The sonance.artistic.project launched the re.sonance07 festival with the presentation of the (mighty) festival catalogue including a DVD last friday in Vienna. The catalogue gives a pretty detailed overview of the actual digital culture scene in and around vienna.
It#s not easy to make your way trough the programme but it’s definitively worth a try. Especially the fact that a lot of exhibition and presentation venues are temporary art residences free of charge – very interesting story! it looks like it’s actually possible to get a temporary (unused) place to work on art projects. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open and try to get some more detailed information’s on this issue – a good time and place to find out more about this would be the vernisage of Franz Xavers exhibition “Biosphären” on Thursday 28th of November in the Lerchenfelderstrasse 65 – this place is used as a “Präkarium” since 2003, looks like a good place to start..
not only from an aesthetic point of view “the 192 loudspeaker experience” is a installation you have to see ! the immersive soundexperience u face is unique and highly impressive and takes you out on a journey through soundscapes which not just surround you > they even intrude you ! ok, it looks like a huge battle of material (192 loudspeakers, 12 sub-woofers, 24 x 8channel amplifiers, 192 D/A converters, 2 x Quad G5, 1 Macbook), but after experiencing one of the three pieces you know that it´s worth it.
an interactive soundtable >> connecting people by making music together “…in our world everyone is digitally connected but never talking to each other face to face anymore…” >> bringing electronic music to a broader audience >>
because philips moved it’s production to the east we can be here and celebrate electronic culture. a couple of years ago the monotonic movements of production robots determined the daily rhythm, now it is the bumping sound of techno music which makes the people move in a robotic behaviour. it’s an electronic circus with artbots, installations, cinema, lecture and performances… STRP is actually a quite mainstream event with a slightly taste of a critic approach. there are no deepening philosophical lectures or theoretical input. but that’s not the intention of the festival organizers : “The composition of the programme is based on the principle that STRP should be a low threshold festival, geared to a large audience.” – from this point of view it’s definitely a big success! A lot of people not only during the day-time, but also the shows were sold out every night! thousands of people everywhere… mostly dutch of all ages, baby’s to granny’s – they were all there. the dutch people are really the most friendly and helpful people i’ve ever met: yesterday i even got driven home on the backseat of a bicycle – thx walter ! :-) i really enjoyed the people and atmosphere a lot at the festival!
After a slightly complicated trainsurfingtrip i arrived in Eindhoven, a small beautiful city in the south of Netherlands… if you go to Eindhoven Beukenlaan by train , you’ll see an old Philips Factory… and inside you find STRP, the Festival for Art, Technology and Music. already surprised at the entrance because of the metal-gates guiding the people in lines i was even more puzzled when entering the first zaal, called the brainport zaal… loads of people and sounds and action everywhere… was like entering at a luna park… ok, aaahhh, to much for the beginning… so, what to see first ? i took the festival program and looked for special lectures or performances which i might miss. oh, it’s dutch… do you have a english version ? …no, but look at the overview, it’s international ;-) ok, it wasn’t supposed to be an international festival… at least on the web-page you find all the info in english. even the lectures are in dutch. alright, i know german, so i could get some info’s out of “paradise bij the laptoplight”, a lecture with the topic “next nature“. how nature becomes culture and culture becomes nature. with international speed lectures (english ;-) , so i could understand better). quite informational and critic view about how we try to copy the nature, commercialise it and how all this is becoming nature again. on a broadsheet we got, you could read : “our technological world has become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its own” or “second life is not sustainable”. after that i started to check out the exhibition… wandering around and had lots of fun… in the beginning i was sceptic about the dimension of the festival and the luna park approach, but actually i liked a lot how the people used the interactive works. it was no such shy distance like in other art exhibitions, where people just look, or maybe very carefully touch. the people really use it and even start to invent new ways of playing around. so it’s a hardcore-test for all interactive works here… after a very interesting and intensive exhibition and my exhausting travelling i was to tired to see the music-program, which was a pity, because there was a very good international lineup ! … so i missed modeselektor :-( check out some works from the exhibition >>>
Maybe some of you have already seen this at the Ars Electronica – an elastic rope connects two excenter points that are driven by electric motors and controlled by an arduino – so simpel, so nice. One of the most beautiful installations i have seen within the last years.
The installation uses a long piece of rope to make a 3-D representation of a group of waves floating on the space. These waves generate sound because of the physics of movement, so sound and images are linked, making only one shape: the rope which creates the volume, creates simultaneously the sound when the rope cut the air.
I liked this one because of ti’s simplicity: Of course you could do this with max, using a micro-controller to synchronize the movement of the mirrors with the video – or you could just connect a photo-transistor via a few resistors to a stepper motor driver and shine on the phototransistor wenn the mirror is supposed to move up, like Ralph did.
This video installation is possible by combining video projection with physical computing. The projected image will be divided in five parts. The light spots in the video are responsible for controlling the movements of the mirrors and synchronizing the movement of the (virtual) video-image and the (real) mirrors
I met Julien at the Piksel Festival last year for the first time: He did a workshop about DIY sinus generators and the at the last evening he did the noisiest and loudest performance i ever attended, no doubt about that. The Installation he did this year is something like a logical consequence for me. Choas, noise, and really loud:
Arougate is an installation that involves the environnement of the space he is invited to hunt in. Arougate is a digital beast who hunts information, tracks it, feeds on it, and generally reacts to it. Arougate behaves like a wolf when he eats his preys ; no one can disturb him without consequence.
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