SCHEDULE
Bringing artists, inventors, dancers, creative technologists, and other thought leaders together in conversation and exploration. By day, an interdisciplinary gathering of innovators will give workshops and lectures on the field's urgent questions and latest developments. By night, we will wander the imaginative terrain of interactive installations and performance. We will showcase ambitious explorations in the field of ART+TECH, from work imagining future machines to intelligent automations crafting masterpieces before your eyes. Get your ticket today!
REGISTER NOWAll attendees are expected to follow our Code of Conduct.
PARTNERS






WORKSHOPS
Monday
June 4
Neural Network and Deep Learning Workshop for Artists with Gary Boodhoo
Three-dimensional experiences of sound and music bring people together, catalyzing shared moments of inspiration, empathy, and wonder with Christopher Willits
Tuesday
June 5
Are you inspired to create high tech wearables but don’t know where to start? The Fashion Technology workshop with Anina Net and Cindy Clark is a great jumping off point.
SPEAKERS
Salon style conversations, 20 mins talk + 10 mins Q&A, and panels, with top speakers in the art, robotics and human robotics interaction industry.
Wednesday
June 6, 9:00AM to 5PM
Interaction designer and machine learning enthusiast, discusses his psychedelic journeys into neural networks in "IMAGE.GARDEN"
Artist, researcher, and experimenter based in Poznan, Poland who combines art with science and technology. Member of HAT Research Center at Adam Mickiewicz University
Electrical engineer whose work focuses on humanitarian applications of engineering and robotics
Amy LaViers, assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD Lab) and Catie Cuan, performer, choreographer, creative technologist and TED Resident
Why would a robotics lab need an artist-in-residence? The idea that function and expression can be divided is present in the first usage of the term "robot" in Capek's science fiction play, RUR, where the characters discuss the differences between human and robots in this light; indeed, this origin confuses the science around this aspect of robotics. Thus, a formalism for the concept of expression – and its fundamental relationship with function – is needed to inform robotic system design and public perception thereof. Through embodied audience participation and visual aids, we will present an ongoing project in the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab that is developing such expressive robotic systems and measuring their effect on humans through art and performance.
What are the artistic attributes of Artificial Intelligence? How do they assist, produce, deprive, or mimic human memory, creativity, and the artist's soul? Artists are using AI in collaboration, but can that replace the necessary growth that comes out of struggle, conflict and failure? How does AI understand nostalgic moments, triggered senses and memory? Can we capture the sounds and music that defined our adolescence through the assistance of neural networks?
Moderator: Danielle Siembieda, ecoartist and Managing Director of Leonardo: The International Society for Arts, Sciences, and Technology
Raphael Arar, award-winning artist, designer and researcher at IBM Research
Evo Heyning, founder and executive producer of new game, interactive, live, VR & 360 experiences at Light Lodges
Scot Gresham-Lancaster, musician, designer and research scientist
James Morgan, artist, educator, and researcher, director at Ars Virtua
Artist and professor UC Berkeley, and a pioneer in internet-based robotic telepresence and Cloud-Based Robotics
In collaboration with CODAME's ART+TECH Festival 2018 #ARTOBOTS, the Living Room Light Exchange (LRLX) will facilitate a dialogue between new media artists, practitioners, theorists, and festival attendees explicating the significance of accidents, mistakes, and so-called 'left-turns' in the quest towards automation. How do such missteps influence current thinking on robotics, automation, and artificial intelligence - either technically or societally? Rather than thinking automation as an idealistic trajectory, what lessons can be drawn by thinking automation as a media-specific phenomena that produces its own new terrain for accidents, errors, and power relations? Moreover, what might it mean to focus on "incompleteness," lacunae, or failures in a domain such as automation, in which unidirectional forward progress is the prevailing narrative? How might artistic practice in particular - and art that leverages AI missteps - function in our public imagination?
Liat Berdugo, artist, writer, and curator. Co-founder and co-curator of the Bay Area's Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art salon
Elia Vargas, Oakland based artist, curator, and researcher. Co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange
Mailee Hung, writer, editor and cultural critic.
Tanya Gayer, curator and writer.
Praba Pilar, diasporic Colombian artist and scholar
Thursday
June 7, 9:00AM to 5PM
Start the day with some Qigong to bring balance and equilibrium to our bodies and minds with Jordan Gray
Readings from their new novel, "Free the Bear": A Buddhist AI, California Secession, and 1 million gamers
Presenting Matchy, a chatbot bringing the connect & collaborate ethos of CODAME to a global scale.
Eryk Salvaggio & Jorge Stamatio (Swissnex) discuss "Mental Work," the first showroom in the world to be operated exclusively by workers' minds, juxtaposing the industrial revolution against the possibly imminent cognitive revolution
Creating things is what we love. In this session we will explore what it takes to share our creations at scale as well as extending to less technical audiences. We will explore the execution of the Distributed Symphony design challenge project. The project was highly technical yet approachable and engaging for an audience of over five hundred minimally technical people.
Physicist, artist, maker, fashion designer, and musician
With the development of open-source hardware, fashion designers and creative technologists have started to include electronics as part of their designs, adding decorative and/or functional elements to garments. Driven by creative designs, the industry has tremendous opportunities but also faces significant challenges in scaling and scientific research. This talk gives an overview of the wearables industry with demos of programmable garments and discusses a few ideas for future development through automation.
Staring at some reputed masterpieces of modern art and at some images produced by A.I. systems, many lay people prefer the latter. Many people think that the art produced by the machine is more beautiful than the art made by humans and certified by art historians, galleries and museums (not to mention wealthy collectors). Many people even confess that they feel moved by the art produced by the machine. That is, of course, until someone tells them that the art was made by a machine. Piero Scaruffi, a cultural historian and veteran of Artificial Intelligence, discusses this issue with roboticist/artist Alexander Reben, art critic Meredith Tromble, and philosopher John Campbell
Piero Scaruffi, cultural historian with several published books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.
Meredith Tromble, artist and writer mixing drawing, performance, and installation.
Alex Reben, artist and roboticist, exploring humanity through the lens of art and technology
John Campbell, prize-winning professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley with interests in psychology, psychiatry and social robots
Artist and leader in XR design, BlinkPopShift discusses their experiments with collaging together various different machine learning outputs to create digital performance masks.
Groundbreaking composer, sound artist, and technologist. "Out of Control" - A brief, personal history of the lady's glove, mapping and neural nets. From dreams of control to dreams of chaos.
Award-winning artist, designer, and entrepreneur
Award-winning journalist and Digital Culture correspondent for NPR
A fireside chat with the people at CODAME making this happen
NIGHTLIFE
Immersive, engaging, out of the ordinary experiences. Featuring gallery installations, screenings, and performances.
PERFORMANCES
& SCREENINGS
Wednesday + Thursday
June 6th & 7th, 7PM to 11PM
A semi-intelligent system powered by Web Audio API and WebGL
Groundbreaking composer, sound artist and technologist, known for developing new and experimental instruments such as the Lady's Glove and Spring SpyreWednesday Only!
A performance using recursive landmark detection to apply layer upon layer of digital make-up, building eerie distorted masks of the performer's own face
A short film ranging cyborg consciousness, constructions of femininity, agency, and empowerment
A dance performance exploring the intimacies of humans and robotics
A film chronicling the journey of technologist Ross Goodwin and his literary artificial intelligence as they set out to write the longest novel in the English language
Pop music as heard by a computer algorithm. Once Bay Area composer and performer David Kant translates machine learning analyses of pop songs into music notation, Happy Valley Band performs these transcriptions live. Thursday Only!
A short film exploring the interstices of physical and digital space
A volumetric film and VR experience exploring the duality of time, the meaning of one's identity in times of transformation, and the interaction of viewer and virtuality
An investigation of personal and collective memory using live performance, video, glitch art and neural networks that reveals our fabricated identities in the context of nostalgia.
TraumaOS™ is a newly discovered modular augmented perception mind bios firmware developed for psychological warfare. It has been installed in a growing number of humans. misterinterrupt will guide infected cybernetic souls into a sonic space fit for uninstalling any TraumaOS™ cultural malware modules. Wednesday Only!
Tachyon Pulse is a performance that uses a homemade xenharmonic tuning system built from an array of delay units. Percussion and other elements are given pitches based on specific delay speeds. Thursday Only!
INSTALLATIONS
A meditation on our hopes and fears about robots and other artificial beings, as reflected in popular media.
A large-scale, immersive, interactive, physics-enabled generative creature universe that makes music and becomes its own audio-visual show
A dress trained to recognize gestures and control the embedded LEDs
An installation questioning the direction in which autonomous systems are headed
Millions of images used to train facial-recognition software flicker past at mesmerising speed
An installation using salvaged 1980s pen plotters to draw, on actual paper, the likeness of participants with algorithmically generated squiggly lines
An installation exploring the idea of self through the interaction between a robotic parabolic mirror and a viewer
Illuminate your wrists with these customizable LED bracelets. Using our onsite laser cutter, we will etch out design and text of your choosing, freeing the glow within!
An interactive projection installation where hand-drawn butterflies are brought to life using computer vision and AI
An interactive work simulating the birth, growth, bloom, and finally, death, of a generative 3D plant that only blooms once an hour
A shadow-theater style installation in which participants can engage in collaborative movement improvisation with artifically intelligent virtual dance partners
An installation that activates hundreds of light switches en masse in a cryptic communicative interplay
A series of prints and interactive installation, using glitch aesthetics to examine the materiality of power relations and infrastructure in much of the Arab-speaking world
Creating a bio-digital environment that documents the human impulse to dominate nature
The Locust sculpture began life on the road in 1924 when parts of its body served to support early automobiles. Many decades later, those parts were repurposed and combined with others to form the unique contours of a stage four locust. From the top of its head to the tips of its hind legs, the piece highlights industrial craftsmanship from a bygone era.
An installation immersing audiences in an environment where music, as a universal auditory stimuli, has spatial coordinates we can sail to by way of a synaptic map and the winds of our senses
A robotic performer that light paints patterns inspired by nature
Assemble artwork from their palette of screens and print your own clothing
SUPPORT
CODAME runs not for profit events as members of Intersection for the Arts a 501(c)(3) and all proceeds will be split with the participating artists.
There are many ways to support us:
- Get your tickets for the workshops, conference talks or nightlife event, see you at The Midway in June!
- Invite your friends or your teammates
- Join us a volunteer, we always need one more hand
- Support ART+TECH and become a sponsor. Contact us.
Thank you for supporting ART+TECH!!!



