Prof. Dr. Bill Seaman
Artist-in-Residence, Jacobs University/VisComX
Professor of Visual Studies, Duke University (USA)
http://billseaman.com/

Wednesday, 02 May 2012, 19:00
IRC Conference Room, Jacobs University

Prof. Dr. Bill Seaman is Jacobs University’s first visiting artist-in-residence, invited by the research center VisComX. In this guest lecture, he will give a retrospective overview of his groundbreaking works as an artist and media scholar. Seaman began as a video artist exploring poetic image/music/text relationships. Later Seaman created “navigable poems,” extensive non-linear poetic systems that each user could explore in a unique manner, weaving together poetic text, video images, stills and “recombinant” music that he composed. Seaman was interested in what he calls meta-meaning — works that would “point at” meaning production as it would arise and change through dynamic interaction.

In 1995 Seaman coined the term Recombinant Poetics. His PhD explored “Emergent Meaning in a Specific Generative Virtual Environment.” This was a shift of focus to the examination of many different kinds of poetic media elements in an emergent virtual world, created by the user of the system, again through dynamic interaction. More recently, Seaman has been focusing on generative artworks: projections in and on architecture, exploring “painterly” juxtaposition of media elements, texts and associative processes — “machinic” creativity. Seaman is also exploring media ecologies, works which “poetically” respond in an organism-like manner to the levels of computer use in particular environments.

Seaman’s most recent work explores notions surrounding Recombinant Informatics — creative approaches to insight production. His book Neosentience | The Benevolence Engine, written with scientist Otto Rössler, is a non-linear exploration of many concepts surrounding the history and future of artificial intelligence, learning systems, and the potential of creating autonomous robots. He has focused his conceptual art research while at Jacobs on the creation of an “Insight Engine,” as well as exploring aspects of the history of cybernetics and the Biological Computer Laboratory as a media researcher.

Click here for more information on Bill Seaman's guest lecture at Jacobs University.
Click here to visit Bill Seaman's homepage and see examples of his work.

Junior Fellows at Duke

(Photo courtesy of Duke University)

Congratulations to VisComX Junior Fellows Florian Wiencek, Mastewal Adane Mellese, Sabine Neumann, Lena Merhej, and Ronak Etemadpour (not pictured), who are spending a semester at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA, as part of a Duke-Jacobs collaborative international graduate education program in visual studies and the humanities. This new graduate education program will integrate existing projects into a larger international network of scholars, and simultaneously develop new graduate teaching and research programs among Duke University and Jacobs University. Click here for more.

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VisComX Overview

 

The Research Center VisComX provides both a platform for international scholarly communication and exchange and the organizational resources for conducting cutting-edge collaborative research as well as transdisciplinary postgraduate education. It is the Research Center’s intention to further transdisciplinary research and knowledge on visual communication and expertise, to contribute to the dissemination of this knowledge and to improve and enhance its application as well as to provide excellent training and education for the next generations of visual scholars.

We offer the MA program “Global Visual Communication” since 2007. As of Fall 2010 we also offer a PhD-Program “Visual Communication and Expertise”.

VisComX will be a nucleus of transdisciplinary research on visual communication processes in Europe and beyond. It will bridge basic and applied visual research that hitherto has been confined to the respective domains of the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, as well as computer science/ engineering, encompasses basic research as well as solution-oriented applications.

VisComX research is transdisciplinary, resting upon four core disciplinary pillars that structue the internal VisComX organization and guide our research foci: Communication Science/Media Studies as nexus discipline, connecting to art history, experimental psychology as well as computer science. A particular research area is connected with the expertise of each disciplinary pillar as part of the Visual Communication Cycle, encompassing processes relating to visual production, perception, interpretation as well as evaluation.

Please find more information about VisComX in the "VisComX Research Center Handbook".