Portugal

## Please watch the explanation video for this work here: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cYjro8mlws


&quot;By April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced half of humanity to suspend their daily activities and spend most of their time at home. The abrupt interruption of human activities seemingly generated an unexpected noise-free soundscape. In this (temporary?) departure of humankind from the outside world, it seemed that nature was regaining its space, also, but not only, its acoustic space. 
The Sound Outside is a sound installation based on an international project run from the end of March 2020 and still ongoing. The project aims to gather sound designers and sound makers from all over the world to collectively document the changes in the urban soundscape recording “from their windows”, during lockdown. The goal is not only to foster a form of active resistance, an example of resiliency of the human inhabitants which re-appropriate of the collective urban space through active listening, but also the opportunity, as a community, for designers and creators of sounds to re-imagine the future of the urban soundscape. The installation uses both recorded soundscapes and the voices of the authors to create a sonic journey through the unprecedented events of the past few months, filtered by the – in some ways - privileged point of listening of sound practitioners.&quot;

ICCC&#39;20

The Sound Outside - Listening to the World at COVID-19 Time

lockdown

sound design

field recording

urban soundscape

covid-19

**BRACIS** originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – **SBIA** (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – **SBRN** (13 editions). **ENIAC** is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. **STIL** is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: **CE-IA**, **CE-IC** and **CE-PLN**.

To access the 10th Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (**BRACIS**), you need to register for the conference.  Please visit the Conference official site to register

[Register now](http://c4ai.inova.usp.br/bracis2021/)

Register now

BRACIS 2021

BRACIS originated from the combination of the two most important scientific events in Brazil in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computational Intelligence (CI): the Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence – SBIA (22 editions), and the Brazilian Symposium on Neural Networks – SBRN (13 editions). 
ENIAC is a national forum for researchers, practitioners, educators and students to present and discuss innovations, trends, experiences, developments and work in progress in the fields of Artificial and Computational Intelligence. 
STIL is the bi-annual Language Technology event.
All events are supported by the Brazilian Computer Society – Special Interest Groups: CE-IA, CE-IC and CE-PLN

## Please watch the explanation video for this work here: https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cYjro8mlws


"By April 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced half of humanity to suspend their daily activities and spend most of their time at home. The abrupt interruption of human activities seemingly generated an unexpected noise-free soundscape. In this (temporary?) departure of humankind from the outside world, it seemed that nature was regaining its space, also, but not only, its acoustic space. 
The Sound Outside is a sound installation based on an international project run from the end of March 2020 and still ongoing. The project aims to gather sound designers and sound makers from all over the world to collectively document the changes in the urban soundscape recording “from their windows”, during lockdown. The goal is not only to foster a form of active resistance, an example of resiliency of the human inhabitants which re-appropriate of the collective urban space through active listening, but also the opportunity, as a community, for designers and creators of sounds to re-imagine the future of the urban soundscape. The installation uses both recorded soundscapes and the voices of the authors to create a sonic journey through the unprecedented events of the past few months, filtered by the – in some ways - privileged point of listening of sound practitioners."

technical paper

Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalising what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.


ICCC'20

The ICCC conference series organized by the Association for Computational Creativity since 2010 is the only scientific conference that focuses on computational creativity alone and also covers all aspects of it.
Computational creativity is the art, science, philosophy and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviors that unbiased observers would deem to be creative. As a field of research, this area is thriving, with progress in formalizing what it means for software to be creative, along with many exciting and valuable applications of creative software in the sciences, the arts, literature, gaming and elsewhere.



In an attempt to teach my computer how to produce portraits, these eight animate reconstructions are produced by an autoencoding neural network that was trained on the faces of Chinese engineering students. This piece treats the neural network’s inherent “flaws” as a medium through which to filter depictions of the human body: by reappropriating the generative blurriness in the facial reconstructions it seeks to illustrate how novel AI technologies can be used as a self-fulfilling form of erasure.
In this case, the ghostly images that result reflect western society’s tendency to dehumanize people of Asian descent often in terms that focus on them as an aggregate, as autonomous laborers devoid of individual identity. In the age of worldwide pandemic where a renewed and heightened xenophobia permeates much of society, these quiet, voiceless animations capture the ways in which people of Asian descent are often silenced and subjugated along cultural lines. As an Asian American, I impose myself onto these representations by projecting video of my own Asian facial features on top of these images to create a computer-mediated cyborg composited from both the living body and the digitally-imagined. Field-recordings of the ambient sounds from manufacturing factories in Shenzhen, China accompany the videos.

Artist Talk: Engine Errors / Self-Portrait

Please click on the link to watch the explanatory video of this work: 

Inspired by Einstein's paper introducing the special theory of relativity titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," "Sobre a eletrodinâmica dos corpos de trabalho" offers a time-distorted view of the concrete plant in Quarry Maljoga in Dade from the Viseu Rural archive (the only sound source). It portrays the work as it echoes off the landscape in compressed time, frozen time, and smeared timelines. It is a reflection on the efforts of man-made forces, the persistence of natural forces over time, and the interfaces between them.

**## Please click on the link to watch the explanation video:**
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OZTXbvDaQ15va-vRfm9YwBFoU-tRxKly/view?usp=sharing

Sobre a eletrodinâmica dos corpos de trabalho

In the Middle of the Room is a fixed media work for voice, sampled and layered upon itself in counterpoint, to explore tenuous new connections among the word fragments that emerge. It reflects on the reminiscences of an elderly woman whose memories are fanciful, regretful, pensive, and failing, inspired by Elisabeth's friendship with an extraordinary woman who, sadly, passed away soon after creating this work.

## Please watch the explenatory video for this work:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2020-08-19/he23rdh/Morris-Blair-NMB2020.mp4

In the Middle of the Room

## „Ghost Hunting – A field experience from hertz to gigahertz“ 

The corona pandemic has changed public life dramatically. Only recently have shops that do not provide basic services been allowed to reopen in isolated cases. Until then, the inner cities were deserted.  But what happens in the urban space when public life does not take place or only to a limited extent? 
„Ghost Hunting“ makes the world of electromagnetic fields tangible. In other words, the oscillation frequencies that cannot normally be perceived by the human ear.
We are not only surrounded by electromagnetic fields in cities. There they were created quasi unintentionally as a side effect of technological development.  Whether under the street lamp, at the junction box, at the ticket machine or at high-performance cables, Internet nodes or mobile phone transmission masts - electromagnetic fields surround us almost everywhere. They are also present in nature. Some of these fields overlap or form so-called interference fields. With increasing digitalisation and the expansion of mobile phone networks, their effects on health are also being discussed, as is the question of how to develop resilience in this context. 
Electromagnetic fields are usually hidden from the human ear. But wouldn‘t it be wonderful to be able to access this world? What do the electromagnetic fields of urban places tell us? What does urban space sound like at night when everything is quiet? What do the spirits that live in the electromagnetic landscapes tell us?
Are these areas not rather invisible spaces of poetry?



## Start the Ghost Hunting tour here:
## https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Start.htm

For further stations scroll down and activate the audio tracks on the map.


**Links to the sound files:**

01_Foundation Kuenstlerdorf: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Start.html

02_Vechte-swimming-pool: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Vechtebad.html

03_Plague-Cemetery: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Pestfriedhof.html

04_Church: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Kirche.html

05_City-Park: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Stadtpark.html

06_Old-town-hall-traffic-lights: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Rathaus.html

07_Parking-lot: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Parkplatz.html

08_Telecommunications-tower: https://ghosthunting.431art.org/Fernmeldeturm.html



www.ghosthunting.431art.org 
In autumn 2020, „Ghost Hunting“ will be realized as an audio walk at 8 stations in downtown Frankfurt/Main. 



Ghost Hunting – A field experience from hertz to gigahertz

Paisajes distantes is a networked audio-visual performance linking human and non-human soundscapes and visuals from two cities — Bogota, Colombia and Pittsburgh, US — captured during the COVID-19 quarantine period of 2020. Conceived as a dialogue between two urban auras in isolation, the piece juxtaposes dissimilar atmospheres including sounds and imagery of ferrovial systems, water canals, urban fauna, and domestic life. These form the substrate for a live performance comprising digitally processed and computer-generated sounds including layers of granular synthesis, heavily processed guitar sounds, and additional samples. The piece will be produced remotely and in real time by the artists — who are also distant from each other, each one in one of the two cities — through a networked music performance (NMP) system. In Coimbra, the performance will be preferably experienced as an ambient intervention in an open area. Accompanying the sound will be a video screen or projection with a split image displaying visuals collected during the lockdowns in the two cities. With these elements, the piece employs digital mediations to explore different conceptions of distance — social, geographic, and affective. Captured while in the midst of an unprecedented moment of personal and collective isolation, the sonic and visual materials give structure to an improvisational, networked digital music performance. Paisajes distantes thus reflects on the possibilities of new encounters, new forms of presence, and new modes of creative engagement shaped by the necessity of isolation and enabled by digital networks and computational processes.

Paisajes distantes

We  argue  that  frameworks  employed  in  architecting self-adaptive systems allow the system to exhibit creative  behaviour,  and  that  many  of  the  existing  self-adaptive systems operating in domains which are typically not associated with creativity are inherently creative.  However, even the current state-of-the-art solutions do not fully exploit stronger forms of creative behaviour, which are required in complex environments, where the system constantly encounters fundamentally novel situations.  To this end, software development necessitates a paradigm shift parallel to moving from procedural design methodology toward self-aware systems where the system adapts to its context at run time.

On the Inherent Creativity of Self-Adaptive Systems

"With an increase in the number of mobile apps making their way to users, there is a growing need for tools to support the app design process. While many tools focus
on increasing the pace of development, few attempt to aide the designer in generating more creative solutions. In this work, we take creativity as the combination of novelty and utility. Particularly during development of user interfaces, assessment of utility (primarily usability) is iterative, rigorous, and time-consuming. The objective of the proposed work is to explore and evaluate the use of machine learning to predict usability measures for mobile app interfaces as a means to automate usability evaluations. Specifically, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to accurately (nearly 90%) predict three usability measures: regularity, complexity, and touchability. This tool automates the assessment of utility in app design, freeing up the designer to seek designs that are novel and thus creative."

Towards Enhanced Creativity in Interface Design through Automated Usability Evaluation

This presentation outlines how a system based on a society of many thousands of micro-agents could produce a narrative which describes a simple situation. The distributed nature of the system should allow for a more diverse range of possible pathways to be taken towards a solution as well as an interweaving of the processes of production and comprehension (or engagement and reflection). This should result in greater cognitive plausibility than models made up out of a small number of large modules.

Creative Language Generation in a Society of Engagement and Reflection

Creative problem solving (CPS) is a skill that can greatly improve resourcefulness and adaptability of existing artificial intelligence (AI) systems. In this paper, we discuss how CPS leverages theoretical aspects from Computational Creativity (CC) and planning in AI. We present a definition of CPS, and discuss how CPS is achieved using aspects of CC and problem solving in AI.

From Computational Creativity to Creative Problem Solving Agents

"Recently, models in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience (CCN) have gained a renewed interest because they could help analyze current limitations in Artificial
Intelligence (AI) and propose operational ways to address them. These limitations are related to difficulties in giving a semantic grounding to manipulated concepts,
in coping with high dimensionality and in managing uncertainty. In this paper, we describe the main principles and mechanisms of these models and explain that they can be directly transferred to Computational Creativity (CC), to propose operational mechanisms but also a better understanding of what creativity is."

The Sound Outside - Listening to the World at COVID-19 Time

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The Sound Outside - Listening to the World at COVID-19 Time

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