From October 24 to 29, the European project Realities in Transition celebrates its first XR Camp in Zagreb (Croatia) under the title Extended Worlds. An initiative promoted by the seven European partners of the project – Ars Electronica (Linz, AT), Dark Euphoria (Marseille, FR), iMAL – Art Center for digital cultures & technology (Brussels, BE), KONTEJNER (Zagreb, HR), L.E.V. Festival (Gijón, SP), CHRONIQUES, main partner (Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, FR), and V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL) – united to create an inclusive, open and sustainable community around extended realities, developing ideas such as open code technologies, the democratization of technologic tools and resources, and the exchange of common knowledge and learning.
XR Camp’s hybrid programme includes a great exhibition, audiovisual and XR live shows, plenty of workshops and a fascinating educational programme, exploring topics such as artificial intelligence, the idea of augmented reality as a new default reality, the use of this technology in education and arts, the reimagining of public spaces, the extension to scenic arts, the visibilization of renowned and emerging XR artists, and much more.
In this programme, L.E.V. organizes the hackaton Recycling the AI from October 24 to 27 at the Museum of modern art in Zagreb. A hackathon is an event where a group of partners take part in a fast, cooperative engineering process during a short period, enabling an interdisciplinary work among people with different skills to sort out a specific challenge. The aim is to supply a functioning product at the end of the event, being the best solution awarded with some acknowledgement. This specific hackathon aims to promote critical thinking about extended realities among young students.
During three successive days, thirty students from the School of Applied Arts and Design in Zagreb will test their skills to create a functioning prototype of several virtual scenes with A-Frame, an open source code library to easily create 3D spaces in a browser.
Virtual, mixed and augmented realities are gaining more relevance in the creative world, helping artists to explore virtuality as an alternative space for creation. As any other digital work, in the last years extended realities have also been influenced by the evolution of the artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Despite being a great tool, AI has also been criticized when applied to the creative field. Digital artists, for example, consider an unfair competition the use of models of networks based on their previous works without consent, in order to generate new 3D models and designs by using conversion techniques of text in contents. Besides, an important strike of screenwriters in Hollywood has taken place in order to demand a regulation against the use of film and TV scripts powered by AI.
We must also take into account the amount of resources needed to generate AI digital contents, and the fact that Internet is full of images, texts, 3D models, videos and animations made with AI, so it’s more than reasonable to think about recycling them instead of thinking about generating new ones. Therefore, this hackathon suggests to experiment with reutilization and recycling techniques of existing digital contents to develop them in functional virtual worlds. By learning basic notions of HTML and using 3D edition tools, the attendees will be able to design virtual environments and host them for their own use, while they will think about topics such as energy use, privacy, open culture, digital representation and accessibility.
Besides collaborating with this XR Camp Extended Worlds of Realities in Transition with this hackaton, in this exhibition L.EV. will also showcase the project Planet L.E.V. Matadero, an artistic and immersive experience created by Children of Cyberspace and produced by Matadero Madrid and L.E.V. Festival, available in a virtual reality format and also for web browsers. A digital, dreamlike universe featuring animated sculptures, and audiovisual and sound installations from artists all over the world,
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