Sustainable Tranformations Seminar Day October 17Th, 2019

CENTRE FOR FINE ARTS BRUSSELS OCTOBER 17TH, 2019 SUSTAINABLE TRANFORMATIONS SEMINAR DAY EXPLORING THE ARTS AND CREATIVITY IN STIMULATING INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGIES WITH A HUMAN TOUCH PALAIS DES BEAUX-ARTS BRUXELLES PALEIS VOOR SCHONE KUNSTEN BRUSSEL PUBLIC SESSION 09:00 T1 Welcoming with coffee 10:00 T2 Technology-assisted Creativity: from Human to Post-Human Opening by policy representatives and keynotes by Aalto University and STARTS speakers 1/Decoding Boundaries Between the Built and Unbuilt: Human Interaction for Resilient Urban Environments Pia Fricker, Professor for Computational Methodologies in Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, Aalto University 2/Co-Creating the Other with Digital Musical Instruments Koray Tahiroğlu, Sound and Physical Interaction - SOPI research group, Aalto University 3/Four Keywords for Creative Approaches Laura Beloff, Associate Professor in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art, Aalto University 4/Art-driven Adaptive Outdoors and Indoors Design: Introduction of Mindspaces Open Call Béatrice de Gelder, Professor at Maastricht University in The Netherlands and director of the Brain and Emotion Lab Moderator: Teri Schultz SPECIALIST SESSION (FOR REGISTERED PARTICIPANTS) 12:00 T1 Lunch Break 13:30 T2 Workshop: Speculative Thinking on Future Wearables Facilitator: artist Claire Williams Co-facilitators: Eva Durall (Aalto University, Learning Environments Research Group) and Ann Peeters (SEAD, A network of Space Ecologies Art and Design) 15:30 T1 Coffee break 16:00 T2 Panel Discussion Sustainable Transformations Panel discussion with participants invited by Aalto University, BOZAR Lab, and STARTS 18:30 T1 Networking Dinner Networking dinner at BOZAR, followed by a concert programme CONCERTS 20:00 HLB Eric Ericson Chamber Choir 20:30 M TEITUR T1, T2, T3: Terarken 1, Terarken 2, Terarken 3 HLB: Henry Le Boeuf Hall M: Hall M PROGRAMME THE SEMINAR IS PART OF A CULTURAL EVENTS PROGRAMME MARKING FIN- LAND’S PRESIDENCY OF THE COUNCIL OF THE EU. IT IS CO-ORGANISED BY AAL- TO UNIVERSITY, THE STARTS INITIATIVE OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION, AND BOZAR. THE TERM ‘SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT’ (SD) MAY CONCEAL A CONTRADIC- TION, IF DEVELOPMENT IS TAKEN TO MEAN MERE EXPANSION. THE CRITICAL CHALLENGE FOR POLICIES FOSTERING SUSTAINABILITY IS TO TRANSCEND A NARROW FOCUS ON INNOVATION MOTIVATED ONLY BY GROWTH. TO RESPOND TO COMPLEX CHALLENGES, MAJOR CHANGES IN THE MINDSETS OF THE ACTORS ARE NEEDED — TOWARDS A TRANSDISCIPLINARITY THAT CLOSES THE GAP BETWEEN DIFFERENT MODES OF THINKING, NEW RESPONSIBLE SOCIAL PRACTICES THAT HELP IMPROVE THE ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN HUMAN BEINGS AND TECHNOLOGY, AND REVISED AP- PROACHES TO CULTURED URBAN AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS. IN THE CON- TEXT OF THESE URGENT ISSUES AND SD GOALS, THE SEMINAR DAY WILL FOCUS ON THE GROWING NEED FOR AN ALLI- ANCE BETWEEN NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND THE ARTS TO ENSURE THAT THE NEXT GENERATION OF TECHNOLOGIES CAN MAKE LIFE ON THE PLANET BETTER. KEYNOTES Technology-assisted Creativity: from Human to Post-Human Opening by policy representatives and keynotes by Aalto University and STARTS speakers. The current political, economic and technological models of modern urban planning are at the end of their tether. Cities around the globe are facing the urgency to respond to current environmental and societal issues (such as global warming, migrations, waste production, mass consumption, disparities in wealth, unemployment, demographic shifts, etc.). While digital technologies can help cities to function better, for them to really enrich the quality of living of citizens, they need to become more focused on the human dimension and must help reconcile humans and nature. Here the role of the arts will be crucial, and speakers from Aalto University and the EC STARTS program will share their experience in bridging technologies and creativity to create social and ecological innovation. How can we appropriate technology to come up with different futures? It is, ultimately, about the human understanding of aesthetics and decision-making. 1/ Decoding Boundaries Between the Built and Unbuilt: Human Interaction for Resil- ient Urban Environments It is time for critical reflection as we entered the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, oversaturated as it is with the diversity and arbitrariness of digital media and rapidly evolving smart city technology. We are at a crossroads: conventional ways of city planning are inevitably coming to their end, while increasingly complex challenges require a new approach in the fields of urban and landscape design. This calls for rethinking the relationship between ‘smart solutions’, citizens and the environment. Understanding the city as a complex system with wicked problems opens up possibilities to envision a new trajectory – one that features a creative inte- gration of technology and computational design methods, and that can come up with solutions that are both visionary and sustainable. While relating her talk to the topic of human-digital interaction, Pia Fricker will present her research and the educational methods that she uses in her courses on ‘new urban landscapes’. Pia Fricker, Professor for Computational Methodolo- gies in Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, Aalto University 2/ Co-Creating the Other with Digital Musi- cal Instruments Koray Tahiroğlu will introduce the current research of his digital musical instruments (DMIs) group, in which autonomous and intelligent computational features are applied to music generation with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Tahiroğlu argues that these advanced intelligence features bring in independent decision-making technology into our relationship with musical instruments with a sense of interacting with ‘something other than me’. This alterity relations with DMIs (Ihde 1990) contribute in positive ways to the arts that are co-created with machine learning and AI. Koray Tahiroğlu, Sound and Physical Interaction - SOPI research group, Aalto University 3/ Four Keywords for Creative Approaches Our society and economy are based primarily on the actions of people that execute strategies and get things done. However, economically driven ideas and frameworks may not always speak to artists and scientists who are motivated by curiosity, not necessarily economic profit. The creativity charac- teristic of the artist’s studio is based on experimen- tation, trial and error, inspiration, play and invention. Often, this is carried out without any of the verifi- cation procedures that are expected of the empir- ical sciences. Creative people often are divergent thinkers who expand the horizon of possibilities. The curiosity that drives our interests and investigations is also typically coupled with uncertainty and risk. Interesting potential opens up when those who work creatively and those who follow rigorous plans are brought together: it is, after all, about capacity of doing something, and potential impact that this action will have on society and on the world. Laura Beloff’s presentation’s premise is that we should not push only the frontiers of art, but also those of science, technology and societal expecta- tions. Her talk will include examples of projects that introduce transdisciplinary approaches and methods across the arts, sciences and technology. Laura Beloff, Associate Professor in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art, Aalto University 4/ Art-driven Adaptive Outdoors and In- doors Design: Introduction of Mindspaces Open Call MindSpaces is a 3-year research project financed by the European Commission STARTS/Lighthouse programme started on Jan 1th 2019. To encourage collaboration of research projects and artists STARTS funds ‘STARTS residencies’ of artists in technology institutions and of scientists and technologists in studio of artists. In this project, artists, scientists, architects, engineers and technology experts closely collaborate under a novel working model scheme to propose innovative designs to address societal challenges faced by cities as they expand, and the evolving needs in functionality and emotional resonance of modern day workplace and housing interiors. Art has the capacity to transcend estab- lished theoretical and conceptual frames and act in cross-disciplinary ways, as it provides space for what is called as ‘lateral’ thinking, that is to address issues with an ‘out of the box’ approach. Béatrice de Gelder, Professor in Visual Professor at Maastricht University in The Netherlands and director of the Brain and Emotion Lab WORKSHOP AND PANEL DISCUSSION BOZAR Lab and Aalto University, together with the EC STARTS programme have invited citizens, researchers and representatives of industry to a workshop and panel discussion to team up with artists and design researchers in creating future sce- narios for wearable technology. Forecasts, models and fictions of the future excite our hopes and fears, weaving into the mix unfolding fantasies and extrap- olations. Panel participants will reflect on the way images and ideas about the future influence both individual and collective actions in the present. ABOUT Sustainable Transformations is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, via the Regional STARTS Centers project, in partnership with Aalto University (Espoo, FIN). About Regional STARTS Centers Between 2019 and 2020, this European network of urban arts & innovation incubation centres will support a series of networking events and seed activities around the interactions between science, technology and the arts as part of the

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