Gira S.O.L.

Gira S.O.L. (Light Observation System) is a project developed by the São-Paulo based SCIArts group, which blends different fields: physics, astrophysics, mathematics, engineering, mechanics, besides arts. The system was based on the sunflower that survives by seeking sunlight. The group decided to emulate nature and so they created a prototype that follows the same strategy. Made of intelligent material, the device moves in search of light. This motion is possible thanks to a material that always reestablishes its original shape, previously recorded, whenever it is heated up. That's why it is considered intelligent.
This system interacts with other artworks, people, and the environment. This memory embedded in the material leads the sunflower to react in the face of environmental changes, as if it could assume its own posture towards life.
This poetic use of solar energy promotes the sunflower to art category.
Dismanting the Articulation of Space and Time as Processional Dimensions
Chris Speed

Chris Speed's lecture investigated time and space concepts. With all our deep involvement in networks, we have to rethink where we are, when we are, and we are urged to change our way of seeing things.
Men were used to expressing themselves in a linear way and time and space were considered parts to be analized separately.
Speed demonstrated how to get lost in time and space. In the United Kingdom, suppose you are in Ireland and you want to send a letter to Northern Ireland, your mail will have to go to London first and from there it will be forwarded to its destination. That is the hierarchy that has always been obeyed. With the network, that inflexible routine doesn't have to be followed anymore.
When you travel abroad, you waste your time with two concerns: thinking of what time it is in your country and about the exchange rate between your money and the money of the country you are in. The time issue is very important to people. Everybody lives in a world controlled by the tictac of the clock, when we should actually make the machine work for our benefit. With the use of technologies, new alternative states of dimension emerge, virtual reality can lead us anywhere, we can create new systems for measuring time and distance.

Wired, wet, and moist: art on the edge of the web
Roy Ascott

For Roy Ascott the art of the next thirty years will be the art of consciousness. But a double consciousness, an open mind to cyberperception. Ascott uses the word "technoetic," which means consciousness plus technology. It brings together ancient and modern, spiritual and artificial, cosmic and cultural. The human body and the artificial beings share a common habitat. It's the postbiological development. An exchange between human and electronic, the moistmedia. And this new reality calls for a new environment and a new arquitecture.An arquitecture in which what matters is not how we feel about the places, but how the places feel about us, not what the buildings seem to us, but what we seem to them. An arquitecture capable of self-organization, self-restauration, and even capable of recognizing the necessary renovation. Whether or not this process will lead the human being to lose his identity and meaning is a question to be posed.
There is a concern in being involved in our development process and both identity and meaning can be our own creation.
Cyberperception will allow us to enter the inner and outer worlds in a deep and rich way, much more than our natural senses could ever allow us. It's possible to establish parallels between these two worlds. Roy Ascott considers that the avatars and electronic agents, for example, correspond to the spirits of Candomblé and Umbanda in the natural world.

texts and photos: Fabia Fuzeti
english version proofreading : Regina Stocklen