This performance was one of the reasons why i was really happy to be at the ars.
it started quite slow – including my nervous soul getting bored – but as soon as a few of the pieces were turned on and rotating, a really great sound collage emerged which i fear is impossible to document: you just have to stand between this swarm of speakers in order to experience this installation. here is a short movie anyway to give you an impression:
the more unhappy you are, the more ice cream you need – thats the simple principle of this machine.
the concept says that i the machine uses a voice stress analysis in order to figure out how much ice cream you need – but see yourself:
thank you james for beeing the best proband ever!
amagatana means “rainy sword” in japanese. it´s an umbrella with bluetooth connection making sounds when being moved. it has been developed by yuichiro katsumoto at the keio university inakage lab in japan.
watch the performance @ marienstrasse @ ars electronica 2007.
we’re there to cover it at the moment, a lot of nice stuff, a lot of crab – and a lot of secondlife.
if you want to contribute media flies please join the flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/ars07/ or the youtube group http://www.youtube.com/group/ars07 .
as i mentioned before, the show is overwhelming. beside of all the well known exhibition venues, this year the “marienstrasse” is also used as an exhibition space on something like 30 spots, which gives the whole festival a complete different look and feel. i like ;) – but still: impossible to cover all oft the stuff, so we’ll just pick out our personal highlights and present them here. according to this, this will be – at least my – first & last 2ndlife post:
come back for more soon…
A project by Masterclass in Digital Environment Design, NABA – ITALY
VIP is a nice plyful installation, representing all the state of the art realtime tools like ir camera motion tracking, max/msp and vvvv. For me, this is a typical master class project: technically perfect resolved, great design, but no story or meaning. but still: it’s great fun to play with this installation and my guess is that this project will be seen on quite a lot of events like this in future and as a matter of fact was already shown with great success at the BIP festival.
one of the first installations to discover was an installation by scenocosme, called Alosos.
you have to make your way through the flowerjungle with a spotlight, by doing so you will discover the sounds of the flowers and create a soundscape… really nice2discover installation.
It’s never an easy job to establish a new theme – especially not when you are the very first one…
this is exactly what the guy’s from the Streamfest are doing: organizing a media art festival in a wonderful area – that has never heard about media art before.
In the region of Salento – at the very bottom of italy – the Streamfest happened from 26th to 28th of july. the location suited the kind of event very well – a 60ies style concrete building industrial building, now used as a cultural center.
We had a very warm welcome and i have to admit that the italien way of celebrating a festival limited my abilities of covering the festival, so i decided to show a nice little collection of works that were presented there.
my resume: the lack of visitors was a problem caused by the fact that the theme of the festival is new to the region, the event itself was well done with great efforts in details like DJ sets and artist support.
chris sugrue (us)
delicate boundaries
actually i really enjoyed this installation, maybe it was the still little child in me that likes to roam around in backyards, pick up worms and try to get them moving on my arms.
in this installation you can have this feeling in a clean digital way, if you touch the screen the litle creatures are starting to cross the border of the screen and crawl along your hands…so cute!
by ka and axolotl
even though sonar is mostly known for the electronic music part we are arty eneugh to almost skip the music part and go straight on to the multimedia section. clearly for our coverage we will focus on that “mostly” secret part of the festival!
the multimedia section was split into: sonarmatica, sonarama, sonarcinema, sonarextra and sonar a la carte.( wow what fantastic creativity of name creations) sonarmatica the multimedia exhibition features the topic magic. sonarama takes place in the casm (centro de arte santa monica) and shows high level multimedia live performances. sonarcinema: the name stands for itselfs and finally sonarextra presents external exhibitions.
now with the experience of all the different components of the festival, its quite clear that the day part is the much more sophisticated one. of course the nightly sessions have amazing names to offer, but the huge number of people and the humongous size of the stages (four) provokes nightmare-like impressions. you feel quite anonymous, lost and like a walking wallet. furthermore, to top the size of the halls they put an autodrom into the fetival area! no joke!
but suprisingly the day program is challenging, acts like khan of finland, planningtorock, fm3 featuring blixa bargeld (video) and even the buddha machine startled us. their unusual performances were presenting more than performing only music but going into various levels of performance art.
in the following articels we will present some single artworks to give you an overview of what the festival had to present.
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