The ix Symposium welcomes artists, researchers, educators, producers and distributors to share knowledge and experience about immersive and interactive technologies and about the art arising from them. It also welcomes broader audiences to world premieres of cutting edge digital works in Society for Arts and Technology’s dome, the Satosphere.

The ix symposium will provide an open exchange platform through a series of keynotes, panels, demonstrations, performances and immersive productions. An objective of the symposium is to help democratize access to immersive spaces and to the tools and processes used for the creation of original contents. Another objective is to foster a network facilitating the creation of a community and the circulation of people, ideas, and works. This will help rethink the models of production, the formats, the delivery systems, and the creative processes needed to maintain and nurture an international platform for strong artistic expressions and open innovation.

Keynotes by Jeffrey Shaw (School of Creative Media of Hong Kong, CHN), Miller Puckette (Max/MSP & Pure Data co-creator, US), Michael Naimark (MIT Media Lab, US), Martin Kusch (University of Applied Arts Vienna, AUT) and David McConville (Buckminster Fuller Institute, US) will launch the discussions of the main themes of the symposium. They will be followed by artists, researchers and practitioners, who will illustrate their side of the practice.

Overall, more than 50 participants from 20 cities and 10 countries will take part in this important gathering of innovators in immersion and experience!

5 original immersives artworks

Quantum & Nimbes
François Wunschel / Fernando Favier (Quantum)
Joanie Lemercier / James Ginzburg (Nimbes)

May 21st & 23rd  – 19h and 19h30

Francois Wunschel and Fernando Favier from 1024 architecture present Quantum, an immersive installation designed specifically for the Satosphere as a numerical singularity provoked by the clash of quark-pixels, the elementary particles also constituting imaginary components of major theories int the fields of physics and the cosmos. Joanie Lemercier and James Ginzburg, no stranger to immersive setups and architectural projection, will then introduce the spectators to Nimbes : a dystopian universe where a menacing nature and austere monochrome landscapes serve as a backdrop to a battle between light and darkness.

IRM (live)
Bruno Ribeiro aka Nohista (FR)

May 21st – 20h and 21h

 IRM is an audiovisual performance by Bruno Ribeiro aka Noshita. IRM (french for MRI) refers to a medical imaging technique that provides 2D and 3D views of the interior of the human body. The artist aims to transform the Satosphere into a gigantic scanner. He mixes video footage of a dancer with computer-generated sounds and graphics for a performance intended as a luminous and kinaesthetic choreography. By means of variations in scales and of sound and visual immersion allowed by the Satosphere, the spectators will be taken at the heart of a sensory experience where light becomes an abstract and musical body, flickering in anunstable universe.

Carapace (live)
Mary Franck (US)
Kadet Kuhne (US)

May 22nd – 20h and 21h

An immersive real-time audiovisual performance about the fashioning of the self expressed as ornate, unfolding architectural spaces. The ego is that with which we give ourselves form, a construct by which we ornament and protect ourselves and the shapeless, excruciating nakedness of raw being. An intimate space, encasing soft strangness and formed over a lifetime, a shell is architectural yet individual. Over the course of the performance these elegant, articulated spaces inspired by shells and exoskeletons will grow and take form, dance, and ultimately dissolve into nothingness. The majority of the visual content will be rendered in real time, performed with and responding to audio thereby enforcing the sense of live, intellegent form. Carapace is an existential allegory, but it also imagines a near future of biotechnology for materials in which hybrids of built and grown architecture are self-generating and mood-responsive.

Fragments (live)
Will Young, RFID (UK)
Jake Williams, RFID (UK)
Ben Gannaway, RFID (UK)

May 23rd – 20h and 21h

Fragments is an exploration of our relationship with memories. How recollected fragments are woven into an ever changing narrative, and emotionally charged events become managed as ordered information. What we remember as reality can be seen as a complex, interwoven construction of these partials and the stories they become.The piece is built around a series of audio interviews with subjects who recall significant past experiences, which have been heavily abstracted. Environmental elements referenced in the interviews are used to reconstruct these stories in a non-linear way – the narration only appearing clearly as momentary fragments, disappearing again into distorted disarray. Fragments is a new collaborative AV performance project between Ben Gannaway and Will Young of RFID and electronic musician Jake Williams. Neither visual or sonic composition leads their process, rather their work is created synergetically throughout the use of interlinked iterative processes. Performance parameters of the visuals are tied to sonic processes and vice versa, often in feedback loops, and their work grows out of this interaction.

About the SAT

Founded in 1996, the Society for Arts and Technology [SAT] is a transdisciplinary center for research, creation, production, training and dissemination dedicated to developing and conserving digital culture. North America’s first Living Lab, the SAT specializes in immersive environments, the use of high-speed networks and experience design.

Source : Society for arts & technology [SAT]