Tegan Bristow lecturer and coordinator of the Interactive Digital Media postgraduate stream in the Digital Arts Division recently attended the Technoetic Telos: Art, Myth and Media conference in Kefalonia, Greece. It was a fascinating conference addressing technology, arts and consciousness in contemporary society. Topics ranged from the Philosophy of Science to Afro-futurism. If you are interested in the topics, the program for the conference can be found here: and papers will be published in the next Telematic Arts Journal for 2012.

The conference session ran parallel to a research update for Bristow with the Planetary Collegium with whom Bristow is taking her PhD, through CAiiA at Plymouth University, UK. The program is an international PhD with nodes in Zurich, Sao Paulo, Milan and now an Ionian Node that was inaugurated at this conference. The conference’s act as an opportunity for all the nodes to share research and practice with the many international delegates in the field of technology arts that attend the conferences.

Bristow’s PhD research concerns arts practice with Digital Technology in South and East Africa. Her paper at the Technoetic Telos was on Afro-futurism as an African Diaspora aesthetic movement in the 70’s and 90’s and how it relates Digital Arts practice in South Africa. More information here on Bristow Website

Visiting Speaker Jossekin Beilharz
Object identification and Pose Recognition on a Pressure-Sensitive Multi-Touch Floor.

Date: Tuesday 21st Feburary 2012
Time: 13:15 – 14:00
Place: Digital Arts Convent Building, opposite Wits School of the Arts

” We propose a new approach to tracking users, objects, and activities in a smart room. Unlike traditional approaches that point cameras into the 3D volume of a room, we provide all horizontal surfaces with touch sensitivity, including chairs, tables, and the floor. Gravity pushes people and objects against these surfaces, causing them to leave imprints, i.e., pressure distributions across the surface. We demonstrate how to decompose these imprints into the object and pose that caused them. The particular “perspective” reduces occlusion issues faced by regular and depth cameras. It also limits the freedom of objects from rotation and translation in 3D to rotation and translation on a plane, which allows us to recognize objects using simpler and potentially more reliable matching algorithms. We present our 8m2  floor installation, a set of active and a set of passive touch-sensitive furniture, as well as the algorithms we created for recognizing objects and poses.”

About Jossekin Beilharz:
Currently working at SAP Research, Pretoria and a member of House4Hack, Centurion. A masters student of IT-Systems Engineering at Hasso-Platter-Institute at the University of Potsdam. He worked on gravitySpace with Prof. Patrick Baudisch, chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at HPI in 2010-2011 and initiated a Random Hacks of Kindness event in Pretoria.