The first part of this article aims to bring forward changes in manufacturing industry starting from the Industrial Revolution up to the today’s tendencies towards one-person industries. The phenomena of Fab Labs and open hardware are also discussed, while underlining the absence of textile fabrication.

Through several case studies, examples, and detailed technical modification of an obsolete electronic knitting machine, we aim to demonstrate the efficiency and future possibilities for applying a knitting machine in the field of personal manufacturing and desktop fabrication.

It is well known that a cross-modal perception of auditory and visual stimuli does not equal a mere summation of individual auditory and visual perceptions. As with the Gesamtgestalt of the perceptual mechanism, sounds are not apprehended individually, but shaped as a Tongestalt, in which auditory and visual stimuli are combined audio-visually, similarly to the perception of auditory apparent motion.

In recent scientific research, audio-visual perception has been usually conceptualised in relation to synaesthesia. However, the notion of synaesthesia refers to individual nerve structures, which do not encompass the implications of Gesamtgestalt. In fact, the latter describes a selective sensory property within the perceptual process, which can be observed in every human being. Recent neurobiological studies seem to underline the universality or non-individuality of cross modal perception. Therefore, we are looking for an alternative hypothesis that explains what happens, when auditory and visual stimuli are perceived at once.

Naturally, it is easy to conduct a perceptual study that records what is shown [input] on the one hand and what is perceived

In the case of motion, perception follows a horizontal timeline according to the physical continuity of motion. However, sound features a physical continuity as well: It moves both on the horizontal and the vertical timeline. While listening to music, the audience follows automatically, but the brain perceives the structure of music congruently in temporal and constitutive in non-temporal. Also, each sounds, articulation, melody and rhythm are is perceived in relation to a prior and consequent element of the same structure. This, in turn, indicates that during the experience of music our senses enter another world, where present, past and future coexist simultaneously, which further complicates our understanding of audio-visual perception and the ruling mechanism behind it.

All of this leads to the question of how to figure the Gesamtgestalt of perception. In our approach we focus on the cutting point of audio-visual perception and try to embody a cross-modal Gesamtgestalt that links sound (=tone) and vision (=motion) in the perceptual process. In this context, the art-machine “Visible Canon” is conceived of as an experimental device for the exploration of audio-visual perception.

The machine looks like a rolling ball structure that plays music and works like a three-dimensional chart. It plays three tracks of various Canons, including Johan Pachelbel’s Canon, and displays the kinetic movement of an iron ball at the same time. Through the combination of the auditory and the visual structure of the canon the uncertainty and complementary relation of the stimuli calls up the Gesamtgestalt of audio-visual perception.

In the case of Pachelbel’s Canon, it might be less important to envision its structure visually and kinetically at the same time, since it will be perceived automatically as rhythm and melody. However, if a Canon has a more complicated composition, rhythm and melody cannot be followed as easily; in the process, the visual information provides the viewing audience with a powerful key to the understanding the underlying structure of the Canon on the basis of the cross-modal Gesamtgestalt.

With the above method we endeavour to embody the Gesamtgestalt of audio-visual perception. At the same time we have explored the new role of art in modern sciences that provides an experimental device able to overcome the shortcomings of the classical methods.

The dynamic, diverse structure of a protein consists of amino acid sequences, quite widespread in the Universe. When X-rayed, it reveals its atomic arrangement, which could serve as a map of a starry sky. Its folding topology, on the other hand, reminds of mysterious geometric formations called “Calabi-Yau manifolds” in which, according to the superstring theory, successive dimensions of our world are “curled up” on a subatomic scale.

In our daily perception we live in a 4-dimensional world but we suspect that it might be a simplified illusion and our relationship with the reality may remain much more subtle than what our senses offer us to believe. The question appears: what kind of tools and methods can we can use in order to comprehend how we exist in the multidimensional Universe? How can we reach it with our minds, “narrowed down” to 4D and understand what does it mean to live in a multidimensional universe?

Can a protein molecule serve as a key to investigate these questions?

Human Genome Project revealed that the number of genes is much smaller than proteins they code. While human genome is made of around 22 thousand genes, human proteom contains around 400 thousand proteins. Each of them, different in its form and functions, reminds us that we ourselves are involved in the obscure matter of the Universe that we only started to discover.

I base my reflections on my art projects realized with the support of International Centre of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in New Delhi and National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India as well as Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology University of Poznań in Poland. In these projects I bride scientific and cultural imageries, translating scientific ideas into the area of art as a source of personal and collective consciousness and invite intuitive examination of the unfathomable nature of our reality.

The author’s artistic practice evolves around the notions of a human, technology, and human relation to her environment and the world when both human and the environment are artificially modified. In this paper the author investigates specifically the relationship between a human and her environment through presenting three recent art works: A Unit, Evidence and Appendix. These three works share similar notions on human as an organism compiled of complex network of connections, and reference Gregory Bateson’s argument that organism + environment is the unit of survival (Bateson 1978 [1969]). However, in the described example cases the situation is intervened by artificially constructed and modified components.

The author proposes that these kinds of speculative approaches that are allowed in art & design, and which offer us new potential scenarios about the future, also help us collectively share, evaluate and construct the desired futures.

From the roots of DIY Culture, to the core of contemporary History, from Myth and Storytelling to pure. Facts, somewhere between a found objects sculpture and a Network Art experiment, Maiitsoh questions the man-machine relationship in an historical, sociological and artistic way, offering the public and users a challenging, playful, aesthetical and multimedia experience. The corpus of interviews includes one hour or more long interviews with Noam Chomsky, Fons Elders, William Gibson and Jeremy Narby, to name a few. Furthermore the Maiitsoh project works at some levels as a meta-meme, specifically in it’s particular design and ways of being exhibited that makes it an icon of the open-source culture, a statement about contemporary History and Computer History and a mindset proposal for trans-civilizational cultural production and preservation.

Adopting a syncretic approach, the perspective of my artistic and more global Research is based on a traditional Aikido sword exercise called Happo-giri , or “to cut in eight directions”. This shape got in my point of view a symbolical connection with the Buddhist wheel or Dharmachakra. I extend my perspective to contemporary practices, and in a more trans-disciplinary perspective the aims of the research is to analyse and theorize the implication (at environmental and various other level) of any industrialization and globalization of traditional and therefore “ultra local” linked practices or “habits”, and their impacts on the mental and natural environment at a planetary scale. With a focus on particular cases studies inside and outside of my personal body of work and research protocols, I will develop in this paper my personal perspectives on bi-cognitivism, ultra-locality and a contemporary look at Craftsmanship (traditional & modern) as an educational , cognitive and knowledge enhancing tool suitable for a sustainable future.

Experimenting with the recycling life, waste, composting, the bio-symbiosis of growing, sunning, observation of plant behavior and movement, I explore the ideas laid out in Dick’s story through my own experiments and other artists.

For the most part environmental actions have failed us. Tactics of identification have somewhat changed the dynamic of meat consumption in the US. But there is a disregard for plant life with a lack of biodiversity, and genetically modified plants commonly accepted. The consideration of plant life and the development of empathy for plants encourages an identification – perhaps a ‘tactic of care’ worth exploring.

The talk will address the questions at the heart of this project. Is the visual aspect of Wikipedia so lacking and dated because it could only use freely licensed images? Or is it that images have to become “historical” to become removed, objective, factual, and therefore applicable to the Wikipedia guidelines? Is the Wikipedia project really inviting visual artists to contribute their work to the commons? Or is visual work inherently less collaborative? As the project evolves it exposes the myths and biases behind these questions and reveals the surprising and complicated dynamics of open culture.