Angelos Floros

Presented: ITP/IMA, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn — May 2, 2024, link

Hosted by Shawn Van Every, Chair and Professor, ITP/IMA

A talk given on returning to ITP after twenty-two years — this time as an affiliate rather than a student.
It opens with what the intervening years produced: bespoke interactive applications for museums and cultural organisations, from the Acropolis Museum to the National Archaeological Museum, from Epidaurus to Mycenae. Work in which technology and storytelling are integrated closely enough to change how a visitor meets an object.
Then the argument, which is about language.

Extending Meaning: The Impact of Technology on Language
Technology does not only give us new tools. It quietly rewrites the words we already had — communication, network, data, information, interface, interaction, new media — and each of them now means something it did not mean before.
Noise, in Shannon and Weaver, is what degrades a signal. In the arts it became material: John Cage made it deliberate, and glitch art built an aesthetic on it.
Networks divide into vertical and horizontal. The first emphasises centralised control and hierarchy, the second decentralisation and peer-to-peer collaboration — and the balance between them shapes power, decision-making and social relations wherever they appear.
Data is the alphanumeric value of a phenomenon. Information is the designed meaning we communicate using it.
Interfaces, in art, are the points where an audience meets the work — physical, digital, or multimodal.
Interaction turns the passive observer into an active participant, and blurs the line between the person who made the work and the person receiving it.
And new media brings McLuhan back, with a practical warning attached. McLuhan built the hot/cold distinction on the body and its senses. Which means: if a work is a high-definition video with narration, heavy interaction will damage it — the interaction becomes noise, and the viewer loses the thread. Let them interact minimally, and the narrative survives. The decision is not aesthetic. It is a matter of how much the medium is already asking of the body.

The talk then turns to open hardware and open software as artistic practice — openness, collaboration and accessibility as working conditions rather than ideology, and a challenge to authorship, ownership and control in how art gets made.

And it closes with the evidence: Kosmas 500 from the University of the Aegean, the six-week public Interfaces workshop at Dynamo Project Space, and student works — cCalendar by Antonis Lourantos, a calendar for all years without end; Soul Trap; Nevronas.

Along the way, a book: Keyboard Events: Architecture and Information, edited with Aaron Cohen, ITP alumnus of 2001, published in January 2012 to bring physical computing into Greek.