More than just a functional domain for the application of established technologies, certain artistic practices constitute vibrant laboratories where the effects and affects of all sorts of (digital) hybrids may be unconditionally explored and creatively 'researched-through-design'. Interactive art puts under scrutiny all sorts of tangible, embedded, and embodied interfaces and interaction schemata. Computational aesthetics, and computational approaches to creativity zero in on, instead, on self-generative computer automata, artificial intelligence, and bio-inspired systems. Data-driven media art draws on cloud-based computing and the ongoing 'datafication' of all aspects of our lives, seeking ways to creatively exploit, and, most importantly, to probe, and to make sense of massively big and massively distributed media content. Endeavours of the sort are typically interdisciplinary and simultaneous draw on, or concern, a wide array of subareas such as digital signal processing, programming languages, pedagogics, cognitive psychology, music, robotics, philosophy, media studies, ethics, phenomenology, design, and archaeology. In this way, the encounter of the arts and humanities with science and technology brings forth, and concretely interrogates, new technological paradigms, and new ways to engage with existent ones.
Marinos Koutsomichalis is a media artist, scholar and creative technologist. He was born in Athens, GR (1981) and has since lived and worked in various cities around the world. His interests comprise computational aesthetics, (big) data in/as art, post-digital objecthood, material engagement/exploration, cybernetics, generative algorithms, post-humanism, and Do-It-With-Others approaches to art and education. He has publicly presented projects, led workshops, and held talks worldwide more than 150 times and in all sorts of milieux, including leading museums, acclaimed biennales, research institutions, and concert halls. He has held research positions at the Universita Degli Studi di Torino (Turin, IT), and the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (Trondheim, NO), and has taught at the University of Wolverhampton (Birmingham, UK), the Technical University of Crete (Rethymnon, GR), and the Contemporary Music Research Centre (Athens, GR). He is responsible for more than 20 academic publications in academic journals and conference proceedings, and for the "Mapping and Visualization with SuperCollider" book. He has a Ph.D. in Electronic Music and New Media (De Montfort University, GB) and a MA in Composition with Digital Media (University of York, GB).
