the Schedule 2022

TUESDAY, JUNE 14th • 9:00AM • WALKER ART CENTER



Explore the process of creating digital-physical life and build a unique kinetic flower that responds to stimuli!



OVERVIEW

This workshop takes participants to a speculative future where flowers don’t just come from the soil, they are crafted by hand and animated with our intentions. Participants will design and create their own living flower kinetic sculpture using paper, nitinol wire, sensors, and a microcontroller. Each will be unique and respond to stimuli in their own unique way.



We'll world-build together and present our creations, highlighting the origin, function and native ecosystem of their discovery. At the end, the flowers will be transplanted into a collective garden where they’ll respond and dance together.



SKILL LEVEL: Intermediate



WORKSHOP OUTLINE:
- CONVERGENCE: Context setting, inspiration, and forming explorer teams

- BIOMIMICRY: Modify and cut origami flowers

- BIOPOIESIS: Assembling the electronics kit - nitinol, sensor and prototyping boards

- INTELLIGENCE: Programming the movements of the flower

- TROPISM: Connect sensors (microphone) to trigger the flower’s movements

- SPECULATION: Futuring exercises to world-build around the new flora and its ecosystem

- PRESENTATION: Presenting your discover to the Academié



WHAT TO BRING:
- Laptop to program Arduino based microcontroller

- USB A port or adapter

- Latest version of Arduino





REGISTRATION FEE: $329
MATERIALS FEE: $50
Material fees will include a full kinetic flower kit that includes:

- custom PCB board

- breadboarding and prototyping material

- origami flower kit

- nitinol wire assembly

TUESDAY, JUNE 14th • 9:00AM • WALKER ART CENTER



A special version of Stefanie’s ‘Data Drawing Class’ workshop, updated and expanded for a special Eyeo audience.



OVERVIEW

For this workshop, data is our life model. How would your approach and sensibility within a data-driven project change if you started exploring visualization approaches through sketching with charcoal instead of using code or spreadsheet software? Starting a data project by sketching by hand introduces novel ways of thinking, and leads to designs that are uniquely customized for the specific type of data problems we are working with.



The workshop begins by providing a basic overview of data visualization as seen though the lens of drawing, also looking at artists who create rule-based drawings or draw data as part of their practice.



Participants then undertake a series of timed drawing exercises where they work with the constraints inherent in a single stick of black charcoal, applying techniques found in traditional drawing classes to data visualization, and exploring quick experimental strategies for pushing their custom visualization ideas into new spaces.



The afternoon will focus on using the strategies tested in the morning to sketch a class dataset, thinking about the creation of a visualization system through using a handmade design process, exploring variability in mark-making and material as a way to communicate information, and how to take visual inspiration from what you see to guide your data drawing



By the end of this workshop, you'll both better understand the custom data visualization design process and also have access to a variety of off-screen creative strategies for working with data and shaping its aesthetic (even if you move onto your computer / into code at a later point!)



SKILL LEVEL: Intermediate



WORKSHOP OUTLINE:
- Introduction to rule-based drawing as an approach to creating a data visualization

- Drawing challenges merging traditional drawing exercises with data to build creative confidence and push experimentation

- Basic data analysis for designers

- The custom data visualization design process

- The role of architecture within a custom visualization design



WHAT TO BRING:
Nothing. The entire workshop will be off-screen, using nothing more than black charcoal, pastels, newsprint, and other traditional drawing materials. All materials will be supplied.





REGISTRATION FEE: $329
MATERIALS FEE: $10

TUESDAY, JUNE 14th • 9:00AM • WALKER ART CENTER



Machine learning is a versatile and extremely general technology, with broad applications to all the other sciences and humanities. It has reignited long-standing debates about the nature of intelligence and the limits of technology, reshaped notions of authorship and originality, and facilitated recent innovations in human-computer interaction. It has numerous creative applications and is rapidly becoming a default faculty in much of the software we interact with daily. Until recently, it has been a relatively obscure technology, requiring uncommon computer skills to work with in a hands-on way. Libraries like ml5 lower the barrier of entry to programmers without specialized knowledge of AI, while tools like Runway lower the barrier even further still to non-programmers and people in other fields.



OVERVIEW
This hands-on workshop introduces techniques from machine learning for real-time interactive applications. We will be using Runway, a tool which makes it easy to install and run models inside your existing workflows, as well as ml5.js, a JavaScript library which wraps neural networks into an intuitive high-level API. Each of these tools, in their own ways, make AI more accessible to non-specialists and people in creative fields who want to apply these state-of-the-art machine learning models to their own craft. We will cover a wide array of vision, sound, and language-based models which do everything from extract structured meaning from raw data to generate photorealistic images and paragraphs of coherent text. Each model will be presented along with its use cases and stubs of ideas for unguided exploration. The class is beginner-friendly and targeted towards artists, designers, and other creatives. Prior experience with programming is helpful but not required.



SKILL LEVEL: Intro / Intermediate



WORKSHOP OUTLINE:
- An introduction to deep learning and how neural networks actually work.
- A review of general use cases and core applications across different types of media and interactive contexts.
- A tutorial on Runway, an application which makes it easy to run open-source deep learning models found on the internet.
- A tutorial on ml5.js, a JavaScript library which wraps GPU-accelerated deep learning into an intuitive interface.


WHAT TO BRING:
• personal laptop



SOFTWARE TO HAVE INSTALLED:
• Most recent RunwayML

• Optionally, also install Docker
*All participants will be given some free RunwayML credit for the workshop.



REGISTRATION FEE: $329
MATERIALS FEE: None

TUESDAY, JUNE 14th • 9:00AM • WALKER ART CENTER



This workshop will give participants insight into the possibilities and challenges for electronic art in the context of the climate crisis.



OVERVIEW

This hands-on workshop will introduce participants to creating solar powered electronic art. Over the course of this workshop, we will cover basic electronic knowledge, methods for upcycling solar cells, off-grid solar circuit design, and ways to incorporate photovoltaic solar power into kinetic, sound, and light art. We will also explore a variety of techniques for working with photovoltaic cells as sculptural material. Participants will build a solar powered art piece and have new insight into the challenges and possibilities of incorporating alternative energy into our daily lives through both practical and experimental uses.



SKILL LEVEL: Intro



WORKSHOP OUTLINE:
- Intro to creative applications of photovoltaic solar power
- Intro to soldering solar cells and building small kinetic solar bots.
- Design and build sound based solar powered artwork.


WHAT TO BRING:
• Pens/pencils & paper

• Bringing a computer may be helpful if you want to look at some of the additional web-based resources that be mentioned in the workshop.



SOFTWARE TO HAVE INSTALLED:
• None



REGISTRATION FEE: $329
MATERIALS FEE: $45

HELD AT THE MINNEAPOLIS CENTRAL LIBRARY DOWNTOWN

The Code+Care Summit is a day-long open summit in which participants will explore ways the creative coding community can work together to create new forms of collaboration, to empower learners and to strengthen communities.

Check-in, get your badge, a drink and find a seat. Lets do this!

In this talk, Kite will investigate our current and future relationships to nonhumans, especially to technology and artificial intelligence, as well as developing protocols through her artistic practice. Humans are already surrounded by objects which are not understood to be intelligent or even alive, and seen as unworthy of relations. How can humanity create a future with relations between technology or artificial intelligence and humans without an ethical-ontological orientation with which to understand what is worthy of relation and what is not? In order to create relations with any nonhuman entity, not just entities which seem human, the first steps are to acknowledge, understand, and know that the nonhuman are ‘being’ in the first place. Indigenous ontologies already exist to understand forms of ‘being’ which are outside of humanity.

Attendees take the stage to present five-minute talks on subjects ranging from dating-data to true color to trash to anxiety. Slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. Can they keep up? It’s always entertaining and enlightening.

How are artists serving other artists and building ecosystems of care? Continuing in a a rich tradition of artists starting galleries, community spaces, and residency programs, what are emerging organizational models that are forging new avenues for support and presentation?

Matt Kenyon will talk about Wolf at the Door, a collection of Kenyon's recent works, many of which reflect upon and critique the language of market forces, and the way banks and corporations leave individual human experience out of the metaphors they use.

Wolf at the Door asks what euphemisms like a debt waterfall, an untapped resource, or a key investment would look like if they reflected the human stories they have unleashed. These works function as centerpieces for a series of long-term community centered conversations about how we got into this situation and what, if anything, we are willing to learn.

I will be sharing my experience of working with A.I. art since 2018, my journey into the depths of my consciousness during that time, and the strange parallels between expanding my awareness as a human and the parallel processing power of the machine.

I'll be showing examples of films we made with A.I. coupled with conscious storytelling and will explain how we are working to raise the vibration of the collective with each project.

In the past decade there's been a pragmatic shift in how visualization designers and theorists think about visualization. From rule-based systems favored by influential authors from the 1980s and 90s, we've moved into a more fragmented world where visualization designers embrace a broad variety of approaches and styles, and make decisions on a case-by-case basis. This talk argues that this is a very positive development.

A conversation about alternative ways to practice that people found during the pandemic. Moderated by Jer Thorp.

A forest of giant algorithmically generated metal leaves, triply periodic minimal surfaces you can inhabit, hyperbolic surfaces of riveted puzzle cells. Nervous System’s sculptural works combine scientific research into natural pattern formation with new fabrication techniques and computational geometry. Unfortunately they haven’t been built yet.

Join Jesse on a tour through the unbuilt sculptural works of Nervous System and the ups and downs of running a small computational design studio. We will follow the twists and turns of inspiration, hilarious coincidences, computational research, and tragic ends of these unrealized works.

As someone who worked in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry for 14 years, I didn’t realize how one set of rules around language would change my perspective on how I communicate and write stories. In particular, how do we follow the rules of language when we may not understand what is being communicated? How does one make another human being understand the importance of something they have yet to learn? In this talk, I will share with the audience my research and work in interactive fiction, playable media, text-based work, and a practice I engage in quite regularly-subversion through methodology.

In this new, intimate talk, Giorgia will speak about falling in love with numbers and categories and how a traditional definition of data no longer fits her work.

She will interrogate the role that data plays in her creative practice and her struggle to identify what it is (and what it can be).

Surveying her diverse projects over the last decade, her current design practice, and her forthcoming work, she will reflect on her approach and process, and on how joining Pentagram as a Partner three years ago has influenced her path. She will bare all about her complicated relationship with data -- how it has both saved her and led her into trouble at times.

In this talk, Giorgia will unpack the challenges she has confronted and the broader context within which she has come to view her work.

This will be Giorgia’s 5th time on the Eyeo stage, and she is particularly excited to see you all again.

We’ll talk about ancient and traditional practices of time and divination, and imagine a possible future that requires a return to holistic technologies, and globally connected local communities. We’ll show projects of folks who are preparing for that possible future by building atomic modular technology and practicing reuse technology as emerging technology. We’ll cover some lessons learned making our own atomic modular tools, like glsl viewer, and the alchemy of making our own digital art with recycled e-waste. Our inspirations include: birds, clouds, Octavia Butler, Rasheedah Philllips and Black Quantum Futurism, Ursula Franklin, Hundred Rabbits artist collective, the Solar Protocol project, and Precious Plastic’s localized global recycling network. Oh! and we’ll have stickers 🙂

For the past 15 years Design I/O has been developing systems to support unconventional approaches to play and creative expression. By Imagining worlds of alternative realities, their work invites audiences to playtest different futures and explore a more playful present. These worlds are designed to be poked at, revealed and explored, often framing a story or setting a stage and allowing the curiosity and experimentation of the audience to make it their own.

In this talk Design I/O will dive into these imaginary worlds, including large scale immersive installations, music you can jump into, empathetic robot arms and open world video games. They will also share their process, the challenges involved and the worlds they want to play in the future.

A night off from talks. Meet other folks at eyeo over attendee led activities and meet-ups. There’s a lot going on. Read on, or just show up. You’ll find something to do. Get there at 8, get acquainted with the space, the schedule, grab a refreshment and jump in. Pretty much all the action starts at 8:30.

More details to come....

This talk will focus on the opportunities and challenges for creative expression with photovoltaic solar power. I’ll be discussing the history of this field and the various conceptual approaches that artists and designers have explored, which I documented in my recent book A History of Solar Power Art and Design. I’ll also be talking about the role of art and design in making the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy more accessible and equitable.

Our senses are how we build the world around us. How can we draw out that information, and shape it into stories that allow us to connect in a meaningful way?

I founded my studio, The Feelies, to explore storytelling in a multisensory medium. We research / capture / create for a new spatial, sensory language, often in immersive contexts. I'm intrigued by the part our somatic intelligence has to play in the world, and in our digital futures.

Drawing on our experience working with Shinto practitioners in Japan, to Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon, on stories from forests to robotics as well as development of the tools to facilitate crossmodal experiences, we'll delve into the thinking and practice behind creating stories for all the senses.

In the early 1980s, hackers were treated as outsiders at best and dangerous criminals at worst. Eventually, world leaders recognized the value of these outcasts, and devised a plan to use them as geopolitical pawns. How did we get here? Find out in this talk by ex-NSA officer, Emily Crose.

Yasmin is an artist, immersive Director and co-Founder at Scatter, inventors of volumetric filmmaking and creators of Depthkit. Art driven innovation, through story making and tool building, has been at the core of Scatter’s approach to defining the volumetric landscape. In this talk, Yasmin will share Scatter’s award-winning work and their unique, hybrid approach to defining the medium through their VR productions, building emerging creative tools and co-imagining with the community.

A conversation between Christopher Coleman, Salome Asega and Dorothy Santos about the ways their different organizations work to support and encourage communities.

After years of being a niche subject of interest for AI scientists and code-based artists, "AI art" has spilled over into the mainstream with the arrival of "foundation models" like CLIP and GPT-3. These models are trained on crowd-sourced datasets containing hundreds of millions of images or billions of words, are capable of rendering realistic and compelling images and text, and can be "guided" by a human through a natural language interface. Whether we know it or not, we are building a global brain that may soon account for a significant fraction of all the media generated on and for the internet. If humans can be said to have something resembling a collective mind, I'm convinced these technologies provide a window to its imagination. This talk will summarize the state of the art, speculate on the future applications and ramifications of these techniques, and explore what they tell us about ourselves.

Artist and programmer Carlos “L05” Garcia explores the relationship between dreams and media and using video games and immersive installations as a way of evoking dream-like experiences.

I’ve spent my career working with data in ways that are considered ‘wrong’ or not in line with ‘best’ practices as per data orthodoxy.

By adhering to best practices, could we be missing out on the *best* parts of dataviz through these inherent limitations? What value can you find when you explicitly set out to do the opposite of what you are ‘supposed’ to do?

This talk is a celebration of being contrary, of what there is to gain when we are wilfully, perversely, and joyously ‘wrong’ in how we work with and communicate data. I’ll also share recent projects that use data for the ‘wrong’ reasons, and confess moments in my own creative practice where (shock horror!) I’ve even been wrong myself.

Climate change is one of the greatest threats of our time. But it is slow-moving, large scale and often invisible, challenging our collective ability to understand its reach. In this session, I’ll talk about how newsrooms like The New York Times use graphics and data visualization to make climate change more real and immediate for our readers.

Can we repair our broken connection with nature by using art & technology?

Ersin’s work draws visitors into a series of ecological explorations which are seeking to highlight our interconnectedness with the wider systems of nature through experiential art.

In this talk, Ersin will dissect the artworks that use research-based approaches, advanced technologies, and scientific collaborations to render intimate, poetic and multimodal encounters between humans and more-than-humans.

A second night off from talks to make room for more conversation. We'll meet over at Malcom Yards Food Hall. Come hungry, they have a number of great food vendors you'll want to try.

In May 2003 I sustained a life-changing injury which prevented me from travelling for almost twenty years (... in case you're wondering why I've never attended Eyeo!). It also demanded profound life reinvention, which was as much of a challenge as a mind-expanding opportunity.

A few years later, whilst carrying out online research for a project inspired by geometric design and architecture, I became disheartened knowing it was likely that I would never be able to visit the Alhambra, Petra and other mesmerizingly beautiful historic sites I saw on my computer screen.

So I decided that if I couldn’t travel the world, I would create my own instead.

“Travelling by Numbers” – a project that started out as a personal journey – took me to imaginary buildings, landscapes and sprawling cityscapes and led to a commission to design the cover images for the republication of four of William Gibson’s best-selling books including the cyberpunk classic ‘Neuromancer’.

“Brown makes his images using generative design software he wrote himself. It creates enormous, complex 3-D patterns that he searches until finding something interesting. The process makes him equal parts magician, explorer, and artist.” Jenna Garrett, Wired

I've been thinking about this thing I'm calling 'Black Virtuality' for the last few years. Loosely defined, it's the construction and consumption of Black bodies, Black cultures, and Black identities in virtual space. In games, film, and social media, Blackness is often extracted from Black people and fragmented into bite-sized, easily appropriated pieces. Through my work on the Open Source Afro Hair Library and other interventions, I seek to preserve a Black whole, distribute a Black intact, and grow the fluid virtual-corporeal community that I've always longed for.

I will be talking about my practice and the way it's been evolving the past few years, and the role that purpose, privilege, and opportunity have played in shaping it.

How conversations with materials and the natural world can shape artistic practice, invite mystery, and disarm impossibility.

Kitundu will share his journey from building hand-made turntable instruments to creating large scale public artwork in collaboration with community. He discusses how genuine partnership with communities generates richer outcomes at the expense of predictability, and how public art agencies should cultivate this mode of working. Kitundu will also address our relationship to tools and how they may constrain our imaginations while facilitating our creations, and the importance of interrogating value, surrendering control, and learning how to improvise from birds.

A conversation between Jenny Odell and Walter Kitundu about how nature informs their practice, moderated by Jer Thorp.

Bias and discrimination are insidious and pervasive, but they are typically studied as discrete moments: a single instance of bias at one moment in time. This picture is incomplete, because in truth, bias (gender, racial, etc.) is experienced continuously-- over weeks, months, careers, lifetimes. To uncover the real-world impact of bias, I partnered with a computer scientist to create an agent-based computer simulation of bias at work. In this talk, I'll share our pan-disciplinary collaboration, our stark findings, and how these can empower us to create a more just world.

This is a story about identity, burnout, finding courage, rekindling a dream, and settling into the discomfort of not knowing what comes next. Oh, and lots of dataviz.

For the past 30 years, Golan Levin has worked as an educator, artist, and instigator at the intersection of machine code and visual culture. Since 2009, Golan has also directed CMU's Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a research laboratory for atypical, anti-disciplinary, and inter-institutional arts research. In this telescopic talk, Golan considers some pasts and futures of emerging media arts: in particular, the perpetual struggle to reclaim computation as a medium of personal expression, and how social sculptures like the STUDIO can operate as strategic improbability incubators for the communities of hybrid oddkins working to address it.

Jacolby Satterwhite is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality and fantasy through immersive installation, virtual reality and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action film of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as the stage on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice, namely illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography and writing. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of references, guided by queer theory, modernism and video game language to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens. An equally significant influence is that of his late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, whose ethereal vocals and diagrams for visionary household products and ethereal vocals serve as the source material within a decidedly complex structure of memory and mythology.

This talk will take you on a tour through Silicon Valley via a creek -- one that passes by data centers, the Apple headquarters, a dead mall, the neighborhood where I grew up, and the former grounds of a 19th century health resort. Along the way, I hope to make a broader argument for context, by foregrounding the ecological and cultural placefulness of a valley that exports placelessness.