26-29 October 2011

Four days of conference, one full day of Workshops and Tutorials providing insights current challenges of MR and AR.

3 keynote speakers:
Oliver Grau, an art historian and media theorist, Mark Bolas, a research scientist, an artist, and a designer exploring perception, agency, and intelligence and Adrian David Cheok, a research scientist focusing on mixed reality, HCI, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing.

Two conference tracks: Science and Technology + Arts, Media and Humanities
Science and Technology combines work in computer vision, computer graphics, user interfaces, wearable computing, mobile computing, displays, and sensors.
Arts, Media and Humanities invites artists, designers, architects, urbanists, and scholars to explore Mixed and Augmented Reality within their respective fields.

Workshop on Visualization in Mixed Reality Environments
Focusing on the aspects of visualization in MR/AR, this workshop gave a promising future for the study of perceptual methods in the field of AR. By far it was the most related topic to our project, and it gave fantastic resources for our current research.

26-28 October

Anja Johansen and Merete Lie (in the project "Inside out: New images and imaginations of the body ") and Rita Elmkvist Nilsen, Aud Sissel Hoel and Annamaria Carusi (in the project Picturing the Brain: Perspectives on Neuroimaging). The picture also shows Anders Skare Malvik (NTNU) and Anna Dahlgren (Stockholm University). Photo by Bård Ivar Basmo.

The media acts conference dealt with the following topic:

Recent technological changes that involve digitization have been claimed to erase the differences among individual media, and fundamentally to alter the conditions of perception and experience. In the art world, formerly dominant conceptions of art forms such as poetry, painting, sculpture, and even video art, which in the 1960s were codified as channeled sensory portals, have been replaced by blurred domains of new media art, of sound art and tangible media. What, then, in the current situation, does the disputed concept of “medium” mean? Certainly, media still matter – but why, how, and in what ways?

Keynote speakers: Jacques Rancère, University of Paris (St-Denis), James Elkins, School of the art institute of Chicago, Sara Danius, Södertörn University College, Frederik Tygstrup, University of Copenhagen, and Aud Sissel Hoel, NTNU.

Panels of special interest to the Picturing the Brain project was the three panels “Medical Media: Bodies, Spaces, Apparatuses” with papers by Anja Johansen, Rita Elmkvist Nilsen and Kathrin Friedrich, “Images, Visual Technologies and Knowledge” with papers by Anne Beaulieu, Annamaria Carusi and Henrik Gustafsson, and “Performative Mediation: The Transformation of Places, three case studies” with papers by Susanne Østby Sæther, Ragnhild Tronstad and Liv Hausken. We would also like to mention Sarah de Rijcke’s talk on enacting artful realities through digital photography.

For more information: http://www.ntnu.no/ikm/mediaacts

17-19 October

We are very delighted to welcome A.Prof. Weisi Lin, Nanyang Technological University, who will visit Q2S during Oct. 17-19. Weisi Lin’s research areas cover image processing, perception-based modeling, signal compression, object recognition, multimedia communication, and fast implementation.

He will give a lecture entitled “Perceptual Quality Evaluation: An Overview and Several New Contributions” on Oct. 17, Monday at 14:15 in E-258 (Q2S lunch room). You are all welcome to attend.

You are also welcome to meet Weisi during his stay at Q2S.

http://q2s.ntnu.no/q2s_colloquium

7 October, 2011

International seminar Visualizing the Brain: Re-conceptualizing Selfhood, Desire and Sexuality through Neuroimaging, at Pufendorf Institute, Lund University. Speakers: Aud Sissel Hoel, who presented the Picturing the Brain project, and Isabelle Dussauge, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University and who gave an exciting lecture about her research project, which ‘explores the neuroimaging experimental science of sex. It attends to experimental dispositifs, the political esthetics of brain images, and the ties to brain research on other human pleasures. I suggest that in its current use, neuroimaging participates in a re-orientation of the human towards “a neural economy of desire” which re-defines the world of social interactions.’

The seminar forms part of the collaborative series of seminars and workshop Biomedical Transformations of Life: Knowledge, Learning and the Rise of Biocitizens, jointly organized by the Genetics and Democracy (GaD) Network, Lund University and the Learning and Media Technology Studio (LETStudio), University of Gothenburg.

The organizers of this seminar was Max Liljefors (GaD), Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Division of Art History and Visual Studies, Lund University and Hans Rystedt (LETStudio), Department of Education, Communication and Learning, University of Gothenburg.

The two lectures were followed by a lively and highly productive discussion, and to quote Mark Elam (LETStudio), who was chairing the discussion, ‘what a great audience!’. Sissel will meet up with members of the GaD network in Berlin in November, and the Picturing the Brain project will definitely stay in touch with Isabelle, the LETStudio and other participants in this inspiring event.

View from hotel Concordia in Lund, 6 October 2011.

22. September 2011

At Twente University in Enschede, Netherlands, there is an interesting department: A philosophy department where everyone studies the philosophy of technology! On Thursday 22. September Sissel presented the Picturing the Brain project in their departmental colloquium – as well as some ideas about “differential mediation”. Very good discussion.

27 April 2011

Sissel guest lectures and presents the Picturing the Brain project at the School of Communication, Media, and IT in the Department of Rhetoric at Södertörn University College, Huddinge, Sweden. Invitation by Mats Rosengren, whom Sissel knows through her work on Ernst Cassirer.

Photo: Hara Konsta

Paris, 11-13. April, 2011.

Three day PhD course/research workshop on science images and gendered representations. The course explored images of relevance to the study of gendered bodies. The course was interdisciplinary, and the concept of “body images” was understood in a broad sense, as transcending the categories of art and science, including art history. Main speakers: Lisa Cartwright (University of California, San Diego) talked about imaging technologies and the body; Adele Clarke (University of California, San Francisco) talked about images as matter of Situational Analysis, and André Gunthert (l’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) talked about the role of the smile in the magazine press in the 1930s-1950s. The course was co-organised by Merete Lie (Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU) and Aud Sissel Hoel.

Photo: Hara Konsta

1-3 April, 2011

Annamaria, Liv and Sissel participated in the international conference Imaging the Mind? Taking Stock a Decade after the ‘Decade of the Brain’ in Amsterdam. The conference was organized by Stephan Schleim, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Theory and History of Psychology, University of Groningen and Machiel Keestra, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies and Cognitive Science Center, University of Amsterdam.

Taking a break, having an ice cream

Jordi and Rita ready to enter the operating theatre

March, 2011

Jordi and Rita were invited to the Neurosurgical Department at St. Olavs Hospital to observe an image guided brain surgery. The operation theatre is equipped with state of the art neuroimaging technology, which enables minimally invasive surgical removal of tumors from a patient’s brain.

It was very interesting to experience how the neurosurgical team in Trondheim plan and perform these operations guided by imaging technologies. Neuroimages from the patient’s brain obtained prior to the operation, such as structural MRI, functional MRI and DTI, made it possible for the surgeons to carefully and in detail plan the whole procedure before the operation begins. During the operation these images are supplemented with updated ultrasound images. The neurosurgeons decisions on what modifications are to be made in the material brain, are all based upon the multimodal information of the mediated brain in these various pre-operative and intra-operative neuroimages.