science

Synthetic Empathic Intelligent Companion Artefacts (SEICA) Human Interaction Labs' (seicalabs.org) is a speculative transmedia narrative and a 12 personae multimedia performance art project. The work attempts to thematically bridge concepts and creative processes employed within the fields of art, science and technology through hypertext fiction and on/offline storytelling. Positioned as a faux virtual organization, SEICA Human Interaction Labs is manifested through its online activities. Operated by a team of personae, the organization produces multimedia research works that reflect on how overhyped media portrayals and oversimplification of information package the modern perception towards scientific discovery and technological innovation. Blending and bending technocultural themes through tropes found in popular culture and internet vernacular, the fictive organization’s cybernetic researchers strive to orchestrate chaos and generate questions that critically engage with near-real-time discourses on human interaction in the age of companion robots. Recent multimedia research works include a study on (non)living things, hardware and intermediary interfaces, commercial user experience design and dopamine level manipulation, objects from the Institutional Cabinet of Curiosities (ICC), and a collaborative essay on re-imagining humanity inspired by Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1984). Disseminated through various platforms including social media, the project’s satirical nonlinear narrative unfolds through inquiry-based performances documented in the new media works, digital artefacts, speculative lab equipment, lab notes, and chat logs that further develop the ongoing dynamics between the interacting personae.

NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism is an ambitious and richly imagined project by Hyphen-Labs, a global team of women of color who are doing pioneering work at the intersection of art, technology, and science. The project consists of three components. The first is an installation that transports visitors to a futuristic and stylish beauty salon. Speculative products designed for women of color are displayed around the space, including a scarf whose pattern overwhelms facial recognition software, and earrings that can record video and audio in hostile situations.

The second part of NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism is a VR experience that takes place at a “neurocosmetology lab” in the future. Participants see themselves in the mirror as a young black girl, as the lab owner explains that they are about to experience cutting edge technology involving both hair extensions and brain-stimulating electrical currents. In the VR narrative, the electrodes then prompt a hallucination that carries viewers through a psychedelic Afrofuturist space landscape.

The final component of the project is Hyphen-Labs’ ongoing research about how VR can affect viewers, potentially reducing bias and fear by immersing participants in positive, engaging portrayals of black women.

(Source: MIT Docubase description)

«oceanografias» or «a memória da água» is a poetic operation made in a computador from a linear numerical relation of correspondence with some signifiers, which are semantically and phonetically close to each other. [...] The project was developed in an 8-bit microprocessor Sinclair ZX Spectrum in January 1986.

Combinatory poem written and programmed by Antero de Alda and Jorge Santos in BASIC for a Spectrum ZX in Sever do Vouga, Portugal, on Jan. 1, 1986. The piece was later renamed as A Memória da Água.

A "recyclopedic" generator of contextually resistant associations Dérivepedia is a combinatory and recyclopedic text generator that recombines sentence fragments from 400 Wikipedia entries to generate specious entries for subjects ranging from Tadpoles And The History Of Weather Satellites To Pliny The Elder: Constructing Ambiguous Witch Trials; from Jimi Hendrix And The Psychology Of Cowpox To Ada Lovelace In The Age Of Cool-Weather Aromatherapy.

(Source: Dérivepedia, Talan Memmott)