Archive for the ‘english’ Category

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AntiVJ @ Mapping Festival 2008

AntiVJ is a VJ Label founded by four VJs francophone – VJ Crustea, VJ Emovie, VJ Aalto and VJ Legoman. Their aim is to leave the traditional work area of a VJ … the lonley screen somewhere in a club…
Well, what they do so far is to create new surfaces for their VJ Sets – that range from unconventional screens in night clubs to installations in public spaces (a market place or a garage) and lightsculptures – as well as developing their own VJ Tools to play on these 3d shapes.

I saw them playing visually with their own installation objects – a bunch of white cubes in a darkend room. I gotta say… it was awesome!You even got the feeling those objects were moving or shivering a bit! Enjoy the video!

mapping festival in geneva: 10.04.08 – 20.04.08

yesterday _ the 10th of april 2008 _ the mapping festival _ a festival for and about visual art _ started with various live acts at the centre d’art contemporain of geneva. due to an unexpacted long trip from vienna to geneva, i only saw the last two vj performances at the opening party. but it was worth to go there!

vj aalto from paris showed his fresh and clear animations that dance happily to the rythm of the music.
later on vj ratsi / emovie experimented with urban photos by defragmenting them in different manners. Have a look at the short summery video to catch the nice atmosphere of this party!

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)

transmediale.08 archive

this year transmediale was back in Haus der Kulturen der Welt which is a big and perfect location for such an event. Not only because again it was gathering people from allround the world related to the digital art bubble for communication, inspiration and conspiration.

and conspire. was even the theme of this years transmediale. but the fact that an artwork is incomprehensibly not necessarily means that it´s conspirativ – some works in the exhibtion were hard to /unpack – not only because of a missing text which might give you an idea. But i think it´s a strange human habbit anyway to try to comprehend everything. and if you need to satisfy your understanding of art reception – insert a coin.

documentation of the festival, like lectures and interviews can be found on transmediale archiv and here

digital theremin workshop

part of the club transmediale were the xxxxx-workshops which where held in the ballhaus naunyn. i tried to participate in all the workshops, but due to lack of sleep and a missed flight to berlin i only participated in the digital theremin workshop which was held by andrey smirnov from the theremin center in moscow and derek holzer. smirnov introduced us to the history of the known theremin instrument and lots of interesting info about leon theremin and his other inventions and his connections to secret services.

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after a short introduction of pd by derek holzer, who also curated the worskhop series together with Martin Howse, we started to play around with the small digital theremin boards connected either via arduino board or via the standard mic/line input of our computers… pretty cool stuff the small digital theremin boards – because of digital tuning of the two oscillators it is very convenient and usefull even for installations, because there is no need for manual tuning which is a problem for analog theremins. so this was really a very good and interesting workshop which i was happy to attend. it was organized by pickledfeet and they are very active in knowledge transfer – so watch out for upcoming events.

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little advice in the end : don´t try pd on macbooks with leopard yet – it nearly destroyed my computer, because it didn´t go to sleep mode after i closed it.

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