Leo Scarin is a multimedia artist, designer and technologist from Italy who is based in The Hague. He investigates how new technologies can bridge physical distances and create a space for more intimate digital interactions. Having grown up as part of a digital generation, he creates work that integrates media such as video art, audiovisual performances, graphic design and interactive installations. His practice takes the form of research into new technologies and their aesthetics, and system hacking in design and artistic processes.

Marlot Meyer is an Interactive Media Artist who creates works that fill spaces with performative content, interactive spaces and installations. She creates thresholds in space that act as both boundary and bridge: investigations of spaces in relation to the body, public and private, local and global, metaphysical and material. Working from her deep connection to her physical body, her works explore the redefinition of the ‘body’, and how this, combined with energy, and the mind, interacts with the world. This world could be physical, virtual, or the liminal space in between.

The Collective Algorithm of Care is the immersive experience of a participatory algorithm at work. The algorithm is learning care: recognized in intra-action and measured through heat.

Surveillance machines, such as thermal cameras, originate from military development for smart weaponry, law enforcement, or state border control. The classification models trained by these sensors are, by design, exposed to the violent biases of postcolonialism.

T.C.A.O.C. shifts this narrative and codes an algorithm using variables of radical care and collective participation. The visitors are invited to step into a system of thermal sensors and hand-crafted heaters. Here, they deposit their warm traces and participate in the collection of thermodynamic data, for the algorithm to re-cognise and train-with.

How can ecological thinking reclaim computational spaces?

The project was presented during the ARS Electronica Festival 2023 “Who owns the truth”, under the name Hylozoic Hotspot. Picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/53170268482/in/photostream/