Program

Robot as a stylized artist – minimalist. Robot as a sculptor.

The final exhibition of the “Future is Now” program of Tabačka Gallery for 2019 presents two world-famous artists – Patrick Tresset (FR) and Quayola (IT). At the exhibition you can see the robot ” Human study ”, which during the duration of the exhibition draws portraits of gallery visitors; as well as a video and photo documentation of the artistic work of the robot ” Sculpture Factory ”.

As humans, we have limited senses to perceive their environment. One of such is our audible range, which is incapable to detect frequencies below 20Hz and above 20kHz. While other species use infra and ultrasounds to communicate, humans, without technology, are unable to communicate in that manner.

In our daily lives, we are exposed to many sources of infrasound and ultrasound – from natural phenomenon to home appliances. A common example is a fluorescent lamp. Marc has captured its ultrasounds and translated them into frequencies audible to the human ear. This material has become the basis of the composition made out of 128 fluorescent lamps. The goal is to visualize ultrasound.

Marc Vilanova Pinyol is a Spanish sound and light artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology. His artwork, which will be presented during the Art & Tech Days festival, was created during his art residency at KAIR Kosice Artist in Residence.

The installation will be available from 20th until 22nd of November, from 4 pm – 8 pm.

Free entrance.

Meet ERNEST, an interactive exploration of machine learning, which places the viewer in the role of training an emotionally aware artificial intelligence designed to make people happy. ERNEST is from an era prior to ubiquitous data collection, so it needs you to help train the Happiness Model™ so it can learn what content makes people happiest.

ERNEST uses computer vision to detect your face and then reacts to you based on your facial expressions. He’s learning to understand emotions and how various pieces of content can affect your emotional expressions. But while we’re training a Happiness Model™ with ERNEST, how else might this technology be applied despite the good intentions of its creators?

Through ERNEST we hope to open a dialogue around the ethics of gathering the data used to train and validate models, the places bias can creep into these models, the gap between intent and real-world applications of these models, and the tensions around augmenting or automating decision making using imperfect models.

The adapted version of ERNEST will be also available in Kasárne/Kulturpark.

Participants should have one of the following:

• Basic working knowledge of UX Design;
• Basic working knowledge of code (HTML/JavaScript);
• Participants must bring a laptop with a camera.

• Human Communication: how language extends beyond words;
• Introduction + Demos: how computer vision can see our face, body, and emotions;
• Use Cases: how others have used this technology;
• Ethical Considerations: designing for ambient technology.

• Break into groups;
• Brainstorm, sketch, and prototype;
• Share + Feedback;
• Closing Thoughts.

What can culture managers learn from computer geeks and data scientists? This and other questions will be answered during this workshop led by Karol Piekarski.

How to investigate the needs and behaviours of cultural events participants? How to compete for the audience’s attention in the data overload culture? Today, cultural organisations – public institutions, but also NGOs and artists themselves – face the same challenges as the media and private companies.

In the workshop, you will explore different research methods – from traditional surveys to the analysis of data from social media – as well as the tools we use in Medialab Katowice to process and visualise data. Based on the Medialab case studies, you will learn how to develop a data-driven approach to use data analysis to inform everyday decisions and future development of your organisation.

For invited participants only (free of charge).

Communication is the basic activity of our body. The expression of our thoughts, opinions or emotions by words, gestures, images or sounds is preceded by the internal communication of cells. The cells themselves communicate by chemical processes. From a macro and micro point of view, communication is not only a natural but also an inevitable process taking place in the human body.

The exhibition is a free visual essay of curator’s selection presenting artists from the Central European region. While creating the exhibition it was important not to follow the way of an educational, informative, explanatory or commentary exhibition. The aim of the New Translation is to stimulate thinking about the possibilities of communication, about us, about the Earth. About new realities, rather than new realities.

Authors: Michal Machcinik, Agnieszka Mastalerz, Michal Mitro, Jakub Ra, Daniel Szalai
Curator: Nikolas Bernáth (VUNU)
Architect: Tomáš Kocka

Exhibition opening: 20. 11. 2019 | 18:00
Duration of the exhibition: 20. – 27. 11. 2019

Free entrance.

Sean Mulholland: ERNEST – An Emotionally Aware AI

Meet ERNEST, an interactive exploration of machine learning, which places the viewer in the role of training an emotionally aware artificial intelligence designed to make people happy. He’s learning to understand emotions and how various pieces of content can affect your emotional expressions. But while we’re training a Happiness Model™ with ERNEST, how else might this technology be applied despite the good intentions of its creators?

Healium Decoration: Platonic Solids

There are only five pieces of geometry in 3D space that match the criteria of being a regular, convex solid. They’re the so-called Platonic Solids: Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron, Icosahedron. They are named for the ancient Greek philosopher Plato who hypothesized in his dialogue, the Timaeus, that the classical elements (earth, air, water, and fire) were made of these regular solids.

Martin Kolařik, Matúš Bafrnec: NerudAI

Computer poet composing free poetry using artificial intelligence. You must have come across simple computer-generated poems – most of the time the main focus is on rhyming and the idea goes sideways. However, the aim of NerudAI is different. It is experimenting with computer learning, as it learns what language and poetry should look like. NerudAI uses a deep neural network of the LSTM type, which has been shown by thousands of amateur free poems from the depths of the Czech Internet. Not only did NerudAI learn Czech itself, but it also could keep the thread of interesting thought going on. Because most of the amateur poems were sad, sometimes there was a feeling that NerudAI reminds the robot Marvin from the famous book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Deliberately – try by yourself.

Free entrance.

The installations are accessible on 20 – 22 November / 10:00 am – 6 pm

Three Migrants in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Smuggler) is a performance installation set as a fictional trip of three migrants and a smuggler on a small rubber boat (dinghy) that is going upstream river Evros at night. Evros is a liquid portal into Greece and thus the European Union, flowing from Bulgaria to Greece and Turkey and is a perilous part of the main migrant smuggling routes. According to Greek sources, the river has the largest number of buried and unidentified migrants in Greece. Based on sketches, dialogue and jokes from the popular comedy classic Three Men in a Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K Jerome.

The installation will be open until November 22, 2019 and is suitable for visitors from 12 years.

The artwork was created within the project Borderline Offensive: Laughing in the Face of Fear supported by the European Union within the framework of the Creative Europe programme. The project was supported using public funds by Slovak Arts Council.

Free entrance.

Join the international conference on media art, technology and digital culture. Inspiring experts will offer different perspectives on the subject of language and communication and how the interfaces between human-human, human-machine, human-art and art-technology work. Go “Beyond Words”.

The ticket price includes coffee, snacks and lunch for participants. Languages of talks: SK, EN (simultaneous interpreting).

Regular ticket: €39
Discount for students: 50%

The conference has been supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council, Visit Košice and Ministry of Construction of the Slovak Republic. The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

Jakub Ra and the members of the New Aliens Agency present performance on prenatal development. It is the process of activating the trans states of mind, through which help we return to our past, to our subconscious, where various blocks, thought codes and emotions appear. Personality development is influenced by upbringing and mainly by the relationship with the mother with whom the first physical contact occurs. Nonlinear meditation also includes body liquids, which are given a certain honour via spiritual optics. Another of the main themes is healing – self-healing – as a phenomenon of today’s technologically advanced age when by collective consciousness we discover a new spirituality not burdened with any religion.

The Danish duo Silicium explores the depths of synthetic sound and graphics in a live concert that is best described as a digital nature experience. Primal forms of organic behaviours are generated by real-time simulations and conducted as improvisational material in synchrony with a dark, yet curious and playful live music set.

Silicium is a collaboration between Danish techno legend Bjørn Svin and computational visualist Carl Emil Carlsen. With their debut in 2015, the duo set out to experiment with novel concert formats and audiovisual improvisation techniques enabled by new technologies. Recently they have performed at Ars Electronica in Linz (2018), CPH:DOX and Cph Stage in Copenhagen (2019).

Students are eligible to get FREE tickets by applying the discount code (via tootoot.fm)

Duration of the concert: 40-45 min

The second conference held for game developers and gaming enthusiasts following the success of the first conference from last year. This is the imaginary peak of efforts to support and develop the gaming industry in Slovakia. This conference naturally evolved from regularly organized meetups of game developers held by Game Dev Košice, one of the founding members of the Slovak Game Developer Association (SGDA) – the only official association covering and supporting game developers in Slovakia. The programme of the conference is based on a packed line-up of industry experts, many of whom have worked on world-renowned top quality game titles. In the form of a series of lectures and open discussion, they will gladly share their long-term experience with the participants.

During this conference, everybody comes into play – beginning developers who want to break into the secrets of game development to the most experienced ones, who can showcase their projects to enthusiasts and get valuable direct feedback from gamers, colleagues or industry professionals giving them the chance to move their work to a new – higher quality level. Moreover, for a few lucky ones, there is an opportunity to take part in a VIP dinner and/or an afterparty with the speakers and chat informally with the living legends of the gaming industry.

Dates: 21 – 22 November

Organizers: Grindstone, Slovak Game Developers Association & Game Dev Košice.

It is not enough just to live a story. It is essential to know how to pass it on. Whether it’s your personal story or a story of your product – it’s important to be able to tell it to your audience so they can understand it and continue passing it on.

At the workshop, you will try to develop each other’s ideas while talking to each other. You will discover how the storytelling is built by skilled storytellers and learn to be the heroes of your own life stories.

The workshop is led by Jiří Charvát and Lukáš Venclík from School of Improvisation. There will be two workshops: one in the morning at 10 AM and one in the afternoon at 4 PM.

Language of the workshop: Slovak/Czech
Duration of the workshop: 3 hours
Capacity: max 16 participants

The workshop is co-financed by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through International Visegrad Fund. The fund’s mission is to promote sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

DAAVS: The days of current audiovisual meetings. The annual festival organized by  VUNU collective, during which the fine art meets, combines and mixes with other forms of arts. DAAVS is thus primarily a celebration of new music, performative arts, film and literature on the horizon of media art in its broadest understanding.

The fifth year of the festival is freely framed by the term “xenopoetics” and through individual projects and arts looks at ways of expressing new realities, and realities that already are or soon will be fundamentals part of our being.

The third day of DAAVS 2019 will present the avant-garde film essay by Jean-Luc Godard and the project Vrtačky po desáté hodině.

Vrtačky po desáté hodině is a well-established project of the unusually sounding Slovak music scene. His sound, influenced by glitch and IDM, is enriched by various acoustic instruments and influences of folk and ethno music. In the systematically improvised live sets, one experiences the dramatic dripping of ambient surfaces and symmetric waves draining into the drone-sounds.

Live act will be accompanied by visuals from VJ Wega, Jakub Ra, Herta Ondrusova-Victorinova.

Zvukodrom is a multimedia tool for groups of children, a portable children’s orchestra, which offers a wide range of work with sound and image. Fero Király, musician and teacher, developed it in 2014 for the Convergence Festival in Bratislava. Since then, ZVUKODROM has travelled all over Slovakia and two continents. Wherever it came, it was found that children are the same- in the desire to discover the world through play and thus a natural way of learning.

Zvukodrom is for children an entertainment which, under the guidance of an experienced teacher, develops their artistic abstract feeling. Children don’t need to play any musical instrument, nor need to have previous musical experience. At the workshop, children will record various sounds and make them our shared music which will be played at the final mini-concert for parents. Plus, there may be another special surprise. Well, we’ll see.

Workshop 1 at 10:00 is designed for children aged 7 to 8 years.
Workshop 2 at 15:00 is intended for children aged 9 to 10 years.
Capacity of one workshop: max. 12 children
Duration of the workshop: 2 hours

The workshop is co-financed by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through the International Visegrad Fund. The fund’s mission is to promote sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

What makes VR different from other media, is that it is as much a physical experience as it is visual. It allows to capture physicality and to reimagine our perception of body, space and time like no other media. Re-imagination of the physicality will be at the core of Mária Júdová‘s workshop

During the Physicality in Virtual Spaces workshop, Mária will go through her previous artworks to demonstrate how the concepts of body and perception relate to the practice, research, and interest. Maria will use cinematic VR experience DUST as a basis to explain how she uses virtual reality to alter a user’s body perception. After a short conceptually/theoretically driven introduction, the series of hands-on experiments will follow.

Participants will use digital technologies in order to reimagine their physicality and to discover the creative possibilities of VR based techniques in the context of movement, dance, and choreography. Using the VR headset, creative coding node-based toolkit VVVV and a volumetric recording using depth camera we will create experiences in which one is able to observe his or her own body movements from a perspective of the third person in real-time or in the recording. We will examine the impact of a different time, location and scale perspective on a movement self-perception.

Duration: 4 hours
Target group: dancers, choreographers, artists, general audience
Keywords: VR 3D,  volumetric capturing 3D vvvv, dance, choreography
Working language: English

Piotr Krajewski, Artistic Director of the WRO Biennale with the theme of Human Aspect chooses from among dozens of video works, installations, media objects, and performances presented during the 30 years of WRO Biennale’s existence twenty pieces that uniquely explore our contemporary realities, which defy any previously practised interpretive approaches. These art pieces are captured in short movies. Seven of them are the part of WRO on Tour Screening at Art & Tech Days 2019 in Košice.

The screening under the curatorial development and presentation by Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka includes:

Winnie Soon, Unerasable Images
Liliana Piskorska, Public Displays of Affection
Jana Shostak, Jakub Jasiukiewicz, The March
Demelza Kooij, Wolves From Above
Andres Baron, Printed Sunset
Akihiko Taniguchi, The Big Browser 3D
Guli Silberstein, Field of Infinity

The screening program was developed in the context of Art & Tech Days 2019.

Free entrance.

Presentation of a book on the visual and philosophical cultures of Earth depiction and the geopolitics of the climate crisis. Through 5 ”figures”of the planet-  the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us & Spectral Earth, the book explores how the planet’s concepts, models, and images affect the possibilities of planetary cooperation and how they form a preliminary program for the infrastructure geopolitics of the climate crisis.

The book is published in English as part of a series of essays on The Terraforming by Strelka Press.

The event is held in Slovak language.
The event is part of the DAAVS festival, and is co-organized by Spolka collective.

Free entrance.

From vibration to vibration. As I vibrate, my body responds. I sink into myself. A flow pulls me in, my thoughts become clear. I am present … a tiny molecule in the huge liquid space.

The performance is inspired by freediving, a sport that one may know from Luc Besson’s movie The Big Blue. We dive in with one single breath of air, accompanied by no equipment. In Urgent Need to Breathe we breathe as well as we hold our breath together. To accomplish that one needs to release his/ her mind and body.

We dive in together as we all share the same immersive space. Our sensorial experience is reinforced by interactive technology, where the LED lights react on light sensors, wearable electronics and interactive sound and light design. Dancers are around us, close to us, above us. We can see them moving from different perspectives. We are not offered a dance piece to watch, but rather a diving experience with its different stages of flow, weightlessness, adrenalin, narcosis, dependance, and even the urgent need to breathe. 

Partners and supporters: Life Long Burning – DanceWorks!, Hungarian National Cultural Fund / NKA / Imre Zoltán Program, National Dance Theatre, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Pro Progressione, Workshop Foundation, Sín Arts and Culture Center, The Slovak Institute in Budapest, Czech Centre Budapest, Balassiho inštitút -Hungarian institute in Bratislava, L1 Association, KristofLab, REZI.DANCE Komařice, Sensorium – Bratislava.

Urgent Need to Breathe is part of the research of the choreographer, Flóra Eszter Sarlós that she started during her master studies of International Art Creation at University Paris 8 and reflects on the creation of sensorial experience in the relation of dance to digital technologies.

The concept of STELLA (Somatic Tech Live Lab) was created by Ziggurat Project with the aim of launching long-term cooperation in the V4 region in the field of movement and technology.

Choreography: Flóra Eszter Sarlós
Performers, co-creators: Ádám Bot, Emese Kovács/ Boglárka Lakatos- Varga, Alexandra Mireková (SK), Barbara Rusnáková (SK)
Light and interactive design, wearable electronics: Ľuboš Zbranek (The Manifesto, CZ)
Light designer assistant: Gergő Lukács
Music composition: Ádám Márton Horváth
Music composition and sound design: Michal Mitro (The Manifesto, CZ)
Mentor: Eszter Gál
Production assistant, marketing, communication: Brigitta Kovács
Special thanks to Kristóf Szabó, Fanni Lakos and Máté Czakó
Trailer: Gergő Lukács

Duration of the piece: 50 minutes

The performance is part of the project STELLA, which is co-financed by the Governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.