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PROPOSAL IV - Setúbal School of Technology of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St.Polten May workshop session

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PROPOSAL IV - Setúbal School of Technology of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St.Polten May workshop session

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Title of Workshop: Introduction to Unity - Creating your Own Playable Reality

Workshop leaders:
Rossana Santos

Concept:
This workshop offers an introduction to Unity, using C# coding to apply gameplay logic (object oriented programming skills are needed). Students will be guided through the installation of Unity, which will be followed by an overview on how to use Unity’s interface, and a short introduction into game theory and mechanics. Students will use free assets to create playable 3D scenes. These scenes can be explored and their components interacted with. Sounds will be added. At the end of the workshop, the students will have the knowledge on how to develop a 3D world/game.

Medium for workshop:
UNITY - Real Time Game Engine

Number of students:
6-8

Workshop duration:
5 days

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Unity creators can deploy their projects to 20+ platforms²

downloads per month of Made with Unity applications³

of the top 1,000 games are using Unity to grow their games⁴

When created, when played, every game will be touched by AI. See how Unity Muse can transform the way you create.

Success stories

See how creators and studios around the world have achieved remarkable success with Unity's solutions and services.

Deep resources, dynamic community

Subscription plans

Personal

Bring your vision to life with free access to the most widely used game engine in the world.

Pro

Unlock your team's potential with the tools professionals use to create hit games across devices and platforms.

Enterprise

Manage complex real-time 3D projects with expert support and creation tools that scale for teams of any size.

Disclaimers

1. Creator credits: Bleak Sword DX, More8bit, Devolver Digital | GTFO, 10 Chambers | Laika: Aged Through Blood, Brainwash Gang, Headup Publishing | Muhammad Ali, Showmax Game Changers, Chocolate Tribe | Sea of Stars, Sabotage Studios | BattleBit Remastered, SgtOkiDoki, Vilaskis, TheLiquidHorse

2. As of September 2023. Source: Derived from internal Unity resources.

3. As of September 2023. Source: Internal Unity sources, Data.ai Steam DB. Disclaimer: Downloads number is a combined figure of 3.56 billion mobile downloads based on data.ai data plus an internal estimate of 98 million downloads based on Steam data.

4. Source: data.ai. Disclaimer: Top 1,000 games is top 1,000 gaming apps by downloads in last 4 weeks from data.ai as of February 2023.

Copyright © 2023 Unity Technologies

"Unity", Unity logos, and other Unity trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Unity Technologies or its affiliates in the U.S. and elsewhere ( more info here). Other names or brands are trademarks of their respective owners.

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Unity Real-Time Development Platform | 3D, 2D, VR & AR Engine

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Create and grow real-time 3D games, apps, and experiences for entertainment, film, automotive, architecture, and more. Get started with Unity today.

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PROPOSAL II - UAS St. Pölten Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St. Pölten May workshop session

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PROPOSAL II - UAS St. Pölten Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St. Pölten May workshop session

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Title of Workshop: "Sound Body Inter-Face"

Workshop leaders:
Christian Munk
Jakob Süss
Markus Wintersberger

Concept:
The body as an Interface. The body as an Instrument. The body as a tool and a machine. We will use music making interfaces such as "Playtronica" to experiment with different materials and interactions between body's, objects, plants, fruits and other physical materials. By combining Motion Tracking & Motion Capture Hard- and Software tools with extended electronic devices, we will create a circle in between the human body and the so called machine. This body-machine is in the end the human base of Metaverse.

Medium for workshop:
Motion Tracking & Motion Capture (Rokoko Suite)
Unity, Ableton, Arduino, Playtronica

Number of students:
6-8

Workshop duration:
5 days

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Playtronica, play music with fruits, cats and anything

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PROPOSAL I - UAS St. Pölten Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St. Pölten May workshop session

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PROPOSAL I - UAS St. Pölten Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St. Pölten May workshop session

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Title of Workshop: "Artificial Museum" - AR Art Spaces

Workshop leaders:
Litto Daniel Weiss
Jascha Ehrenreich
Jakob Süss
Markus Wintersberger

Concept:
Augmented Reality tools and concepts are the main topic in this workshop module. Based on the project "Artificial Museum - https://artificialmuseum.com" we will create extended possibilities of art pieces and try to explore the idea of an interface into the Augmented Reality Metaverse. Within the "Artificial Museum" art can be everywhere, can be unlimited and can also be seen by everyone at the same time from every place on Earth, in the Universe or at the Metaverse.

Medium for workshop:
Augmented Reality
Motion Tracking & Motion Capture (Rokoko Suite)
3D Blender

Number of students:
6-8

Workshop duration:
5 days

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There are more artworks by dead men stored in museums than can be exhibited. What remains is the virtual, imaginary area, with it's almost infinite amount of room.

Instead of continuing the current trend of art as "temporary intervention", we use the space between the worlds as a self-determined, permanent and experimental playground, with the goal to reawaken imagination and collaboration in public space.

We challenge the status quo and redefine the concept of the museum, rethinking the questions:

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There are more artworks by dead men stored in museums than can be exhibited. What remains is the virtual, imaginary area, with it's almost infinite amount of room. Instead of continuing the current trend of art as "temporary intervention", we use the space between the worlds as a self-determined, permanent and experimental playground, with the goal to reawaken imagination and collaboration in public space.

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PROPOSAL III - PJATK Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St.Polten May workshop session

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PROPOSAL III - PJATK Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology  St.Polten May workshop session

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Title of Workshop: The use of body?

Workshop leaders:

Klaudiusz Ślusarczyk

Jakub Karpoluk

Jan Piechota

Emilia Miękisz

Concept:

With the dawn of the Metaverse universe, parameters of human biology are being adapted to the artificial world of technology. According to Stanislaw Lem, the possibility of interfering with the biology of the human body, deprives man of the basis on which the parameters of ethical systems are based. He claims that biological norms serve as the last foundations for axiology. In eradicating the body, will we become an element of the technosphere, and as a result, change with the unpredictable evolution of technological innovation? As part of our workshop session we aim to critically assess the nature of the Metaverse universe and create an artistic response to a number of questions that need to be asked at what seems to be the advent of a non-biological existence.

Medium for workshop:

Mapping

Site specific projections

Number of students:

10-12

Workshop duration:

5 days

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AT LAST WE have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw Lem's oeuvre, his consummate work of speculative nonfiction. Trained in medicine and biology, Lem synthesizes the current science of the day in ways far ahead of most science fiction of the time.

His subjects, among others, include:

Virtual reality

Artificial intelligence

Nanotechnology and biotechnology

Evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology

Artificial life

Information theory

Entropy and thermodynamics

Complexity theory, probability, and chaos

Population and ecological catastrophe

The "singularity" and "transhumanism"

Lem was one of the very few thinkers at the time to examine these burgeoning subjects in the context of both the humanities and the social sciences. Yet despite the far-ranging explorations, Lem tempers his speculations with a de-romanticized and often grim view of humanity. Indeed, part of Lem's genius was his keen awareness that the possibilities of science and the possibilities of humanity do no more than scarcely overlap, and so our investigations must be conducted with our limited vantage point in mind.

It would be indeed unusual if it turned out that the set of orders that our mind is able to construct and accept, having as it does a deep sense of "understanding the essence of things," matches precisely the set of all possible orders to be detected in the Universe as a whole. We should admit that this is not impossible, yet it does seem highly improbable. This way of thinking, so modest in its assessment of our abilities, is probably the only way recommended, given our lack of knowledge, because we are not aware of our limitations.

Perhaps this epistemological modesty was reinforced by Lem's unique position in literature. Lem occupied an uneasy place in the world of letters, overlapping several fields without being claimed by any single one, enjoying a reasonable degree of popular success without reaching preeminence, at least in English-speaking countries. Even in Poland, however, he did not associate with the literary mainstream, and while he is a giant there, he remains a singular figure detached from larger trends. Lem captured the predominant attitude toward him in his satirical introduction to his collection of reviews of imaginary books, A Perfect Vacuum, which takes the form of a fake, dismissive review of A Perfect Vacuum itself: "We know that Lem has devoured encyclopedias; shake him and out come logarithms and formulas."

Genre science fiction had concurrently begun to touch occasionally on some of Lem's subjects - Philip K. Dick on virtual reality, Harry Harrison and John Brunner on ecology, Cordwainer Smith on biotech, Pamela Zoline and J.G. Ballard on entropy - but Lem went far deeper than any of them. Lem was devastatingly scabrous to genre science fiction, singling out only a few authors such as the Strugatsky brothers and Dick for praise, but his assessments were still incisive: "The primary ontological elements - space and time - are Dick's instruments of torture," he wrote in "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans." He similarly displayed great impatience with theoreticians like Tsvetan Todorov and Jacques Derrida who elided logic and took shortcuts in pursuit of neat answers and flashy displays.

Lem's earliest novels, never translated into English and more or less disowned by him as worthless, were optimistic tales of space travel. By the late 1950s, his work had become darker, increasingly focused on the limits of humanity's knowledge and the limits of human society in pursuing both truth and virtue. Lem esteemed his classic novels like Solaris because "[t]hey incorporate cognitive problems in fictions that do not oversimplify the world."

More than any other author, Lem integrated science into science fiction, putting much "hard" science fiction to shame. But it was not enough to get facts right and respect the laws of physics: great speculative fiction needs to use creativity within the parameters of scientific and philosophical naturalism in order to explore the limits of what is metaphysically and sociologically possible. Many of Lem's works take the form of thought experiments.

Summa Technologiae catches him at an equivocal point: the all-encompassing pessimism, reminiscent of Schopenhauer, that would characterize 1980s works such as Golem XIV, Peace on Earth, and Fiasco has yet to reach full fruition, but Lem's focus has decisively shifted to the sociological problems of scientific knowledge. This would shortly yield one of his masterpieces, the sober and grim look at scientific inquiry, His Master's Voice.

Whether due to the format or to its earlier date, Summa does not read as darkly. In Summa, folly is more a statistical likelihood than an object of study. Lem is concerned here more with possibility, and while he maintains a robust skepticism as to whether any of these possibilities will come to pass, and whether they should come to pass, he remains focused on his explorations rather than making moral or social assessments of them.

These explorations contain the seeds of much of Lem's subsequent fiction. The ethics of artificial life in "Non Serviam" (from A Perfect Vacuum), the evolutionary satire of Golem XIV (from Imaginary Magnitude), and the scientific malpractice of His Master's Voice are all already present here in fully developed form, vividly and rigorously imagined.

Despite the lack of cynicism, the book is hardly idealistic. Lem reserves his harshest attacks for starry-eyed futurists who embrace technology without thinking through the often-devastating moral implications. His critique of techno-utopian Freeman Dyson's circumsolar "Dyson spheres" is more devastating than anything from today's neo-Luddites, precisely because he takes seriously the underlying need to deal with the issue of population, questioning the assumptions of the solutions rather than the very idea of them: "It is hard to understand why reproductive freedom would have to remain intact even if it was to lead to a total immobilization of individuals, to smashing the cultural tradition, to giving up, literally, on the Earth's and sky's beauty."

Though the writing is denser than all of Lem's fiction save Golem XIV, with which it shares much, Lem is still capable of beautiful and elegant passages. He cogently expresses the sheer metaphysical angst that besets an individual contemplating the universe, suggesting that it is this feeling more than any other that defines who we are as a species, at least at our best:

Civilization lacks knowledge that would allow it to choose a path knowingly from the many possible ones, instead of drifting in random tides of discoveries. The discoveries that contributed to its construction are still partly accidental.

As much as any of his fiction, Summa Technologiae's intensely marries Lem's Borgesian imagination with his philosophical and sociological rigor.

Lem does not integrate his concerns into a single unified theory; Summa is a fantasia that follows certain lines of speculative thought as far as Lem can take them. The spur, as ever for Lem, is the cognitive limitations of humanity. Lem announces early on that humanity is on the brink of becoming obsolete because it is reaching a scientific "information barrier" beyond which disorganized humans will not be able to process the amount of knowledge we are obtaining: "Science cannot transverse this barrier; it cannot absorb the avalanche of information that is moving in its direction." That is, Lem sees that with the exponential growth of knowledge that has taken place since the Scientific Revolution, humanity is reaching a choke-point where the physical capacities of our brain, in conjunction with any and all possible societal configurations in which our brains can work together, will simply not be sufficient to (a) continue the work of scientific research, and (b) maintain a stable civilization. If we wish to exercise some sort of collective self-determination, we must accept that our current sentient forms aren't up to the task.

The point is not to construct synthetic humanity but rather to open up a new chapter in the Book of Technology: one containing systems of any degree of complexity.... Even if man is indeed capable of anything, he surely cannot achieve it in just any way. He will eventually achieve every goal if he so desires, but he will understand before that that the price he would have to pay for achieving such a goal would reduce this goal to absurdity.

If we are limited beings, there is nothing to say that other kinds of sentient beings are similarly limited. However, we will cease to understand those other beings at the point that they wholly surpass us - or contrariwise, we will cease to be ourselves if we reach that point. The point is debatable, but Lem's dour view is certainly plausible.

Having proposed this paradox, Lem then asks what possibilities do exist for the future. Lem starts from the framework of cybernetics. Lem was strongly influenced by cybernetics, a mid-century field of study that has since fragmented into control theory, complexity theory, artificial intelligence, and other areas. Norbert Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" to refer to "the study of control and communication in machines and living beings." In other words, cybernetics examines structure and stability in groups of organisms: how they evolve in order to establish homeostasis, and what communication methods the organisms use to maintain homeostasis.

Loosely speaking, cybernetics is an abstracted, unified conception of evolution and artificial intelligence. Evolutionary psychology frequently falls down by trying to map complex human behavior onto reductive categories of evolutionary adaptation and fitness. Lem, like Wiener before him, does not make this mistake. Rather than looking at the outcome of evolution (this or that behavior, this or that psychology), Lem tries to understand the limits on what evolution and similar complex processes could produce, thereby avoiding the just-so stories frequently given us by Stephen Pinker and his brethren.

Though much of cybernetic theory itself has been supplanted, its issues endure, and Lem presciently extracts the perennial issues from its dated particulars. His investigations of artificial life (here termed "imitology") and virtual reality ("phantomatics") feel utterly up to date. Yet they are ultimately sideshows next to his recurrent obsession, which is the analysis of life, natural or artificial, in an ecological and evolutionary context, and what role technology can play in controlling it.

This obsession is rooted in three central themes which occupied Lem his entire life:

1 The limits of human cognition.
2 The nature, function, and restrictions of the evolutionary process.
3 Probability's metaphysical role.

These themes are interlinked. Evolution, through brute-force stochastic processes, has produced such finite, limited creatures as us and is responsible for our cognitive limits. As sentient creatures, we intentionally attempt to exert control over and influence evolution, but we are limited in our agency and in our ability to grasp the structures of life and the universe. We may fail intellectually, socially, or simply physically.

Our ambitions so often outpace our efforts that humanity's actions appear to be primarily folly in the macro context in which Lem is examining them. (For example: politics, economics, warfare, reproduction, even technology itself.) Hence the ever-darkening satirical viewpoint that Lem took in his fiction. For Lem, communism and capitalism are delusional twin faiths: communism, that we can collectively and centrally control chance and causality; capitalism, that chance and causality will intrinsically prove benevolent and productive for us.

Lem reflects this nondeterministic fatalism back onto science itself. The scientific process, he says, is by no means insulated from our lack of self-determination. Science just happens to be the best of many bad options.

Civilization lacks knowledge that would allow it to choose a path knowingly from the many possible ones, instead of drifting in random tides of discoveries.

From this comes the irony of the title, a play on Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, our assured knowledge of God replaced by our uncertain advances into physics and technology. Having gained sentience, we are the only knowing gods around, though mostly ignorant and powerless.

To understand the cosmos, evolution, and even ourselves, one should start by examining how chance works. Sentience stands in opposition to probability, the most daunting of the three themes. In the nineteenth century, evolution and thermodynamics showed that the processes of the universe are the result not of clockwork laws but of complex and chaotic processes, and as such are governed, at least from our vantage, by the laws of chance and probability. The theories of Bolzmann, Gibbs, Maxwell, and ultimately Einstein disposed of the dream of the ordered, clockwork universe. Wiener's cybernetics treated biological, social, and mechanical systems as thermodynamic systems, intending to establish what processes existed to preserve homeostasis against the universal, disordering forces of entropy. Lem was profoundly influenced by this basic model: the forces of probability, chance, and chaos loom heavily in his work as fundamentally conditioning all systematic activity, human or not.

This theory was quite far from the Chomskyan model of cognition that shortly became dominant in linguistics and artificial intelligence. The Chomskyan model was deterministic, structural, and considerably easier to implement. The cybernetic model was feedback-based, evolutionary, and algorithmically opaque. Alas, it is the latter that more closely mirrors life.

The idea is not new. The rule of Fortune goes back to Heraclitus, the Stoics, and Seneca and Lucan, but the modern age brought with it such an emphasis on determinism and agency that Lem achieved something novel in reintroducing metaphysical chance into literature (half-assed efforts like Pynchon's "Entropy" notwithstanding). Into this probability-governed world comes the concerted, intent-driven efforts of sentient beings. And they are mostly futile, for at the macro level, society seems to be governed more by those laws of chance and complexity than by rationality.

Olaf Stapledon, another of Lem's great influences, had treated the interaction of society and chaos in his classic novel of future history Last and First Men (1930). Stapledon similarly took it as a given that human beings in their current forms would be supplanted by other creatures that would call themselves "men." Some would fly, some would be inorganic robots, others would simply be beyond our current understanding. Stapledon, however, chronicled these changes on a primarily sociopolitical level: the changes in beings occur as a result of some kind of upheaval or long-term social change. Lem shifts the focus to the limits of our understanding.

Lem's shift owes mainly to intervening scientific discoveries, particularly theories of computation such as Alan Turing's, and the discovery of DNA. These provided Lem with the tools to analogize two devices that, against the general statistical law of entropy, produce increasing rather than decreasing organization: human thought and biological evolution. If evolution was charted in a form of code, and a simple Turing machine could be shown to be equivalent to the most complex computational machines imaginable, then evolution and computation should not be treated as incommensurable processes, but as divergent models of a single type of development. DNA and the Turing Machine were fundamentally alike.

Yet DNA has succeeded in creating sentient creatures, whose creation processes are very different from those of any other known material process. We utilize intention and meaning. And we are at a point where we are taking up the work previously done by evolution, for better or for worse. Lem is keenly conscious of the paradox that our powers are at once superior to evolution's in their directness, yet inferior to evolution's powers in their reach and scope, for, as Lem says, "One creates philosophers while the other only creates philosophies."

Thus we reach the main thesis of Summa Technologiae: human society is becoming increasingly large and complex at an exponential rate, but our capacity to regulate our society is not keeping up, making homeostasis increasingly difficult to preserve (if indeed it ever has been established). The technologies by which we might preserve homeostasis will not - cannot - be fully controllable by us, for to be controllable, the technologies would have to be so impotent as to be useless in assisting us. They too will have to be probabilistic and chance-governed, yet influenced by our intentions.

The deepest and most difficult chapter, "The Creation of Worlds," deals with evolution and the possibilities for creating intelligence through genetic algorithms. The analogies here between technology and evolution become considerably deeper and more complicated, but the basic idea is that (if I may paraphrase what I've written elsewhere) if computers are stupid, then so is evolution, and consequently they share more with each other than either does with us.

Lem's conceit that if one were to develop a program that generates self-reproducing organisms which would be incrementally capable of accommodating themselves to their environment - that is, functionally understanding it - then that program would end up looking a fair bit like evolution. It would push out increasingly complex machines/organisms that would increasingly grasp the nature of their world and of themselves. Would such a process really be analogous to evolution? Lem presses on forcefully without analyzing the details of where the points of difference might be, but it is a breathtaking analogy, high-level brain candy. He then speculates on what a semantics for evolution would look like: survival is truth, extinction is falsehood.

This is all rather grim stuff, for we turn out to be waste products of a self-reproducing genetic code trying to survive through clumsy brute-force efforts, presaging Robert Trivers and Richard Dawkins's sociobiology work in the 1970s. Lem would later summarize some of his points here through the mouthpiece of the supercomputer in Golem XIV, which along with "The Creation of Worlds" probably represents the pinnacle of Lem's intellectual achievement:

Evolution is forced to use death, since it cannot go on without it; it is lavish with death in order to perfect successive species, for death is its creational proofreader. Thus it is an author publishing ever more magnificent works in which typography - the code - is merely its indispensable instrument. However, according to what your molecular biologists are now saying, Evolution is not so much the author as a publisher who continually cancels works, having developed a liking for the typographic arts!

Not that things are hopeless. Lem holds out the possibility that we may be able to wrest control of such evolutionary processes and redirect them to serve our purposeful endsrather than the ends of propagating genetic code above all. Lem would later retract this hope and decide that humanity simply wasn't up to the task, but the final chapter of Summa, "A Lampoon of Evolution," at least speculates on the chances for us to dethrone evolution from its vulture's perch. He ridicules evolution's inefficiency, ruthless violence, and lack of foresight, and in these regards we have indeed been able to do better, albeit in vastly smaller contexts. The paradox remains, though, that it was evolution that created us, and its scope of achievements remains unfathomably greater than ours. Do we even have a chance of beating it? We are helpless idiots competing with omnipotent, undirected chaos. (This, in fact, is the same competition portrayed by Laszlo Krasznahorkai in his fiction.)

Certainly the construction of complex systems has gone far beyond what once seemed feasible. Abstraction and modularity in software have proven surprisingly robust, at least within carefully controlled settings. This has been made possible by the immense boom in computing power that has come to be known as Moore's Law, stating loosely that processing power doubles every two years. This absurd prediction has held up, and consequently computers are over ten million times faster today than they were at the time of Summa Technologiae. Moore's Law makes efficiency considerably less important than one would think: within a few years, your optimizations will cease to be a chokepoint.

In 1981 Lem spoke of sentient self-programming computers a million times faster than ENIAC. Lem's prediction of the date was exactly right: 2000. He knew his stuff. (In a follow-up essay from 1991, "Thirty Years Later," Lem flaunted the accuracy of his virtual reality predictions to Leszek Kolakowski, who had critically trashed Summa on publication.)

On the other hand, Lem predicted sentient machines quickly to follow such increases in speed. Computer intelligence hasn't kept up. My laptop is a million times faster than ENIAC, but little smarter. So it has been with cybernetics. Creation of genuinely viable artificial intelligence has proven exceedingly difficult if not impossible. Today's code lacks any of the self-organizing and evolutionary abilities about which Wiener and Lem speculated. The challenge that Lem knew such intelligence would pose to us has not been made. This failure postpones confrontation with some of the issues Lem raises, but they still await.

As for humanity itself, I do believe Lem underestimated the social structures permitted by the Internet, the spontaneous self-organization of political and social communities united by an interest or an agenda. Whether these organizations will ultimately prove beneficial or harmful remains to be seen, but they do allow for one more potential force against the overwhelming onslaught of unorganized information.

But if social forms and technology can be experimented with sufficiently in an ecological way that lets the most benevolent manifestations flourish, and these experiments can be done quickly enough, perhaps there is yet hope that we won't drown in the idiocy and violence that evolution has bequeathed to us.

In the years since Lem's masterwork, Western intellectual thought has been set upon by a vulgar and ill-informed pessimism that shares Lem's skepticism without possessing any of his vision. In the guise of critiquing culture, critical theorists parrot received ideas and cling to an archaic essentialism about humanity. They look backwards to falsely imagined golden days, rarely bothering to learn the details of the science they are critiquing. Meanwhile, science simply ignores such chatter and proceeds onward unthinkingly.

Lem offers a far more rigorous model for thought. Lem's sober materialism may seem dehumanizing, but he brings back to the forefront a question that has plagued civilization since the beginning, and whose shifting, always insufficient answers have always signaled revolutions in culture: what is it to be human?

¤

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Devourer of Encyclopedias: Stanislaw Lem's "Summa Technologiae"

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AT LAST WE have it in English. Summa Technologiae, originally published in Polish in 1964, is the cornerstone of Stanislaw Lem's oeuvre, his consummate work of speculative nonfiction. Trained in medicine and biology, Lem synthesizes the current science of the day in ways far ahead of most science fiction of the time.

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Each university sends it to markus.wintersberger@fhstp.ac.at before X-mas.

Workshop title, workshop lead, description, photo, requirements, etc.

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The International Office of St. Pölten UAS will send a
- list of hotel/youth hostel recommendations incl. prices for students
- list of hotel recommendations incl. prices for lecturers

Each university/participant will take care of the reservations & payment themselve.

Further the St. Pölten UAS will send further info about costs and prices (e.g. bus tickets, etc.).

Detailed info will follow on a microsite.

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Snow Crash and four other novels which are required reading for the Facebook generation

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Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology

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Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology

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The workshop will explore the term interface from the perspective of art, digital media technologies and experimentation. The interface is commonly understood as the interface between a user and a device. A book, a game arrangement, a mirror or a character can be described as an interface in an extended sense. Among the first and still common technical interfaces are the remote control, the computer mouse and the keyboard. A touch screen, mobile devices (mobile phone, tablet computer), voice control devices (Amazon Alexa, Google Smart Home, Apple Home Kit), Arduino / Raspberry PI, virtual reality headsets and augmented reality devices are current possibilities that connect and relate us to the digital world.

A special focus in this workshop will be placed on developments in the area of augmented reality "interfaces" and "applications". In the current media discourse, technologies such as VR and AR are taking us into the "hyped" and so called metaverse. Promising a new era in the development of digital media technologies, the metaverse is being aggressively pushed by Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Apple and other notable platforms. The Metaverse is ultimately intended to bring together the physical real world with the digital / virtual world and to dissolve the boundaries between the two spheres.

Together we want to research the points of contact between real and virtual space. We want to ask important questions regarding the construction, relevance and impact of these new forms of reality. These questions will lead to concrete artistic-technological project implementations, which the participants will realise together in interdisciplinary project groups - a total of 5 to 6 groups will be formed. Starting on a virtual workshop basis, this will be followed by a workshop week from 16 to 20 May at the St. Pölten UAS. During this workshop week, the individual teams will realise their projects in the laboratories of St. Pölten UAS - Interactive Media Lab, E-Lab, Maker Lab, Video Studio, Photo Studio and Future Lab. At the end of the workshop, the projects will be presented in an "Interface | Metaverse Exhibition and Party" in the Future Lab of St. Pölten UAS and as AR artworks on www.artificialmuseum.com and made accessible to the world.
The workshop topic "Interface | Metaverse - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology" will be

(1) from the perspective of digital media technologies:

Electronics, Electrical Engineering, Arduino / Raspberry PI, 3D Printing, Hard- and Software - Tooling, Circuit Bending, AR / VR.

(2) from the perspective of digital arts and experimentation:

Installation, Interaction, Sound, Sculpture / Object, Space-Time Stage, Speech and Performance - Motion Capture & Tracking, AR / VR.

(3) from the perspective of product and graphic design:

Design process (scribble, sketch, drawing), layout and poster, animation (2D/3D), storytelling - AR / VR.

will be dealt with.
Furthermore, questions of meaning, aesthetics, usability, social integration, impact and accessibility of the interface | metaverse will be reflected and integrated into the project implementation process.

The workshop programme is divided into 5 - 6 workshop modules, each dealing with a thematic focus on the topic of "Interface | Metaverse".

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In an age where Facebook seems to know everything and big data controls the planet, the world can look pretty scary. Still, if it's any consolation, none of our current troubles are novel. In fact, they have been the subject of novels.

For generations, science-fiction writers have been predicting the future. Most of these predictions have proved false, of course. We're not jetting about in flying cars, twirling sonic screwdrivers, or battling triffids in the wild. Still, plenty of predictions made in science-fiction have proved accurate.

Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash was reportedly once required reading for new recruits at Facebook and is one of a number of works of fiction that seem to speak directly to the waysocial media has changed our lives. Here are a few of the others and some of the lessons we should learn from them.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992):

There's no denying that Snow Crash is more timely than ever. Plus, with an Amazon TV series on the way helmed by Ant-Man writer Joe Cornish, there's never been a better time to read this classic work of science-fiction literature.

The early 21st Century, sometime around now, is Snow Crash's setting. The US no longer exists after various private organisations and enterprises ceded control of territory. Much of the action takes place in a virtual reality successor to the internet called the Metaverse. Digital avatars represent all the users. (2011 novel Ready Player One, which has recently been adapted into a film, borrowed liberally from Snow Crash.)

The novel's plot sees a tech entrepreneur attempting to infect people's brains with malware using some ancient religious macguffin.But what's much more interesting is what happens behind the plot.

There are plenty of examples of modern technology that Snow Crash predicted. These include crypto-currencies like bitcoin, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality hangout spaces. In the novel's future, couriers carry all mail, eerily similar to the accusations Trump has made about Amazon in recent weeks. There's also an intelligence agency who have unfettered access to everyone's private data.

Arguably the most prescient element of the novel is the government's failure to legislate to curb the technology which controls the world. At one point, the villain of the novel notes:

"Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favourite sport... It's like if they figured out a way to regulate horses at the same time the [Ford] Model T and the airplane were being introduced."

Now what does that remind you of?

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953):

Another science-fiction dystopia is coming to television in 2018. Funny how that keeps happening.

So what does a novel published in 1953 have to say about life for the Facebook generation? Well, broadly, the novel discusses information and its dissemination. Facebook's 'pivot to video' could be read as a direct parallel of the societal ills suggested by Fahrenheit 451.

The novel tells the story of Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to burn books. Books are illegal in the dystopian future America because people were more interested in film and television, social networks, fast cars, and drugs. As a result, books were banned by minority groups. They argued books contained controversial and outdated content.

There are certainly parallels between the idea of trigger-warning and safe-space culture. However, for social media users, one element of this novel should be more worrying than any other. At one point, Montag's boss, Captain Beatty tells him that books became unpopular in the first place because they were endlessly abridged and simplified to become mindless entertainment designed to please but never challenge the masses.

Consider, in comparison, 'news videos' favoured by Facebook's algorithm. These are short chunks of footage, often no longer than a minute designed to explain complex or long-winded problems. Often, these videos divorce their subjects from context to dumb down or oversimplify their content.

Also, there's the issue of viral media. In Montag's world, people don't care about information. Montag's wife and her friends have next to no interest in politics or an oncoming war. Instead they are purely focused on entertainment. Compare this to Facebook where entire media brands have built up followings of tens of millions of people by sharing viral, 'shareable' content.

The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov (1957):

The insight of The Naked Sun on the Faceook generation isn't quite as complex or novel as the aforementioned examples, but it is worth noting.

The Naked Sun actually might be one of the first ever science-fiction novels to predict social media and its place in the world.

Set on the planet Solaria, the book is a detective story. Earth-born detective Elijah Baley has to investigate the murder of Rikaine Delmarre on Solaria. The planet has a population of 20,000 humans but AI-controlled robots vastly outnumber them. He finds a society where people view face-to-face conversation as dirty. Instead, Solarians communicate via holograms and social networks.

This mode of communication allows Solarians to edit their features and personalities to tailor the way they present themselves. Obviously, there's a very pronounced comparison with modern social media, in that sense.

There's also some fun stuff about how nudity is perfectly normal and accepted online but not in reality. Perhaps that one is more similar to Tumblr than Facebook, but it's interesting nonetheless.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909):

Writing for Slate, Lawrence M. Krauss, director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, noted that science-fiction writers never really predicted the internet.

Still, The Machine Stops is about as close as it gets to the internet in early science-fiction.

In the world of The Machine Stops humans live underground, completely alone and isolated in individual rooms. Like the Solarians in The Naked Sun, they avoid contact with others as a matter of course. The entire purpose of humanity is to share their 'ideas' and discuss them.

Meanwhile, the Machine, a robotic artificial intelligence, cares for all the humans and tends to their physical and spiritual needs. Eventually, the people begin to worship the Machine. They begin to view the Machine as omnipotent and neglect to fix the processes which keep the machine functioning.

Obviously there is a parallel to our modern dependence on Facebook and the internet at large. But perhaps, more broadly, the humans' choice to view the Machine as omnipotent and avoid repairing it speaks more generally to society's unwillingness to challenge Facebook or act in our own interest against the company's technology. For example, the Senate's decidedly soft-ball questions to Zuckerberg at the recent hearing, or the failure to legislate for the internet.

There's also probably plenty to say about the modern obsession and worship of artificial intelligence.

The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G Ballard (1970):

Arguably the most challenging of the books on this list, The Atrocity Exhibition is an incredibly convoluted book. While some scholars describe it as a novel, others contest this description.

Each of the book's chapters takes the form of a short story or a 'condensed novel'. Overall, the book follows a doctor at a mental hospital, as he navigates a mental breakdown. The main character reconstructs various different events and people in his mind. He attempts to twist their narratives to give each more personal meaning.

But what does that have to do with the internet and the Facebook generation? Well, it all hinges on the way Ballard envisaged the future.

The solipsistic, self-centred way the protagonist of The Atrocity Exhibition attempts to view history is similar to how Ballard believed humans would view the world in the future. In an essay for Vogue, he wrote:

"Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded... a computer [will be] trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day... each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role."

Essentially, Ballard predicted the future of social media. The world and the news are constantly refracted through seven billion personal views of it on social media, each with the person making them as the star.

In an interview with ID in 1987 he said:

"In the media landscape it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction."

Fake news, anyone?

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Snow Crash and four other novels which are required reading for the Facebook generation

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From Snow Crash to Fahrenheit 451, science-fiction novels from the 20th Century have a lot to say about the way we live now, particularly how we use social media. Here are five of the most prescient science-fiction novels and how they predicted Facebook decades in advance.

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Mon, 6 Dec 2021, 15.30-16.30 p.m. CET (course description, administrative/organisational issues, accommodation, labs needed, etc.) | Meeting link: Klicken Sie hier, um an der Besprechung teilzunehmen
Thu, 13 Jan 2022: 10.00-11.00 a.m.  CET | Meeting link: Klicken Sie hier, um an der Besprechung teilzunehmen

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Students:
St. Pölten: 8-10 students
Warsaw: 10-12 students
Setúbal: 5 students
Athens: 8 students
Timisoara: 6-8 students

Lecturers:
St. Pölten: Markus, Christian Munk, Jacob Suess
Warsaw: 4 lecturers
Setúbal: Rossana
Athens: 4
Timisoara: 4 (Radu, ...)
Additionally: Artificial Museum lecturer (Vienna), eventually other people from the artistic field

List of participants: Send list of participants (students + lecturers incl. e-mail addresses) until 7 Dec 2021 to St. Pölten UAS

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Template from Daniela
Markus works with all BIP respresentatives on description and distribution of roles

How to divide the groups? - approx. 30 students
Group building in the virtual meeting (-> interfaces)
Who is responsible for which group?
Project allocation?

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Which one will we use? - Moodle? MS Teams? Platform developed by Timisoara? (Radu will check that)

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Meeting with BIP-Partner respresentatives: 10-14 Jan?
Virtual Mobility:
-Fri, 4 March 2022, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. CET (45 minutes break)
-Fri, 8 April 2022, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. CET (45 minutes break)

Physical Mobility: 16-20 May 2022 (30 hours) - incl. Final Presentation / Final Exhibition of students
Present installation at the beginning of the physical part

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[To Do] Please feel addressed and welcome to integrate your ideas into the padlet

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[To Do] Please feel addressed and welcome to integrate your ideas into the padlet

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Idea: having a portal with 3D information where people can communicate with each other

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Idea: having a portal with 3D information where people can communicate with each other

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Real life Time Portal built in Poland Lithuania

-> would be great if the portal could convey 3D spatial information

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Portal connects cities through a giant circular digital display and a live-streamed webcam

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[To Do] Reserve labs at UAS St. Pölten for May 16-20, 2022

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[To Do] Reserve labs at UAS St. Pölten for May 16-20, 2022

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-> TV studio, 3D printing & 3D modelling (E-Lab), IM lab, Motion capture studio, AR /VR glasses
-> open & unconventional work space (Maker-Lab)
-> Spaces for and with Live Streaming Stations
-> one bigger seminar room

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[To Do] Document how the whole BIP is set up

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[To Do] Document how the whole BIP is set up

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-> how was the virtual part, how was the things we were doing in present, what were the results, ...
-> [TO DO] DOCUMENTATION OF ALL STEPS

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Idea: use E-trash to model something, manually connect them, engineering,…

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Idea: use E-trash to model something, manually connect them, engineering,…

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-> Circuit bending

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Idea: maybe integrate the artificialmuseum team into the workshop

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Idea: maybe integrate the artificialmuseum team into the workshop

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We collect, preserve, and archive analogue and digital art and embed our collection in public space all around the world

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There are more artworks by dead men stored in museums than can be exhibited. What remains is the virtual, imaginary area, with it's almost infinite amount of room.

Instead of continuing the current trend of art as "temporary intervention", we use the space between the worlds as a self-determined, permanent and experimental playground, with the goal to reawaken imagination and collaboration in public space.

We challenge the status quo and redefine the concept of the museum, rethinking the questions:

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There are more artworks by dead men stored in museums than can be exhibited. What remains is the virtual, imaginary area, with it's almost infinite amount of room. Instead of continuing the current trend of art as "temporary intervention", we use the space between the worlds as a self-determined, permanent and experimental playground, with the goal to reawaken imagination and collaboration in public space.

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Idea: work with something that is very specific to St. Pölten environment

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Idea: work with something that is very specific to St. Pölten environment

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-> E.g. LAMES = la musique et sun & SKW = Spratzerner Kirchenweg - https://www.lames.at
-> This workshop session would be deeper tapping into the space, into the environment.
-> there is a colleague in Athens who does this very often (third mission)
-> we could even invite somebody in the beginning of the week who knows some things that are special to the region and bring possible topics to the table.

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-> people come together outside of any organised setting to create something together
-> this could be a possible format to invite also them to the format – at least to the European researchers night

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ruangrupa: "We want to create a globally oriented, collaborative and interdisciplinary art and culture platform that will remain effective beyond the 100 days of documenta fifteen. Our curatorial approach strives for a different kind of collaborative model of resource use - in economic terms but also with regard to ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations."

ruangrupa has built the foundation of documenta fifteen on the core values and ideas of " lumbung". It is the Indonesian word for a collectively governed rice barn, where the gathered harvest is stored for the common good of the community. Understood not only as a building but also as a way of working and living together, will be operational in the lead-up to documenta fifteen in 2022, and beyond.

ruangrupa has underscored this approach: "Under the current conditions, the concept of lumbung, and its values of solidarity and collectivity, has never been more vital and relevant. In moments when so many are experiencing the inequality and injustice of the current systems, lumbung can act as an effort (alongside so many others) to show that things can be done differently. We are therefore not suspending lumbung, but accelerating it."
more about the concept

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ruangrupa: "We want to create a globally oriented, collaborative and interdisciplinary art and culture platform that will remain effective beyond the 100 days of documenta fifteen. Our curatorial approach strives for a different kind of collaborative model of resource use - in economic terms but also with regard to ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations."

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In this week there is also the research night at the UAS St. Pölten

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In this week there is also the research night at the UAS St. Pölten

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-> [To Do] the workshop could show the results there

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Invite a special guest for the week (prominent person from experimental media)

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Invite a special guest for the week (prominent person from experimental media)

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-> E.g. as an open lecture, also to promote the workshop and the university
-> if an event is only organised at the campus it is only for students, therefore it is also good to have something in another place

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time and space independent museum

https://www.instagram.com/theartificialmuseum/

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There are more artworks by dead men stored in museums than can be exhibited. What remains is the virtual, imaginary area, with it's almost infinite amount of room.

Instead of continuing the current trend of art as "temporary intervention", we use the space between the worlds as a self-determined, permanent and experimental playground, with the goal to reawaken imagination and collaboration in public space.

We challenge the status quo and redefine the concept of the museum, rethinking the questions:

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There are more artworks by dead men stored in museums than can be exhibited. What remains is the virtual, imaginary area, with it's almost infinite amount of room. Instead of continuing the current trend of art as "temporary intervention", we use the space between the worlds as a self-determined, permanent and experimental playground, with the goal to reawaken imagination and collaboration in public space.

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-> Minimum 15 to maximum 25 students. We should aim at 25 students.
-> E.g. 5 groups of 3 or 3 groups of 5 and each group works with one expert on one special topic
-> Each group is a multicultural / multidisciplinary group

-> Or station work – each station with one expert

-> In the end we would have 3 to 5 projects (results)
-> To discuss: we have a combination of master students and bachelor students (2nd year 4th semester); also maybe allow advanced people to be with the group (young researchers we want to develop anyways)

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-> these are the three Erasmus+ "BIP" topics that have to be addressed

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Virtual part in order to assure that there is a common understanding and common knowledge between the participants

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Virtual part in order to assure that there is a common understanding and common knowledge between the participants

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-> (topics e.g.: coding, design, animation, augmented reality, ...)

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[To Do] We need a general thing how to name the BIP an a discription

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[To Do] We need a general thing how to name the BIP an a discription

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-> Suggestion: "Interface"
-> [To Do] Description – important: not only for technicians but also for designers

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Virtual part has to be developed together

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Virtual part has to be developed together

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-> meeting in January: students themselves can come up with ideas for the workshop session (with guidance)
-> choose what would be the thing they want to work on together

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Workshop leaders can be sent from different insitutions but we are free to choose

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Workshop leaders can be sent from different insitutions but we are free to choose

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-> Something innovative has to be developed together

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5 day model to create something with art + tech (Robotics, Arduino, Augmented Reality…)

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5 day model to create something with art + tech (Robotics, Arduino, Augmented Reality…)

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-> Experiment in Art, Design & Technology; create a platform for different areas to work together

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-> Workshop should fit to the background of the participants!

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An Interview with the Philosopher and Media Theorist Byung-Chul Ha
Vera Tollmann

(INPUT Klaudiusz Slusarczyk)

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No one can honestly say they have an overview over the extent of the global data mountains in the internet. During the early years of the internet, cyber culture was still alive with futuristic ideas. Today, the mood on the World Wide Web is far more pragmatic and obsessed with the present. Users are driven by market share, self-marketing and other techniques of the self. The private domain, not the political one, is public. A handful of top firms like Apple, Facebook, Google and Weibo try to bond customers to their self-contained systems. What is the community feeling in a close digital world? Invisible algorithms steer personalized search results and generate advertisements. A few well-networked hackers prevail in the face of the mainstream and copyrights.

Increasingly, the internet appears to be regulated as a digital desk with attached film and TV archives, department stores, cafés and a communication terminal. Once one social network has been installed, people are reluctant to start all over again with another one. People who want to use the most recent social network, Google+, have to register under their real name; firms want consumers and not blogging activists, and least of all ephemeral avatar creatures.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has come up with refreshing explanation models for this change from optimistic elation to pragmatic user interests. In his 2006 book "Hyperkulturalität"1 (Hyperculturality), Han describes how culture changes under global conditions. Different times and continuities exist side-by-side in hyperculture - which is why Han calls his global terrain a "mosaic universe." Friendliness is the basis of hyperculturality. "Its very lack of rules enables a widespread impact. It creates a maximum in solidarity with a minimum of interrelation. Where the shared horizon unravels in a multiplicity of different identities and ideas, it engenders a singular involvement, a continuum of discontinuities."2 "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft" (Tiredness Society) 3 was published this past summer, a surprise hit that the very society it analyzes welcomed as a fitting diagnosis. While the creative game with fictive identities was described as hyperculture, "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft" is the result of the weary society's "surplus of positivity." That's why there was so little energy! This positivity "inhabits the negativity-free space of the same, where there is no polarization of friend versus foe, inside versus outside, or what is personal versus what is foreign."4 This is where his most recent book picks up: "Die Topologie der Gewalt" (The Topology of Violence)5, which is about transparency as an effect of the economic process.

In digital forums, it was netiquette that ennobled the discourse with a few commonly accepted rules; social networks, on the other hand, try to prevent negative statements of any kind by providing only narrow windows for interaction. No less than five million users are after all in favor of a "dislike" button on Facebook. Compared with the 750 million members, that is a negligible figure. Can friendliness still be relevant in such a context? And what about the non-material value of friendship?

[b]Vera Tollmann:[/b] In your 2006 book "Hyperkulturalität," you characterized hyperculture using internet-specific terms such as links and networking. When you say hyperspace, do you mean the internet, or is hyperculture evident elsewhere as well?

[b]Byung-Chul Han:[/b] Hyperspace is a completely hybrid and promiscuous space where everything is intermingled and networked with everything else, a space where cultural and territorial markers have been deleted, a space marked by a total lack of distance. Hyperculturality is hence different from inter- and multiculturality, which is still infused with the negativity of cultural tensions, and varies as well as from transculturality, which still preserves cultural markers and spatial scope. Of course, the internet certainly has elements of hyperspace and speeds up global hyperculturization. Culture in a classic sense disappears in what is, so to speak, more cultural than culture, namely in hyperculture and in reality: as Baudrillard would put it, it disappears in what is more real than real, namely in hyper-reality.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] The sociologist Aras Özgün once compared the dominance of the social networks to Haussmann's modernization of 19th-century Paris: the social networks, he says, are the grand boulevards of the internet. Do the social networks also make up the architecture of hyperculture, or do you see other organizational forms in the Net?

[b]Han:[/b] The term "boulevard" comes from "bolwerc," that is bulwark, originally part of a fort fortified by ramparts and trenches. Paris boulevards actually do resemble these bulwarks. The network is no bulwark, however. A rhizome would be a more fitting metaphor for a network. On the other hand, social networks are not as open and uncontrollable as rhizomes. They form instead an electronic panopticon. The internet is not merely a space that grants freedom; it is in itself a panopticon that enables total control. It offers up all its users either to a voyeuristic gaze from the outside or to capitalist exploitation. Contrary to the panopticon in a disciplinary society, however, control is not achieved by isolation but by interconnection. Confined inmates make way for free users - or at least users who believe they are free. But both are at the mercy of the panoptic gaze.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] Which notion of freedom does the internet stand for? Is it "freedom of choice" - the neo-liberal formula?

[b]Han:[/b] Freedom is manifest as excessive dislimitation, as exposure that goes as far as pornographic nudity, as an orgy of communication, information and production. But what is interesting is that this freedom is turning into its original opposite. In "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft," I pointed out that freedom is turning into the violence of self-exploitation. The freedom of dislimitation and disinhibition spawns obscenity. A world without narration, rituals or scenes is obscene. A world that no longer needs a scenography is pornographic.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] You write that "friendliness is capable of the kind of ›windowing‹ that opens and connects" different cultures. "Windowing" is what you call the "hypertextual mode of experience," where everyone "mirrors the other or lets others become apparent in the self ".6 "Friendship" is a concept that is overtaxed in social networks. Would you say that what they call friendship is what you call friendliness?

[b]Han:[/b] A while ago, Burger King launched its "Whopper Sacrifice" project. If you delete ten friends on Facebook, you get a free Whopper. The friends are notified that they were sacrificed for a Whopper. A friendship on Facebook seems to be worth as much as a few grams of ground meat. Neo-liberalism has turned even individuals into micro-entrepreneurs who only enter into business deals that promise a profit. Friendship is no exception: it is likewise expected to be profitable. A friend, according to Aristotle, is a second self. Today, a friend is a product. And you can't idealize Facebook as a friendly space; it is, after all, a space where unscrupulous bullying takes place. And from an economic point of view, Facebook is a space of exploitation.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] What product is traded among friends? Is it information or attention? And what would the profit be: the symbolic capital?

[b]Han:[/b] "Friends" would be customers and new friends would be new customers. They strengthen the narcissistic sensation of the ego. The internet is a space where above all you encounter yourself. The other person is long gone. Depression is a disease of the narcissistic self that has been set adrift from relationships, that has lost all sense of what is different. The virtual space is a hell of sameness.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] If you look at "Hyperkulturalität" today: was your vision of the future too optimistic? And should we regard "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft" - published five years later - as a sobering present-day analysis of this future?

[b]Han:[/b] The book "Hyperkulturalität" ends with a question mark, or rather, a Handke quote: "If you feel the pain of the threshold, you're not a tourist and a transition is possible." The book "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft" also ends with a chapter about Handke's "Versuch über die Müdigkeit" (Essay on Tiredness). But it's true: the appearance that underlies "Hyperkulturalität" is intentionally naive.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] Is hyperculture a prerequisite for the tiredness society? Is it what triggered what you've analyzed as a "surplus of positivity"?

[b]Han:[/b] Hyperculture is a culture without thresholds. Today, we really no longer feel the " pain of thresholds." Total mobility and promiscuity even let the "transition" in an emphatic sense disappear. The present society breaks down any negativity. The threshold is a kind of negativity. When all thresholds, differentiations and borders are broken down, the result is a general proliferation and obesity of circuits, a hyperinformation, hypercommunication and hyperproduction. The "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft" takes the last sentence in "Hyperkulturalität" a step further, but with a new look.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] On Facebook, it is only possible to show you agree with something, by clicking on the "like" button, which has no negative counterpart. How does this lack of negativity and criticism affect society and how it communicates?

[b]Han:[/b] Where something totally different exists, shock or anger are not just a possibility: they become a necessity. Current society is dominated by a surplus of positivity, even in one's own affective household. It seems negative feelings are an impediment to accelerating the process. The utmost in acceleration can be expected where the same answers to the same. Negativity slows down and prevents a chain reaction of sameness.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] "The Far East has a very ›natural relationship‹ with ›technical‹ networking."7 What do you mean by that? Is the West's relationship with "technical" networking estranged?

[b]Han:[/b] The Far East doesn't have a culture of identity that people might feel is threatened by networking. There is much more networking: take, for instance, online games. It would appear that Asians feel more comfortable in the internet than Europeans. There is much less criticism concerning internet culture. Perhaps the Buddhist notion of reincarnation implies a general interconnection of living beings. The Chinese philosopher Laozi says: the skilful traveler leaves no traces. Traveling in the virtual space might correspond to this ideal ...

[b]Tollmann:[/b] But users do leave traces: their data. There is quite a discussion going on about how much influence users have on how this data is used. It is difficult to imagine what might come after user-specific ads.

[b]Han:[/b] "The skilful traveler leaves no traces" would have fit in "Hyperkulturalität." It's true. Users leave traces. They become inmates in the electronic panopticon. What's interesting is that you feel free in the panopticon.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] You write: "The globalization process, accelerated by new technologies, creates a distance to the cultural space. The closeness that is created in turn produces an abundance, a pool of cultural life practices and forms of expression."8 Does hyperculturality overcome the differences between West and East because the West must deconstruct its cultural idiosyncrasies such as narration, persona and identity via hyperculturality?

[b]Han:[/b] Cultural hyperspace doesn't have a West or an East. In fact, hyperculturality proclaims the disappearance of space and time. Today, we live in the here and now. In the meantime, even the distance that was apparent in the old Microsoft motto "Where do you want to go today?" is disappearing. We live in times of a complete lack of spatial or temporal intervals, times without distance and without discretion.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] In "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft," you refer to Melville's Bartleby as an archaic role model for opposition to the disciplinarian society. In today's achievement-oriented society, which has driven the individual to the point where he exploits himself, "I prefer not to" no longer functions as a formula for refusal. Does that mean that there can no longer be an effective form of refusal?

[b]Han:[/b] As a matter of fact, refusal is only possible in connection with outside coercion that I can decline. Exploitation of the self is much more fatal than exploitation from the outside, because it is linked to a feeling of freedom. At the same time, it is more efficient and productive than exploitation from the outside, because by choice, you exploit yourself until you break down. That appears to be the deceit of the system. Today, we don't have a ruler or sovereign whom we could oppose by saying No. We are subject to a systemic compulsion, a systemic power that forces, even entices, the achieving subject to exploit itself. Stéphane Hessel's "Empört Euch" (Be Outraged) alone doesn't help much in this regard. The deceit inherent in the system is that it makes the very thing one could revolt against disappear. It is very difficult to be up in arms if every perpetrator and victim is at the same time the exploiter and the exploitee.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] Wouldn't the loss of unprofitable interest as a key trait of friendship be a reason to be outraged? Or will completely new social relationships evolve along with the digital ways of life?

[b]Han:[/b] Sociology and the cultural sciences have the important task of describing the new forms of relationships that have evolved thanks to digital media. The total lack of distance produced by digital media, for instance, allows for the emergence of a new form of love that may no longer be love, a love that lacks all distance, all longing, all barriers, a love that knows no history or fatefulness. A love that no longer unfolds lyrical powers. The surplus of positivity creates total non-commitment, ties without any real contact ... Actually, love is a phenomenon of negativity. Maybe that's for the best ... One shouldn't compare the different forms of relationships and play them off against each other. Instead of love, we now happen to have the "like" button, which lacks all fatefulness.

[b]Tollmann:[/b] At the end of "Müdigkeitsgesellschaft," you refer to positive forms of tiredness. According to Handke, fundamental tiredness enables "serene inactivity." You see this state as being excluded from active society. At the same time, you say tiredness makes a "society imaginable that needs neither affiliation nor relation."9 Handke uses a Dutch still life to illustrate this state. Where do you see these forms of society today?

[b]Han:[/b] The Handke quote I refer to reads: "I have an image for the ›all in one‹: those 17th-century, for the most part Dutch, floral still lifes, in which a beetle, a snail, a bee or a butterfly sits true to life in the flowers, and although none of these may suspect the presence of the others, they are all there together at the moment, my moment." What I have in mind is a utopian society, a society of friendliness that can make do without relatives or a common affiliation. This friendliness only awakens in the face of the other, the stranger. The bigger the difference is to the self, the more friendliness is bestowed on the other. Friendliness toward the same is not possible.

1 Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität. Kultur und Globalisierung. Berlin 2005.
2 ibid., p. 71.
3 Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft. Berlin 2010.
4 ibid., p. 14.
5 Byung-Chul Han, Topologie der Gewalt. Berlin 2011.
6 Han, Hyperkulturalität, p. 49.
7 ibid., p. 57.
8 ibid., p. 17.
9 Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, p. 59.

Byung-Chul Han tends to write sparse, "bony" books in protest against a surplus of facts and information. The booklet "Shanzhai. Dekonstruktion auf Chinesisch" (Merve Verlag Berlin) was published in spring 2011. Shanzhai is a cultural technique that openly plays games with original works. The copy is no longer a secret. Han has never visited China; a dialectically-thinking theorist, he describes a certain problem and, for lack of a better word, calls it China. Raised in South Korea, he studied philosophy, German language and literature, and Catholic theology in Munich and Freiburg.

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

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No one can honestly say they have an overview over the extent of the global data mountains in the internet. During the early years of the internet, cyber culture was still alive with futuristic ideas. Today, the mood on the World Wide Web is far more pragmatic and obsessed with the present.

# data[].attributes.headline
Stuff in Space (INPUT Klaudiusz Slusarczyk)

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Stuff in Space (INPUT Klaudiusz Slusarczyk)

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Stuff in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL.

The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.

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https://sketchfab.com/mwintersberger

# data[].attributes.headline
Setúbal School of Technology of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Portugal

# data[].attributes.subject
Setúbal School of Technology of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal, Portugal

# data[].attributes.body
Setúbal School of Technology of the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal Lissabon - https://www.estsetubal.ips.pt
Rosana Santos: rossana.santos@estsetubal.ips.pt

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Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal - ESTSetúbal/IPS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
APSE | Apoio à Prestação de Serviços Especializados

# data[].attributes.body
Universitatea Politehnica Timișoara Timisoara - https://www.upt.ro
Radu Vasiu: radu.vasiu@upt.ro

# data[].attributes.headline
University of West Attica, Agiou Spiridonos, Egaleo, Athen-West, Greece

# data[].attributes.subject
University of West Attica, Agiou Spiridonos, Egaleo, Athen-West, Greece

# data[].attributes.body
University of West Attica Athen - https://www.uniwa.gr
Katerina Antonaki: antokaterina@mail.com;
Eleni Martini: emartini@uniwa.gr

# data[].attributes.body
PJAIT NEMA Warschau - https://snm.pja.edu.pl/en/start-2
Ewa Satalecka: ewa.satalecka@pjwstk.edu.pl;
Jakub Karpoluk: jakubk@pjwstk.edu.pl;
Jan Piechota: janpiechota@pjwstk.edu.pl;
Klaudiusz Slusarczyk: slusarczyk@pjwstk.edu.pl

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Universitäten in Europa. Deutsch Version.

# data[].attributes.headline
UAS St. Pölten, Matthias Corvinus-Straße, Sankt Pölten, Österreich

# data[].attributes.subject
UAS St. Pölten, Matthias Corvinus-Straße, Sankt Pölten, Österreich

# data[].attributes.body
UAS St. Pölten - https://www.fhstp.ac.at -
Franz Fidler (Head of Department Media and Digital Technologies): franz.fidler@fhstp.ac.at

Markus Wintersberger (Deputy Head of Degree Program Digital Design (MA) / Master Class Experimental Media): markus.wintersberger@fhstp.ac.at;
Christian Munk (Research group Media Creation - Institut for Creative\Media/Technologies):
lbmunk@fhstp.ac.at

Daniela Lohner (International Office): daniela.lohner@fhstp.ac.at

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A Phase 1 - virtual connected / remote
1 Research
2 Concept / Idea
3 Collecting, Publishing, Sharing, Rebuilding, Remixing
4 Presenting & Discussing
5 Evaluating, Editing

B Phase 2 - physically present on site
1 Presenting & Discussing
2 Selecting according to topics
3 Group formation according to topics
4 Concept / Idea
5 Production and implementation
6 Collecting, Publishing, Sharing, Rebuilding, Remixing
7 Final Presentation

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Interface - Common Space(s) / Shared Space(s) / Extended Space(s)

How can we capture, collect, share and combine "our" spaces and build a common space(s)?

Thinking about the topic of "homeland", "island", "continent", "city scapes" or "nearby places" as an inscribed field of real and virtual memories. Collecting space(s) and memories as a digital data set or an individual code and transcribing it into a visual correspondence - a sort of "mirror world", a "digital twin".

# data[].attributes.headline
Interface - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology

# data[].attributes.subject
Interface - Experiment in Art, Design & Technology

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Interface - Common Space(s) Map