NTNU, Gløshaugen university campus
Sem Saelands vei 7-9, room IT-454, 4th floor IDI
Thursday, October 12th the Department of Computer and Information Science at NTNU -The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, hosts a lecture and workshop with Anna Notaro, about software art.

12.15 - 16.00 Digital Authorship by Anna Notaro
The music industry has for a long time been using techniques of sampling and re-mixing. New media has accelerated the effect and the possibility of sampling not just from music but from many other digital sources such as images, videos, texts, source codes, software etc. Today, in many cases, it is difficult to clearly identify an author. Rather, we see emerging a system of multiple, hybridized, collective authorship. This lecture examines alterations in authorship brought about by new digital technology across different media (print, cinema, video games) in order to answer the following question: is cyberspace an occasion of strengthening, restructuring or abandoning of authorship?

Software art by Letizia Jaccheri and NTNU master students
Art finds expression in numerous products in society, where developments of products are complex, competitive, global and intercultural in scope. The advent of multi media technology has changed art production processes and the way art both music, video, and figurative is fruited by consumers. Our hypothesis is that the interaction between technology, in general and software technology in particular and art is also beneficial for the software technologists.

Art and computer science have been in contact since the sixties. In 1970, Sakky Yeates Sedelow in her visionary paper summarizes and elaborates the requirements that humanities and fine arts pose on computer research and vice versa. Knuth in his award lecture, when he received the ACM Turing Award in 1974, addressed the topic of Computer Programming as an Art and provides an overview of the concept of art and its role in science and computer programming. Software art is defined as works of art where software, or concepts from software, play an important role; for example software applications which were created by artists and which were intended as artworks. According to this source, software art is closely related to Internet art since it heavily relies on the Internet, most notably the World Wide Web, for dissemination and critical discussion of the works.

More recently, artists have used new media technology have been working with researchers who often use the same media with the goal of stimulating interesting art and new scientific innovations, for example through the program at Xerox interdisciplinary artist in residence program at Palo Alto. Other well established research programs include the MIT Media Lab www.media.mit.edu, or the Swedish Interactive Institute http://w3.tii.se/. Scene.org www.scene.org is a non-profit organization aimed at providing the ‘electronic art scene’ with a forum for communication and for sharing their work.

This workshop will be open to everybody. The discussion will address the role of scientific literature in software art.