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!
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.
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.
first step :-|
by axolotl and ka
it was quite easy to be reminded to organize everything in time because of huge smiley posters all over town.
the smiley symbol seems to be the main merchandising source this year. we have a number of different theories about the use of this icon. for one it is a trademark and we were wondering if there is a connection involving loads of money. also it was widely used as a symbol for the 80ies acid house movement. an this brings us directly to the last reason: (as you might remember) there were a huge amount of xtc pills that had exactly this symbol engraved 8-)
also we had to discover that now this festival is as far from underground as vienna is from the sea.
not that it is only the fault of sonar, as we had a big phantasy of this cool festival that it can surely not fit. and partly because, well, only one phrase: SELL OUT! :(
almost immediately after the “your payment was recieved” mail the follow-up message told us about the wonderful world of SONAR merchandising this year. the flagship item is the somewhat boboesque adidas-SONAR-vinyl bag “free” for acreditation holders (of which finally we are proud owners) yupiiieeee.
and in good old bobo attitude the guy next to us (of course he was viennese) stated that the vinyl bag really is quite small (we estimate a maximum of 8 discs fit into the bag – good for minimal techno or style but bad for turntabelists)
we found out that the sum of 3500€ buys you a place in the bag for your own commercial insert. the bag exists in a limited edition of 4000 pieces. that’s nearly 1 euro per bag, man *:D
as you can see from the picture, they could’ve spent more thoughts or money on the design.
for the notes, check out the flickr site
after our first contact with the festival (so far we only picked up our bags) we as tagr.tv members officially tag the smiley logo as “not be used again in the next ten years”. we are quite pessimistic concerning the future of our sms conversations.
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
as an endless number of smileys pass by, the capitalist character of the festival becomes more and more evident.
with the price of almost 50€ per night for entering (if you buy single tickets), we were wondering how expensive drinks will be on the inside. so we are already making plans how to smuggle in huge amounts of beer, but no worry, we have our super special SONAR bags and are allowed using the super special “accreditations only” entrance. :)
%*[] (as you might not know this particular one stands for “super toasted”)
these are our first impressions. more when we report from the inside tomorrow when the festival actually begins.
we’re at the dutch pavillon. aernout mik shows some recent works, where he reflects on the situation in a nationstate during ‘the age of paranoia’. multichannel video screens, severe police training, kids wearing uniforms, all in all overwhelmingly set up.
we are all confronted with the situation, that nations restrict the civil rights, homeland security and common mistrust. is there a real threat, or do nations only use this scenery to fundament their status quo? you decide..
Ruben ramos balsa, bowling
two tables, two monitors. Stereo sound that somehow interacts with a tube that does bubbles into a glass of water. weired, melodic sound, from a piano that is used in a cageous style. This is the first stop of our journey through giardini: the spanish pavillon
Ruben ramos balsa. Spain
here you see the installation from a different perspective. thru a tube, air is being pumped into the glass where it bubbles. on the video screen on the right, a boy blows into the other end of the tube. blowing halt..
this is another installation of ruben balsa. one the one side a camera attached to a glass. the other is a beamer, where the cam sends its picture to. if you blow on the surface of the water, the picture on the beamer shows some nice patterns. ruben really seems to be quite into ehrm blowing..
Formed in 1996 by Kensuke Sembo and Yae Akaiwa, Exonemo is group devoted to the experimentation of new ways of interaction between art and public.
LUCA: Object B presents, compared to the consumer society, a different kind of immersion between real and virtual spaces. what do you think about the relationships of virtual and real spaces of contemporary world? And what do you want to communicate trough the hacked interactions of Object B?
EXO: When considering about the “real” and “virtual” space, we feel the border between them has been getting more ambiguous than before. It might be no longer an indivisible concept. But actually, not only “real space to virtual space” but also divided world such as “country to country”, “culture to culture” or “person to person” exist around us and make conflicts between them.
The Object B focuses on “communication” between divided worlds.
By multiple approach to the installation, for example, from the exhibit space (physically) or from the game space (as a nonphysical avatar), you will experience an obvious communication gap between two worlds.
We think that’s the interesting point on communication.
LUCA: Which seeds where the starting point to think this piece?
EXO: Maybe at the moment when I doubted if a person on the other side of the internet was a real human being…or not!?
LUCA: What do you think about game industry today?
EXO: Regading the Half-Life, the game company VALVE opens the developement environment partly to get the scene active and also let expert programmer join the company. It’s intersting that we can touch the structure of the game by modification. Game modification has a potential for expansion but we have a limited feeling about the distribution system STEAM because they tighten controls on license. Meanwhile, game industry in Japan seems different. Japanese game companies almost never open the developement environment to the public, but they activate the game scene by allowing re-creation of game characters such as cosplay, fan fiction and so on.
Each environment is open and closed at different point and we see an interesting difference of game culture there.
LUCA: Open source and free exchange are important vectors of innovation, don’t you think that with all this new and specialized hardware and software instrument, that are quite “closed”,that users will have a little range of creative possibilities?
EXO: Focusing on open source and free exchange in art creation, we think it is different from software development.
For the software development, “function” is absolutely imperative and we can share the function by getting source code. So we think the open source for software development is very important but for the art work, “function” is not important thing so there isn’t much point in sharing the source. To represent the concept through an art work might expect
next creativity like open source and free exchange on software development.
LUCA: Water, what makes you thinkin?
EXO: MOST IMPORTANT MEDIA
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