Author Archive for muk

FILE Festival Sao Paulo 2011

FILE Festival, Sao Paulo. Huge city, huge exhibition. Like every year, the File Festival manages to show a wide variety of international contemporary new media art. Installations, Performances, Machinima, Animations, Webart,… But they also host Workshops dealing with newest technics and tools and a Symposium which addresses current topics and therefor is a good discursive platform for new media art.

A big difference to most of the new media art festivals is the wide-ranging audience visiting the exhibition. With about 1000 visitors per day and a period of one month it does not only adress the typical new media art nerds.

Because i participated with my installation “skia” in the exhibition and the symposium i had a very limited time frame to document the artworks.

But i even managed to get Christobal Mendoza for an interview, whos collaborative work “nervous structure” was one of my favourites.


Another very poetic and beautiful piece was ADA, an analog interactive installation by Karina Smigla-Bobinski.

The next work i have to explain a bit…. If you stand in front of this screen, your face is tracked and alternately displayed with some movie scenes, where the head of the actors are on the same position in the framing as yours… It is called “movie mirrors” and was made by Ali Miharbi from turkey.

atom performance @ soundframe 2011

Das soundframe Festival freute sich heuer über Christopher Bauder [white void] und Robert Henke [monolake], die mit ihrer ATOM Performance den Marx Palast rockten. Leider konnte die Installation aus technischen Gründen nicht wie ursprünglich geplannt in den Rinderhallen aufgebaut werden, da sich dies gegenseitig sehr positiv ausgewirkt hätte. Die Installation hätte sicher noch etwas mehr Platz vertragen, dafür wirkten die kolossalen Räumlichkeiten der Rinderhallen leider etwas leer. Trotzdem genossen wir es die Performance, die mittlerweile seit 5 Jahren um die Welt tourt, einmal live zu erleben. Gleichzeitig mit dem Event eröffnete auch die MediaOpera, die seit ca. einem Monat in den Rinderhallen ihre Dependance hat und der Wiener Visualistenszene eine Spiel- und Experimentierstätte bietet. Das heisst in den Rinderhallen könnte in Zukunft noch einiges Interessantes passieren. Platz und Technik gibts jedenfalls ohne Ende.
Wir baten Robert Henke und Christopher Bauder unter den tagR.umbrella >

Interview: Peter Schlager
Kamera: Andreas .muk. Haider
Schnitt:
Andreas .muk. Haider

Secrets Trilogy by Reynold Reynolds @tm11

The exhibition opened with the transmediale 2011 and runs until 3.4.2011. He told me that the exhibition space will function as a studio also where he is going to work on a new shooting series while the public can watch him and his team in progress. If you are in berlin by that time, you should not miss it. I had the pleasure to get Reynold Reynolds under the tagR.umbrella to talk about his work.

tm.11 walk with peter moosgaard

ambient impressions from this years transmediale festival in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Digital Art Festival 2010 in Sofia

I spent a wonderful week in beautiful Sofia at the second edition of the Digital Art Festival. It was a small, but fantastic event organized by the National Academy of Art in Sofia. Apart from the professional and very nice team i met a lot of interesting artists like Paul Granjon, who´s hilarious approach to human<>machine interaction inspires me a lot, or Mark Coniglio who held a workshop with his Software “Isadora” – the first SW i paid for and worked a lot for live visuals and video-dance-performances. I also got to know Reynold Reynolds, a fascinating film maker who studied at Stan Brakhage and his very distinctive philosophical visual language is just breathtaking. He exhibited his two screen video installation “six appartments“, which won last years distinction award at the Transmediale.

Oh, and there was Brian Kneb, a very nice guy, who creates interactive installations with a great organic style. The way he works with code is fascinating. For me as a total rookie in coding it is such a mind twisting field of teaching a computer the rules and dynamics of nature. Super interesting was that out of his work with code and classical digital interaction he started some “real life” experiments with multicellular organism interacting with bacteria taken from his own body. I should not forget hexler, who exhibited a generative installation experimenting with the analysis of psychologist Hermann Rorschach. And besides some nice drinking and fun time together he managed to teach a processing workshop at the festival.

I had the pleasure to get a walk through the exhibition with the two main organizers and curators of the festival, Galina Dimitrova and Venelin Shurelov, who also teaches at the Digital Art Master Program of the Academy. The walk is splitted into two parts. The first is the main exhibition in the Gallery space and the second one presents student works from the Digital Art Program of the Academy, the Animated Film Department of Zagreb University and the Digital Art class of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Something i have to point out is that most of the Presentations and Performances were streamed live and are available to watch on demand as well. Like this very interesting talk by Don Foresta about a “New Renaissance”

DA Fest 2010 Main Exibition Gallery:

DA Fest 2010 Student exhibition space:

Flächen @ ARS 2010

Die diesjährige ARS Electronica findet erstmals sehr kompakt in der stillgelegten Tabakfabrik statt, die mit ihren grossen, leeren Produktionshallen die perfekte Atmosphäre für das Thema “repair” bietet. sind wir noch zu retten. ohne Frage. ohne Antwort. wer ist wir. vor wem. uns selbst. Für Julius Stahl aus Berlin stellt sich diese Frage erst gar nicht. muss es auch nicht. Er schafft mit seiner Arbeit “Flächen” eine ästhetisch ansprechende Rauminstallation, die den Grenzbereich zwischen akustischer und visueller Wahrnehmung erforscht und erfahrbar macht.

Heart Chamber Orchestra @ FILE 2010

The Austrians again… well it feels a bit strange to take part on such a big international Festival and meet artists from your country everywhere… I think about 10% of the artists participating at FILE Festival are Austrians somehow – even if the most of them have chosen to live somewhere else. Like Erich Berger who is living in Helsinki and Peter Votava who is living in Berlin. Well, i guess such Festivals are anyway not that kind of patriotic or nationalistic events like football games or ski worldcups  ;-)  But the international context of such Festivals and the country next to your name reminds you about your origins, even if the new media art scene feels like a family from outer space. If you have such a lot of common interests and ideas like in such a community, distances and borders just dont exist. I wish everybody could feel the same !

But actually i wanted to write about the Heart Chamber Orchestra, who got the second prize in the electronic sonority category at the FILE PRIX LUX Award. And as i liked the performance very much – i have to tell you, that they really deserve it.

Also known as the audiovisual collective Terminalbeach they upgraded there work by adding a whole live playing orchestra. Sounds like a challenge. Right, but the way they are working with the orchestra is fantastic. They connect each of the musicians with heart rate monitors in order to work with their inner metronom and transform this data into a fantastic performance. But listen to their explanations and interesting details yourself:

Relational Lights @ FILE Festival 2010

I had the pleasure to get Ernesto Klar for a short interview. He is an artist from Venezuela, living in New York and won the first prize in the FILE PRIX LUX competition in the category of interactive installations. The FILE PRIX LUX Award took place for the first time this year and had three categories: interactive installations, electronic sonority and digital language.

“Luzes relacionais” (Relational Lights) is an interactive audio-visual installation that explores our relationship with the expressional-organic character of “space”. The installation uses light, sound, haze, and a custom-software system to create a morphing, three-dimensional light-space in which spectators actively participate, manipulating it with their presence and movements. “Luzes relacionais” is a hommáge to the work and aesthetic inquiry of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.

PixelACHE Festival 2010 in Helsinki

Well, unfortunately i never attended Pixelache in Helsinki, Finnland, but it supposed to be quite an interesting festival addressing the classical contemporary topics like capitalism, sustainable energy and alternative systems. But don´t wanna talk a lot about a festival i haven´t been…. better check out their massive videocollection on vimeo or their flickr collection to get a review of what we have missed.
or listen to Juha Huuskonen the programme director of pixelache, whom we know from transmediale 2009, when he was part of the jury.

And if you wanna attend in next years festival > don´t forget to apply to their call for proposals. deadline 15.4.2010

chapter I – the discovery

we proudly present one of our favourite artworks nominated for the transmediale award 2010 : chapter I – the discovery from the spanish artist Félix Luque Sánchez which is exhibited in the cervantes institute near alexanderplatz. we had the pleasure to get him for an interview. so listen to him personally :

and here´s the docuvideo by himself including the first room :

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