Metacreation Lab Newsletter | Summer 2020

Updated Website + Portfolio 

We have updated our presence on the web with a new design and user interface. Our archives of projects by the Metacreation Lab's researchers and have been transferred and expanded into this new space, and we invite you to have a look!

Last month, we also made updates to the Metacreation Lab’s portfolio of artistic works, which has now been expanded with documentation of new pieces from the lab’s researchers and artists. The two latest projects to be featured are Audio Metaphor and Translanguaging.

Jianyu Fan — PhD Thesis Presentation

We would like to congratulate Jianyu Fan with his Ph.D. defense. Jianyu is a researcher at Metacreation Lab, Simon Fraser University, whose research interests lie in the field of Affective Computing, Machine Listening, Human-Computer Interaction, and Computational Creativity.

Follow the link below to view Jiyanyu’s virtually-presented defence of his thesis, titled Advances in Soundscape and Music Emotion Recognition

Mirjana Prpa — Best Paper Award at CHI20

Mirjana Prpa, a PhD candidate and researcher with the Metacreation Lab, was a recipient of a Best Paper Award at CHI, which honour exceptional submissions to SIGCHI sponsored conferences.The award was for the paper titled Articulating Experience: Reflections from Experts Applying Micro-Phenomenology to Design Research in HCI.

A total of 31 Papers received a Best Paper award (top 1% of submissions), 125 papers received Honourable Mention (remaining top 5% of submissions).

The full list of papers and honorable mentions is available below.

ISEA2020 — New Dates — Metacreation Lab Publications

ISEA2020 will now take place between October 13—18 as an online electronic art symposium.

ISEA2020 will be fully dedicated to examining the resurgence of sentience—feeling-sensing-making sense—in recent art and design, media studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, anthropology, history of science and the natural scientific realm—notably biology, neuroscience and computing. We ask: why sentience? Why and how does sentience matter? Why have artists and scholars become interested in sensing and feeling beyond, with and around our strictly human bodies and selves? Why has this notion been brought to the fore in an array of disciplines in the 21st century.

We are pleased to announce that some of these questions were explored in the following papers by members of the Metacreation Lab, which have been accepted for publication as part of ISEA2020.

Liminal Scape: an interactive visual installation with expressive AI
Mahsoo Salimi, Nouf Abukhodair, Steve DiPaola, Carlos Castellanos, Philippe Pasquier

Chatterbox: an interactive system of gibberish agents
Ronald Boersen, Aaron Liu-Rosenbaum, Kivanç Tatar, Philippe Pasquier

Call for Papers: CSMC + MuMe:
2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity

We would like to take this opportunity to remind you that the call for papers for the 2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity is still open. The paper submission deadline is August 14, 2020.

The 2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity brings together for the first time two overlapping but distinct research forums: The Computer Simulation of Music Creativity conference (est. 2016), and The International Workshop on Musical Metacreation (est. 2012). The principal goal is to bring together scholars and artists interested in the virtual emulation of musical creativity and its use for music creation, and to provide an interdisciplinary platform to promote, present and discuss their work in scientific and artistic contexts.

ICCC20: Extended Deadline for Early Registration

The 11th International Conference on Computational Creativity this year will be an online workshop designed to support doctoral candidates in the field of computational creativity by providing them with opportunities to share their ongoing research, connect with peers and established researchers, and explore research questions. The organizers have made the decision to extend the early registration deadline to August 31st. 

Access the registration link below and visit the conference's website for more information. 

Call‌ ‌for‌ ‌Submissions:‌ ‌Art‌ ‌Machines‌ ‌2:‌ ‌International‌ ‌Symposium‌ ‌on‌ ‌Machine‌ ‌Learning‌ ‌and‌ ‌Art‌ ‌2021

The Art Machines 2 symposium will take place in 2021 between June 10th–13th at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. "Art Machines 2," will bring together Academics, Artists, and Professionals in the field of Computational Media Art in a four-day symposium on the topic of Machine Learning and Art.

The deadline for submissions is December 15th, 2020. For more details on the symposium and the wide range of Open Call topics and formats, click below.