Abstract (short paper)

The Aeon instrument is an expressive visual music instrument used for live media to support interdisciplinary performance practice. The Aeon instrument enables generative animation, editing and compositing, tailored for improvisational expression of projected visual elements and spatialized audio. In this paper, we discuss the design of Aeon in terms of its conceptual, design and performative aspects both in aural and visual domains. Our instrument presents the performer with a large set of techniques that enable flexible media manipulation and generation. The paper also addresses issues related to the tensions between narrative structure and performative expression, live and recorded media, image and sound and the structuring of improvised media.

• Aleksandra Dulic (Associate Professor, Department of Creative Studies, The University of British Columbia, Canada) is an artist-scholar with expertise in interactive art, climate change communication, and media for social change. She is the Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCT) and leads an interdisciplinary research team that engages multiple forms of art, media and information technologies as vehicles for the expression of community, culture, and identity. Dulic’s research is centered on the creation of interactive systems and experiences that bring local, cultural and communal resources to the forefront. One thread of this work involves the development of learning context and experiences using game play as a device for sustainability awareness grounded in local ecology. Another thread is the research in interactive installation with multi-channel audio-visual displays that enable the creation of complex community images. These threads of research intersect in the idea of interactive art as a place for community reflection. Dulic has managed a number of interdisciplinary research projects and secured Canadian federal and provincial funding for these projects. She has created a number of large-scale dynamic environments and multimedia project as well as published insights that arise from these research-creation projects.
• Miles Thorogood is an artist/engineer at the University of British Columbia (CA) with research centered around the practice and theory in media arts for developing interactive experiences. He engages with quantitative and qualitative methods toward cutting edge research in the development of computational systems for community-engaged artistic creation. Miles’ research contributions have produced new knowledge in the fields of soundscape studies, affective computing, and cognitive science focusing on sound design practice. This research seeks to identify formal models of creativity as it is by investigating aspects of human perception and design process in order to encode creative structures for computer assisted technologies in art making environments. Building on this research, he has leveraged methods to multimedia systems that combine audio, video, and electronics that explore the human and community experience. As a service from the output of this research, the work has been featured as interactive museum exhibits, installations, and performances. The interactive installation and performance works frame the research in creative practice that brings meaningful contexts of experience and environment to the foreground using algorithmic processes combining art-making, audio and visual media, databases, artificial intelligence, and physical and network computing. milesthorogood.com