ICIDS 2024
2-6th
of December
of December
Barranquilla,
Colombia
Our exhibition STREAMS ~ CORRIENTES draws upon our connection to water bodies and their close relationship to our lives as evoked by the waters that flow around Barranquilla, Colombia.
Inspiring artists like the fountain of Xanadu, water is an infinitely mutable metaphor of constancy and irreversible change. These collected works reflect on water as it shapes our world and as it is reshaped by human-caused climate change along with currents of data, ideas, code, and people; streams of memory and history; and surges of defiance and resistance to injustice, opposing the prevailing currents of wealth and power. Whether exploring visual, textual, aural, or embodied or haptic dimensions, the works of the exhibition include VR, interactive fiction, algorithmic generation, and immersive digital experiences from artists worldwide. In an outpouring of creative expression, these innovative works use novel and reappropriated interfaces to explore new directions in interactive digital storytelling.
Jennifer Davenport, Aster Meyer, Professor Josh Fisher (build)/James Davenport, Alex Davenport (voice actors)
Cosmic Waters
Cosmic Waters is a transmedia game set in a world submerged after the polar ice caps melt. Players choose sides—Water Bandits or Space Pirates—for unique, replay-worthy experiences.
Alan Bigelow
My Summer Vacation
"My Summer Vacation" is about the drowning death of a young boy at a summer resort. Each of the five narratives is realized not just visually, but also by accompanying original voice-overs. The sounds of ocean waves crashing on the shore add to the interplay of voice and image to create a sense not just of geographical, but emotional space.
Robert A. Emmons Jr.
Palimpsest
Palimpsest is an interactive documentary that traces childhood fear and anxiety from the Cold War to school shootings in America, along the way connecting Archimedes, Choose Your Adventure books, Baseball, Ray Bradbury, Charles Dickens, Peter Pan, and Turtles. Palimpsest scrapes at this messy history in an attempt to reveal causes and solutions for one of America's greatest public health epidemics.
Mez Breeze
Humidcity
"Humidcity" is an interactive digital narrative reimagined in 2024, originally conceived to celebrate Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Using Mezangelle - a fusion of poetic language, programming code, and internet communication - the work invites readers to shape the story through click-unfurling. This transforms the text into a mosaic of meanings, exploring the experience of an imagined rain-soaked city.
Jedidjah Julia Noomen (creative director, writer)
Last One Standing
You enter a room. There is a mobile phone, and a list of names. Who will you call? Last One Standing is a 20 minute site-specific theatrical experience for one person at a time. It is a project that aims to connect people and offer innovative immersive storytelling to everyone, whether they are experienced art/theatre consumers or not. A combination of live action and simple digital elements makes this an experience that will stay with the audience even after they go home.
Ash Eliza Smith and Robert Twomey
Fish Phone Bath
Fish Phone Bath invites participants into a contemplative, immersive sound bath connecting human and ocean life through interactive audio and AI. Blending scientific data and speculative design, the piece allows users to experience underwater acoustics and explore interspecies connections. By engaging with fish behavior and ocean sounds, participants reflect on our shared intersubjectivity across species and environments.
Vincent Morisset, Sean Michaels, Caroline Robert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit
Motto
Motto is a playful, one-of-a-kind adventure—an interactive novella that uses thousands of tiny videos to tell the thousand-year tale of a kindhearted spirit named September. Part ghost story, part scavenger hunt, Motto finds a way to be both documentary and fiction—incorporating participants’ lo-fi, unstaged footage into its own emotional narrative. It’s like a mirror ball that refracts its audience’s imaginations, rearranging the way they look at the world. Discover its six chapters at your own pace—inside your home or out in the world, with your phone in your hand.
Rafaela Nunes, Andrés Isaza-Giraldo, Paulo Bala, Rafaela Nunes, Terhi Marttila
Being Water
In this interactive piece, we propose imagining how it feels to be water. By thinking about its perspective as waterbeings, we explore a speculative view of water as a speaking and feeling agent through a hypothetical post-human vision of its thoughts — by being water.
María Mencía and women community groups of la Ruta Pacífica and Zoscua and research group presented on the documentary website.
Invisible Voices: Women Victims of the Colombian Conflict
The project connects with the key concepts of flow, movement, and transformation, particularly through its approach to storytelling and digital interaction. It captures the flow of emotion and information by collecting personal stories from women affected by the Colombian conflict. These stories flow through digital layers, including personal and collective memories, political activism, and storytelling.
Milagros Vilaplana and Todd Ross
Border Waters
How can you plug up the deluge of a rainstorm? Spillover of the watershed into the Tijuana Estuary is an allegory for the issue of human migrants seeking asylum from Mexico into the U.S. And the field of electronic eco-poetry with its computer screen landscape and software technology can explore the multiple, natural and geopolitical concerns of this precarious region.
Jolene Armstrong and Hendrick deHaan
Slava Ukraini
Slava Ukraini is a meditation on the disruption to Ukrainian culture and sovereignty caused by the 2022 full scale Russian invasion. The piece plays with tradition and cultural practices as a kind of metaphorical stream, an imaginative river that carries the language, values, and traditions through the generations and hardships, while representing the horrors of war through spatialized sound.
Vincent Morisset, Caroline Robert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit, Philippe Lambert
Way to Go
Using hand-made animation, music, 360° capture and webGL sorcery, Way to Go imagines a dream-world of journeys. Walk, run, fly; crouch in the grass and remember what's hidden all around. Way to Go is a small experience that gets bigger as you uncover it. Set out, in deliberate lucid looking and you'll find, perhaps, the present.
Caroline Robert, Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit, Mathieu Charbonneau, Vincent Morisset
Brainstream
What if all the energy we spent on our screens every day could be turned into something useful? In Brainstream, the simple act of swiping a finger on a screen has a concrete and positive effect on D. Our movements, combined with those of other participants, generate powerful energy, which she experiences in real time as flowing serotonin—the happiness hormone. We massage D.’s brain, relaxing her neurons and helping her open up new cognitive pathways. We experience D.’s thoughts visually through animation, capturing a constant and continuously changing electric flow. A close, intimate relationship and a feeling of solidarity forms between participants and D., as we awaken her memories, see how she reacts, and go down forgotten or unexplored paths.
Monique Tschofen
Careless Water | Streams of (Artificial) Thought
Set near the river Seine at one of the originary locations of modernism, Careless Water explores the confluences of ideas, and the flows of perception and thinking itself. These works rendering an artificial consciousness in action wrestling with a language practice designed to show a human mind in action are part of a larger project that uses AIs to investigate Gertrude Stein’s poetics and, reciprocally, uses Stein's poetics to investigate AIs.
Irene Lema
El Beat
EL BEAT is a cross-platform narrative consisting of a VR experience, an interactive documentary and a linear film. It unfolds the story of Benkos Biohó, an enslaved African and founder of the first free town in the colonial Americas, and the story of his descendants, the people of Palenque. It is a tribute to the African diaspora and the Black Power of Latin America.
Vivian Hernández Ramírez
Sonic Cartography
In a performative act, her body, the water, a self-made interface and the glass vessels work simultaneously as containers and mediators of the river story. The sound pieces and the water are both contained in the vessels waiting to be touched by the performer to take part in the storytelling. The artist developed a sound piece created in collaboration with her body, field recordings of the territory, and the Llobregat river. These items later transformed into a 40 minute performance and a collective listening setup.
Elder tobar
Códice futuro
Códice Futuro is a multiplatform project of Transmedia Narratives that seeks to explore and propose other visions of the future through laboratories, illustrations and stories that make up a multiplatform narrative.
It takes as a starting point the ancestral futurism or indigenous futurism to expand from there a series of stories that allow us to observe other forms of temporal perception and our visions of the future.
Thanks to our jury
Michael Russo | Edgar Plata Chacon | Toni Celia | Anna Nacher | Erika Fülöp | Vinícius Carvalho Pereira | Itoro Bassey | Astrid Ensslin
This year, the exhibition will take place at Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia, in conjunction with ICIDS 2024 conference. The exhibition runs from 3-6 December, with the online opening on December 2nd and on-site opening taking place on December 3th (GMT) at the MAPUKA museum.
Art exhibition chairs:
Gabriela Muñoz Barrios
gabrielab@uninorte.edu.co
Mark C. Marino
mcmarino@usc.edu