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Summary

New Media, or Interactive Art is broadly defined by the use of a computer. This black box at the core is accessible through interface elements familiar from the everyday use: keyboards, cameras and microphone, screens, loudspeakers and other common media devices. The rennaissance of the physical is transforming this status quo. As hacker spaces, maker movement, and rapid manufacturing technologies change our outlook, media artists are designing their own hardware and electronics, increasingly freeing the art from the constraints of the products available in the market. Media, instead of software and data, is becoming physical in nature: 3D milled, machined and transformed to tangible spaces and artefacts. These concrete things then can be loaded with computational intelligence, but are physical manifestations of the ideas, where their abstract malleability is not at the focus anymore. In recent years we have been exploring this transformation in our own work with reflective computational sculptures. These "things" can be experienced directly with all our senses, and they react to their surroundings with the laws of physics we expect from the reality. These material qualities give new kind of richness to the digital, where they interact directly with the physical world, without necessarily the presence of a "black box" computer brain, whose logic we are not supposed to decipher. The spectacle is in the physical, perceptual experience in the world.

Vita

jussi1Being involved in academia, design industry and conducting his individual experimental work, Jussi Ängeslevä is focussing on embodied interfaces, experiences and services for the public. His work as Vice Creative Director at ART+COM media design studio is consistently yielding international recognition in exhibitions, installations and awards. In parallel he is an honorary professor at the Berlin University of the Art teaching Digital Media Design and has been serving as a juror, chair or advisor in various academic and design bodies such as D&AD, ARS Electronica, TEI and Siggraph. His design ethos is leveraging hardware, software, physical and graphic design in the search for elegance in highly specific solutions, where the meaning of a work is inseparable from the medium communicating it.