IN BETWEEN: CREATIVE VIRTUAL SPACE FOR COLLABORATION

In-Between is part of the Delphus project that first started in 2004 at Delphi. Those projects’ activities are characterized by the creation of a virtual environment which contributes to the development of research collaboration and artistic experimentation. The main goal of In Between project and all other projects under Delphus umbrella is an attempt to merge forms with ideological symbolism and metaphorical correlations.

In-Between incorporates efforts of yielding virtual forms with concepts and creates a unique and constantly evolving multimedia hypertext environment for interaction. It aims to create an experimental environment for research and communication based on simple or complex concepts.

Through the development of new forms, resulting from the combination of conceptual references to three-dimensional shapes or/and short video, the main purpose results to the discovery of new kind of tools. Their role is to contribute to a larger field, and lead to complex configurations and intellectual frameworks.
Borrowed from philosophy where ontology is the science of existence, being and reality in general, the term ontology in the digital world is a bridge between human interpretations of reality and what the computer can be read based on a common terminology.

Given that ontology is a set of definitions for terms that describe the external world, Delphus project seeks for new relationships among forms and conceptual references. The purpose is the development of experimental embodied forms that contribute to a renascent time-space continuum. Essential ingredients are creativity, imagination, randomness arising from the collective cooperation.

For the purpose of Delphus project the creation of ontologies, as intellectual embodied structures, can be opposed to social constraint while the whole project is open to improvisations and accidental game-like opportunities that lead to new adventures of creating symbolic worlds, structured by multimedia tools.

Dimitra Gounari PhD researcher

hi!

Minutes from ASFA team discussion about the project

In the last years we have been working jointly on the creation of a digital environment for artistic collaboration, creation and research.

Previous attempts (like, the Delphous, MySquare, and now the InBetween platforms [1], [2]) were initiated by our need to overcome reality imitation and create new relationships and expressive means in the digital space.

Despite the fact that we rejected social and ethical conventions (thus defining in this sense a “non space”) we still kept some of the fundamental physical principles of the real world (like ground, gravity, Euclidean geometry), and in some cases expressive tools borrowed by traditional Arts (e.g. painting, cinema) and computer games.

This year, triggered by our need to discover a new, autonomous language of expressing concepts in the digital “non space” – an indeed ambitious goal – we try to completely degrade both the space and our thoughts, and come out with basic elements (audiovisual materials, concepts) and basic structures (like in the molecules) that can be integrated in order to give an evolving environment.

We have been investigating the term ontology both from its philosophical perspective, and the engineering one.

In Philosophy, ontology [3] deals with the nature and organisation of reality, the Science of Being (Aristotle, Metaphysics, IV, 1). It tries to answer the questions:

· What characterizes being?

· Eventually, what is being?

The term ontology has also been adopted by Artificial Intelligence and recently by the Semantic Web terminology [4], for defining taxonomies of knowledge (which is machine interpretable!).

“The Semantic Web is not a separate web but an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in co-operation.“ [Berners-Lee et al., 2001]

Scientists of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering have defined the term ontology in many similar ways (you can check in [5])

Some of these definitions are:

· An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. (Gruber, 1993)

· Ontologies are defined as a formal specification of a shared conceptualization. (Borst, 1997).

· An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization (Studer and colleagues, 1998)

In any case, an ontology – in its scientific and not philosophical meaning – is a tool for formally and explicitly defining concepts and properties of the real world in such a way that they can be machine readable (not only human readable) and can be easily shared.

Generally, ontologies may be composed of the following elements:

Classes: Concepts of a field usually organized in a taxonomy (e.g. humans are such a class).

Properties: ears, legs, hands, etc (all humans have them)

Relations: A kind of interaction between concepts (e.g. subclass-of, is-a) (e.g. women are a subclass of humans)

Functions: The n-nth element of the relation is uniquely determined by the (n-1)-th elements (I can’t think of any right now – you can check [6] – “The Digital Human Ontology”)

Axioms: They represent clauses that are always true. (e.g. all humans die, a man and a woman is needed for reproduction)

Instances: Specific elements of a class (e.g. George, Mary, any of us)

The most currently known language for writing ontologies for the Semantic Web is the OWL [7]. But, there are many other ontology languages, targeting other fields of knowledge [8].

Ontology languages are usually declarative languages, and are commonly based on either First-Order logic [9] or on description logic for reasoning [10]. Reasoning is the process of validating that a certain piece of knowledge is consistent with the ontology.

More to come after out tomorrow meeting!

References

1. 7th IEEE International  Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies,

Towards  Defining a Suitable Environment for Teaching Digital Arts – 

The Delphous Experiment, 

Manthos Santorineos, Stavroula Zoi, Nefeli Dimitriadi, Chu-Yin Chen             

July 18-20, 2007, Niigata, Japan

2. The In-Between project – www.medialab.asfa.gr/inbetween

3. Ontology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

4. Semantic Web - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

5. Ontology scientific definitions - http://okeanos.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/what-is-an-ontology/

6. Digital Human Ontology - http://www.ercim.org/EU-NSF/DIGHUM.pdf

7. OWL - http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/

8. Ontology languages - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_language

9. First Order Logic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic)

10. Reasoning - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason

IN BETWEEN PROJECT IN ( MIDEN FESTIVAL ) KALAMATA

Manthos Santorineos has been invited by the creative team of Video Art Festival Miden in Kalamata, to lead a workshop in the context of Urban (R)evolutions, a project realized by Festival Miden this year.

A week before Festival Miden 2009 annual screenings in Kalamata’s Historic Centre, this introductory seminar, which has more the form of a meeting with young artists and creative youngsters of Kalamata, will set the basis for a continuing collaboration for a future project, organized by Sea Level (the non-profit organization that runs Festival Miden) entitled “Dreaming of my city: an open social web action for art and culture in urban environment”. The project will extend “Urban (R)evolutions”, which begun as a collective video and images screening, to a wider communication platform for urban environment on the web.

In this context, Manthos Santorineos and Voula Zoi will make an introduction to the IN BETWEEN PROJECT. The participants of the workshop will create new entries to the In-Between project, which is a collaborative project for the creation of multicultural virtual neighborhoods on the Web.

IN BETWEEN PROJECT started as an initiative of the Multimedia - Hypermedia Lab of the Athens School of Fine Arts, and has gradually become an open platform for artistic experimentation, including participants from different Universities. The participants can insert an audiovisual description of their house, different audiovisual elements as well as other information, to the dynamic database and their house automatically becomes member of the endless neighborhood.

The introductory presentation and the workshop will take place at the Environmental Training Center of Kalamata, from 4 to 6 of July.

For more information
http://www.festivalmiden.gr
info@festivalmiden.gr
msantori@otenet.gr

X dimensions

Hypercubes and Plato's Cave - The best video clips are right here

before internet

Some Useful Links and Ideas (Part I)

• MOMA Interactive - http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/



• Social Collider - http://socialcollider.net/



• Social Collider (Concept -discussion)
  http://postspectacular.com/process/20090320_socialcollider

the project

Delphus project 09 : IN BETWEEN www.medialab.asfa.gr/InBetween/
A Socrates-Erasmus Intensive Programme (9 - 21 July 2009) in Delphi.

This is the fourth meeting between Art Schools (Athens School of Fine Arts, multimedia lab / Department art and Technology of the Image, University Paris 8 / Master Artes Visuales y Multimedia of University of Valencia) /ERSEP Ecole Régionale Supérieure d’Expression Plastique Tourcoing ) and its main goal is the development of a virtual space suitable for artistic education, collaboration and research.

The main purpose of our efforts up to now has been a virtual space that is not a copy of reality, as most of existing virtual spaces. In this way, we will avoid restricting constraints, resulting in a space open to any kind of mental adventure or to the discovery of new concepts or actions that result from experimental audiovisual creation, creation of synthetic 3D images and original programming procedures.

Towards this end, we are avoiding to use conventional structures like earth ground and laws governing it (e.g. gravity or wall collisions), or social conventions (e.g. the recreation of existing urbanisms or architectures).

The subjects of the previous seminars were: (for more information you can visit www.medialab.asfa.gr -> projects)

A. WithoutWords project: research for an international non-verbal language (Delphi, July 2005)

B. ATELIE « Art etTEchnologie pour une Langue InternationallE »
Programme Intensive SOCRATES-ERASMUS (Delphi, July 2007)

C. IN-BETWEEN – The In-Between project is a collaborative project for the creation of multicultural virtual neighborhoods on the Web. It started as an initiative of the Multimedia - Hypermedia Lab of the Athens School of Fine Arts, and has gradually become an open platform for artistic experimentation, including participants from different Universities (see link participants). The participants can insert an audiovisual description of their house, different audiovisual elements as well as other information, to the dynamic database and their house automatically becomes member of the endless neighborhood Moreover, some of the participants have used the InBetween platform as an environment for artistic experimentation, thus resulting in different conceptual levels. (Athens School of Fine Arts 2007 – 2009 / Phd of Nefeli Dimitriadi at University Paris 8 )


D. MYSQUARE – (is a new level of IN-BETWEEN platform) a virtual square on the network – creation of a multicultural space on the network - Université Européenne d’Eté (Paris, July 2008)

Ε. The activity is continuing with the seminar of this year (July 2009), through the Intensive Programme SOCRATES-ERASMUS

This year seminar, which will be the continuation of the Université Européenne d’Eté 2008, will have as its main objective the completion and upgrade of the MySquare platform.

Other collaborations – activities

Link with UTOPIA PROJECT EXPERIMENTATION AND RESEARCH IN CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PRACTICES
www.utopiaproject2009.blogspot.com/
Workshop in Rethymno, Crete
6th Painting Studio ASFA (Athens School of Fine Arts)
Organizer-Facilitator: Vassilis Vlastaras

Seminar at Digital Studios, Goldsmiths University (www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/gds/)
February 09 and future collaboration at Delphus 10 ( next July 2010)

Seminar and artistic activities with IN BETWEEN platform in MIDEN FESTIVAL www.festivalmiden.gr/taftotita_eng.html at Kalamata town. 3 – 6 July 2009

Seminar at Master Informatique, Synthese d’images et conception graphique
of TEI – University of Limoges

Mavromichali street , a project of Giorgos Chloros and Anastasia Melekou ( collaboration of Department of Plastic Arts and Art Sciences, University of Ioannina (arts.uoi.gr/) and Fournos Centre for Digital culture (www.fournos-culture.gr) 2008

You can Participate / go to www.medialab.asfa.gr/InBetween/

- Any web visitor can freely navigate inside the virtual neighborhood and explore the different levels.
- Inhabitants are those who add their house and personal information to the global database of the In-Between virtual neighborhood. To become inhabitant, please contact Manthos Santorineos (msantori@otenet.gr) in order to get a user name and a password. Then, you can fill in the relevant form in order to upload your data to the virtual neighborhood, based on the specifications described there in.
- Experimenters can propose their own conceptual level to the In-Between database. To become experimenter, please contact also Manthos Santorineos (msantori@otenet.gr).