Dear All


Please join us on Tuesday 21st January for a special networking Digital
Futures session and a great opportunity to hear about some fascinating
projects including OpenStreetMap by Dr. Yuwei Lin, Contours by Fabio
Antinori (in collaboration with Bare Conductive + and Alicja Pytlewska),
Liminal Cities by Francesca Perona, Vectors by Ann-Kristin Abel and Paul
Ferragut, Polymetros by Ben Bengler and more!


Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided! Please let me know if you
would like to attend.



All the best
Irini




V&A Digital Futures
Tuesday 21 January, 14.00 - 17.00 
Digital Studio, Sackler Centre 

Digital Futures is an open studio showcase presenting groundbreaking new
work and offering a space for researchers and other participants to
share work and ideas, but also a platform to network and nurture
discussion and future collaborations. 

Presentations by:

Dr. Yuwei Lin
Yuwei Lin, Course Leader for BA (Hons) Media Culture and Communications
and BA (Hons) Media Culture and Creative Writing at the University for
the Creative Arts will introduce the concept of 'open source
cartography', the famous OpenStreetMap project, participatory mapping
practices, creative applications and implications of open source
cartography in different areas of society. 

Contours: Bare Conductive + Fabio Antinori and Alicja Pytlewska
Contours is an immersive artwork featuring interactive tapestries
reacting to the movements and the presence of the audience. It
represents the first collaboration between London based creative
collective Bare Conductive, artist Fabio Antinori and designer Alicja
Pytlewska.
Commissioned by the MAK Museum of Applied Arts and Contemporary Art in
Vienna for the Scientific Skin program 2013, Contours is a large-scale
metaphor of the surface, or textile/skin, coming to life through human
touch.
A real time generated soundpiece based on the modulation of sounds
sampled from medical machines (CT scans, MRI, ETC) is modulated
depending on the interaction between audience and the reactive
tapestries.
The talk will briefly show the genesis of the commission by using video
documentation, from the development of the concept, to the engineering
of the capacitive sensing technology and the production and installation
of the artwork at the museum.
More info about Contours can be found at:
http://www.mak.at/en/program/event?article_id=1350932577734
http://www.designboom.com/technology/conductive-ink-responds-to-tactile-feedback-to-create-sound-12-06-2013/
http://www.creativeapplications.net/maxmsp/contours-breathing-life-into-a-textile-skin/

Francesca Perona 
Francesca will be introducing her latest project *Liminal Cities*,
presented at the NEoN Digital Arts Festival in Dundee in November 2013.
Commissioned by the Hannah Maclure Centre at Abertay University and
partly sponsored by Imakr.vc, the project examined the ambitious £1
billion Dundee Waterfront regeneration project.
After having researched the historical, cultural and social aspects
involved, Perona expanded on the *material agencies* that have recurred
in Dundee’s urban redevelopment throughout history. Perona aimed to
re-enact these transitional processes and to recreate a sense of time in
the gallery space. She produced sculptural artifacts made with reclaimed
concrete from the construction site and 3d printed sculptures made with
smart soluble materials. She then created an irrigation system in the
gallery space and micro-dripped water on the sculptures over time,
reshaping them through a controlled corrosive process.

Through these material reconfigurations* Liminal Cities* aimed to trace
connections between past, present and future heritage of the city of
Dundee, emphasising on the liminal boundary between imagination,
expectation, reality and uncertainty.

Francesca Perona is a London-based textile designer with background in
digital print design and textile&fashion trend research.  After
graduating with an MA in Computational Arts (distinction) from the
appointed Visiting Fellow at School of Creative Media, City University
of Hong Kong. Upon her return to the UK, Perona was commissioned a new
body of work and solo exhibition in occasion of the NEoN Digital Arts
Festival in Dundee, Scotland. She now works as freelance artist, textile
consultant as well as digital tutor at Corelli College for the Ideas
Foundation, teaching interactive technologies and design to high school
students.

Through her art & design practice Perona is investigating the
application of smart materials and cutting edge technologies to
interdisciplinary contexts. Her design research aims to develop a hybrid
craftsmanship at the intersection of high-tech and low-tech, melding
traditional textile techniques, digital technologies, physical computing
and material science.
Her work as textile designer has been exhibited at international fairs
such as Milano Unica, Comocrea, Premiere Vision, Intertextile Beijing
and Formex Stockholm. More recently, her work as art and design
practitioner has been presented at Watermans, V&A and HMC gallery.

Ann-Kristin Abel 
With a background in Fashion Design, Ann-Kristin Abel has graduated from
the MA Design for Textile Futures, Central Saint Martins in 2011. Being
part of vectors, a design initiative that launched in 2013, she recently
co-curated ‘Design Beyond Making’ at Protein Gallery, London.  With a
fascination in neuroscience and emerging technologies her design
practice investigates the intersection and the mergence of human nature
and technology to probe and craft visions of a possible human future.
http://www.wearevectors.co

Paul Ferragut, graduate of MA Communication Design - Digital Media at
Central Saint Martins is a Creative Technologist who explores digital
art and interactive installations. He is researching in creative coding
and physical interaction, seeking opportunities to bridge his practice
with other artistic disciplines. Technology is becoming a medium to
generate surprises and challenge our experience and perception of media.
Recent installations include drawing and performing machines all aiming
towards a humanisation of technology by utilising it as a new form of
craft.http://www.wearevectors.co

Ben Bengler
Ben Bengler is a creative technologist, interaction designer, researcher
 and artist. He has a background in electronic engineering, computer
science and interaction design as well as in music and audio technology.
His research focuses on the design and evaluation of interactive music
works that enable broad audiences to experience collaborative
music-making and foster public musical creativity in real-world
settings. A pioneering aspect of his approach is that the research
outcomes are gained from comprehensive user studies conducted in
real-world settings such as major art museums and international music 
and media art festivals. His research seeks to contribute to a
fundamental understanding of how people behave and interact in such new
creative spaces and aims to provide a valuable resource to inform new
designs that aim to foster technology-mediated social and creative
experiences.
Research group: http://isam.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/
Ben's homepage: www.benbengler.com

If you are interested in taking part in future sessions, please contact
Irini Papadimitriou [log in to unmask] 


Coming up

Digital Design Drop-in: Marguerite Humeau & Choy Ka Fai 
Saturday 25 January, 13.00-16.00
Sculpture Gallery 21a

Marguerite Humeau is a designer on a quest to explore contemporary
myths: the grey and unknown areas of our reality. Design is used to
explore the means by which knowledge is generated in the absence of
evidence, or in the impossibility of either reaching or analysing the
object of investigation. Humeau weaves factual events into speculative
narratives, therefore enabling the unknown to erupt in grandiose
splendour. The work is presented as a series of live science fictions:
semireal, synthetic, supernatural events.
Marguerite Humeau has exhibited her work institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Talk to Me,
2011, curated by Paola Antonelli), Hayward Gallery (The Universal
Addressability of Dumb Things, 2013, curated by Mark Leckey), Cité du
design in Saint Etienne (Politique Fiction, 2013, curated by Alexandra
Midal), Mudac, De la Warr Pavilion, since she was initially noticed in
2011 with her diploma project at the Royal College of Art called
Proposal for Resuscitating Prehistoric Creatures – an odyssey which
quest was to resuscitate the sound and to create an opera of prehistoric
creatures.
Her work has been recognised internationally through various talks,
awards and publications such as Design Indaba (Cape Town), Monocle, TAR,
I-D, Blueprint, Monocle, WMMNA, BLDGBLOG, Design Week, NPR, France
Culture, Libération, and Le Monde, it is also part of the NY MoMA
permanent collection.

Choy Ka Fai an artist, performance maker and speculative designer. He is
inspired by the histories and theorisations that together contain the
uncertainties of the future. His research springs from a desire to
understand the conditioning of the human body, its intangible memories
and the forces shaping its expressions. These factors converge into
complex
articulations at the intersection of art, design and technology.  Ka Fai
graduated in Design Interaction from the Royal College Of Art London,
under a National Arts Council (Singapore) Overseas Scholarship, and was
conferred the Singapore Young Artist Award in 2010. His work has been
presented internationally, notably at Festival Tokyo (2011), Singapore
Arts Festival (2012) and Tanz Im August, Berlin (2013). www.ka5.info 





Irini Papadimitriou
Digital Programmes Manager
Learning & Interpretation Dept
V&A
South Kensington
London SW7 2RL
T: 020 7942 2258
E: [log in to unmask] 

Working days: Monday, Tuesday and Thursday

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