Inspace: Exhibitions

As part of our Festival exhibition for Inspace- Every-Body: City, Technology and the Body, we invited 3 prominent scholars to respond to the works of pioneering design studio Universal Everything. The second response is from Dr Kate Sicchio, Kate is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real time video systems. Kate reflected on Universal Everything’s Smart Matter. Smart Matter (2018) is a series of films that are part of the studio’s Hype Cycle work explores the relationship between technology hype and its affect upon us. Working with dancers and motion capture, an algorithm becomes a third dance partner, building a tension between actions and form.

Algorithmic Choreography
This talk explored questions around different ways digital technologies can be used within a choreographic process. How can computational systems be used to help make a dance or even interrupt and hack a choreographic process? Can we make new dances with computers? By using systems such as live coding and machine learning, various dance compositions will be discussed.

Kate Sicchio
Dr. Kate Sicchio is a choreographer, media artist and performer whose work explores the interface between choreography and technology with wearable technology, live coding, and real time video systems. Her work has been shown internationally in many countries including the US, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK at venues such as PS122 (NYC), Banff New Media Institute (Canada), V&A (London), and Artisan Gallery (Hong Kong). She co-edited the book Intersecting Art and Technology in Practice: Techne/Technique/Technology (Routledge) with Dr. Camille Baker. She has given invited talks at EU Parliament, Eyeo, Resonate, Node Code, Expo ‘74 and countless universities and events across the globe. She has presented work at many conferences and symposia including CHI, ISEA, ACM Creativity and Cognition, Digital Research in Humanities and Arts, and Dance Studies Association. She is currently Assistant Professor of Dance and Media Technology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985. Edward’s currently holds a Chair in Law, Innovation and Society at Newcastle University.

She has co-edited (both with Charlotte Waelde and alone) four editions of a textbook, Law and the Internet (later Law, Policy and the Internet); the fourth edition appeared in 2018. She won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for work on online privacy and data trusts. A collection of her essays, The New Legal Framework for E-Commerce in Europe, was published in 2005. She is Associate Director, and was co-founder, of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Centre for IP and Technology Law (now SCRIPT). Edwards has consulted for the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO.

Edwards co-chairs GikII, an annual series of international workshops on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture.

Edwards is Deputy Director of CREATe, the Centre for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology, a Research Councils UK research centre about copyright and business models.

Running Order:

4pm Introduction from Prof Chris Speed
4.05pm Talk from Prof Lilian Edwards
4.45pm Q&A session

As part of our Festival exhibition for Inspace- Every-Body: City, Technology and the Body, we invited 3 prominent scholars to respond to the works of pioneering design studio Universal Everything. The first response was from Ola Uduku. Ola is Professor of Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture where her research explores the history of educational architecture in Africa, and the contemporary issues related to social infrastructure provision for minority communities in cities in the ‘West’ and ‘South’. Ola reflected on Universal Everything’s iconic Walking City project.

Walking City (2014) recovers the futuristic visions of the 1960’s architecture practice Archigram. As Walking City moves along, her body adapts and morphs through a series of 50 different environments, offering a representation of place as citizen. For this academic response we invited Ola Uduku to explore how these ideals of modernism have been translated in different cultures. Ola Uduku took us on a journey from traditional African architecture through to High Modernism. Reflecting on how indigenous architects dealt with Western ideas and transformed them into a new hybrid style for Africa, adapting to the tropical environment, much like the constant evolution of Walking City.

Every-Body: City, Technology and the Body

Universal Everything is a collective of digital artists and experience designers who explore the relationship between humans, technology and futures. We bring their work to Inspace to stimulate discussion about how the body is shaped through AI and the city.

The Exhibition will be up from the 6-31 August 2020 https://inspace.ed.ac.uk

Image: Walking Cities, 1964. Photograph: © Herron Archives