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LIVE INTERFACES journal (Univ. Lusófona/ CICANT) ISSN 2975-9943

The SECOND EDITION features three media-rich contributions focused on sound art performance, interactive installation, and automated video editing. They reveal distinct interpretations of liveness and creativity, contrasting sharply with one another in terms of motivations, methods and modes of discussion. Yet, ultimately we can also extract an overarching theme: interfaces that transcend personal control.

This common ground invites the reader-viewer-listener to reflect on a series of fundamental questions. What defines liveness? How are flow and expression realised? Where do creativity and authorship reside? And what roles do interfaces play in these processes? These are ongoing, open questions, given the wealth of existing approaches and interpretations. Interrogations are Live Interfaces’ reason-to-be.

The FIRST EDITION gathers theoretical and media-rich contributions, which interrogate the meanings of ‘liveness’ and ‘mediation’ in quite different ways. In consonance with the cross-disciplinary spirit of the journal, these investigations reveal fuzzy thresholds between material and imaterial, entropy and negentropy, self and other.

Media-rich Proceedings of the International Conference on Live Interfaces 2022, ed. Adriana Sá, Lusofona University, 2022.

ICLI 2022 offered the opportunity to investigate how different understandings of performance technology might convey an approach or an alienation from the physical body and the environment. It exposed a variety of motivations and approaches to ‘liveness’, ‘timing’ and ‘flow’.

The debate on environmental impact and sustainability has been proliferating, and so do the social “off-grid” movements, as well as artistic practices that sonify and visualise physical phenomena that are not directly perceivable through human senses. This coexists with the dominant paradigm in our current societies, where all is supposed to be quantifiable, and the reality on a mobile phone screen is seemingly truer than direct experience. Nevertheless, software is necessarily biased: it mediates our action through code, and code embeds theories informed by specific purposes and criteria. The problem is, those theories are too often taken for granted. They remain concealed in a black box formed of multiple layers of code; the more science and technology succeed, the opaquer and obscure they become, and the more distant we become from computation as creative material. The more distant we might become from a humanistic way of thinking.

Previously, ICLI took place in Newcastle, UK (2012), Lisbon, PT (2014), Sussex, UK (2016), Porto, PT (2018) and Trondheim, NW (2020). In 2022, it assumed a different format. There were invited contributions, rather than submissions. The program proposed a set of research vectors, while questioning how to connect the physically and non-physically present participants in inventive, engaging ways. The experience generated material for further research, and motivated the emergence of a peer-reviewed, media-rich journal called Live Interfaces.

INTER-FACE: International Conference on Live Interfaces 2014 (ICLI 2014), ed. Adriana Sá, Miguel Carvalhais, Alex McLean, pub. Porto University, CECL & CESEM (NOVA University), MITPL (University of Sussex), 2015. ISBN 978-989-746-060-9

With preface interview-discussion “Live Interfaces: Seeds of Debate” by Adriana Sá, Joel Ryan, Edwin van der Heide, Atau Tanaka, Andrew McPherson, Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean, Miguel Carvalhais and Mick Gierson, pp. 14-28. PDF

INTER-FACE, the second International Conference on Live Interfaces, was dedicated to problematizing convergences and divergences between different understandings of performance technology. It sought to expose a variety of motivations and approaches, and discuss how specifc understandings of ‘liveness’, ‘immediacy’, ‘timing’ or ‘flow’ manifest in performance with digital media.

INTER-FACE gathered numerous paper presentations, performances, interactive installations, poster demonstrations and workshops. It happened in Lisbon, Portugal, at the Fine Arts Faculty of the University Lisbon (FBAUL); the School of Music of the National Con