Art Events Data Table

Curator:

• Jacques Charbonneau

Participants:

• Philippe Boissonnet (Canada)
• Daniel Cabanis (France)
• Jacques Charbonneau (Canada)
• Ginette Daigneault (Canada)
• Carol Dallaire (Canada)
• James Durand (France)
• Hubert Durocher (Canada)
• Jean-Pierre Gagnon (Canada)
• Richard Garneau (Canada)
• Gregory P. Garvey (Canada)
• Daniel Hogue (Canada)
• Alex Kempkens (Canada)
• Sowon Kwon (USA)
• Pierre Monat (Canada)
• Robert Mongeau (Canada)
• Georg Muhleck (Germany)
• Andre Pappathomas (Canada)
• Sylvie Pronovost (Canada)
• Jacques Rancourt (Canada)
• Barbara Rauch (Czech Republic)
• Cynthia Beth Rubin (USA)
• Richard Ste-Marie (Canada)
• J.W. Stewart (Canada)
• Anton Vidokle (USA)

This interactive media dance performance is the result of a year long collaboration between the Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) of Arizona State University and Montreal-based Montanaro Dance. The work features the Video Sensing System that has been developed by John T. Mitchell and Robb Lovell, two artist-technologists associated with the ISA.

Organized by Centre Copie-Art—Galerie arts technologiques, this exhibition will present in parallel, for each artist included, a copigraphy (copy art) produced at the beginning of their career and a work representative of their present output.

Curators:

• Monique Brunet Weinmann
• Jacques Charbonneau

Participants:

• M. Amal Abdenour (France)
• Barbara Astman (USA)
• Dina Dar (USA)
• Marisa Gonzalez (Spain)
• Sarah Jackson (Canada)
• Doreen Lindsay (Canada)
• Joan Lyons (USA)
• Lieve Prins (Belgium/Netherlands)
• Sonia Landy Sheridan (USA)
• Nell Tenhaaf (Canada)

Presented in connection with the exhibition Changing Configurations, this day of interaction and exchange will offer an opportunity to examine some of the aspects of the immediate problems confronting the image and its relationship with technology and art. Various guests will debate this problem with artists participating in the exhibition and the public concerned by the contemporary question of the image. Organized by Vox Populi as part of the event le Mois de la Photo. Followed by the opening of the exhibition Changing Configurations.

Participants:

• Daniel Canogar (Spain)
• Marie Carani (Canada)
• Carol Dallaire (Canada)
• Timothy Druckery (USA)
• Alain Renaud (France)
• Dr. Hubertus Von Amelunxen (Germany)

In an era which certain people qualify as “post-photographic”, the exhibition Changing Configurations questions the increasingly narrow connections that unite images and technology. This exhibit is produced by Vox Populi during the event Le Mois de la Photo.

Curator:

• Richard Baillargeon

Participants (Maison de la culture Mercier):

• Marc Audette (Canada)
• Carol Dallaire (Canada)
• Caroll Moppet (Canada)
• Sophie Bellissent (Canada)
• Joan Fontcuberta (Spain)
• Daniel Canogar (Spain)
• Celine Messier (Canada)

Participants (Vox Populi):

• Dominique Pelletey (France)
• Ramona Ramlochand (Canada)

Concept
Historically the thought is following the development of the instrumental theater by Mauricio Kagel & Karlheinz Stockhausen for a mutual apply in multimedia arts. Here is the attempt of combination of instrumental theater with electroacoustic music in an improvised interactive audiovisual structure. The idea of >work in progress< dedicates to an >interdisciplinary and cross-cultural communication<, as ISEA2002 committed to. In the sense of interdisciplinary progress this work offer an open form for all arts to have reciprocated experiences. The stage aspect associates with the Chinese shadow-puppet-show (PIE) and running-figure-lantern for approaching a mind of crossculture exchange.

Functions of the work
Technically this work detects audio by a number of microphones, which are carded by the musicians and dancers. It then makes a choice of pictures accordingly to the sound and transforms those. Also the sound will be transformed in stereo of 6 channel by granular synthesis and will fit it in a prepared electroacoustic composition and stage arrangement. The audiovisual ambience and the interpreters are open to the public. The performance is expected, but undetermined. The public can participate in this performance by going and coming through the orbit stage like the moving figures in the Chinese running figure- lantern. For the performance of this piece in ISEA2002 Nagoya two musicians and two dancer (1x male, 1x female) with good (vocal-) improvisation will interpret this piece.

With support of City of Graz , province of Upper Austria, Thundeskanzleramt Kunst, Nagoya City University, Bruckner-Conservatory Linz, University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz, the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs Austria.

NeverEndingStories is structured as a looped animation leading us deeper and deeper in the euphoria of communication. The animation begins with a Mickey Mouse head whose ears alternately can be changed (by pressing the computer keys) from spheres to globes, hearts, money signs, atom cells, record players and yin yang symbols. Culled from an encyclopedic array of globally recognizable symbols NeverEndingStories continues by displaying a world map on which rain a shower of angels, bombs, guns, ears, candy, eagles, shopping carts, clocks, machine wheels, bugs, ringing telephones, ticking clocks, waggling fingers, pigs, skulls with heart shaped eyes, analysis charts and more. The work allows for both directional and optional interaction, making it a dynamic tool comparable to a software application. The keyboard-driven trajectory allows one to replace scenes and choose one fragment after another, resulting in a linear deployment of interlinked events that develop semantic connections as well. The interactive keyboard provides for a choice of ingredients, an extensive vocabulary from which it is possible to produce many combinations. Consulting the work resembles “mixing”, the computer becoming a kind of musical instrument or assembly device, putting the visitor in the position of a “processor, ” the operator of a machine.

The performance by these two Brazilian creators incorporates different features including video, poetry and music, played live by the authors. The title Pincelulas derives from a combination of Portuguese words which convey the fundamental messages in this work: pincel (brush), the painting instrument; cellula (cell), the basic unit of all Living species and pincelada (stroke), the painters manifestation.

The performance’s objective is to tell the story of human development, from its physical inception to its emotional constitution, attempting to address each of the three stages of life: embryo, formation, birth and growth; intellect and senility.

Eder Santos has become a respected personality as a producer and video artist in the Brazilian and international communities. Since 1989, he has been presented in various festivals and museums in Brazil, Europe and the United States. Eder Santos produces commercial work and videoclips with famous Brazilian musicians on a regular basis. Paulo Sergio dos Santos, by the other hand, also born in Belo Horizonte, bring his vast experience as a musician to their cooperative work: he was a percussionist with the Minas Gerais Simphony Orchestra for nine years and has been part of the well-known UAKTI musical group since its inception 19 years ago. With a series of concerts throughout these years, UAKTI has been acclaimed and admired by an eclectic public in the United States, Canada, Japan and most of Europe. He has been the constant composer of music and soundtrack for Mer Santos videos and installations.

Brazilian videomaker Eder Santos creates vibrant, poetic works that merge the personal, the cultural and the technological to reinterpret motifs that are central to Brazil’s African, indigenous and European heritage. Evoking the rhythms and textures of memory and history, he crafts a visual language of high-end and low-end technologies, from digital media to Super-8 film. As a Brazilian artist, Santos is acutely aware of the socioeconomic relation of technological media and cultural representation: “I have never lost sight of the fact that I am using a technology rather foreign to my city and country – in short, there is a gap in the relation between the social and the technological. As a consequence, I always attempt to use our own cultural elements.” In the vivid UAKTI-Bolero (1987). Santos’ electronic rendering of a musical performance, Ravel’s Bolero has been interpreted in terms of a Brazilian sensibility. Rite & Expression (1988) is a televisual reconstruction of 17th-century Baroque architecture, religious syncretism and African cultural rituals. Europe in Five Minutes (1986) and I Cannot Go to Africa Because I Am on Duty (1990) address the use of technological media as modes of cultural “documentation”. States Santos, “I use technology to express visual and tactile sensations, moods and feelings. I aim at creating a private world that is both an inner and an outer reality.”

The first performance of “VirtualAERI” was given in 1997 at IRCAM’s Espace de Projection, in Paris, France. The second version “VirtualAERI II”. was written in 1998. It consisted of four sections, each of which dealt with a different kind of space, large, medium and small. The form is intentionally simplified, like the succession of “block type” sections. The static sections anticipate with the kinetic sections always following. These are abruptly alternated in this piece. This idea of form was originally experimented with in a previous composition. In this composition it is evolved to further possibilities. The mechanical textures are superimposed one onto another. At the same the this creates poly tempo. In each section the texture starts in one shape then gradually transforms into another. Not only in the sections, but also within the whole piece, the overall phase gradually transforms and intensifies.

Virtual instruments, or controllers, cannot produce sounds by themselves. They merely send signals that produce sounds by means of a computer or a sound module. They may be regarded as an interface between the performer and the computer insofar as they translate the energy derived from body movements into electrical signals. At the same time however, they allow the performer to express complex musical ideas. With the help of a controller, a tiny gesture can trigger any number of complex musical passages at one and the same time in a real time context, whereas a traditional instrument can produce only a limited range of sounds.

Get your eyeball tattooed!

A black & white world bound together by immersive imagery set in a radical minimal soundscape. The empty white screen reveals itself to be just another layer among endless projected inscriptions onto the eye. Cell’s mesmerizing visual projections are created by C.V.A: a real time rendering graphics engine prototype. For 66b, the idea of test patches has lead to a live movement film strip where myriad afterimages highlight the relationship between performer and ground in an ever-shifting dynamic. 66b/cell, together with Tachi – Maeda Laboratory Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, are developing wearable devices synchronizing body gesture to the visual and sound network.

All and nothing. Black and white. Elusive and permanent. Indelibly stamped.

The relationship between space and body within a media-oriented society interests me greatly, and as the theme for this piece I have chosen “Ambiguous Senses/ Misleading feelings” as relates to the legs and body, using legs and images of legs to express this theme.

While I am an artist, or in other words, a person who sees and draws, I am also a performer, or an actor. My perceptions of “sections” of the body, and how I perceive the relationship of the “moving body” to the “body as a stationary Image”, is an extremely important question.

In art history, body parts, or selected body members, have often been used for “artistic exercises”. Sketching part of the body, such as the head, hands or legs, is seen as a natural step when starting a piece of art or even a simple study for a piece of art. As a viewer/drawer it is possible to see only part of the body, and that section can be isolated in any manner. However, the performer can only focus his attention on part of his body, and can only put importance on a specific member. He cannot actually cut out and isolate that part. While the actor can concentrate on a certain body part, he cannot connect that part with 1 other parts. The part is an indivisible called a body, and when one end trembles, the vibration is conveyed to the other end at a distance. How should the artist/performer interact with this matter called a body to which he is unwillingly connected?

In the actual performance, I use real legs and images of photographed legs. These movements are random; they do not carry a special message, nor do they try to express anything. However, the image of the actual legs and images moving near and far cause confusion; the viewer falls into a state of confusion and experiences “ambiguous and misleading sensations”. The act of walking does not have any particular story to it, however, it might appear that this performance is trying to express something. One reason for this is that the cut legs belong to an actual body, and are always connected to a body. The actual legs and projected legs are seen in an “misleading sense”, that is, as somehow connected to a body.

Microtonal sound installation for multiple mobile sound sources,  performed by Singaporean community artists as part of the IDMI’s New Music and the Networked Ensemble Project.

Pocket Gamelan – Mandala 7 is a microtonal sound installation for mobile devices in which sound projection relies entirely on hand-held battery-operated amplifiers of sixteen Nokia mobile phones. The work does not depend on mains amplification, fixed speaker placement or tethered performance interfaces but explores the collaborative potential of mobile phones used as moving sound sources and as hand-held remote control units. Sound interaction involves chorusing, a by-product of the movement of each sound source and microtonal tuning algorithms which are programmed into each handset and activated by commands initiated by the players.

Pocket Gamelan – Mandala 7 uses a tuning configuration that resembles a mandala. Its geometry defines a reflective listening space in which each of the players interact with one another as they explore a 35-note microtonal scale developed by contemporary tuning theorist Erv Wilson. This scale contains many harmonic intervals described by music theorists from antiquity and still found in musical traditions from various parts of the world.

Pocket Gamelan – Mandala 7 uses a j2me network framework developed at the University of Wollonging by composer A/Prof Greg Schiemer assisted by Mark Havryliv.

Different cultures have special rules and common elements that humans identify as behavior or grammar. We developed a computer model to illustrate this. We also developed Hitch Haiku, a system to express and to interactively experience cultural understanding using cultural computing. ZENetic applies some aspects of Buddhist philosophy as a model in computational science. Our motivation derives from the more than 2,000 years of innovative Buddhist tradition. Methods of interaction between Zen master and pupil, developed to sharpen the understanding of human consciousness, provide a rich base for interactive modeling — a field still unexplored in the Western scientific tradition. Hitch Haiku system interactively aids users in creating haiku, poems with imagery-maximizing mechanisms, the shortest in the world. First, “kire-ji”, words that indicate a transition in the poem, and particles are added to the word/phrase input by the user to make a five- or seven-syllable phrase. Second, phrases including terminology related to the user’s input are located in a phrase database holding examples of haiku from the Japanese literary four-season calendar, ensuring the cultural validity of the haiku. These phrases are then “hitched” together to generate a haiku. Although this system periodically generates flawed haiku, the ability to generate haiku that support the expansion of users’ cultural understanding has been confirmed through assessment experimentation. The i.plot system discovers the hidden connections between words. It determines that a connection between words exists if two words are found in the same thought-form or make up a stimulus-response pair in the Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus. Then it finds several connections between the two words by tracing a large set of possible paths between them, so that the paths traverse several two-word connections. If the chaos engine is in an appropriate state, a preference may be added so that longer paths are displayed, or so that the paths are forced to connect through a more distantly connected word. The user may further expand the connections of any word of interest.

Crosscurrents: New Media Art is the collective title of a three-part exhibition of new media art that together comprise a cross cultural discourse on art, sound, image and object that is being presented by the Osage Art Foundation and the Shenzhen Fine Art Institute at Osage Singapore in association with the Singapore Arts Festival.

Crosscurrents includes work drawn from the exhibitions Sharing Memory by Beijing-based artists Qiu Zhijie and Jin Jiangbo, Ambient Art by Hong Kong artist Kingsley Ng and Dancing with Frequencies — a new site specific work by Singaporean artist Zulkifle Mahmod.

This exhibition of new media art from Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore is a form of international cultural exchange that helps to focus attention on the importance of regional and cultural uniqueness.

Resembling an early black & white film still, this unique picture comes to life but refuses to disclose the plot.

Visitors peer into a Magic Faraway Tree to get a glimpse into a fairytale forest in which a virtual bear pays homage to pioneer video artist Bruce Nauman.

Offering omnipotence through a touch screen, Charmed invites visitors to tinker with the lives of animated people in a tabletop city.

ZiZi is an affectionate ottoman couch that asks for emotional support while offering physical comfort.

A treat for the senses Immersion lets visitors play with sea creatures in a virtual underwater world.

Etherradio Live: Experimental music from Aotearoa new Zealand
Performance by Adam Willetts and PSN Electronic (Peter Stapleton, Su Ballard & Nathan Thompson)

Sound artists Bruce Russell, Adam Willetts, and PSN Electronic (Peter Stapleton, Su Ballard, and Nathan Thompson) use old and new radio technologies in ways that reveal both the richness of radio as a material of media art, and the density of New Zealand’s unseen radio environment. These three works were recorded in the South Island in June and July 2008. Through the interaction of radio waves, atmosphere, and topography they are infused with the winter storms of the Southern Pacific, the volcanic hills and harbours of Port Lyttelton, Port Chalmers and the reclaimed swampland around Christchurch’s Avon River.

Bruce Russell: Electro-magnetic Feedback Study #1 (Strange House in the Snow). Recorded in Lyttelton during a snowstorm, this piece was created with the audio produced by an electromagnetic feedback loop produced by a roughly wound coil of galvanised steel wire, connected to a Tivoli Model 1 radio through the external aerial socket. An audio line out was taken from the Tivoli to the #1 and #2 inputs of Bruce’s vintage Concord Contessa guitar amplifier. The coil was then placed around the speaker magnet in the rear of the amplifier. The radio was tuned to the so-called ‘X-band’, the frequencies above the AM broadcast radio band in New Zealand, used for radio-location and navigation.

PSN Electronic: Teleporter 1 (recording)

Electronic samples, Korg and shortwave radio.

In the Teleporter series of works PSN Electronic explore the landscape of electricity and broadcast, constructing new sound environments by reconfiguring afterimages of recordings and transmissions. The works are inspired by the Voyager discoveries on Mars, by remote core samples and images dissolved into thin strands of data transmitted back to Earth, information delayed and filtered through transmission and reception. From the less distant locale of Port Chalmers, PSN Electronic engage a process of dissolution and reconstruction, weaving radio transmissions and field recordings into a new kind of landscape. Teleporter 1 explores unknown environments that melt on examination.

Adam Willetts: Electrosmog Lightning Ride

Electrosmog Lightning Ride is an improvised sound work created using walkie-talkies, Wii Remotes and an electrosmog detector to produce complex patterns of gesturally-controlled radio interference, feedback, and live sampling. This tactile and physical approach to electronic improvisation incorporates the wireless space and electrosmog of these instruments as both method of control and as audible output. Adam emphasises the presence and position of the body, locating it in electromagnetic space and revelling in the magic of the ether.

Current work of the et al. collective is best summarised as a kind of archiving of societal events and issues, aspects of which are explored through immersive installation environments that engage with issues of global political inter- (or hyper-) activity, fundamentalisms, and belief systems. The collective’s practice evokes the closed and secretive dimensions of global communication, information, and transport networks, and to this end the social meaning of things deploys tools such as synthesised speech, political sound bites and aleatoric scripting, reconstructed Google Earth visuals and advertising hoardings and noticeboards. et al.’s scenario both informs and excludes the viewer.  the social meaning of things is embedded in the political flows that create, maintain, and permeate nations and borders.

Kentaro Yamada’s Listening Heads highlights the nuances of communication made from the non-linguistic elements that shape conversation. Speaking into one of the microphones hanging in front of these large-scale video portraits provokes an emotive but silent expression from the sitters – they frown, fall asleep, look bored, or intent. The viewer engages in a phantasmic conversation, seeking by habit an approving or appropriate look from faces that appear open and responsive but simply form a thin veneer over a computer interface. The resulting monologue can feel reassuringly complete, an illusion of interaction framed by intangible presence. Sometimes the spoken input and the video response coincide, but other times the head’s reply leaves the viewer with the sense of a communication breakdown. Listening Heads plays with our human perception of the face as privileged object. The illusion that the heads listen and respond turns the portraits into a kind of mirror, returning our gaze. By clothing his hardware and software in his friends’ visages Yamada constructs a kind of wordless Turing test.

Alex Monteith’s Composition for farmer… tweaks an archetype of agrarian New Zealand, so often described as a nation of 40 million sheep and 4 million people. In the crisp air of a Taranaki farm, Lloyd Bishop, a champion New Zealand dog triallist, expertly choreographs three dogs and 120 sheep across the viewfinders of Monteith’s four simultaneously recording video cameras.  The once-primetime television staple of sheepdog trialling, where farmers and their dogs compete to usher a mob of sheep through a course and into a pen in record time, becomes in Monteith’s video installation a pattern of animal and human bodies. There is nostalgia for an imagined rustic innocence, contradicted by the muddy specificity and the fantastic pointlessness of this choreography. Formally, the work draws a relationship between the rigid framing of the camera lens and the pegged arenas the sheep move between.  This work evokes nationalist, multi-screen hymns like This is New Zealand, a celebration of culture and landscape that screened at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka.

Stella Brennan’s South Pacific made in collaboration with radiologist Dr David Perry, examines the links between sonar, radar and ultrasound; technologies for making images from non-visual sources. Playing with relations between the visual, aural and textual, the work explores how the Second World War changed the perception of oceanic space and the conflict’s legacy in the region. In 1954 American radiologist D. Howry and his team created live ultrasound images using declassified material from the gun turret of a B29 Superfortress – planes which, at the close of the Second World War would leave Pacific island airfields in their hundreds to bomb the Japanese mainland. Reviving a technique of this early experimental ultrasound, which required the patient to be immersed in water, Brennan forms images exploring the interface between war, technology and perception. South Pacific recalls stories of tropical lagoons littered with rusting ordnance and coral islands flattened for runway, a vast ocean is glimpsed by radar, video and ultrasound.

Granddaddy of New Zealand experimental media practice,  Len Lye (1901-1980) is known for his vivid and entrancing films – often made by directly scratching, painting and printing onto filmstock – and his kinetic sculptures that boom, flip and crash.  Free Radicals repurposes and reimagines film  through movement hand-scratched onto black film leader. Lightning-fashes, scribbles and stripes synchronise to drumming – a homage to Yoruba, god of thunder. The music was printed as an optical soundtrack, the waveforms of which then feed back into Lye’s animation. The film retains a sense of process, of Lye’s fascination with doodling and unconcious mark-making as a way to access deeply held, pre-rational understanding. Scratching the emulsion back to the clear film beneath, the drawn marks of the hand are clearly visible. Lye’s studied mix of accident and control sends scribbles rotating and stripes dancing across the frame. Forms pulse and twist in a kinesthetic meld of image and sound. Free Radicals suggests molecular interactions; the film’s black void could be interatomic or interstellar space.

Sam & Gigi have been solidly producing for over four years now. They have been recognised all over the world by some of the most famous djs and producers like Roger Sanchez, Kerri Chandler, Jori Hulkkonen, H-Foundation, Ian Pooley, Dave Clarke, Lottie, and many more. Sam & Gigi continue working not only together but also with other producers and groups in various projects. Sam & Gigi’s musical history goes back more than a decade, with influences in jazz, classical, disco, and techno. This mix gives their production a unique and influential sound. Creating soulful music that can capture the moment and arousing feelings is their passion and main priority. With Sam being one of Finland’s earliest underground warehouse event promoters since 1991, his love for electronic music has been deeply imbedded within his soul.

Sam began producing in late ’98. At the same time he met Gigi and as things started to find their place, they were in the studio together. Gigi’s background in classical music and jazz has given her excellent tools to produce house and techno not forgetting the feminine touch she gives to the production. In duo they seem to get something unique into their work which is impossible to achieve solo. They have been signing all of their tracks to high profile labels such as Ovum, Siesta, Drenched, Still, and Stickman’s sub-lable Aquarius. When Sam & Gigi perform live they are surprising in many ways. Their repertoire includes strong house and techno. They have an astonishing way to combine minimalist techno with smooth vocals. They can move people in their emotions as well as on the dance floor. Whenever you want to hear real quality live, this is the duo for you.

Three years ago street performer and new media artist Tim Bray from sunny Gold Coast, Australia, was in Helsinki with a broken heart and a broken pogo stick. He saw a cruise ship being built and had a dream of playing home keyboards on a ship leaving Helsinki. The dream has become reality.

CasioNova and his band AutoChord perform a history of 80’s home keyboards demonstrating the joy of electronic music making. The show utilizes reconfigured 80’s technologies such as home keyboards, a Commodore 64 and an Atari 2600, along with projections, physical theatre and comedy, and of course some incredible sounds and songs from “obsolete” equipment. In addition to the stage music performance CasioNova will also perform a street theatre piece using a solar sound system, and conduct an open workshop for a Casio orchestra.

INTERFACING SOUND

Yoshio Machida’s piece Infini: The Speed of Light was composed by processing the sound of the Steel Pan with the Max/MSP audio software.

The sound of the Steel Pan, which is performed by the artist, is often associated with “tight”. In Asia the instrument has long been a symbol of light, mainly because of its sub-division into differently tuned panels, which can be seen as similar to the construction of light from many different waves. In this piece, the sound of Steel Pan is processed and modulated by Max/MSP so that it becomes more ‘transparent’ than traditional sound. The sound will dance in the air freely, like light.

S.S.S proposes an experience where the main roles are played by sound, image and the intensity of bodies in movement. A three-sided conversation that modulates a sonic and luminous flux. Cecile Babiole: Ultrasounds; Laurent Dailleau: Theremin; Atau Tanaka: BioMuse.

S.S.S. create a sound/image environment centered around gesture. The performance features three artists onstage: two producing sound and the third manipulating image. These materials, light and sound, are articulated bymovements of the arms and body. Sensor systems are the instruments turning gesture into digital information.

Each performer has his instrument and occupies his part of the total media sphere: the Theremin, the first gestural electronic music instrument from 1919; the BioMuse, which captures muscle tension data or EMG signals; and ultrasound sensors which translate movements into flowing computer graphics. Together they create an ensemble whose product is a combination of interdependent parts. Image and music are composed together, taking on equal importance. This is not a soundtrack to a video or a VJ putting wallpaper to music — there is not one medium pasted on as an afterthought to the other. Nor is it a simple synaesthesia of one medium reflecting another.

Babiole, Dailleau and Tanaka are instrumentalists that interpret a unified compositional. concept — one in light and the other in sound. Corporeal gesture brings their worlds together creating a dramatic performative whole. Expressive gesture becomes the channel of interaction between the performers, technology, and media.

On this occasion, Syntfarm focuses on bringing you a glimpse of an alternative lifestyle. SYNTBOUTIQUE is a specialized showroom that collects recipes, methods, myths and platforms for sustainable lifestyles that we are not used to. In SYNTBOUTIQUE, you will be able to interact with fantastical allegories through videos and rapidly prototyped replicas of objects, tools and landscapes that are found and used by people who don’t have access to information technologies, electricity and mass media, and are still living in a mutually beneficial relationship with their surroundings. The historical, anthropological, functional, and aesthetical values of these found objects, along with their alive-ness and complexity, are reduced to a series of pure singular expressions. This occurs as they are fabricated into the raw synthetic forms of rapid prototypes. The singular structures and layers of the transformed artifacts can help us to see and get closer to experiencing the use of human-appropriated objects from nature.

One of the main aims of SYNTBOUTIQUE is to promote and encourage sustainable living. Syntfarm hopes to be able to initiate a lively dialogue between visitors to the showroom and the artifacts displayed. All the commodified objects from SYNTBOUTIQUE are fabricated with the best quality materials found on market today and are the first step in establishing consumers’ trust and support.

Water is an elemental force of life and destruction; it’s also a key component in the environmental transformation that the planet is now experiencing. It is the most powerful symbol of flow, purity and survival, and plays essential roles in our daily life as well as global geopolitics. The artwork is an interactive film installation which takes water as its subject matter, as well as its substance and the interface by which users experience the artwork. Visitors to the gallery can touch and activate the ‘water touch pad’ onto which words are projected; their movements and choices will call up a wide range of images, texts and moving images that relate to the theme of water. These will be generated and edited dynamically in real-time, producing an unpredictable, unique experience for every user.

Anyone who has walked along a large bridge will know that bridges make sounds – what we can’t hear is the tension of the cables in the atmosphere, which create sonic vibrations across a range of frequencies. Understanding these sounds as a form of music, the artist recorded the song of her first bridge in 1995, and has been engaged with the Singing Bridges project ever since, capturing the unique voices of bridges all over the world. Rose sees each bridge as a musical instrument, and collectively the bridges she has recorded as urban temples, each one an instrument in The Global Bridge Symphony. The culmination of Singing Bridges is the proposed The Global Bridge Symphony, linking together the music of bridges internationally. The artist worked in collaboration with bridge engineers and artists in Singapore using sensor monitoring equipment to explore the technical, philosophical and musical aspects of the cable vibrations through local and global transmissions.

Water in Singapore can never be taken for granted. Most of it is brought into the country from Malaysia, but the city-state is always looking for ways to produce its own supplies, with reverse osmosis being the most recent method. As a metaphor of this ongoing ‘search for water’, the artists are sourcing for water across Singapore using an ancient, albeit completely un-scientific technique. Dowsing is the practice of using a flexible rod to ‘divine’ the location of water underground. It was believed that the dowsing rods acts as an amplifier of the body’s ‘natural’ sensing of underground water.

As a fusion of body, instrument and landscape, dowsing was a pre-scientific form of location-positioning technology, and – for the artwork – the artists tried to combine this age old ‘technology’ with modern sensing methods. The dowsing rods were enhanced with GPS and Motion Sensors, allowing data to be collected, correlated and juxtaposed to hard scientific water data to create a map of potential water sources. And if all goes well, we could end up with ‘new’ newater!

Deserted islands have long fuelled our imaginations with the romantic promise of idyllic isolation, although in reality their discovery often leads to territorial disputes and conflicts between states. For this artwork, Jason Wee has chosen one such space, a ‘white rock’ located off the southwestern tip of the Malayan Peninsula. Contested by both Singapore and Malaysia, it is known by two names, Pedra Branca (for Singapore) and Pulau Batu Puteh (for Malaysia). The artist booked time on a satellite, and had it flown over the contested territory. The satellite is capable of identifying ships by their wake. He then chartered a boat to enter the contested waters, thus crossing paths with the satellite. The satellite capture is shown in the gallery, while the island and its surrounding waters is re-mapped in the form of a 3D CG model so that virtual images are placed alongside the real ones. This artwork is a critical exploration of borders and territories, both actual and imagined.

The smile is probably the most powerful expression we have in our repertoire of facial gestures. It can be used to socially break the ice, to seduce and charm, and to indicate real and fake pleasure and enjoyment. Different professions can be said to have their own particular brand of ‘smile’ which is like a costume or work uniform; from corporate executives to nursery school teachers to exotic dancers. This artwork is an exploration of the subtle messages of compliance, attraction, persuasion and power that the smile sends out, and how our society interprets them. Collecting smiles from residents in Singapore, the artwork results in a gallery installation that involves the projection of ‘smiling patterns’, which the audience will be able to recognize and match with their own smiles.

The title is an ironic reference to the motto of submarine captains in WWII who knew that the silence of their craft was the key to remaining undetected. In contrast this artwork is a whole-hearted embrace of the richly sonic world deep within the ocean.

The work is an ‘audio portrait’ of the Singapore harbour created by recording underwater acoustics, running the gamut from sonar to whalesong. This library of sounds has been further ‘composed’ as a virtual cartographic environment, which invites the visitor to navigate space and simultaneously create a dynamic 3 dimensional soundscape.

This project employs the AudioNomad system to geo-spatially locate hydrophone recordings and other marine audio data, rendering this into a rich map-based composition that allows live ‘mixing’ in the form of Virtual marine journeys. AudioNomad is a collaborative Art + Science Research and development project between the artist (Sonic Objects: Sonic Architecture) and Dr Daniel Woo of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Collaborating with the AudioNomad Research Group and Marine Mammal Research Laboratory. Run Silent Run Deep is a co-production between the Artist Dr Nigel Helyer of ‘Sonic Objects; Sonic Architecture’ and the ‘AudioNomad Research Group’ of the University of New South Wales (Dr Daniel Woo, Michael Lake, James Salter).  The artist would like to thank Dr Elizabeth Taylor and the researchers at the Marine Mammal Research Laboratory of the Tropical Marine Science Institute, National University of Singapore; Dr Mandar Chitre and the researchers of the Acoustic Research Laboratory of the Tropical Marine Science Institute, National University of Singapore; the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore; the School of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

An interactive video installation that brings together sound and image allowing the viewer to conduct a ‘virtual’ quartet. Four video screens are arranged in the space, each one playing a different percussive instrument by triggering photo-sensors attached to the screens. In this way video images, traditionally conceived as powerless ghosts, are given the ability to affect and even strike physical objects in the real world. The viewers’ gestures at the screens are captured to enable alterations of the musical behavior of the virtual musicians creating a rich interaction between real actions and virtual objects.

Let me walk in your shoes for a day, while you walk in mine. I can hear all of your conversations, intimate and banal; I hear your silences, while simultaneously, you listen to mine. I know where you travel; I listen to your friends, your family, and those who meet you for the first time. We exchange our lives aurally and experience each others’ realities while remaining fixed in our own physical existence. The ability to understand another’s location begins through direct immersion into a new environment. To create meaning, one must be able to experience empathy, an exchange or sensitivity that could be lost in this world of strangers and friends.

In this artwork, pairs of visitors are equipped with mobile telephony garments that remotely transmit their own auditory environments to each other. Through this interactive audio exchange, which oscillates between disorientation, intimate surveillance and a new form of communication, the artwork questions our relationship to space and place, sound and technology.

Power, authority and influence increasingly rely on information networks. Although networks seem to have abolished the old hierarchical structures, such structures are now recast through networking effects that reproduce the power divide between central actors and peripheral content. The race for visibility, both for ranking high in search engines and for accumulating influence in social networking platforms, produces an implicit behaviour of accumulation of links or ‘friends’. The resulting ‘self-referentiality’ is aimed at confirming one’s own position in the network and linking to actors who are always already central. The power gained by connections to and from these centres overrules most of peripheral connectivity and suppresses the potential for dissent within a sphere of influence. This social phenomenon directly accounts for the creation of new public spheres of a global order, which include the production of borders between these spheres.

Exodus is the compound name for a ‘research engine’ into algorithms and visual strategies for searching the internet, revealing the structural properties of web content and its inherent distribution of influence. Exodus promotes bridging behaviour across the web’s new borders of power.

Computer games, along with most other digital interfaces, are primarily about sight, sound and physical movement, so it’s only logical that other senses could play their part as well. The artist is interested in how smell, the olfactory, can be incorporated into gameplay, not just as a novel addition, but as an integral element within the interaction between the player, the game and other players. In this artwork, players will need to navigate their way around a virtual environment using their sense of smell. Sniffing becomes a radical new interface for play, as players will need to recall certain scents in order to accomplish tasks. Players can communicate by triggering these aromas, deciding when and what scents to be emitted during the virtual navigation. Is olfactory gameplay fun or unpleasant? Does it increase immersion in the virtual? This is an ambitious and highly original experiment that reaches into areas of interactivity that are just starting to be explored.

The World Wide Web is an open environment capable of distributing information in a decentralized manner, allowing participation and the constant transformation of its content. DIY GORI focuses on the very nature of the Internet as ‘Open Source Culture’, the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created contents; and it experiments with the idea that objects exist as evolving pieces of digital data in cyberspace where they are continually remixed by users.

As a first experiment for DIY GORI a ‘seed’ was prepared for distribution throughout the Internet. The term ‘Gori’ means open hook in Korean and is often used to refer to the ‘fastening’ and ‘loosening’ of human relationships. The seed to be planted in cyberspace is a blueprint for GORI, a new media plant of physical computing, growing up or dying, fed by network data, connected to the Internet by USB. The blueprint is published on a Wiki site to introduce the project development process and technical details to the net-public/the self-evolving environment for free distribution that any net-citizen can browse and design on their own. At ISEA2008, a selected version of the blueprint is presented as an installation where its Wiki contents are printed and exhibited on a more traditional medium. Seed_1216976400 is the name of the installation and the 10 digits ‘1216976400’ indicate one specific point in time of Wiki history, as a still frame of the seed evolution. It is in fact the converted Unix time stamp of 2008-07-25 00:00:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) which is the first day of ISEA2008.

In Eastwood’s earlier ‘modification’ of Sid Meier’s seminal computer strategy game Civilization, Civilization IV players took the role of corporate IT workers. This work continues their project of mapping the aggressive military-capitalist tendencies of ‘real-time’ strategy and online worlds. Civilization V is a game that self-reflexively addresses the competition for dominance between new media companies working with so-called Web 2.0 technologies, such as Facebook, YouTube, and persistently online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. In order to advance through the game, companies will have to use tactics like ‘Emotional blackmail’, ‘Tribal marketing’ and ‘Love bombing’. The project is using recent researches and developments in the field of digital economy, online marketing and social networking.

The energy given off by bodies, objects, particles and electrical charges of all kinds produces the electro-magnetic field that surrounds us. An invisible landscape that exists within our more tangible, physical environment. The artists are focusing on another wave that opens the doors of the inner realms.  This installation offers an alternative way to render the different states of consciousness through the exploration of cognitive conglomerates. The observer is invited to explore a paradoxical place of creation where the brain waves articulate the evocations of archetypal constructions, and where the consciousness spared of the coagulation of representation, go back to it’s incommunicable and fundamental origin.

Marie Christine Driesen  and Horia Cosmin Samoila explore within the GhostLab, the full spectrum of electromagnetic landscapes, its beyond, and cognitive limits. Their work in this area has manifest themselves in video, performance, installations, and other new media projects.

Collaborating with: Mixed Reality Lab.

Appropriate Response is a generative audio installation that creates an ongoing, dynamic conversation between three modified television sets. Using sound clips harvested from local broadcast media, the televisions will act as individuals engaged in an evolving topical debate. Each individual will share a basic set of rules on how to proceed and a ‘cultural database’ from which to derive responses while also developing a ‘personality’ that will guide specific choices. The sound-archive that the installation draws from will evolve over the course of the exhibition, allowing new information to be gathered and old information to be ‘forgotten’.

Inspired by the proliferation of media in our information-saturated world, the artwork comments on a cut-and-paste ethic that has arisen in contemporary discourse.  It often seems a ‘logic of selection’ is employed in which the juxtaposition of existing information fragments has become an accepted form of constructing an argument, without the need for synthesis or a cumulative rationale.  Can it be appropriate to simply appropriate a response?

The artists would like to thank Dr. Li Haizhou from the I2R, Human Language Technology Department and Joseph Moore.

ABFLUG’s Departure Lounge offers a ‘departure’ point from the mainstream of electronic music into an experimental unknown courtesy of live performers who create soundscapes which blur the line between music and art.

Departure Lounge offers live music and video served by three well-known and experienced Abflug artists. The aim of the lounge is to stimulate interaction between ISEA participants and to entertain them during the symposium.

ABFLUG is a Helsinki-based electronic media Label dedicated to electronic music and video arts. The aural criteria for ABFLUG releases ranges from ambient to experimental to downtempo to deep tech no. Each ABFLUG release includes both an audio and a visual element. The two components, music and video, are complimentary but separate, and not necessarily by the same artist.

Fylkingen has played an important role in the Swedish as well as in the international art world by presenting new currents within the arts and by bridging the gap between visual art and music. Since the ’60s it has been characterized by the explorations of experimental art and an interest in the possibilities opened up by encounters between various art forms and by collaboration.

Today the Fylkingen society comprises some 180 artists active within a number of different areas of expression, from chamber music, electro-acoustic music, dance and video to performance, sound and visual art. From its founding until the ’50s, Fylkingen operated strictly as a society for chamber music. During the ’50s it introduced electro-acoustic music, a music genre still associated with the name Fylkingen. The experimental artistic climate of the ’60s brought about a significant turning point in Fylkingen’s history and Led to a more complex and multifaceted set of activities. It was above all at this time that Fylkingen established its position as advocate of radical and experimental art forms, for example by taking a stand against instrumental music and by presenting new currents within the arts. At ISEA2004 Fylkingen will present shows by Johannes Bergmark & Soren Runolf, Daniel Rozenhall, Line Selander, Per Ahlund & Fredrik Olofsson.

Fylkingen was founded as a non-profit society in 1933 by a group of composers and musicians. The organization of the society includes a board of directors and a production group of active members, the shifting makeup of which has influenced Fylkingen’s programmes and artistic direction through the years.

INTERFACING SOUND Performance

The military-entertainment complex has taken over as the warlords and wizards of symbolic domination and information peacekeeping. Meanwhile, in Super Mario land…

Computer games are overtaking the cultural and economic significance of the movie industry. Although Pong, arguably the first computer game, was a byproduct of DARPA, intended for use in military training, even early games as seemingly innocent as Space Invaders and Pac-Man typically staged a scenario of alien invasion or biological body snatching. Historical games Like Super Mario provide an air of cheerful innocence from a time when digital space was seen as an area of possibilities – rather than a virtual prison in the desert of the real. Inspired by cruise ship entertainment, Konrad Becker will play classic game levels with a beat and a kick, routing 8-bit game console music through notebook patches of musical noise.

The sounds of game playing are triggered and enhanced by a walk through a vast audiovisual 3D environment (based on the Unreal engine) and an 80’s Super Mario emulation. In addition, the game screen is framed by flickering video towers as electronic architectural elements.

At the borderline between sound art, psycho-acoustics and contemporary dance practices, Monoton will feature a selection of 25 years of electronic musical noise. Konrad Becker’s project has crossed a variety of genres over the years starting with meta-mathematical sonic specuLation and performative multimedia installations ranging from industrlal ambience noise to audio software art. Monoton re-emerges into a proto house and techno context. Involved in the early rave scene and later developing extensive theatrical stage productions, Monoton has recently focused on notebook music.

This concert presents a historical overview of computer music works created at the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (CRCA), University of Calfiornia San Diego during the past 20 years. The program represents computer music that walks the fine line between music and noise.

As computing technology has become more pervasive in the production and presentation of music, our individual and collective concept of noise has evolved. Upon first hearing computer music most listeners have difficulty finding a musical or lyrical handle by which to respond. Upon listening to a broad range of computer music compositions and performances it is difficult to hear musical distincts and nuances unless the listener is trained in contemporary music practice. The level of creativity by the musician or composer, and their level of skill with software and computing devices, must be high or the works will tend to a range of similarity. This concert seeks then to break through the conventional computer music event by arranging a listening program of pieces that have been designed through reductive, destructive, minimalist or explosive techniques to integrate or showcase that ‘thing’ that most people would not equate to music: noise.

The University of California has supported the involvement of musicians and composers in research activities for over 30 years. UC San Diego is home to one of the oldest arts research units in existence, CRCA, the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts, which evolved from a long and established history as for Music Experiment. CRCA is an organized research unit of UCSD, whose mission is to facilitate the invention of new art forms that arise out of the developments of digital technologies. Current areas of interest include networked multimedia, virtual reality, computer-spatialized audio, and live performance techniques for computer music and graphics.

Explorare Invisibilis is a 30-minute, continuously looped electro-acoustic work. It does not make use of any fashion or trend from electronica, techno or ambient music. It instead presents a landscape of three-dimensional energy, implication, sound, and silence. The great explorers travelled to the ‘unknown’, looking for treasures and new lands. Some of the greatest are rumoured to have merely described fictional adventures, travelling only in their imagination. In Explorare Invisibilis, the audience is submerged in spatial reality while the sounds evoke only thoughts of what is or could be ‘real’ through the use of the Latest ambisonics spatialisation technology. The listener is no Longer detached from the sound world projected through the loudspeakers, and instead can immediately embark on their sonic voyage. To complete the environment, lighting, texture and fleeting forms are projected from a synchronised DVD.

Explorare Invisibilis uses second-order ambisonics decoded over 12 loudspeakers arranged spherically around the listener who is elevated into the centre of the array on an acoustically transparent platform.

INTERFACING SOUND LIFE SET

Borgia Ginz is a techno dance music project of Ian Andrews who’s work In a Few Seconds Across the Ocean appears in the ISEA2004 exhibition at Kiasma in Helsinki. Borgia Ginz is one of the latest musical projects of Andrews who has been making electronic music since the early eighties. His previous projects include The Horse He’s Sick[experimental), Hypnoblob [Dub &Jungle) and Disco Stu (techno). Andrews is also a member of the The Sydney based anarcho-techno crew: Organarchy, previously Non Bossy Posse.
A Borgia Ginz set ranges from deep mutoid house and electro-glam, through to machinic Detroit style techno. Andrews’ first Disco Stu album, Adult Themes, was released on Clan Analogue Recordings in 1999. Since then he has released 12″ EPs on the German Ghetto Charge label, on Frankfurt label Cyclotron, and his notorious An Englishman in Ibiza EP on Clan Analogue Recordings.

Northern Lights takes the Aurora Borealis as its source material in a collaboration between art and science.

In 2001 when composer and sound artist Petri Kuljuntausta was searching for new ideas for a forthcoming concert, he discovered that interesting new sound material had recently been recorded under bright Aurora Borealis. During thousands of years many observations have been made, however, there are no earlier measurements or recordings containing similar data. He contacted the person behind the research project, scientist Unto K. Laine, and a listening sesson was promptly arranged at the Acoustic Laboratory of the Helsinki University of Technology. Kutjuntausta was excited about the originality of the sounds and the sonic range of their characteristics, and the idea of a composition based on these sounds from space began to crystallize. The collaboration had begun.

In this concert we hear the original field recordings as well as processed versions of Auroral sounds. A continuous dialogue between the auroral soundscapes and their digitally manipulated alternate forms is created on stage using only real-time digital sound processors, such as a touch-sensitive sound processor.

For the performance, video director Semi van Ingen has created a visual accompaniment, based on video clips of the Aurora filmed by Unto K. Leine. The videoscapes are closely connected aesthetically to Kuljuntaustais real-time manipulation of the soundscapes.

Babel-On is a sound-based audio-video work exploring the melodic and rhythmic dimensions of human spoken language. This sound and four large-scale projection digital video piece with synchronized sound focuses on languages as musical instruments of communication and concentrates on the sound of human verbal expression rather than on its meaning.

The work features close-up video images of a multitude of people of numerous nationalities and races speaking in their respective Languages about these very languages. With its language-based sonic accompaniment, it creates a fpolyphonic chorus of voices and idioms in continuous interplay, correspondence and/or conflict, suggesting various relationships between diverse geopolitical regions, cultural traditions and civilizations. Babel-On is intended to create a very physical, living audio-video flow of associations and dissociations, of different tensions, between image and sound, speech and music, words and significations, intention and chance – a constant flux of unstable, slipping, shifting anings and perceptions. It is an experiential piece that evokes the non-verbal itilities of vocal communication.

Babel-On is a collaboration between New York intermedia artist/composer Phill Niblock and Montreal video/multimedia artist Katherine Liberovskaya.

Shifting Nature is an interactive art installation that provides a visual projection by tracing the movement of users within the exhibition space. The installation was influenced by minimal art principles based on the theory that art is created out of simple unitary forms, which will be distorted by human interaction.

Shifting Nature is a study of graphic visual forms, projected onto semitransparent glass in order to represent nature’s influences on human development in art, culture and the living environment. The visual, aural and interactive elements of this installation enable the audience to experience unusual visual sensations when encountering the work.

The installation creates a reaction to space and the environment. It is a representation of a continuous activity, bringing back a sense of belonging and a deeper understanding about the relationship between man, nature and technology. One unique aspect to the work is its ‘multiple-point’ interactive technique that enables the installation to detect and react to multiple user movements/interactions simultaneously.

Hyperthesis Visual Lab is a design communication group from New Zealand and Malaysia. It was formed to explore new innovations in design, and to search for strategic solutions in global communication, new media and education.

Induction House is an architecture prototype looking into ways of treating digital media as physical matter. The surface of a computer projection is unfolded onto a structure, becoming a spatial experience.
Aether Architecture is an adventurous collaboration between Adam Somlai-Fischer, Peter Hudini and Anita Pozna. Our focus is on design research relating to spatialities in actual and virtual environments. Our driving force is to create a valid architectural response to the rapidly changing social spaces of the information and media society, where information and its re-organizing effects have dramatically altered our perception and understanding of spaces.

Such new architectures are not yet present, so to test new concepts, our investigations are carried out through the making of ‘architecture prototypes’ – installations that combine both physical design and engineering as well as computer programming and graphics. Our media design focuses on low-tech solutions by re-appropriating existing tools and technologies for new functionalities. These installations – for example Aether Induction House – are then presented to the public, where the exhibition is used as a test bed for later evaluation in order to assess how certain issues and spatialities are responded to by visitors and professional discourse

AETHER ARCHITECTURE is a Barcelona->Budapest->Stockholm design and research collaborative focusing on architecture, digital media, interaction design and related academic teaching. Work is produced on various platforms, in different collaborations.

Sankari is karaoke, a TV-drama and a video game.

Sankari Show is a participatory video show about Elias. Elias is quite a nice guy, but he is not able to speak – so he is a little bit helpless on his own. Actually, Elias does speak, but it is the audience that gives Elias their own voice. That is the genius of the show – what they say defines his future. Sankari is an improvisation show offering people a fun way to perform in front of an audience. It is a combination of karaoke, drama and video game. “Sankari” is the Finnish word for a hero. It also means the main character in a story

The format of Sankari is based on interactive scenes where the participant improvises with virtual characters. The scenes consist of small video fragments. We listen to the improvisation and choose how other characters react by showing different video dips. The story can develop in many directions depending on the performance. Elias works in a bar, but he wants to get famous. He dreams of a career as a talk show host, and of the beautiful rock star, Laura. Tonight Laura and big TV-producer Anders are coming to meet Elias. For Elias this means a date and a job interview at the same time.

Can you help Elias in his tricky situation? Whether Elias succeeds or fails depends on what you say. If you screw up it doesn’t matter because it is Elias who screws up. And in any case the audience has a great time – whatever happens, Sankari makes you a great entertainer. Sankari is created by Petri Kola and Minna Nurminen and hosted by Zarkus Poussa. Zarkus has his highly danceable gig after Sankari, so the positive vibes continue.

Unstablelandscape is my artistic and research platform to investigate and deploy: Dance improvisation within digitally augmented environments; The dramatic tension between design and desire, abstract patterns and anthropomorphic depictions; Real time composition or improvisational performances with hybrid systems (humans, computers and other living systems); The improvisational creative act with generative strategies and systems; Alternative human-computer interfaces for dance performance and multimedia installations; Embodied, embedded and distributed cognition; The relation between moving bodies, cognition, technology and the design of experiences and realities; The intelligence of biological systems and bottom-up or biologically inspired architectures for art making and performance systems and?The relation between improvisational digital pop-culture (DJ/VJ), art making and social events/performances.

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE INSTALLATION

In Free Evenings and Weekends, CLN SWP seeks to create a site-specific sound performance for Max/MSP, audience participation, and cellular phones. The project acknowledges a reorganization of contemporary urban space/ soundscapes at the hands of widespread cellular phone use by initiating a series of chance operations which “instrumentize” the performer’s mobile phones.

A series of homemade, mobile phone activity detectors serve as triggers controlling a Max/MSP program. These devices monitor -handshakes” between handheld units and transmitter towers when a call is placed or received. The installation is dependent on mobile phone activity to generate audio, and without signal activity on the frequencies used by GSM phones it would remain silent. This serves to underscore a current fact of the “wireless revolution”: that it is in the hands of those who can afford it.

The audio program in Max/MSP consists of a series of voice recordings that make up a non-ordered glossary of terms which are neither Swedish nor English, but a mutation of both languages. The intention here is to render audible all that which is normally silent the signal rather than the ring, etc.) and subvert the standard hierarchy for “Listening” to/for one’s phone in terms of static/noise rather than message.

CLN SWP is a recently-formed artists’ collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their projects involve collaborative work with a political emphasis between visual artists and writers who work with film, video, text, installation, and performance.

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE

WiFi Radio is an attempt to make perceptible the invisible fields of the wireless internet, and to create the experience of moving through wireless information as if it were physical.

Encased in a hacked Walkman radio, WiFi Radio receives information packets moving through the ambient wireless internet and transforms them into voices, so you hear the websites, passwords, usernames and other information flowing on the internet. To simulate movement through this space, we attach various sensors such as accelerometers, which alter the voice reading the wireless message. For example, if you are moving quickly you only hear snippets of a great deal of wireless data, but spoken softly. If you stand still you begin to hear less packets, but what you hear is louder and longer.

The goal is to create an environment and an experience where you are awoken from your dogmatic perception of the world and begin to incorporate these invisible fields into your perceptive range.

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE

The Cartographic Command Centre will serve as a space which allows ISEA participants to explore several web-based and mobile cartography applications as interactive VR environment in 3D.

The Cartographic Command Centre will serve as a space which allows ISEA participants to explore several web-based and mobile cartography applications, and general the field of ‘locative media’. It will use a variety of web-cartography applications to display: Geographic Information Systems [GIS) databases of GPS waypoints, climatological data, geological data, local historical data, and geo-encoded information produced specifically for ISEA by this project and hopefully by other ‘geo’ projects at ISEA as well.

The Locative Media Lab is a collective of new media artists, developers and researchers, exploring the design of new time-space-social interfaces through wireless networking and locative media (mapping and positioning). Currently the Locative Media Lab is collaborating with the RIXC in Riga, Latvia and Project Atol from Slovenia, on various international events and projects.

POD (2003) is the first installation created for the Wind Array Cascade Machine (WACMI data network. POD is a 64 channel light installation, that uses nearly 3000 Light Emitting Diodes to portray a 4 dimensional portrait of the wave movement of the wind. The wind amplitude of each WACM tilt sensor is streamed to the individual LED pods 1 to 1, with each light cluster or pod resembling the amplitude meter of a audio mixing console. PODS also visually refers to the tali grass and grain of the Canadian prairies which inspired the project. The telematic data is produced by the 64 tilt sensors of the WACM system, situated outside, on the artist’ studio rooftop in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This real time data is streamed over the Internet to the POD installation at Kiasma for the duration of the exhibition.

A wearable, wireless interactive billboard is being carried through public spaces. StalkShow deals with the threat of insecurity and isolation. It invites the audience to participate and give this threat a personal face and space; to expose both its horror and its beauty.

StalkShow takes place in public spaces such as railway stations, festivals, museums, squares, and airports. Karen Lance! carries an interactive billboard containing a laptop with a touch screen around these spaces. People are invited to touch the screen and to navigate through texts about the threat of insecurity and isolation.

StalkShow texts originate from a collection of statements that Lancet has been collecting from the internet since 2000. The statements – “personal strategies for dealing with a social space” – have been written by people living in isolation, such as a prisoner, a nun, an asylum seeker, and a digi-persona.

By navigating through the StalkShow texts, the audience is invited to generate their own montage of social strategies. With the aid of a webcam and wireless internet connection, live video portraits of members of the audience appear together with the statements on a large projection screen in the same public space. Projected, ‘watching’ faces, view the (watching] audience,

Thanks to: Amsterdam Fund for the Art, Fund for Performance Art, [Nes]theaters Amsterdam, Foundation DasArts; and Mart van Bree, G. Heeg, Hermen Maat, Robert Steijn, Jason Wilson.

Light Rain is a fusion of two works – Rebecca Cummins’ The Rainbow Machine 119981 and Paul DeMarinis’ RainDance (1998) – that explore the acoustic and optical phenomenal properties of water droplets. Among the many 19th century attempts to make sound visible, the physicist Savart’s discoveries of the effect of sound on water streams led to avenues of research that are still actively explored. A stream of water falling from a faucet, though it looks continuous, is actually a series of distinct droplets falling at intervals. Sound vibrations can influence the structure of the stream, producing distinct visual patterns. What is more amazing is that these patterns preserve aspects of the sound signal itself, such that when the drops fall on a resonating surface recognizable melodies are produced. Like its predecessor RainDance, Light Rain uses this phenomenon to play musical melodies on spectators’ umbrellas.

The falling water also produces primary and secondary rainbows while the sun shines. The spectra of the rainbow are virtual images caused by the refraction of light in water droplets. With early morning and late afternoon light, the rainbows appear high in the sky; at mid-day, circular spectra form on the ground. Depending on the viewer’s position relative to the sun and water, the rainbow may appear to be 2 or 60 meters across.

In this literally ‘immersive’ installation you can let the sunlight fall on your back and follow your shadow into the rainbow, or intercept the water streams with your umbrella to initiate surprising sound effects.

Tentacle is best described as a transmitting sculpture. The Beeoffs studio in Stockholm forms the main body with tentacles at several sites: Kiasma, Stockholm lKungstradOrdeni, Paris iLaVillette), New York [Eyebearril and Montreal (SAT). At each location there will be a camera and a monitor/projector. The images from the cameras will be transmitted to the Beeoff studio in Stockholm where they will then be combined into a single, TV-quality stream.

The Tentacle is a piece by the Swedish artist group Beeoff (Mikael Scherdin, Olle Huge and Tomas Linell). The group was formed in the mid 1990’s and have since then been exploring the boundaries between analogue and digital, and new and traditional media – always focusing on real-time production and distribution.

Path of Illusion is based on reflections concerning the manipulation of contemporary Thai society by commercial advertising with the aim of instilling false artificial values (as opposed to true intrinsic human values) in the lives of the majority of people. The familiar sight of 5 electricity poles of tapering sizes positioned strategically illuminating the streets and generating conspicuous computer designed commercial advertising forms, distort and exploit people solely for commercial interests. This distortion and exploitation lead to a false sense of material well-being and resultant unconscious indulgences in what is believed to be material progress at the expense of proper perspectives of life and its true values or meanings.

fluID is a multi-user computer game about identities. You can discover your identity, change it, steal or borrow another person’s identity, destroy identities or create new ones from scratch.

What is an identity? It is the idea that single parts of yourself belong together. It is the idea that your past, your present and your future all belong to one single owner, called: YOU.

Do cities have identities as well? Mathias Fuchs and Sylvia Eckermann, developers of fluID believe that cities have fluid identities. They relocate Gilles Deleuze’s question “what is the identity of a particular city, a person, a face?” into an artistic context, which is a gaming context as well. As users, participants are able to explore the changing identities of Tallinn, Helsinki and other cities, through a virtual cityscape.

The fluID game puts you into a terrain of identities where you start as a perfect nobody. You have no face, no name, no clothes, no sex, not a single thing to differentiate you from other players.

So now’s your chance! Try to be someone!

In a Few Seconds Across the Ocean refers to, and interrogates a number of references from 20th century art that might broadly be described as “a poetics of wireless technology,” ranging from the Futurist poetry of Marinetti to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1966 work Hymnen: anthems for electronic and concrete sounds.

Following Marconi’s 1909 invention of wireless telegraphy, a plethora of poetic texts influenced by this new science appeared across Europe. Wireless communication, became an aesthetically determining factor, in both poetic form and content. This work utilises a generative techniques (random number generation, permutative structures, and graphics/sound interaction) to produce aleatory music, graphics and text based around these writings. The piece plays in a Loop that never repeats in the same way, and the generative structure is designed to create a multi-channel sound environment where the randomisation of the process distributes the different sound elements throughout the space.

In a Few Seconds Across the Ocean attempts to go beyond the uncritical (re}production of modernist themes and aesthetics (singularity, purity, form over content) which have become all to common in sound work. Instead it seeks to interrogate modernist aesthetics from a standpoint which is hybrid, fragmented, culturally dispersed and informed by post-modern (inter)textuality. It attempts to displace the idealist opposition of divine, or natural writing (‘Words in Freedom’), over human finite inscription, which characterises many of the Constructivist and Futurist texts, instead, shifting the Formalist concept of ‘poetic language’ towards noise and difference.

For 15 years, Timo Kahlen has investigated “immaterial” phenomena in numerous wind installations, sound pieces and experimental media works. His most recent sound sculpture, Media Dirt (2004), will be created especially for exhibition in Kiasma.

Media Dirt consists of three glass cylinders (approx. 152 cm high), several loudspeakers (on the floor inside the cylinders) and the gurgling, whispering, hissing, singing, “dirty” sound of radio interference – the nomadic, temporary, immaterial noise and beauty found in-between radio stations. The radio interference – constant radiation that occupies the apparently ’empty’ air that surrounds us all the time – creates a complex, artificial, purely technological but seemingly-natural setting-with references to insects whirring through the air, to birds singing. In this way, the glass cylinders become the laboratory for a reconstruction, a new abstract form of ‘nature’” -Werner Ennokeit

INTERFACING SOUND

Harvester is an installation that employs sound, kinetic elements, and interactivity to create a shifting audio field from a system of controlled feedback.

In Harvester the sounds heard are derived from the piece itself: a set of feedback tones that arise naturally from the electronic components. These tones are a real-time monitor of the status of the piece as it moves and changes. Harvester is constructed using a set of microphones held at the ends of slender, flexible support stands and moved by electric motors. The stands are distributed around a space so that visitors can walk among them. The microphones pick up ambient sounds, including their own amplified signal. These sounds are processed and sent to the speakers resulting in a feedback network whose sound varies as microphones move.

As visitors move through Harvester, they can affect its behaviour by their physical presence in the path of the sound. The interaction in Harvester occurs without the visitor having to actively address any sort of technology; both the visitor input and its results occur in real physical space. It is a form of interaction that is both complex and subtle, one that is intuitively engaging and rewards extended interaction. The installation allows participation in a kind of living system that is both a metaphor for the myriad ways in which electronic and physical acoustic spaces are mapped onto one another, and an example of exactly such a space.

The origins of Scramble Suit lie in the name of the three-dimensional kinetic costumes used to hide the identities of undercover narcotic agents in Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly.

In the installation users encounter a real-time projection of their own image, which soon comes under attack from a computer generated ‘kinetic monster’. The monster attempts to cover the user’s projected image in order to take control of it. When the user moves and tries to avoid the visual invasion, she becomes engaged in a struggle to keep her own appearance. If the visual invasion is successful, the creature takes control of the user’s image, sucking and transforming it into a part of itself. Users are encouraged to engage in a physical dialogue with their newly transformed counterparts in an attempt to recapture their image. Scramble Suit transforms the user’s reflection into a media zombie, which remains wandering around the screen until somebody gives it an identity again.

The installation deals with the vulnerability of our self-representation, which can be shattered in an instant by an outside force. It effectively encourages people to fight for their own image and protect it from the manipulative, cloning effects of the Scramble Suit.

Constructed Narratives is a block-based construction game designed for adults based on the form and function of children’s construction toys. It is a tangible social interface designed for use in public spaces where people have the opportunity to encounter the game and subsequently learn about each other.

The hardware and software system architecture developed for this project could be applied for experimental computer-based interfaces for several human computer interaction and interactive art domains including collaborative learning [CSCL), and collaborative design activities in the tradition of computer supported collaborative work ICSCWI. The current domain explored for Constructed Narratives is that of computer systems designed to enable shared experience through play, or computer supported collaborative play (CSCP).

The goal of the Constructed Narratives project is to develop a framework for the design of social interfaces, or “discourse wranglers”. The social interface is a catalyst for the transformation and reinvention of the social and cultural environment. The”discourse wrangler-facilitates the communication and contextualization of ideas, assumptions and beliefs among its users. The act and metaphor of construction is used to illustrate how a simple artefact can provide an interactive platform for discourse between collaborating participants.

Constructed Narratives provides a common ground for negotiation around issues of identity, culture and values that can form invisible walls between the self and others in public spaces. To construct is to creatively invent one’s world by engaging in creative decision-making and problem solving activities.

Zona de Recreo consists of a multiuser, interactive interface that controls 3D games in real time. By joining physical interfaces and videogames Diego Dias and Clara Boj try to introduce new methods of gameplay that mix physical and virtual elements.

Zona de Recreo was born from the transformation of a traditional children’s game called Balancing. This work establishes new systems of relations by introducing a physical interface that permits four people to interact in the virtual space of a multiuser game. To physically move the structure, or to explore and navigate within the virtual space, the participant uses their body weight and balance. Zona de Recreo forces us to cooperate and participate in a group from a physical point of view. We have to move the structure collectively in the real. world – a sharp contrast to traditional game design in which collaboration is carried out only in the mediated, virtual realm. Zona de Recreo unites the physical and virtual collaboration in a new videogame system that favours verbal communication between the participants.

This project is an attempt to challenge the abandonment of urban public space by exploring new ways of interacting that permit users to play games through physical communication and interaction with others.

The lives of three families in the Helsinki region will be brought together into an audiovisual presentation using MMS narratives. The stories will unfold in three adjacent windows on the project website and in the Kiasma video projection. A low fourth window is open for audience participation…

Situations4x takes as its starting point the fluidity of MMS imaging in constructing real time visual narratives as actual events unfold. The low image resolution, which favours details and close-up images rather than panoramic views, alongside the instantaneity of the image capture, are here developed to create a practice that enables a group of people to be virtually present in each other’s lives.

The time stamp that accompanies every MMS message is, in the Situations4x expriment, used as the key structural element. On one hand, it is used as the that automatically organizes an image sequence into a narrative sequence according to the time. On the other hand, the connection of any particular event to certain date is broken and replaced with a thematic connection. In the space of audiovisual presentation, the families, as well as the participating audience, experience together the variations of an imaginary summer day in August 2004. Thematically, Situations4x exposes the invisible everyday lives of the three families for public view and participation. But as the camera phones begin to circulate among the family members, it may also highlight differences in the ideas of what constitutes a “family”.

BuBL Space is a concept device and complete marketing strategy. A small portable device, like a mobile phone, creates a phone-free zone around the user. A personal space in public space where one will no longer be disturbed by the noises emitted by ringing mobile phones and the people that use them.

The marketing strategy for BuBL Space targets the same groups as mobile phone companies; the device is designed as a small, stylish gadget in white silicon rubber. It comes packaged in inflated transparent plastic. Flyers and posters show a young model enjoying her personal space while using the device. This strategy not only shows the real marketing potential that BuBL Space offers, but also plays with the interchangeability of hype and gadgets. it clears the way for an ‘arms race’ of devices and counter-devices within the marketing space of a young urban public.

BuBL Space is designed to be a ‘friendly’ device. The three main differences between BuBL Space and existing GSM blockers are its portability, its working radius [three meters, so it really focuses on the personal space) and the way it operates: it only works while its button is pressed, so it can’t be switched on permanently. This means it takes an active decision every time BuBL Space is used.

WEARABLE EXPERIENCE in PUBLIC SPACE

The Blanket Project is a robotic blanket that resides on top of a bed. Sensing the presence of viewers it attempts to lure them on to the bed for a physical exchange.

The Blanket Project is a tactile object that physically interacts with the audience. Resembling a blanket, the device navigates through space, seeking out individuals for intimate encounters. The object is embedded with electronics and machinery to enable sensing and movement. The resulting form is a hybrid toy, sculpture and tool.

The blanket has been designed with modularity and multipurpose reusability in mind. Its application varies to suit the site-specific context. It could be used within a dance or performance context. Two blankets can be networked together to transmit touch information between two remote users. A blanket can also be automated as a house pet of sorts – which is the case in this installation.

The blanket resides on top of a giant bed. It remains at rest until approached by a viewer. The blanket then attempts to engage viewers in physical relationships. It approaches their positions and reaches out to touch them. Viewers receive no instructions regarding the installation, and must decide their own level of participation. They are welcome to remain at a distance and observe the phenomenon of an animated household object. Alternatively they may mount the bed and engage the blanket in a physical relationship, becoming an active part of the installation for other viewers.

(Re)design your very own label for one of your favourite products! Simple, quick, reliable and easy just make a selection from the menus and click on ‘Print’.

Shilpa Gupta’s My Own Label project develops a new approach to the subversive activity known as ‘shopputting’ — where home-made artefacts [CD’s, sandwiches etc.) are taken to supermarkets and left amongst the retail produce for customers to discover and purchase (or steal!). Instead of creating a new product. however, My Own Label allows you to create a new label which can replace the label for an existing product.

It a project based on excessive branding in a world where consumerism reaches ever higher levels in the capitalist economy, and where globalization is still pretty much a one-way street without sign posts or rules (read: WTO guidelines). It is also a subtle critique of art, which Gupta believes has become too comfortable in its elitist circles to employ a language that is accessible to a wider audience. It also intents to address authorship [via its erasure] and the extension of the electronic medium into outside ‘lived’ space.

Advice Lounge is a meeting point in two senses — in the real world passers-by can drop in for a spot of non-professional advice on a subject of their choosing; in so doing they take part in a public, participatory performance which is combined with web-based interactive media.

Jillian McDonald describes her participatory installation Advice Lounge as “a physical incarnation and extension of an existing web-based intervention where I offer free non-professional advice to strangers. I will be present in a public space outfitted with comfortable chairs, quiet looped music, and two laptops. Passers-by will be invited to seek free advice on various matters”.

As the participant enters the booth the advice session begins. A contract is signed in order that the participant knows they are agreeing to receive advice of a non-professional nature. The participant and artist take their place at the two computers facing each other or in opposite directions, according to taste, and begin an online advice session, Both artist and participant will be visible to an audience of passers-by outside the lounge, and the Advice Lounge interface will also projected onto a window to entice others to participate. The fact that the two parties communicate through the computer interface rather than viscerally will serve to privatize the experience, despite its public nature, in the manner of confessional or therapist’s office. The piece will exist simultaneously allowing a ‘third’ audience of Internet visitors to participate as well.

Artists Laetitia Delafontaine and Gregory Niel create spaces where skin-like membrane interacts with the user. This membrane is connected and driven by software interface, and controls the geometrical definition of the space. Creating direct relationship and dialog with the visitor, the surface of the space is dynamic and it’s shape can be modified. It is a search of a space reactive to its environment, an interface sensitive to vibrations of sound frequencies.

The reactive space project, RS-3, creates a space where a surface or membrane interacts with the user. This membrane is connected and driven by a software interface, and controls the geometrical definition of the space. To create a direct relationship and dialogue with the visitor, the surface is dynamic and can be morphed out of shape. The RS-3 installation is comprised of a floor/map which interacts with sound frequencies. The floor is formed of a flexible surface that moves in relation to sound frequencies. A camera films the distortion of the floor in real time, and a video projection of the camera input recreates the sensation of the space. The combination of the floor and the projection creates an immersive, reactive space. The reactive space is created with the collaboration of Studio Creatif of France Telecom R&D. The research into “reactive space” and habitat is sponsored by the research grant “PUCA” [Plan Urbanisme Construction Architecture) of the ministry for equipment and urbanism [France) around the theme the future of habitat”.

DN is Laetitia Delafontaine and Gregory Niel. They work with the relationships between architecture, art and new technology. While studying sensitive and reactive space, they have created, with the collaboration of France Telecom R&D, an installation which reacts to the presence of the body in its environment.

ID Communications is an interactive installation which also works as a welcoming gate to one of the ISEA2004 exhibitions in Tallinn. In fact, it could also serve as an entry point to the Tallinn part of ISEA2004 – for visitors coming from the ferry, the Rotermann Salt Storage warehouse is the first ISEA2004 venue you will encounter. ID Communicationsexpresses stories about Estonian identity. The visitor steps onto one of the twenty stars on the ground and starts a dialog between two monitor ‘heads’ of the artists. Each star represents one of the European Union membership countries. The dialog between the two artists reflects on the new situation of joining the EU. As a consideration to visitors from other EU countries, the artists provide them with some information about Estonian culture – how to speak Estonian and how to behave according to the local customs. The artist-group ID have been inspired by the EU law which obligates the members to honour the customs, languages and culture of the other states. The goal of the artists is not to become like the other EU members, but to explore and study their culture as is befitting to a new member of the union. The authors acquired information about the various EU nations mainly from the web, adding a little conviction into the fragmented mix of information gathered.

ID was founded in summer 2001 by Estonian multimedia artists Ivika Kivi and Dagmar Kase.

Desert Views, Desert Deaths is a large-scale computer installation of an interactive stereoscopic immersive environment. It was created as a memorial for those who have died of dehydration and heat exhaustion while crossing the border from Mexico into the United States.

The strict enforcement of border crossings has forced migrants away from the main routes and cities they have taken in the past, to more remote desert locations. In the summer the desert temperatures reach 37-48°C for more than three consecutive months. Illegal ‘border guides’ drop people off in the middle of the desert with one jug of water. They are told that the nearest city is an hour away when in fact it is often over 2 days away on foot. Last year a record number of people died of heatstroke or dehydration while crossing the border. This year hundreds more will die in the Sonoran Desert.

This virtual unreality is a memorial for those who have died while crossing the desert. When you enter Desert Views, Desert Deaths you are in the middle of an elusive graveyard of crosses. In the distance you can see into translucent overlapping caskets composed of desert images. You enter the life-size caskets and see the names of those who died of heat and dehydration while crossing the border. As you follow the caskets you find more information about the people. While traversing the landscape you hear sounds of the desert following you as you continue your journey.

Remote access to the artwork via the internet eliminates the physical boundaries of distance. Remote viewers/users can leave a tangible residue of their virtual presence and watch real-time participants via a web cam. Adams states that “viewers leave fragile traces of both real time and virtual interactions that create a complex interplay between participants, machines and locations — merging and rupturing identities.”

Wave Writer employs an immersive, interactive installation format that encourages empathy between the viewer and the artwork. It poses questions about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which our understanding of ourselves will be changed by contemporary developments in biotechnology. Wave Writer examines the human urge to make a mark, to leave a trace of one’s presence. Visitors to the exhibition in Tallinn will interact directly with Trish Adams’ installation through a Kymograph – a machine invented in the 1840’s that was used extensively in various scientific disciplines. Individuals physically impress and transfer their energies by stepping on a foot pedal, displacing a pen and thus recording their presence as a change in the continuous line on a rotating ream of paper.

Venus Villosa is an interactive installation staged around the sense of touch. It refers to the western myth of the Beast, particularly to the dichotomy of “beauty and beast”. It comments on the unresolved ambivalence of our relationship towards nature as it concerns our body and our identity. As new technologies allow the exploration of a different level of interactivity and involvement of the body in the sphere of the artistic experience, a subsequent need to rethink some of the metaphors associated to the different senses emerges.

Venus Villosa’s journey into the erratically unlawful act of touch takes the shape of a tactile interface, nested into the referential landscape of the mythical Beast, the archetypical representation of the unconscious mind. The installation enhances the physicality of the interactive experience and at the same time it critically addresses the notion of the body as the polarizing subject against which the culture of technology shapes its dreams of disembodiment.

Venus Villosa’s is articulated around three metaphors – the sense of touch, hair and the breast – as a way to unfold the dichotomies of the beauty and the beast, the ideal and the material, the natural and the artificial. The interactivity works as a meta-commentary, reinforcing the significance of the user’s experience as a whole. By engaging in the usually forbidden activity of touching art (and breasts), the user turns the beauty into the beast.

The Relative Velocity Inscription Device is a live scientific experiment in the form of an automated electronic installation in which Paul Vanouse literally races skin-colour genes from his Jamaican-American family against one another.

Vanouse’s work Operational Fictions/The Relative Velocity Inscription Device explores peculiar intersections of “big-science” and popular culture. It addresses complex issues raised by varied new technologies through these very technologies. These Operational Fictions are hybrid entities — simultaneously functional machines and fanciful representations — which are intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary landscape. Contextualizing this work are previous projects involving human genomics such as Cult of the New Eve and his current project Latent Figure Protocol.

Safe As Mother’s Milk: The Hanford Project is a website and installation examining the atomic history of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The project incorporates recently declassified documents and historical photographs available online through the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System.

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is Located on 565 square miles of desert in south-eastern Washington State. For more than forty years, Hanford released radioactive materials into the environment and onto an uninformed public while producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War era. Although the majority of the releases were due to activities related to production, some were also planned and intentional.

Hanford workers, their families and other downwind residents became guinea pigs for radiation experiments that were carried out at the facility by the former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense, and civilian sub-contractors including DuPont and General Electric from 1944 to 1972.

Safe as Mother’s Milk examines these events through declassified historical photographs, media and documents available online at various government archives, like the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System and Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX).

This project illustrates how the internet may be used to investigate, research, and disseminate “unofficial” social and political histories to the public.

Com_muni_port is a portable radio broadcast unit created for short-range pedestrian broadcasting. It has been designed to facilitate community communication, munition municipality and portal portability.
Com_muni_port models itself after historical military, scientific, and commercial communication devices. However, to distinguish it from its many predecessors, Com_muni_port activates the local and functions as a tool for information dissemination and public participation. Its transmission range is determined and limited by the plateaus and canyons of urban space. Its dispatch is an invisible membrane of suspended audio, the radius of which moves with the user, Com_muni_port consists of an FM transmitter, a CD player, a microphone, headphones, and a multi-channel mixer – all battery powered. Its portability makes it ideal for use within political demonstrations and marches, by mapping audio frequency within a city, and allowing spontaneous interviewing and broadcasting. We see it as having myriad communicatory and inventive functions, all in one unit.

Weather Report is a highly compressed found-sound story, heard as a drifting voicemail message from a weather balloon. A hybrid 21-minute documentary collected and edited outdoors, where it is best heard walking with headphones. So go find a Walkman!

Janek Schaefer produced Weather Report during his trips to Minnesota as a McKnight Composer in Residence with the American Composers Forum. “I lived in Minneapolis in December 02 and June 03 where they love their diverse and often hostile weather, which was the catalyst for the project.

“My main ideas were to create and collect new sounds that were related to the concept of weather in the broadest sense; to document and research weather in the media; and to float recording equipment up on weather balloons in various ways. These processes were integral, as my focus was on sound ‘associated’ with the weather, rather than the weather itself.

“The weather balloons were used in three main ways. Firstly one icy winter’s morning I attached a mobile phone to receive and send low-resolution sound, letting it float away from the surface of a frozen Lake. Secondly using a digital Dictaphone I made time-lapse recordings of the sky by floating it 500ft above my lush metropolitan neighbourhood. Lastly a few all-American friends and I set out to shoot the balloon down Late one June afternoon, Leaving the sound to parachute back to earth. I Let the recordings speak for themselves, no effects, no EQ, just straight cut and splice collage where you can hear the edges of time. All temperatures in Fahrenheit!”

Group C.Cred explores local socio-political terrain in Tallinn and how it could be mapped, also what kind of trajectories could be found. C.Cred works collaboratively with local artists, activists and collectives and will during the event be developing local platforms including an installation of the existing Counter/Cartographies archives linked to a series of informal live events: walks, drives, journeys; dinner, drinks, discussions or interviews. Certain aspects of these events are documented as cartographies by themselves and added to the expanded archive/cartographies and installations.

The District of Leistavia Welcomes You was created specifically for ISEA 2004. It is part of the interRepublic of Hybridia, a non-geographical entity whose borders are mediated by digital files. Leistavia is a hybrid cultural space influenced by Pitcairn Island, Norfolk Island and Estonian cultures.

Questioning the boundary between and technology and culture is one of the main concerns of this project. Cultural theorists today are examining culture from the point of view of processes of change rather than fixed tradition — giving rise to the consideration of cultural hybridisation.

The project set out to Locate intercultural connections between Estonian, Norfolk Island and Pitcairn Island cultures. These connections were overlapped to create a hybrid culture — Leistavia. A constitution voting form was drafted, influenced by aspects of concern to people of the contributing nations, as located on the Internet and via email. Open voting determined the final constitution.

The process of creating the art work is documented on the website art-themagazine.com; an anti-video – a moving image projection consisting of a sequence of still images ‘of’ Leistavia was created; and the concept of a digital language — written but not spoken — identified: Keyboard, the native language of Hybridia. These elements were assembled for the gallery installation.

Estonian dance and media artist Kylli Mariste collaborated, and many have given images and thoughts – this project would not have been possible without their contribution.

Provoked by the notion of “the lack of women’s voices”, the Ruta Remake project works to map out relations concerning a politics of identity in Lithuania today. Ruta Remake unfolds as a search system that is suggested as the play between forms, ranging from the remainders of the ‘Homo Sovieticus’ through to the Modern Capitalistic Model.

Linguists, philosophers and music theorists join the Ruta Remake project to investigate the contemporary state of women’s voices. Through the shared recollections of media they build a pathway to navigate through a collection of samples that reflect social construction and metaphysical qualities, resulting in a ‘voice archive’.

Participants suggested a specific weaving pattern named Ruta (rue) that refers to a perennial plant. In Lithuania, this pattern was imbued with different meanings, to become an icon representing virginity and femininity. The Ruta pattern provides a system for sound notation, a shuttle for composing the voice threads of the archive, as lines of information and as routes, joined in patterns.

Ruta Remake employs an updated version of the Thereminvox, the TheraMiDi device, which allows a user’s hand gestures to mediate between sets of acoustic samples using two light-sensitive resistors linked through a MIDI interface. The hand’s movement within light casts shadows, and these register output and representation. In this way the TheraM/D/ based navigation turns the user into a performer, charting a path through the sound archive of voices in real time and weaving patterns to compose a sound fabric.

GEOPOLITICS OF MEDIA

Colombia has been involved in a conflict that has lasted several decades. As travelling in Colombia has become troublesome, television, radio, newspaper and mobile phone networks have become the main channels of contact, recognition, identity and communication between distant communities.

Quiasma is a creative project which consists of an audiovisual exploration of Colombian territory in interactive DVD format. It intends to reveal the power of culture embedded in celebration and feasting during the stress of conflict, and proposes to reactivate alternative image sites through the use of digital technology. The interactive platform allows users to set up their own territory. Joint narratives are generated between the various levels of image. This audiovisual model invites the spectator to investigate the DVD in order to identify the diverse events within it and to create a new narrative.

During the presentation at ISEA, three users will browse the DVD via three simultaneous live projections which will also be broadcast on the web in real time.

Late 1999, we were bumping to some Turentine in our lab in Troy, NY, we’re reading “Player Piano” by Kurt, no favorite, but his heart was in the right place; he’d just read Wiener and was feeling not himself. Kurt was all, machines trained to replace people. Which is against the new economy, right? IT creates jobs (we love what it’s IT, kind of like THEM) thus prosperity, but Vomegut’s all, people didn’t want to be replaced, they didn’t want skills and experiences they owned replaced, once they’re automatic, boom, smoke, gone. So Kurt shows these machinists in Troy, where we were machining in the lab, talking engineers replacing machinists with machines. So we’re all: “the intelligence attributed to machines hinges on the cultural invisibility of the human skills which accompany them … If such machines look intelligent because we do not concentrate on where their work is done, then we need to think harder about the work which produces values and who performs it.” [Schaeffer] Cut in at 1877, a patent for “aplate, diaphragm, or other flexible body capable of being vibrated by the human voice or other sounds, in conjunction with a material capable of registering the movements of such vibrating body by embossing or indenting or altering such material, in such a manner that such register marks will be sufficient to cause a second vibratingplate or body to be set in motion by them and thus reproduce the motions of the first vibrating body.” [Edison] Later, 1977, the Technics SL1200mk2 is redesigned with pitch control. That’s it, Official History of Turntables. The people, in boogeydown, that’s another history. They took the delicate and made it delicious. They made the apparatus appetizing. Now some busters trying to make DJ digital. No one’s listening. You can’t vibrate what isn’t there. Player piano, scratching slicing. We’ll win the DMC competition biting deepBlue style by 2005. Gottagetupandbesomebody. Use Troy gimmicks – proportional integral derivatives, metal cutting lasers, n485 networking. Make machine skills manifest. 3 months we hack, we code, we bite. We hack, lathe, cut. It spins, it jitters, it cuts. A player DJ, straight outta Troy: IT plays it. It becomes “internationally known.”

Grandmaster Flash
Concentrate on who produces the values. 50 years of computer music that’s command, control, not much communication. Our access is random, but our signal path analog and our destiny manifest. Try biting that.

Author’s note
Among the reasons that have led me to feel interested In the distinct music of the remotest past, is a story narrated in the historical memoirs of Sima Qian, concerning the musician Kui in the reign of the legendary Emperor Shun in a dynasty for which there is not yet any archaeological evidence but of which no Chinese person doubts its existence, myself amongst them.

In those far off times of profound silence and darkness, the musician Kui struck and tapped the stones with his fist. When I hear sound around me, I cannot help but think that in some form, these sounds are connected to that first blow.

Technical details
Dance of Stone was created at the PHONOS Foundation (Spain). All the sound was generated on a Macintosh 7100 with Common Usp Music and Common Music by Bill Schottstaedt (Stanford University) and Rick Taube (University of Illinois) respectively. The work received 1st prize in the Music for Dance genre in the 26th Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition 1999.

Digital work for 3 DVD et 3 video screens. Three kinetic studies for digital video and music, in there equal movements. All the visual sources are concrete and had been manipulated through digital processing software. There are no synthetic images. The music was produced using the video editing as a score.

FILMTEXT 2.0 is a digital narrative for cross-media platforms. The present version consists of a Flash art work, an mp3 concept album, an experimental artist ebook, a live performance, and a DVD installation. For ISEA2002, source material from the FILMTEXT 2.0 website created in collaboration with Flash artist John Vega will be remixed by Mark Amerika and the sound artist Twine.

FILMTEXT 2.0 expands the concept of writing so that it now becomes a form of interactive cinema, where image ecriture becomes narrativized as hyper rhetorical performance. Highlighting moving images captured by Amerika in Hawaii, Tokyo, and the Australian Outback, FILMTEXT 2.0 is the second iteration of a series of investigations tracing the Life Style Practice of the Digital Thoughtographer and his search for the meaning of life as he analyzes the artificial intelligence of alien light forms.

Blind is an audiovisual improv duo performance consisting of hc gilje on video and kelly davis on audio.

A strong telematic duet that integrates gestual creation, video, graphic design and electro-acoustic through network and in an interactive way. A fascinating live network performance of electronic art. Two distinct spaces which can be thousands of miles apart. Two performances using different stage and technological set up that are in every moments interdependent and interrelated. Two worlds that pour into each other, that reply and echo to each other.

This is a innovative and unique stage writing where the body and technology answer and stimulate each other at a formal as well as organic and philosophical levels.

The dancers of The Dementia of Angels (Isabelle Choiniere and Alyson Vishnovska) have a double presence: a direct performative one with their immediate audience, and a telematic one, which is that of their bodies projected into the other space.

The interaction between both performers, their movements, spaces and music are developped and transmitted through coded captors placed on each dancer bodies, the dancers then intervene with their voices, their breath becoming aware of the sounds they produce.

The data generated by the captors are formatted and sent to the other location where they generate a specific musical space. A movement produced in the distant location will have an impact on the sound of the main stage.

The secondary space is not as colorful and technologically complex as the principal space. It opens the doors to a parallel world. It’s a refined environment, far from the multimedia shows and the technological performances. It was conceived as a performance to be presented in museums and galleries in response to their structure and to their aestheticism. It was created to live-in a nearness, a hypersensitiveness. To feel a presence sometimes visible sometimes not, but always strong and subtle.

This is a sometimes immersive experience in which the audience participates physically in the osmosis that the Internet invents. The environment completely surrounds the audience.The beginning of the performance drives the audience into total darkness. The depth of the blackness evokes the interior of the body through sensations that it procures, and slowly invades it and stands out as a real presence, an incarnation, as a body which embraces all the other ones.

This holding corral creates then a hyper-sensuality, a hyper-perception that encourages the audience to take advantage of the sensuality that it has to develop.

FAUSTECHNOLOGY is a 40 minute music-computer animation work based on a contemporary interpretation of the Faust myth. It evokes human behavior in the face of a machine that generates visual and sound stimuli, a machine that seduces, and produces pleasure. The work is divided into two parts during which a series of visual and aural micro-variations gradually evolve. Faust appears as both entropy and seduction: the threat of increasing disorder in the material world, and seduction as a promise of control through simulation techniques. The sources of the sound and visuals are entirely synthetic.

The theory behind the project is that the imagination is stimulated by incomplete information. A word only partially heard, a fragment of a sentence taken out of context or language spoken in a foreign tongue can lead to misinterpretation and an alternative or parallel context can be developed. We propose that, under receptive conditions, the brain will try to interpret what information is received and, like a fallible computer translation program, the more the signal is processed the more “corrupt” the information will become. This “corrupt” information can potentially lead to new and unexpected associations often grasped on an intuitive and emotional level making for a stimulating and interactive process where every experience is unique and acceptable, each person using their own set of conditions in the interpretation.

We intend to achieve the conditions as stated above by using a digital sampler, tape recorders, shortwave radio, microphones, home made oscillators, various sound effects boxes and a mixing desk to create a stereo “sea” of information whilst a video of people using sign language is projected behind us. The sound elements of the performance will be shifting in space and volume. Microphones will be placed around the performance space to catch fragments of, and possibly encourage conversation, the audience becoming a part of the performance. Prerecorded spoken word samples will be used covering a range of emotions, timbres and contexts such as chanting and shouting, soothing and aggressive tones and the voices of women, men and children. Shortwave radio will be used to pick up live local signals. Tapes will be spliced and processed during the performance using tape delay and pitch shift effects among others.

I am woman, so I am Water. The world is born from Water. Let’s see each other though the purity of water and water will wash our souls, cleaning them, wiping away all evil from them.

PACJAP is a franco-japanese collaborative group and project about new investigations in computer, music and the internet. This project gathers artists from Japan and France around the emergences of new forms and researches with the use of new technologies (Max-MSP, etc.). This project was initiated by A.M.I., National Centre for Modem Musics Development from Marseille/France. The objective is to release new tools (such as D-system) for real interaction between music and computers. This workshop count around ten participants, five japanese and five french, who meet each year, for two ten days sessions (one in Japan, one in Marseille), during three years : 2000-2001-2002.

Following several contacts, or after attending several festivals, it occurs that one of the fist wishes of internet operators remains paradoxally the need to meet physically and informally in a specific place. Working together in front of the same computer cannot be totally replaced by a virtual relation. The extraordinary vitality of the new Electronic Festivals is a true witness of the importance of this physical meetings.

We know that technology is far from having reached its limits. It is therefore more interesting to overcome the actual limits (“Sound on Internet is not perfect”, “down-loading is long”, “tele-payement is not efficient”, etc.), and to work on a content prospective (“what will be the model for music-circulation”, “how collective instant composition will work”, “will the keyboard be replaced”, “what will be the interaction between sound and image”, etc.). The whole process must be visualised in the next five years or more. Therefore, the general profile of the team members should be more artistically oriented.

Following the conversations with the concerned musicians, activities are organised around two directions: creation and diffusion. These two orientations are of course interactive, and, even if members have to choose their orientation, it does not seem reasonable to separate the two workshop sub-groups in terms of location. In the same care of considering the 21st century, recruiting will consider as a priority the youth factor. New forms of art introduce new thinking processes. Such a project, totally oriented on future, has to privilegiate new generations.

public address is a live performance with video projection, framed by a large plate-glass window and presented in any city streetscape of the world over a period of 2-3 days and nights. By day, the artist appears as a figure moving back and forth across the window, engaged in the repetitive task of slowly covering and uncovering the window with sheets of A4 tracing paper. By night, engaged in the same task, the artist repeatedly crosses paths with the video projection of her earlier self. Both figures are engaged in uncovering and recovering the window and the streetscape which lies beyond it, but in different time frames. Passers-by glimpse the familiar streetscape and see themselves, possibly, in each other. Past and present overlap and reflect sameness and difference. The ‘normal’ position of the urban viewer/voyeur becomes blurred temporally and spatially.

public address takes the street-front window and draws attention to it as a bare membrane, confusing outside and inside, public and private, subject and object, now and then. Within the (non) space of a window, the city streetscape is passed through a thin filter of time, questioning what seems fixed and concrete, highlighting the ordinary and the everyday and opening up a fresh space for reverie and play within the highly regulated and scopic public domain.

public address will be touring to the US, Canada, the UK and Europe in early-mid 2003. The artist invites expressions of interest in hosting this work in any city on any continent of the world. The project is assisted by the Conference and Workshop Fund of the Australian Network for Art and Technology, a devolved grant program of the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s Arts Funding and Advisory Body.

“world-mix_nagoya” is planned as A thirty-minute, interactive radio and internet performance broadcast. The broadcast will consist of a live mix of indigenous audio fossils collected from around the world and locally from the host city where the broadcast takes place-in this case the host city will be Nagoya. The timeline of the mix will move out gradually from the local to the global to inter galactic space, thereby creating an alternative history of our shared sonosphere here on planet earth and the universe.

“world-mix_nagoya” will utilize the new hybrid forms of radio that are now developing between traditional forms of broadcast radio and internet radio. Unlike the traditional one-way model of broadcast radio, which involves a single transmitter transmitting to many receivers, our proposed radio/internet station would operate on the principle of many transmitters and many receivers transmitting and receiving in “real time” simultaneously on multiple radio frequencies and on the internet. This two-way model of broadcasting would “abandon the borders of territory” and potentially create a more democratic, less corporate space and time for cultural and artistic audio activity around the globe.

Tony Allard (FOSSIL MEDIA) and Dwight Frizzell (Wabi Media), began the WORLDmix project in 1992 and have presented nine broadcasts to date. Each new performance of the WORLDmix project is mixed live with recordings of all previous WORLDmixes, thus creating a generative and evolving audio history of our shared sonosphere. For ISEA2002 in Nagoya, Allard and Frizzell will set up a temporary radio/internet station from which to broadcast the live mix over FM radio, the internet and all other forms of broadcasting audio that are available at the time of the performance. The performance will take place at the site of the ISEA conference and will involve several collaborators (VIA the Internet, radio and telephone) from around the world who are currently working in radio and streaming audio in real time. In addition, participants at the show and anyone capable of generating audio from their computer on the internet could collaborate in “world-mix-nagoya”.

The two most recent WORLDmix broadcasts: “WORLDmixMONTREAL”, Montreal, Canada in 1997, in collaboration with the 3rd Manifestation, an electronic arts event hosted by Champ Libre in Montreal; and “WORLDmixLA” in Los Angeles, California in 2001, broadcast at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Los Angeles as part of the Art in Motion festival hosted by the University of Southern California.

In this work, firstly, our guest Space Artist, Richard Clar will access in our website of Tokyo Space Dance from California and show the images of “Postures into Outer Space” from his work “Space Flight Dolphin” on the screen in Nagoya. Secondly, Tetsuro Fukuhara, Tombo and other dancers takes special costumes for making postures and come in the tube space. Then these dancers will make several postures like “Postures into Tube Space, as a half-and-half non-gravity space” and “Postures into Informational Space” as a dance. Also Keisuke Oki, as a technical coordinator, will make an informational environment by expressing the interaction between the dancers and the space using the sound etc.. Finally the audience come in the tube space and dance freely, so they can enjoy their own postures. Also in this work, Jotaro Kobayashi will make a real-time webcasting for this event.

What is Space Dance?
Space Dance is a new dance to make the appearance of the relationships of the unity between the Body and the Space. Usually people forget this unity in their daily life. But the relationship of this unity exists as a mass like invisible “fluid body”. How can we take the sensation of this unity back? How can we amplify and enjoy the sensation of this unity? How can we create the new designs by using this sensitive experiences? This is our Space Dance.

We will make several social designs at this new theater of Space Dance by using the new methods of “next human engineering”, “artificial life” and “interaction”. Space Dance is an approach to the design from the Body. Space Dance is an environmental design and information design based on the Body. Space Dance is a new movement of dance & design. This is a remarkable character of our Space Dance.

‘sPace, Navigable Music’ is an online project investigating the impact of IC technologies and particularly, 3D Real Time modeling languages (such as VRML) in the construct of space. According to the objectives of LAB[au] the project constitutes as much a space for theoretical research as a space of experimentation on the possibilities of space settings in shared processes in order to build up connectivity.

In sPace, navigable music, the object or architecture is generated in real time according to the position and movements of the user (mix color, mix image, mix sound). Operating on structural parameters, the integration (recombination) of spatial (x, y, z), temporal (t-movements) sonic (frequency, pitch) and generative image sequencing functions, each interaction by the user, displacement, transforms this visual and sonic environment. In addition, the recording of movements allows users to produce a travelling according to camera movements, montage and image sequencing. The established relation between the spatial visual and sonic formalization processes and the editable interactivity of users lead to an experience combining architecture, music and cinematic techniques through movements patterns. The ‘Navigable Music’ thus constitutes a space, in which the user experiments cyberspace by dropping sounds into space, mixing music throughout space and navigation, record its movements to produce an animation, a travelling in its sonic space architecture, a kinetic music clip.

The [sPace] performance is a collaboration between LAB[au] and the electronic musician [ERZATZ] who composes specific navigable music spaces. Based on the space, navigable music project ERZATZ explores the different forms of mixing music in and through e.space and its related images sequencing in order to create an immersive sonic and visual environment. The composing of music through navigation in e.space and the spatialization of music through the quadraphonic diffusion, thus constitutes a performative space covering a broad range from VJ-ing to recorded soundspaces to live navigation and live space mixing, Linking the digital space to the concrete one, mixed reality through vision and sound.

The performance consists in the live set (60min.) of [ERZATZ] presenting the compositions and real time mixes in the space, NAVIGABLE MUSIC environment.

The music set is conceived as an open-end performance, where [ERZATZ] mixes his music while the public can experience the ‘spaze’ compositions via headphones.

Tibet is a musical concert piece for Tibetan bowls, EMG/biosensor, and Position sensors. The piece explores the interstitial spaces between acoustic sound and electronic sound, between movement and tension, between contact and telepathy. A solo performer begins the piece eliciting acoustic sound by bowing resonant Tibetan bowls. The EMG trajectories of these gestures are tracked and slowly start to electronically augment the acoustic sound. At the first critical juncture in the piece, the bowing stick is lifted off the bowls, and the sound continues – this sound is the captured acoustic sound, and continues only as long as a certain muscle tension is maintained. This space between bowing contact and gestural sonic sculpting will be explored in part two of the piece. The EMG based articulation of the sound is itself then augmented by position sensors. The position sensors give topological sense to the otherwise tension based EMG data. Similar muscle gestures then take on different meaning in different points in space. Part 3 then explores this articulatory space of complementary sensor systems. The piece finishes with a closing section that comes back to physical contact with the Tibetan bowls, keeping the EMG and position sensing in a unified gestural expression.

Technology makes our life easier.

So, the human can be slaved by technology, but the most important thing is the human who drives behind it.

Searching for meaning in hi-tech world makes human more humanize.

Performance Art Concept:
Action Poetry can be viewed as one of contemporary arts belonging to non-representational genre. It does not only come up from subjective consciousness as ideological response toward socio-cultural problems, but also a manifestation of the artist’s interior self-exploration. Action Poetry is unusual activity made up from the usual world. It could be read as multi-interpretable text. Thereby, it takes the risk of becoming “something” or nothing at all.

The Scalene project takes the three cities of Manchester, Montreal and Melbourne as its geographical trio of urban contexts and produces a project that takes 3 sets of 3 practitioners from each city who collaborate with each other. The 3 outcomes of this project will be a double CD Rom (sound and video), a three country tour of the project and the web site.

The project Mirror Man – Universe 2002 is the contact of simulation and traditional culture and at the same time reflects the world of artificial heros.

The belief that art and culture are essentially social phenomena, has provided a range of practices that were essentially fostered by former post-modernism. Within that over-attention for the creation of a situated art, sometimes the historical avant-garde was forgotten to accommodate for the more traditional oriented western-american-european obsession for narrativity and figurative audio and visual works.

models for art and creativity
The effects of more than 50 years of computer programming are readily to be found in all common creative tools we are using – from image editors to software synthesizers. This leads to the assumption that an important feature in global communication and culture is essentially a techno-scientific one. Not only the pairing of models found in computer programming and systems. Engineering with an artistic sensibity and affective point-of-view, is leading to a new phenomenon, a techno-aesthetic model. It can only become as such, when there is also a communicative protocol available, as an essential part of that model. The algorithm becomes the driver for any expression.

across backgrounds and cultures
There are a number of ways to deal with different cultures, but apart from looking for differences and parallels, a common experimentation and the joint generation of new forms and artifacts in the genetical and linguistic sense, seems to us a more appealing direction. With mutual influences and visions the emergence of new form and content is possible.

making a jump into another century
Nowadays we see a renewed interest in abstract artforms, supported by a younger generation of artists unspoiled by a formal training in the traditional artistic disciplines, making unknown references to earlier radical pioneers of electronic art. On top of that, the outcome of the popularisation of electronic music and the proliferation of global networks added a kind of new attitude towards collaboration: audiovisual, experimental, dynamic, distributed, materialistic, algorithmic and .. totally digitalismic.
Let’s draw a line on a picture and make it move!

We live in two illusory states: awake and dream. The two only co-exist at a special time during a “waking dream”. At this point, we only exist; dream and awake co-exist. This can happen when we are waking up in the morning and is accompanied by a strong sense of situatedness and paralysis. It can be an unsettling, frightening, and enlightening moment. In one experience, we feel pressure on our chest holding us down in our bed but we can see the room around us. Something is happening around us, trying to get us out of bed but we can’t get up. We are aware but immobile. Tension mounts and we try harder and harder to raise up. We panic and struggle. Then, we realize, we are dreaming and fall back asleep hoping to really wake up. This pattern cycles around as if layers of consciousness are being peeled back. In “Waking Dream”, we explore this moment of coexistence. What does it mean? Is this “reality” free of illusion?

kondition pluriel’s artistic directors, Marie-Claude Poulin -with her background in dance – and Martin Kusch – from the media arts – both have extensive experience in their respective creative fields. Their performances are founded upon the convergence of different disciplines. Their artistic practice relies on the hybridisation of media, the process of electronic-image transformation, and the influence digital technologies exerts on how the body and space is conceived. They are working on the construction and simulation of spaces where they reactualise the presence of the dancer?/ performer. In terms of body language and gesture, they stage different bodily states and raw action, suggesting a multiplicity of attempts at the body’s reorganisation, metamorphosis and adaptation to situations of constraint.

The way the body is put into perspective and its relationship to architecture are key factors in defining the character and spatiality of the work.

The choreographic installation scheme II (2002) – integrates dance / performance with an interactive media-environment. scheme I1 is an ongoing research and development process, where the principal subject of experimentation is the interactive manipulation of video, live images, sound and 3D environments, by dance/performance. The two performer control and generate this environment, their movement is translated via sensors into MIDI data. These sensors are mounted on their arms, legs and on the head. Two prototypes of a wireless sensor box, three video cameras, five computer and two moving projectors are forming with the performance an expressive system.

A matrix – developed in MAX/MSP, enables multiple control parameter mapping and is managing the data flow. With this project, kondition pluriel has generated an interdisciplinary creation where the use of new technologies – in coexistence with the living body – leads to question the traditional codes of representation, to modify the very nature of spectacle and to put forward a reflection on the phenomenon of perception.

scheme II, provides a time and space situation, where the performer/visitor and the media interact between each other, forming an intelligent space.

The relationship to time, memory and space immediately stands out as thematic of this singular practice, geared toward the transformation of the real.

TIME DROPS is an attempt to express such ideas as eternity, infinity, and cosmic equilibrium in an embodied form. It is based on two hypotheses: a single stroke of a bell, as it fades, can evoke a sense of infinity in our mind; an impulse creates a universe when it returns to the original state of stillness. The project was realised in two formats: installation of sound and light, and electro-acoustic music.

Music Version
The CD version of TIME DROPS was produced at composer’s home studio using Macintosh Computer and various audio software. In order to gasp cosmic eternity, attention was paid to the behaviours of small transient sounds-the very opposite to the concept of eternity and yet considered to be the continual process in eternity. Strokes of Tibetan bells marimba etc. were collected and harmonically modified to form various short sound objects. They are then carefully disposed within given frame of time and space. Special attention was paid to the subtle change of timbre and pitch relationship in order to create consistent musical structure and sonic behaviour.

Installation of Sound and Light
The installation version was created in collaboration with light artist Jude James. It was first exhibited at Ally Gallery in London in 2000. Sound and light are considered as physical entities through which time and space are divided and redefined. The concept of multi-dimensionality which the installation reflects, is enhanced by the inclusion of a minimal object, a marble egg sculpture (by James), as the physically intensive focal point in the space surrounded by membrane-like walls.

A Place for Contemplation
Despite its conceptual nature, TIME DROPS is experienced through perception, by the senses, and not through intellect. It aims to create a special place for contemplation for each individual regardless hls/her source of origin. The very reason why electro-acoustic sound and light were chosen as the media, was because they can communicate directly. Another advantage of electro-acoustic manipulation is that the composer can characterise the sound so that the sound becomes an independent being existing in the space, drawing no attention to how and by whom it is executed. Like rain drops making rings in water, the sound generates rings of oscillation in accord with the light. As each sound appears and disappears, the perpetual process of creation and decline in the cosmic equilibrium can be experienced. All you need is a tiny drop of spontaneous imagination.

‘Blip Kino’ is a live performance from the archive. Unrecognised fragments of film – those moments of depersonalised establishing shots where the screen is uninhabited are separated from their place in the original narrative and brought together for use as the central, rather than marginal, content of a new kind of live cinema – reinvented for an era of random access memory.

scopac vs. sowari is a project that combines the live image manipulation of Rob Flint (scopac) with the electronic sound performance of Phil Durrant (sowari). Two artists – one generating sound, the other a video image – perform at a table with computers, a sound system, and a large video screen. Reversing the usual relationship of musician accompanying an existing film, the video becomes a malleable tool, responding to the generated sounds in a dynamic and spontaneous way. The performance itself is unique, unrepeatable.

scopac vs. sowad exploit and enjoy the spontaneous potential of new random access media, but this is an exercise in human interaction as much as new technologies. Resisting the trend for audiovisual spectacle, they attempt to demonstrate the infinite range of textures present in even very limited means. Blip Kino uses the video image less as a representational form, than an means of dynamic collaboration between sight and sound. scopac vs. sowari take video as something that is neither cinema nor television, but is capable of reproducing and substituting for both. We enjoy the paradox of a live, improvised unique performance in an era of perfect copies.

We like to exploit the faults, noise and marginalia of cinema and TV, and to address those media (through performance) as kinds of experience, as well as different kinds of form or content.

Fetish is a performance that manipulates the bottom end of noise – bass feedback and distortion. It Fetishises this element of the audio spectrum, and uses it to control, capture and trigger images projected onto, into and around the performer. The artist uses a bass guitar, copper wired bows, radios and a variety of specially devised MAX patches to control live sampling and video interaction. The result is a wall of combined sound and image unlike anything you would have heard or seen…

“Fetish is a performance that has psycho-industrial strength, unrelenting passion noise and vision that redefine the terms inventive, futuristic, original and loud.” _Zebra Magazine, 2002

The piece refers to low quality, high quantity (of words for example) and devaluation; awarded at emsPrize 2001 contest for text-sound composition (Stockholm).

Nobadimi is deephouse over fragments of Argentine Tango.

The album was produced by using PC, Keyboards, electric Violin and Melodica – all the other instruments are from digital or virtual sources. Idea, production, engineering and digital composition is from Turby Schmidt. Electric violins, Keys and melodica are from Sami Abadi.

Turby Schmidt, aka Midinovela, also is DJ and producer. Sami Abadi does electroacustic/experimental music and is violin teacher. The idea behind was creating electronic music with includes local roots, because most of argentine and latin electronic music productions didn’t sound like something latin. The typical producers are working with european or north-american styles, ignoring latin music. So the producer Turby Schmidt worked out the Project Nobadimi to create electronic dance music with Buenos Aues Flavor. Some people might say that they hear some spirit of Piavolla in this project, and the producer is pretty proud of such comments, but on the other hand it’s difficult to compare, the best way to imagine how tango and house sound together is hear it.

The record was produced and recorded in Almagro/Buenos Aires from November of 2001 to march of 2002.

artistic concept
based on the japanese spirit of harmony between humans (chowa) the computer senses harmony between 2 improvising players and/or voices (waon) and acts accordingly to them in generating audio and visual.

description
Waon is an audiovisual improvisation for two musical instruments. In the first part voices of different nations (Japan, USA, Taiwan, Austria) will be analysed and transformed to melodies by oscillators and visuals by the computer. In the second part, two live instruments are improvising from playing the same note, over micro tonal distortions up to free audiovisual improvisation. The computer senses the correspondence of the instruments and reacts in real time. If there is only one frequency, the system plays the same and everything is quiet and in tune (waon). If the notes are different from each other, the computer plays frequencies inbetween as an electronic sound ambience. In case of very far distance the computer reacts with as much frequencies as possible, which could be a noise. The analysis and reactions are displayed in real time by graphics, based on circles and their distortions, ovals.

Waon, Andreas Weixler 2000/01, interactive audio visual performance for 2 instruments

“As in a reverie, the objects separate from their sense to become poetry”.

The idea of the project is to give life to the sparkle in different materials. Metal, glasses, ice, will travel in time and space by means of computer animation. There is also a play with sensations of fragility and transparence. The music plays the same notions by using recorded sounds of the same materials. In fact, the discours is lead by the music which guides the time development and underlines the sense of colour.

“Destellos” (Sparkle) (5’37) (2001) Music, image and video animation by Elsa Justel.

Leader of our group, Seiji Nagai was a founder menber of pioneering multimedia free improv wanderers The Taj Mahal Travellers. This work tries restructuring of the dense, organic flow of The Taj Mahal Travellers in a basis with art thought of Nietzsche.

Supposing the Nietzsche is the founder of thought of noise music, how does it feel?

Nietzsche considered chaos as dionysus without Got first in the West.

Chaos is a meaning similar to noise in music today. And Nietsche thought about the music that exceeded logos as a symbol of Dionysus of chaos that it was essential thought expression. our music often centres around a juddering piano or turntable phrase, while Nagai runs slowly coalescing rings around the other players. This aspect seems to be just like Dionysus both unify will of the root before long while continuing destroying order of Apollon in sequence.

In other words Dionysus and Apollon may say that I express the world of unified chaosmos while chaos and a cosmos stimulate it mutually.

In addition to above, in a meaning to express respect to Nietzsche, this work inserts music work of Nietsche with subliminal method.

“A patent is a type of property right. It gives the patent holder the right, for a Limited time, to exclude others from making, using, offering to sell, selling, or importing into the United States the subject matter that is within the scope of protection granted by the patent.” -U.S. Patent Office

i-BPE 2.0 takes its cue from Large institutions and governmental agencies that have begun a procedure they call ‘Deep Harmonization’. Deep Harmonization is an attempt to come up with a Global Patenting System. ii-SPE wilt participate by giving the public the right to revise existing patents for the non-scientific, non-bureaucratically inclined.

i-BPE agents will offer patent play, for non-governmental ownership.
i-BPE will filter the gene market’s esoteric intelligence networks for aggressive take-over by 1-BPS users.
i-BPE is an open patent project.
i-BPE is a counter-market-objectivity tool.
i-BPE will offer to patent the patent action.

Home and Away is an audio-visual document exploring the world of British Asian children. Home, for them, is a unique combination of London’s physical space and the Indian subcontinent’s culture. If London is home, it is still distant and away. And if the subcontinent is away, it is still home to much of what makes up their identity.

Home and Away is a multi-layered work exploring the dynamics of defining one’s identity. The children in Home and Away are second and third generation British Asians from families that traveled to Britain from across the Indian subcontinent: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. An unfamiliar land was filled slowly with the familiar: objects, sounds, smells. For the first generation, it may have been easy to identify themselves as the Indian diaspora, with a comfortable division between a home left behind and a new home, between a nostalgic past and a pragmatic present. But for the children of that generation, this is the only home they have ever known – a unique combination of London’s physical space and the subcontinent’s culture.

Home and Away is made up of digitally produced panels which integrate large single images, as well as selected strips from contact sheets with text containing excerpts of interviews and the author’s narrative. The exhibit is bound together by a soundtrack using voice, music and sound effects. In one corner, a computer displays an HTML presentation which combines all the elements of the exhibition but is a stand-atone work that allows the viewer interactive freedom.

The word ‘feral’ denotes a process that is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or naturally-wild (wolf). The passage of goods through feral trade can open up wormholes between diverse social settings and organisations, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel.

The first registered feral trade was conducted in 2003, with the import of 30kg of coffee from the Association Cafetalera de La Paz coffee co-operative in El Salvador to the Cube Microplex cinema co-op in Bristol, UK. The coffee is traded through the UK and Europe via a number of social, cultural, familial and occupational networks. August 2004: Coffee to Estonia, Inauguration of a new feral trade route connecting Bristol and Tallinn via the distribution of coffee. Freight methods for this route are various, but voluntary product-hitchhiking in the baggage of UK-Tallinn ISEA symposium delegates will be considered.

Pine Gap, a US-Australian Joint Defence Space Research facility and base for global satellite technology is one of the largest ground control centres in the world, located 17 kilometres outside Alice Springs. The base connected the world to Pine Gap. Connected considers how disembodied and shadowy the experience of being constantly connected can be.

Connected adopts a Pine Gap modus operandi. Sites are monitored, from the air and from the ground – Anzac Hill; the airport; the Pine Gap exit; Ormiston Gorge; Hermannsburg Mission; Kata Tjuta – to create a sense of a town and a landscape inhabited by shadows, mirages, and reflections.

People inhabit this space tenuously. You never get to see them. You hear from them, or about them. Every one around Alice Springs has a story, or a friend with a story, that connects them to the base. These anecdotes interweave with intercepted news reports; ambient sounds; static; Morse code from Telegraph Station, the roar of road trains speeding down the Stuart Highway; a lone didgeridoo.

Connected has nine related episodes and is presented as a single-channel DVD projection installation with 5.1 Surround Sound.

The shadows of forgotten pirates and smugglers fall on a network of nodes – a mesh that defies boundaries. “Lightning Raids in New Delhi basements” reveal a web that spans the world and fits into a CD. Films, music and information proliferate faster than the vectors of an epidemic. Enter No_Des.

“…Nodes, when written, perhaps erroneously, as ‘no-des’ gives rise to an intriguing hybrid English/Eastern-Hindi neologism, a companion to the old words – ‘des’, and ‘par-des’. ‘Des’ (in some eastern dialects of Hindi, spoken by many migrants to Delhi) is simply homeland or native place; ‘par-des” suggests exile, and an alien land. ‘No-des’ is that site or way of being, in des’ or in par-des’, where territory and anxieties about belonging, don’t go hand-in-hand. Nodes in a digital domain are No-des…- Rags Media Collective, 2002.

Media practices in South Asian streets have a history of using the edit, record and copy/paste function to celebrate a culture of shared usage, gifting, reproduction and low-cost distribution mechanisms for high-value information goods. Backstreet CD burners and basement hard drives combine to produce a thriving network of unofficial information trade. Some people call this piracy.

The Network of No_Des uses found material from web searches, fragments of Hindi film scenes and research notes from Sarai’s ongoing exploration of new media street culture in Delhi to present an engaging and occasionally irreverent perspective on how deep the razor of intellectual property cuts into the skin of contemporary South Asia.