Institutional Presentation Statement 

CCCB, June 15th. Session: Art centers and art residencies

Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme in the framework of S+T+Arts initiative (Science, Technology & the Arts). S+T+Arts supports collaborations between artists, scientists, engineers and researchers to develop more creative, inclusive, and sustainable technologies.
The main objective of MindSpaces is to develop novel art-driven design processes and technologies, which build upon artificial intelligence, multimodal data analysis and fusion algorithms and are augmented by data insights gathered through the collective social behaviour and responses of occupants experiencing dynamic and adaptive environments. https://mindspaces.eu/

S+T+ARTS is driven by the conviction that science and technology combined with an artistic viewpoint also open valuable perspectives for research and business, through a holistic and human-centered approach. https://starts.eu/

DïaloG a is a public art, generative, interactive, and evolutionist project. He shows how the new status of the artworks that experiences mutations made possible by the technology moved the object it used to be (sculpture in marble, painting on canvas) to a real subject. The art-subject, able to perceive its environment, dotted with memory, and afferent cognitive functions: artificial intelligence, artificial intentionality, autonomous behaviour, may also experience a new form of affectivity. Lost in a human controlled world, the artwork is a strange stranger. It doesn’t look like us, it may express a complex behaviour triggered by specific emotions – from fear to curiosity, from excitement to compassion – it may also activate a semi-organic process of assimilation based on absorption of perceived information altering its own DNA. They want to learn and to understand. What they perceive becomes part of their persona in constant mutation. With more time, they’ll grab bits of language from the public, interact with them, and even more: they will interact with one another. The Alien is the Other, and like highly elaborate robots, these affective machineries are striving to decrypt the world as if it would be a necessity for art survival. In troubled times, when war, climate, or poverty induce large-scale migrations, these aliens offer the possibility to discover and experience the strangely familiar quest of interspecies and intercultural mutual understanding.”
(Alejandro Martín presenter)

• Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is a media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines.
• Maurice Benayoun (aka MoBen or 莫奔) (born 29 March 1957 in Mascara, Algeria) is a French pioneer, contemporary new-media artist, curator and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong. His work employs various media, including (and often combining) video, computer graphics, immersive virtual reality, the Internet, performance, EEG, 3D Printing, large-scale urban media art installations and interactive exhibitions. Often conceptual, Maurice Benayoun’s work constitutes a critical investigation of the mutations in the contemporary society induced by the emerging or recently adopted technologies.
• Alejandro Martín (Art Director and Curator) strongly believes that creativity and art are key in our globalised world. He has a holistic vision stems from his background chemistry and engineering, a vast experience in Business Development, and he has indulged in long research of Fine Arts and Art Production. Founder and director of a contemporary Art Gallery and he has now launched Naranjo Projects, a platform directed to support artists to develop their international career Based in Barcelona, Spain, he has a global approach to Art, using the international cooperation as the best formula to promote contemporary art and to facilitate the cultural dialogue.