Tag Archive for ‘media-art’

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)

STRP festival part II

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!

Interpenetrating Systems @ Arse Elektronika: F**kzilla

To learn how to make computers more human, we have to f**k them.

Arse Elektronika’s sex and technology conference in San Francisco held 5-7th October 2007 at kink.com’s Pr0n Palace opened with a bang. Here a young cyberpunk woman engages in sex with a robot for the first time in media art history.

This video shows her, F**kzilla and operator Jacob Appelbaum preparing the next giant step for mankind by trying F**kzilla’s tongue chainsaw: “We have the technology.” (Jacob Appelbaum)

Arse Elektronika 2007

References:
Wired, “So who wants to f**k a robot?”
The Register, “Rise of the f**king machines: Arse Elektronika bumps uglies with Web 2.0″
RE/Search, V. Vale on Arse Elektronika, Fri-Sun Oct 5-7, San Francisco


In my talk I explored the relationships and intersections between porn, art and politics. In my opening statement, I made two arguments1. We must understand pr0n as a medium of expression, criticism and resistance
2. Therefore we have to make pr0n a language of public discourse

My lecture covered a brief introduction to the work of the Serbian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, a founding member of Yugoslavia’s oppositional “Black Wave”, famous for his groundbreaking films of Yugoslav cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Makavejev’s breakthrough and international recognition came with W.R.—Misterije organizma (W.R.—Mysteries of the Organism, 1971), a film that he described as “a fantasy on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of authority and power over others.”

Stefan Lutschinger @ digitaldrafts.at

sonar the art experience

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!

sonar autodrom

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.

las palmas exhibition @ deaf07

las palmas… sounds like sea, beach and cocktails ! but it´s the name of a recently upgraded building on a small old-harbour-like corner on the other side of erasmusbridge. it used to be a small piece of freedom there, before they build the bridge. people living on boats, squatter in the brick building, which is now adapted and called Las Palmas. surrounded by towers of business. things are changing, when cities are growing and bridges are built.

the exhibtion is in the basement of the building, in a dark hall with big cement-columns, which has very special atmosphere for the works shown. it somehow starts to suck u inside…. into the black hole – full of strange freaky interacting media art. a real good selection and overview of worldwide contemporary electronic art.

Before entering the mainhall you pass by a ladder consisting of 24 TV screens stacked up to a vertical column. Go Up! Go Up! (by Hu Jie Ming) On the screens you see someone climbing up. The audience intervenes the climbing scene by either shouting at them or making noises, the climbers fall down hopelessly, and start to climb once again.

ondulation @deaf07

Ondulation (by Thomas McIntosh) with Mikko Hynninen and Emmanuel Madan) is a composition for water, sound and light. A two ton pool of water is set into motion using sound, beams of light are projected onto the surface of the water and reflect onto a projection screen. The pool becomes a liquid mirror that is slowly sculpted into perfect three-dimensional expressions of a musical composition. a very aesthetic and poetic piece of art. Hard to transport this slightly psychedelic visual spectacle through video. u better go and watch it !

harddisko @deaf07

“Harddisko” is an installation piece dealing with raw computer sounds. Rhythmic noises are evolving from sixteen harddrives, which are orchestrated through simple power circuits. By cutting the harddisk’s power in varying sequences and amplifying the peculiar sound characteristics of each drive, an unpredictable acoustic and visual interplay is taking place.

http://harddisko.ch.vu/

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