Bag lady 2.0 (2008)


Symposium:


Presentation Title:
  • Bag lady 2.0 (2008)

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Artist Statement

    Baglady 2.0 is a live performance with a customised electronic performance tool: a bag with an antenna and an embedded board, programmed for live wireless broadcasting on-the-fly of sound, digital images [motion jpeg]. It probes found wifi zones as a platform to pipe through this data. It highlights how such ephemeral oral or folk histories on the street can be played out on the WWW, being such an inhabited and ubiquitous place at present.

    The bag can serve as personal recording device to capture one’s daily life, to record conversations, log geographical data, and take images. Or it can even be used as a tactical medium in urban space, this is not symbolic. Imagine the bag as a tool for grassroots journalists operating under the conditions of repression. They can record images and audio files, and send them immediately to a remote server, while deleting the compromising data from the bag’s memory. (‘BagLady: trading secrets spreading news’ Mirko Tobias Schafer (2008)
    Scenario
    A nomad living in the wreckage of the new dark ages, baglady2.o tracks and inherits neo-liberal capitalist waste, wanders through its discarded wardrobe, transforms it and plays with it. She is a hunter-gatherer of ephemeral moments. She finds it vital to collect and share signs, omens from the everyday, seeing the beauty in the banal, validating the fragile and shifting world made up of spontaneous aesthetic subcultures. She travels light, carries around with her a bag with an antennae to probes the aeather and pirate the network…
    Details of material/media
    Networked performance / custom built interface – suede bag, Alix3c3 mini euro-card format with Audio, VGA and Award-BIOS [super expandable] 500 MHz Processor antenna, Battery Power – 12 V.8 Gb Cf card, USB webcam Logitech CamPro 9000 is 1600×1200 ( HD-TV), LFS linux from scratch, KNOPPIX kernel, audio streaming darkice as client, encoding ogg vorbis, Webcam UVC video module.

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