronted with one of the market traders, observing her from the projected image of their market stand surrounded by the merchandise they sell. From this pose and the framing of the shot, the character seems to be waiting for a customer. The character will carry on like this, breathing and blinking, sometimes smiling until the spectator touches the screen. As soon as contact is made, the character starts moving, responding with the same gesture, placing her hand and gaze on the user’s hand, following any route it follows. While the virtual and the present hand touch, the spectator will be able to listen to the trader’s stories about the market, life in general and the effect of the world cup in their life and surroundings. When the contact stops, the character will become silent again. Trapped in this small sequence of gestures the character and the viewer meet one another in an instant of simulated communion. Physical contact, so natural for the market traders amongst each other, but so rare between the predominantly Indian and Zulu traders, and the very often white visitors of the gallery, becomes a condition for communication as well as an ingredient for emphatic listening.

Because I’m not a programmer / engineer myself, I will have to use TUIO protocol and something more manageable such as Flash, VVVV, Processing, PureData, or something of that sort. My friend Luis Fernández is coaching me through email, for which I’m quite grateful.

Regarging the touchscreen itself, it is still not 100%finished because I don’t have a special kind of silicon which is needed in order to avoid air bubbles preventing the contact of the fingers with the acrylic plate and the projecting surface. I’m looking for ways to solve that issue. However it seems that there is a TUIO simulator, which allows writing applications and testing them without having to use any kind of multitouch interface, so it won’t be necessary for me to have the projector, and all the screen paraphernalia on all the time while experimenting.
The most common simulator is the one made by the team who designed the reacTable at my former university in Barcelona: http://mtg.upf.es/reactable/?pic=reactivision04.png

With this, and the right libs and plug ins, I will be able to start testing my experiments quite soon.

Led touchscreen frame photo Lilia Pérez

After the experience with “Frontera” which worked with a kind of gesture tracking that is more similar to the single touch interaction, I’m experimenting with other forms of multitouch screen interaction. The first one I’m looking into is FTIR, which is becoming very widely used. Great tutorials about how to make your own multitouch screen can be found online. I’m using one that I found while surfing this site:

http://www.nuigroup.com

Attached is a picture of the point of the process that I’m in now. Basically, I’m about to finish the screen, I’ve soldered and placed the leds and the resistors , I have the polished acrylic board, and I only have to put everything together and connect it to the software part. (I already tested it using the computer’s internal connectors as a power source, and placing the camera under the glass).I will be making posts on the progress of this. I’m really looking forward to the results of this first approach to an alternative technique.
More to come…

The Interface Studies Group is a recently formed interdisciplinary research collaboration between the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Their research aims to investigate how current human-computer interface technologies and culture affect each other.

Founding members of this group are:

URL: http://www.interfacestudies.org

Research project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam, 2007-2011.

Imagined Futures (iFut) is concerned with the conditions, dynamics and consequences of rapid media transfer and transformation. ‘Media’ here encompasses all imaging techniques and sound technologies, with the cinema providing the conceptual starting point and primary historical focus. While changes in basic technology, public perception and artistic practice may often evolve over long historical cycles, the project’s main assumption is that there are also moments when transfer occurs in discontinuous, unevenly distributed fashion, during relatively short periods of time, and with mutually interdependent determinations.

iFut initially identified two such periods of transformation taking place across a broad spectrum of media technologies: the period of the 1870-1900 and the period 1970-2000. The first witnessed the popularization of photography, the emergence of cinema, the global use of the (wireless) telegraph and the domestic use of the telephone, the invention of the radio and of the basic technology of television, while the second saw the consolidation of video as popular storage medium and avant-garde artistic practice, the universal adoption of the personal computer, the change from analogue to digital sound and image, the invention of the mobile phone, and the emergence of the internet and world wide web.

A key characteristic of such periods of rapid media change is the volatility, unpredictability and contradictory nature of the dynamics between the practical implications (industrial applications and economic potential) of these technologies, their perception by the popular imagination (in the form of narratives of anxiety, utopia and fantasy), and the mixed response (eager adoption or stiff resistance) from artists, writers and intellectuals. These shifting configurations among different agents offer a rich field of investigation for cultural analysis, posing methodological challenges and requiring specific case studies.       

Three Strands

The mutual basis of all research conducted in the context of the iFut is the triangulation of media technology, the avant-garde and popular media as the main areas of cultural practice within and across which imagined futures (and recovered pasts) take shape. iFut clusters three core projects which fall into a historical, a theoretical and an ‘applied’ strand.

1) The historical strand directly relates to the concept of the (historical) avant-garde and the position of the artist (in the past, the present and the future). The artist, the work (and, by extension, the art world) are explicitly engaged – and intervening – in a dynamic (and not merely antagonistic) relation with the theoretical text and its public/popular/commercial applications. This also includes due consideration of technology and technological change, especially as this manifests itself in the media constellations usually referred to as the different dispositifs.

2) The theoretical strand extends very broadly to the academic discourses (and, by extension, the academy as institution) whose ambition it is to make sense of the (technological, aesthetic, social, economical) implications of changes in today’s media, and to investigate (new) models of ‘crisis historiography’ (such as Foucault’s concept of Archaeology, Systems and Network Theories, New Historicism and Counterfactual History). These discourses include ‘performative theories’, such as manifestos, artists’ statements, but also instruction manuals and online discussion groups advising ‘users’.

3) The “applied” strand is product- and practice-oriented. It includes all manner of applications of (new) technologies, ranging from social issue uses, locative media projects, to commercial schemes, military applications, public space projects. For the sake of mnemotic brevity we can group the various uses in three categories: social applications, military/economic applications, and public sphere applications (among which we include mainstream cinema).