Monthly Archive for March, 2008

Bruce Sterling Interview Preview

Saturday Night @ Share Festival: Bong-Ra

bong ra monitor

ok, lets keep this straightforward: this is the monitor he used to perform with, thanks to super-charming ella esque we were able to plug the recorder directly to the mixer and you can find a proper 320kbps .mp3 bootleg from his performance here, and this is to give you a visualized impression of the party:

video by Sharefestival

winner of the share prize 08

Christine Sugrue is the winner of this years share prize. Her work “Delicate Boundaries” satisfied the jury members bruce sterling, anne nigten and stefano mirti – Congratulation!

delicate.jpg

Jury Statement:

Anne Nigten — manager of the V-2 Lab and director of the Patching Zone in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Stefano Mirti — architect, designer, and teacher from I-D Lab in Milano.
Bruce Sterling, author journalist from Austin Texas and guest curator of Share Festival, chairman of the Share Prize jury.

So — as you may know, we three members of the jury were responsible for picking these six pieces of art. We love all of them dearly. Nevertheless only one can take home the SHARE prize — the digitally-manufactured SHARE Prize.

Our artists have created extraordinary works where digital images crawl out of screens and onto human fingers, where digital sound samples leave the computer to become solid chunks of wood carved on lathes. We also have a large, synaesthetic, immersive installation, two multi-user interaction pieces suitable for groups, and one of the scariest and most physically confrontational pieces of electronic art yet created.

We were much taken by D3D’s Virtual Identity Project. The fine Italian aesthetics work at an eye-candy level, while also raising substantial questions about identity and our data shadows on the modern net.

We very much appreciated the muscular appeal of our runner-up, Emmanuel Andel’s knife hand chop bot. This installation mesmerized everyone who saw it in action — it’s a fearsomely strong work of art, which provokes dripping sweat, racing heartbeats — it’s the personification of the hidden violence of new media!

It struck us that our winner and runner-up are the feminine and masculine version of the same artistic concept. It’s a pity they can’t marry — but only one can win.

With its mixture of subtle feminine menace and charm, our winner is a piece that was universally beloved by everyone who attended SHARE: Delicate Boundaries. We were encouraged by its poetics of social networking — everyone contaminated by these sprites immediately wants to share the infection with someone else. We also admired the sophisticated programming, and very clear and limpid user-interface. A hearty welcome from Torino to an American artist with global appeal, Chris Sugrue.

Honorary mention to Knife.Hand.Chop.Bot by Emanuel Andel.

share08, OWL PROJECT (UK), “sound lathe workshop”

to lathe sound? what a curious idea, but after we have talked to the sympathetic guys named: “OWL PROJECT”, it finally made sense.

A carpenter’s workshop transforms the sounds of working wood (cutting, sawing, and fixing together) into genuine small objects with the help of a “sound lathe”. This machine records audio data coming from real hand-working processes and mixes them with the dust, sawdust and sounds of the workshop to produce unique, one-off, often flawed objects that become a sort of material souvenir of how we construct furniture.
(from toshare.it)

watch the video to see how exiting it is to make sound with such an simple thing as wood and a carving knife.

friday night: hiroshima mon amour

there is one thing that makes this media art festival really unique: the people here _never_ forget about the social part of a festival – and after years of media art festival hopping i know that this is not quite common. yesterday night we were taken to the “hiroshima mon amour” club . when we entered the venue the reactable performance had just started – i saw the reactabe for the first time a few years ago and i liked the new interface – but when i arrived to the “hiroshima – mon amour” club in turin yesterday i was really impressed that they developed it to a proper instrument which they used to not only show how the interface works but to really rock the house!

after that autechre rocked the house on the mainstage, you can find my first bootleg here. it’s pretty LQ, unedited and really just useful to give you an impression…

as ever the coin has two sides and the parties claim their victims. we managed to take some really nice interviews – some of them are already cut and will be online soon – but most of them are only recorded ad will not be online during the weekend. have to go now, party on… :twisted: :twisted: :twisted: :arrow: :mrgreen:

to.share.it

if you appreciate good things like italien food, good wine and you also have a big crash on media art, the share festival in torino (IT) is the place to be right know. the italiens know how to make things perfect for bon vivants like they created a own wine label with the same sujet than the festival. impressively genial!

share grafitti

the guest curator of the festival is no less than bruce sterling. you may not connect him with media art but more with cyperpunk – but if you know his novels its quite clear that he is having an elusive good feeling for art. i am especially thinking of the episode in “schismatrix” were lindsay (main character) got the first contact to the just arriving aliens and is accidental perceived as an artist as he caused an explosion:

“are you the artist?”
“yes,” lindsay said. he pointed at the screen. “notice the subtle shading effect where our recent blast darkend the sculpture.”
“we noticed the explosion,” the alien said. “an unusual artistic technique.”
“we are unusual,” lindsay said. “we are unique.”

(citation schismatrix)

sound:frame festival symposion

Ist VJing Kunst ? diese Frage stellten sich ein paar namhafte Vertreter der österreichischen Visualistenszene bei einem Symposion des sound:frame Festivals im Künstlerhaus.

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