Department of Audio and Visual Arts

Taboo and fear or fear and Taboo. The use of fear as structural feature in visual arts and cinema art, through autoethnographic recordings of the postgraduate students in the “Audiovisual Arts in the Digital Age” program of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of Ionian University.
The feature of “fear” influenced strongly the arts, because the charm of this matter is linked the process of myth and collective unconscious. These issues may be particularly interesting for the art world, but they are considered as taboo by the majority of the society. As a topic, fear is intrinsically linked with art and, in certain cases, marked their maiden voyage. A characteristic example is one of the first screenings of cinema film by Lumière brothers, the title of which was: L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat1895, where it is referred from many sources that the audience stood up terrified as they saw the “virtual train” coming straight at them. Peter Gsellmann states: “The audience was running towards the exit consumed by fear when they saw the puffer coming towards them. They feared that it could come out of the screen”. Over the years, both fear and the aesthetic media have changed and have been adapted to modern reality. The present announcement refers to studying fear as taboo in art, focusing on the project results of the students in the postgraduate program “Audiovisual Arts in the Digital Age” of the Department of Audio and Visual Arts of the Ionian University for the lesson of “Video- Art”. The main objective of the projects was the attempt to connect the audiovisual arts with the language of cinema and the performing arts. The ultimate objective was the production of integrated projects, which had the topic of fear as their structural feature. This experiment gave the opportunity to various approaches of the art to come together through the educational process. Except for the production and the delivery of the projects, students researched the issue of fear in order to produce autoethnographic projects on their perception about fear. The material produced from the present announcement will be the production of an academic research by the professors of the course, which will also link the theoretical issue of fear as Taboo through three different approaches (Video Art, Performing Art, Cinema) as well as the presentation of some parts of the students’ projects and their autoethnographic portfolio that came from the research carried through the educational procedure. The research questions that will be answered are the following: Is fear a taboo in today’s art today? How is this reflected in the educational process through a combining way of learning various approaches of art?

The conferences "Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science" include theoretical presentations and artists' talks focusing: a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality - as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, b) in the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art.

"The research interest on modeling everyday human emotions and controlling them through typical multimedia content (i.e. audio and video data) has recently increased. In this work, an interactive methodology is introduced for detecting, controlling and tracking emotions. Based on the above methodology, an interactive audiovisual installation termed “Elevator” was realized, aiming to analyze and manipulate simple emotions of the participants
(such as anger) using simplified emotion detection audio signal processing techniques and specifically selected combined audio/visual content. As a result, the human emotions are “elevated” to pre-defined levels and appropriately mapped to visual content which corresponds to the emotional “thumbnail” of the participants."

Modern interactive means combined with new digital media processing and representation technologies can provide a robust framework for enhancing user experience in multimedia entertainment systems and audiovisual artistic installations with non-traditional interaction / feedback paths based on user affective state. In this work, the “Elevator” interactive audiovisual platform prototype is presented, which aims to identify, control (or elevate) and monitor discrete human emotions (such as anger) and produce a visual outcome of the raised emotion, defined here as the emotional “thumbnail” of the user. Optimized, real-time emotion detection audio signal processing techniques are employed for monitoring the achieved emotional intensity, while the emotional elevation is performed using appropriately selected combined audio/visual content reproduced using state-of-the-art audiovisual playback technologies that allow the creation of a realistic immersive audiovisual environment. The demonstration of the proposed prototype has shown that affective interaction is possible, allowing the further development of relative artistic and technological applications.

The research interest on modeling everyday human emotions and controlling them through typical multimedia content (i.e. audio and video data) has recently increased. In this work, an interactive methodology is introduced for detecting, controlling and tracking emotions. Based on the above methodology, an interactive audiovisual installation termed “Elevator” was realized, aiming to analyze and manipulate simple emotions of the participants (such as anger) using simplified emotion detection audio signal processing techniques and specifically selected combined audio/visual content. As a result, the human emotions are “elevated” to pre-defined levels and appropriately mapped to visual content which corresponds to the emotional “thumbnail” of the participants.

Modern interactive means combined with new digital media processing and representation technologies can provide a robust framework for enhancing user experience in multimedia entertainment systems and audiovisual artistic installations with non-traditional interaction/feedback paths based on user affective state. In this work, the ‘Elevator’ interactive audiovisual platform prototype is presented, which aims to provide a framework for signalling and expressing human behaviour related to emotions (such as anger) and finally produce a visual outcome of this behaviour, defined here as the emotional ‘thumbnail’ of the user. Optimised, real-time audio signal processing techniques are employed for monitoring the achieved anger-like behaviour, while the emotional elevation is attempted using appropriately selected combined audio/visual content reproduced using state-of-the-art audiovisual playback technologies that allow the creation of a realistic immersive audiovisual environment. The demonstration of the proposed prototype has shown that affective interaction is possible, allowing the further development of relative artistic and technological applications.

Modern interactive means combined with new digital media processing and representation technologies can provide a robust framework for enhancing user experience in multimedia entertainment systems and audiovisual artistic installations with non-traditional interaction/feedback paths based on user affective state. In this work, the ‘Elevator’ interactive audiovisual platform prototype is presented, which aims to provide a framework for signalling and expressing human behaviour related to emotions (such as anger) and finally produce a visual outcome of this behaviour, defined here as the emotional ‘thumbnail’ of the user. Optimised, real-time audio signal processing techniques are employed for monitoring the achieved anger-like behaviour, while the emotional elevation is attempted using appropriately selected combined audio/visual content reproduced using state-of-the-art audiovisual playback technologies that allow the creation of a realistic immersive audiovisual environment. The demonstration of the proposed prototype has shown that affective interaction is possible, allowing the further development of relative artistic and technological applications.