sorrowful we had to accept that we could not make it to the makeart festival, but we could still do our web 2.0 job and asked some people on flickr to join the makeart07 flickr group. it looks like there were not too many photographers at the festival who uploaded their stuff to flickr – but the ones who did are great. please enjoy some great pictures from portier, thanks to manuel braun (www.decept.org) and flickr user yesyesnono for sharing their photos!
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Formed in 1996 by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa, Exonemo is group devoted to the experimentation of new ways of interaction between art and public.
LUCA: Object B presents, compared to the consumer society, a different kind of immersion between real and virtual spaces. what do you think about the relationships of virtual and real spaces of contemporary world? And what do you want to communicate trough the hacked interactions of Object B?
EXO: When considering about the “real” and “virtual” space, we feel the border between them has been getting more ambiguous than before. It might be no longer an indivisible concept. But actually, not only “real space to virtual space” but also divided world such as “country to country”, “culture to culture” or “person to person” exist around us and make conflicts between them.
The Object B focuses on “communication” between divided worlds.
By multiple approach to the installation, for example, from the exhibit space (physically) or from the game space (as a nonphysical avatar), you will experience an obvious communication gap between two worlds.
We think that’s the interesting point on communication.
LUCA: Which seeds where the starting point to think this piece?
EXO: Maybe at the moment when I doubted if a person on the other side of the internet was a real human being…or not!?
LUCA: What do you think about game industry today?
EXO: Regading the Half-Life, the game company VALVE opens the developement environment partly to get the scene active and also let expert programmer join the company. It’s intersting that we can touch the structure of the game by modification. Game modification has a potential for expansion but we have a limited feeling about the distribution system STEAM because they tighten controls on license. Meanwhile, game industry in Japan seems different. Japanese game companies almost never open the developement environment to the public, but they activate the game scene by allowing re-creation of game characters such as cosplay, fan fiction and so on.
Each environment is open and closed at different point and we see an interesting difference of game culture there.
LUCA: Open source and free exchange are important vectors of innovation, don’t you think that with all this new and specialized hardware and software instrument, that are quite “closed”,that users will have a little range of creative possibilities?
EXO: Focusing on open source and free exchange in art creation, we think it is different from software development.
For the software development, “function” is absolutely imperative and we can share the function by getting source code. So we think the open source for software development is very important but for the art work, “function” is not important thing so there isn’t much point in sharing the source. To represent the concept through an art work might expect
next creativity like open source and free exchange on software development.
LUCA: Water, what makes you thinkin?
EXO: MOST IMPORTANT MEDIA
barcelona
is famous for a lot of things, for the lovely beaches, palmtree avenues, interior design shops on every corner, parties, pakistanis selling beer and samosas on every plaza all night long, its modernistic and contemporary architecture, its fashion victims and their bad taste for glasses, all those fucking “guiris” and last but no t least the great number of festivals (i daresay each weekend one)
one of them is the OFFF festival that features current movements in multimedia design. it takes place at the CCCB (curios all thes triple letter words for festivals and museums here).
but it seems to be a quite barcelonian problem that for locals its hard to manage to buy tickets on time because of the maniac number of foreigners who want to connect with all the lovely advantages that this city has to offer.
so it results that the tickets were sold out one whole month before the fesival actually took place. even our guest (erasmus paid holiday) university BAU didn’t manage to get tickets for their studens (us).
so the only thing that we ended up being able to do is stroll around the festival chillout area, which was outside, and find out when and how the people got their tickets and if there were any freebies.
how you might have figured out already this article not really treats the art that took place at the festival, no, its about the art of getting a ticket.
so find out for yourself how the people did it:
actually it was quite interesting to talk to all those people visiting the festival because we found out a few interesting things: first of all few people paid the tickets themselves. lesser people really are from barcelona [!?$], you better get up earlier to buy your tickets (or get your fabulous press acreditation), this is the best way to get in touch with the creative lot, and the feeling in this city is like a “piefkesaga” in disneyland with people who talk catalan instead of tyrolean.
in the end we felt like outcasts because we were the only ones without those shiny glowing neon unreachable bracelets.
we didnt catch OFFF here in barcelona but we just might make it half way round the globe to OFFF in mexico…
if you like to know more about offf, read some résumés:
*h2omagazine (spanisch)
*ntmy (english)
and some slasher:
*otro blog más (spanisch)
*tink (english)
realtekken ! the people from god´s entertainment know how to cross the borders between reality and game. it really made me happy to see this manic performance, especially because the music-program this evening was kind of chippy. the performance took place in a backdoor-room of the stadtsaal and there were only limited tickets. while people were gathering inside you could feel the atmosphere of somethings going to happen and you already could smell perspiration and violence. it was mesmerising to feel the tuning of the common mood when the first fighters were beating each other. i am not fascinated in fights and even don’t play computer-games, but you couldn’t escape this ecstatic atmosphere. i was even playing in the final round. ok, i (we) lost, but it was a crazy feeling to move a real body by pushing buttons.
it works like this – there are 2 players with controllers & 2 real fighters connected through light-signals on the floor. the player pushes the controller and the fighter sees the light-signal and moves the corresponding limb. very interesting was that two players declared a strike and didn’t want to push the buttons. “ok, if we don’t play – u don’t have to fight” – a pretty ineffective effort of political correctness, because they were immediately mocked. but actually a wise statement ;-)
the rules were clear and everyone intended to play – even the fighters, so no one was forced. but the fighters definitely felt the pain of the hits caused by the players.
real pain !! not just subtracted points !!!
one difference to computer-games was also that the fighters were the real heroes and not the players, and of course they really deserved it !!
Krems, known as a kind of conservative city in lower austria is the mainspot of the annual contemporary music & art festival “donaufestival“. Tomas Zierhofer-Kin and his team are bringing international high quality program to krems. read his statement. Apart from international contemporary musicprogram, which is the mainpart of the festival, it shows new pulsing mediaart and performances. This years theme was “unprotected games” and a not to be missed work in this context is of course the painstation
another immersive installation in the lounge was “pause” from
Lynn Pook & Julien Clauss
u lay down in a hammok, get earplugs, get connected with contactspeakers, close your eyes & disconnect normal perception.
relax & go deeply inside. its like lying in a samadhi-tank.
you can hear your heart beat … poch poch ! but is it really your heart beating ?
… your bones making sounds – or just your mind experiencing inner visions ?
noise & resonance…in your bones and in your body !
the sound u experience is a composed piece of 18 min.
also they found H.A.P.P.Y – the infomonster in the danube. a huge fluffy something is sitting in the lounge, next to a terminal, where u could ask this monster – and it had an answer for any question.
why didn´t u stay in danube ?
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