Ivor Diosi

Portrait 2015

_humane after people_

The Qualia Project 

Showcase 2014-WIP

Anti-[Machine-Vision-Surveillance] 

Design Concept :: Intelligent Bio-Engineered Camo Skin 

Exhibition 'The Sentimental Machine' 

STATE Festival 2016 

STATE of Emotion ‘The Sentimental Machine’

Kühlhaus Raum für Kunst, Berlin

TBA November 2016

Getting ready for Berlin...

Exhibition ‘FutureFest 2016'

Tobacco Dock, London

September 2016

Views of the exposition, the current setup and audiences engaged with ‘molding the signifier’, my award-winning art/science installation, at FutureFest 2016 London.  (Photography: Tadej Vindiš + Matt Alexander /PA Wire)

My huge thanks goes to the curator, Ghislaine Boddington, and  the team-of-teams of co-organizers who made my travel and the exhibition possible, under the label The Games Europe Plays: EUNIC London, the Czech Centre in London, the Finnish Institute in London and body>data>space, with support from the British Council and the Arts Council England.

More about the venue

More about the concept

FutureFest 2016 

Powered by NESTA

(Event overview)

Tobacco Dock, London

September 2016

FutureFest  is Britain’s top futurist and innovation-culture event, a Festival of ideas, experiences, talks and debates, run by NESTA,  UK’s leading innovation agency. 

“Held every eighteen months in London, FutureFest gathers some of the planet's most radical thinkers, makers and performers together to create an immersive experience of what the world might be like over the next few decades.

This year, we saw dancing drones, watched people being implanted with chips, enjoyed many great debates and heard from some truly interesting speakers including Will Self, Cindy Gallop, Brian Eno, DJ Spooky, Es Devlin, Mustafa Suleyman, Rhianna Pratchett and many more!”

I have been commissioned by Ghislaine Boddington, curator of the 2016 Festival’s “FutureLove” section, to participate with my award-winning ‘molding the signifier’ art/science installation. The event was wonderfully produced and it set my personal record in audience attendance, with 700 visitors in just two days!

Details of the exposition

The photos I have selected from the 2016 Festival’s highlights show a man with one of the world’s most advanced bionic arms, a participant in the upcoming and very first Cybathlon 2016, the ‘Dancing Spheres’ interactive installation designed by studio Harvey and John, eponymous interactive stage by ‘Collective Reality’, Brian Eno giving his keynote talk, cyber-athlete Claire Lomas walking onto the stage in her robotic exo-skeleton and the multitude of attending visitors. (Photography:  Matt Alexander /PA Wire)

FutureFest Main Page

FutureFest Trailer by NESTA

https://player.vimeo.com/video/190250220

(please click through - the videos don’t play from here anymore)

Vlog Report (the relevant segment starts 9:33)

‘O HAI! GRAHAM’  Concept

A bit of state-of-the-art dystopian extrapolation.

The ingredients:

I. A contrived, nonetheless virally very succesful meme generated upon the initiative of Australia’s Transport Accident Commission, as part of a state public awareness campaign. Embodied by a wonderful, original,  ominous and mesmerizing sculpture by Patricia Piccinini. This is how an evolved human is supposed to look like, one that is biologically equipped to survive heavy accidents, especially car-crashes. 

II. The AI, a machine perception-based autonomous vehicle, that’s coming into our futures from several directions at once, here represented by the most cutesy model of them all, from Google. This is the Hello Kitty of self-driving cars.

III. And last but foremost, a recent (February 2016) scientific paper from OpenAI and Google researchers, describing methods of Attacks against Deep Learning Systems (such as used in the self-driving cars), that can, in a highly sophisticated, humanly undetectable way, fool an AI to see something that isn’t there, or to ‘think’ that it sees something else instead.

Now connecting the dots...

Adversarial Examples in the Physical World 

Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples

Exhibition ‘BODY<>TECH‘

Stephen Lawrence Gallery,  University of Greenwich, London

2016 July-August

Showing my award-winning ‘molding the signifier’ art/science installation, at the University of Greenwich London.

“Exploring our body from its hidden microflora to its digital incarnations, The Games Europe Plays – BODY<>TECH takes a playful look at how digital technologies are helping us to heal but can also disturb our wellbeing.

Presenting the works of interactive artists and game makers from the UK and continental Europe, the show envisions how we will inhabit and take care of our virtual and physical bodies in the future. 

Meet A.I. (Artificially Insane) avatars, enter the whole genome sequencing of bacteria in virtual reality and rebalance yourself through play. Go on a journey where your body, mind and senses will be guided and confounded. Are you ready to explore the uncanny valley?”  

With: Anna Dumitriu with Alex May (UK), Ivor Diosi (Czech Republic), Marco Donnarumma (Italy), Blast Theory (UK), Designswarm (UK) and Grendel Games (Netherlands)

‘grARffiti’ Concept 

Augmented WorldSpace for Digital Creative Existence

August 2016

Europeana Space Prague Hackathon 2015

‘Hacking the [Dancing] Body’

CIANT Center for Art and New Technologies Prague

2015 November

I have been commissioned by CIANT Center for Art and New Technologies Prague to attend the ‘Hacking the [Dancing] Body’ Hackathon (a hacking marathon), held in November 2015, jointly organized with Europeana Space, C-DaRE Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University and REMIX Summits Business Incubation London; and to provide, along with other experts, consulting and guidance to the participants.

I ended up forming my own team and developing a concept that combined body motion tracking with a brain-computer interface and 3D game environments to shake up how to explore cultural heritage in a highly innovative way; and went on to become one of the three winners of the Hackathon.

Winning project: ’In The Moment’

The Europeana Space organized an exciting event about the use and re-use of cultural digital content in dance in particular. Participants formed teams and during two days of focused and intensive collaboration, with assistance from the hackathon ambassadors (experts in programming, BCI (brain/computer interface) scientists, specialists in motion-tracking and cultural heritage), explored new creative ideas and designs, and developed prototypes. The Prague Dance Hackathon focused on the re-use of cultural heritage materials in live performance, cross-media storytelling, motion tracking and transformation of data, brain/computer interfaces in performance. We encouraged participants to combine different aspects of these elements to create something truly new and unique that would shake up the market! We were seeking creative and driven participants with a passion for dance, technology and digital cultural heritage, who would want to take their creative ideas and prototypes to the commercial sector and raise the possibilities for creative re-use of cultural heritage material and dance technology.

Topics:

Dance (patterns in body movements)

State of mind (patterns in brain signals)

Cultural Heritage Content (patterns in history of art)

Light and sound (patterns and rhythms)

Interactive art, body/mind, digital art

‘In the Moment’

Interactive Experience

CIANT Center for Art and New Technologies Prague

2015 November 

I have lead a team that won the Europeana Space ‘Hacking the [Dancing] Body’ Prague 2015 Hackathon for the Czech Republic and went on to the European Finals in London in early 2016.

Team:

Ivor Diosi - concept and direction, Virtual Reality visual design, interaction design, Kinect, Unreal Engine

Julia Gleich - concept, somatic movement, project pitch (poetry)

Martin Zrcek - vvvv, 3D models

Dmitri Berzon - NeuroSky hardware, OpenVibe, python

Cyril Kaplan -  NeuroSky software,  vvvv

Description:

Portal or Gateway conjuring visual imagery from the Europeana collection.

3D stereoscopic interactive experience with outcome of entry into the imagery of dance and somatic world. A process of discovering your own active calm and developing greater awareness of the changes involved in transitioning from one state to the next. Ultimately this could become a larger gaming activity associated with refining states of consciousness while increasing awareness of the soma (Ironically this word once referred to an intoxicating drug that equates with bodily knowledge).

Elements:

Two black suns controlled by each wrist.

Liquid mercurial bubble moved by the head, with its volume controlled by EEG wave measurements. The higher the peak of the waves, the smaller the bubble, the smaller your immmersive presence - the calmer the waves, the larger the presence. The idea is to expand the kinesphere through meditative relaxation, potentially using calming techniques or mindfulness.

There are further elements that appear upon movement, grow and create directional reach, emerging from the locations of the black suns and diminish with increasing stillness.

Possible use: bio-feedback therapy systems that use the technique to train people to improve their health by controlling certain bodily processes, that normally happen involuntarily, such as heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, and skin temperature, through mental stillness within physical movement. (This is a different approach and may help with kinaesthetic learners and others who relax through movement or need to find ways to perform physical actions but with relaxation.)

Imagery: Pina Bausch - Tanz Teatr Wuppertal, Loie Fuller, Portrait of dancer from Ljulbljana, Scene from performance in Dvojnic

More about the Europeana Space Prague Hackathon 2015

TMIAAA 2015

‘Trust Me, I Am An Artist’

Ex-Post Space for Contemporary Art, Prague

2015 November

Trust Me, I’m an Artist: Developing Ethical Frameworks for Artists, Cultural Institutions and Audiences Engaged in the Challenges of Creating and Experiencing New Art Forms in Biotechnology and Biomedicine in Europe is a collaboration between Waag Society, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, The Arts Catalyst, CIANT, Kapelica Gallery, Medical Museion, Capsula and Leonardo/OLATS, supported by funding from Creative Europe.

The aim of “Trust Me, I’m an Artist” is to investigate how artists and cultural institutions can best engage with biotechnology and biomedicine in order to understand the ethical issues that arise in the creation and exhibition of such artworks.

Exhibition 'TRANS(e)MISSION 2015'

(opening)

Ex-Post Culture Space, Prague, Czech Republic

2015 November