Art Practice and Research in SIAT

In this talk SIAT professors Philippe Pasquier, Steve DiPaola and Niranjan Raja will discuss their approaches to art making as an insterdisciplinary practice within the School of Interactive Arts and Technology.

About our speakers:

Steve DiPaola

Steve DiPaola, active as an artist and a scientist, is a researcher at Simon Fraser University. Steve directs the I-Viz Lab which uses cognitive-based Artificial Intelligence techniques and computational modeling. He parallels a professional art career. He came to SFU from Stanford University and before that spent 10 years as a senior researcher at NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, an early pioneering lab in high-end 3D techniques. He has over 100 computer science-based publications patents and books and held senior positions at Electronic Arts and Saatchi & Saatchi Innovation. His artwork has been exhibited internationally including the A.I.R. Tenderpixel, and Tibor de Nagy galleries in NYC/London as well as museums MoMA, Tate, Whitney Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian. He co-curated the first computer art show in a major NYC gallery in 1988 and had one of the first one-man travel shows of his AI art.

Philippe Pasquier

Philippe Pasquier is a professor at Simon Fraser University's School for Interactive Arts and Technology, where he directs the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. Philippe leads a research-creation program around generative systems for creative tasks. As such, he is a scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, a multidisciplinary media artist, an educator, and a community builder. His contributions range from theoretical research on generative systems, computer-assisted creativity, multi-agent systems, machine learning, affective computing, and evaluation methodologies. This work is applied in the creative software industry as well as through artistic practice in computer music, interactive and generative art.

Philippe's artistic work has been shown in prominent venues on six continents, including at Ars Electronica (Austria), Centre Pompidou (France), Les Bains Numériques (France), Eastern Block (Canada), Earzoom festival (Slovenia), GMEA (France), IRCAM (France), ISEA2012 (Turkey), ISEA2014 (Dubai), ISEA2016 (Honk Kong), ISEA2017 (Columbia), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Mutek Festival (Canada), Plus One Gallery (USA), Space One (Korea), Sydney Biennale (Australia), Vooruit (Belgium), ZKM (Germany), ICST (Switzerland), and Akbank (Turkey). The Metacreation Lab research is being applied widely by the likes of Teenage Engineering, Steinberg, Generate, Elias, Spliqz, and Microsoft.

Along with the Metacreation Lab fellows, Philippe has co-authored over 180 peer-reviewed contributions presented in the most rigorous scientific venues. His MOOC class on Generative Art and Computational Creativity on the Kadenze platform has served thousands. To further advance the Creative AI community, Philippe instigated and chaired the International Workshop on Musical Metacreation (MUME) and the MUME concerts series, which led to the creation of the Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity. He also founded the International ACM Conference on Movement and Computation (MOCO), and was the director of the Vancouver edition of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA2015). Philippe is a Senior Program Committee member of the Joint International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). 

Philippe's projects are finding industrial applications in the creative industry at large and have gained support and recognition from more than 20 scientific or cultural institutions including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), MITACS, the Canadian Council for the Arts (CCA),  the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Australian Council for the Arts, the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, and the European Community.

More info on Philippe Pasquier's work:

Lab's PORTFOLIO (2019): https://metacreation.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/metacreation_300dpi_v08-jul9.pdf

More about the Metacreation Lab: http://www.Metacreation.net

More about Philippe: http://www.sfu.ca/pasquier

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philpass/

Niranjan Rajah

Niranjan Rajah is an artist, theorist and researcher at the School of Interactive Art and Technology, SFU. Niranjan’s The Failure of Marcel Duchamp/Japanese Fetish Even! (1996) is the first identified work of internet art in Southeast Asia. He co-founded E-Art ASEAN Online, 1999-2003, a pioneering regional electronic arts portal. Niranjan has presented in retrospectives including RELOCATIONS, ISEA Singapore, 2008; and Intersecting Histories, School of Art, Design and Media Gallery, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2012. His Koboi Project has been exhibited at Fergana Art, Penang, 2015; NVAG, 2016; Singapore Biennale 2016; Burning Man, Nevada, 2017; Kuala Lumpur Biennale 2017; Bangkok Biennial 2018; and Courtyard Hiroo, Tokyo, 2018. Recent Publications include -
The Koboi Project: diasporic Artist… diasporic Art in Interlaced Journeys, 2020 (pp129-150)  https://pcan.org.ph/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Interlaced-Journey_E-BOOK.pdf and Towards A Post-Traditional Gnoseology of Potentiality and Prediction: Preliminaries in A House Made of Dawn, 2021 https://www.sublimehorizons.ca/towards-a-post-traditional-gnoseology-of-potentiality-and-prediction-preliminaries/ 
Niranjan Blogs at https://koboiproject.com/