This year’s RIXC Art Science festival with the title Symbiotic Sense(s) took place from October 23-25, 2024, in Riga, Latvia, exploring art, technology, and collective intelligence from the perspective of sensual perception and extended cognition. The festival, positioned at the intersection of symbiotic art aesthetics and visionary scientific paradigms, aims to embrace symbiotic thinking, based on a close collaboration between nature and culture, combining individual responsibility with collective action towards a more symbiotic future.
In a keynote at the start of the festival, artist and researcher Rosemary Lee will presented her research published in the book ‘Algorithm, Image, Art’ , while her workshop invited artists to consider theoretically and practically how early applications of algorithms in image-making have influenced contemporary cultural practices with technology, as well as to reflect on the role of new technology in their artistic practice.
On thursday, October 25, 2024, from 10:30, at the Neiburgs Hotel, Rosemary Lee did a deep dive into her book Algorithm, Image, Art, expanding from her keynote at the start of the festival. It situated current artistic practice with AI in relation to the historical context behind algorithmic visual media. This includes looking at how emerging cultural practices with technology have been shaped by earlier methods of applying algorithms to the production of images. Participants looked at the implications of formulating images algorithmically, from instructional methods to the embedding of geometric and optical relations into flat images, to the questioning of authorship brought about by the advent of photography and relationships between human vision and the highly automated forms of image-making performed by machines. Elaborating on this through participatory exercises, workshop participants worked together to reflect on what role emerging technologies play in their own practice.