Page 121 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014seems to me to be particularly interesting is the Korean Lisa Park. She uses her body and her mind to develop works of performance art. In Le Violon d'Lisa she uses a nichrome wire fixed to a cello bow. When this wire touches the artist’s body, the data are collected by a computerised system, and after a process of calibration, are converted into sound. She has turned her whole body into a sort of interface and instrument at the same time. In another of her works, Eunoia, it is her brain‐waves that create the sound the audience hears. The brain‐wave data are transmitted to the computer via Bluetooth, where a program collects them and turns them into different sounds. These sounds are played through speakers with various dishes full of water on top of them. Every time asound isemitted, asprinkling ofwater comesfrom one of thebowls.Something atwhich manypeople wouldshudder—particularly those with an aversion to technology, even more integrated or in contact with the human body—is turned into a strange calm, between the artist, the sounds and the movement of the water responding to the reading of brainwaves.5. THE VALUEOF INTEGRATIONOn the basis of the Internet, technology is weaving another web of connections, a sort of computational intersubjectivity, in which it seems more and more that everything is possible. From the most advanced scientific research to our pockets, technology is invading our daily lives much more than we are aware. This is perhaps the success of these technologies, or of their proper implementation: their ability to integrate, which under no circumstances should be understood to mean to destroy. The integration of technology, from today’sAC/Ebasic levels of online communication to the more developed examples of affective or contextual computing, does not imply—or ought not to imply— a complete rupture with the analogue world we have known, but a natural evolution in which these technologies are just tools to be used.We are not in the era of the man‐machine singularity, but in that of technology at the service of man and I think that is how it should be understood. Describing a series technology‐related trends, examples and projects does not imply that all or any of them should be adopted by every stratum of the cultural sector. As has already been the case with Web 2.0, every cultural organisation must choose which tools to use, which might advance its aims, whether they be trade, communication, service, content or even creation (there is already a generation of digital artists, some of whom use Facebook not as a promotional platform, but a creative one).Similarly, this next generation of technology must be understood, not as an imposition, but as an opportunity. Naturally it is still necessary to have many reservations and not everything is applicable to every discipline, entity or business in the cultural sector. There are still questions such as privacy to be resolved. The digital transformation cannot serve as an excuse to destroy some of our most fundamental rights.For the most fearful, there is still a long way to go before a machine is capable of developing emotions and behaving exactly like a human being, whether it be for entertainment or to provide a specific service. Nor will human beings all respond in the same way to any given stimulus. Think of Agatha, the protagonist of George Bernard Shaw’s ill‐fated novel An Unsocial Socialist. In her yearning for knowledge to escape from the conservative education considered appropriate for well‐bred young ladies, she reads books on medicine, but the descriptions of the symptoms makes her feel as if she has got the diseases being described so she has no choice but to give up this sort of reading. Then she decides to read a novel in which “none of the emotions described inAn artistic creation that incorporates sensorial and multimedia elements to map emotions through movementWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 9: THE NEW AFFECTIVE TECHNOLOGIES COME TO THE CULTURAL SECTOR CURRENT PAGE...121