monochrom/JOHANNES GRENZFURTHNER
Johannes Grenzfurthner, vernissage.tv - monochrom/Interwiev with Johannes Grenzfurthner, part 1
Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software industry), Johannes Grenzfurthner gives a theoretical and applied – and not unamusing – overview of the musical genre of corporate anthems. Come and sing along. Powernapping is welcome too.
monochrom is a worldwide operating collective dealing with technology, art, context hacking, and philosophy which was founded in 1993. They specialize in an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, and political activism. Their mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost “in culture archaeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment”. Among their projects, monochrom has started Arse Elektronika, has released a leftist retro-gaming project, established a one baud semaphore line through the streets of San Francisco, started an illegal space race through Los Angeles, buried people alive in Vancouver, and cracked the hierarchies of the art system with the Thomann Project. They ate blood sausages made from their own blood in order to criticize the grotesque neoliberal formation of the world economy. Sometimes they compose melancholic pop songs about dying media and host the first annual festival concerned with cocktail robotics. They also do international soul trade, political sock puppet shows, aesthetic pregnancy counselling, food catering, and – sorry to mention – modern dance.
http://www.monochrom.at/english/
The Innermost Unifier: The Corporate Anthem
The advancement of pre-capitalism (i.e. the form of organisation for the social production of goods and of its distribution) to post-capitalism (i.e. the form of organisation for all social relations in a particular economical ideology) is seldom as apparent as in a modern company or corporation, the most dominant type of organization of the post-capitalist endeavour. The company has taken the place once inhibited by the factory. The factory thrived on the opposites of worker and owner. The modern corporation, however, is built around the core-idea of the post-antagonistic concept of work itself. The employees have become co- and sub-entrepreneurs. Yet of course they are not, which becomes evident when looking at who actually owns the means of production within the company. The employees however are being turned onto the illusion of being an active part, even a decision-making part of the “big family” (I love this company!). The modern corporation wants to return to the pre-capitalist crisis of class struggle. That means: contradictions within, and indeed clashes of interest take a step back behind the curtain of the “community” (a visit of the Google Campus in Silicon Valley illustrates this concept drastically). The return to old ideas of community also brings with it certain forms of rituals, like the usage of a corporate anthem. But there is no right feel-good in something that is wrong.
PAULE EČIMOVIĆ
Born in Ljubljana. After living for almost two decades in Toronto, London, and San Francisco, he enrolled in mathematical logic at the University of Ljubljana, where he later completed his undergraduate studies and his masters degree. Currently, he is writing a doctorate in Earth and Space Science at York University in Toronto. He did informatics system design work for the Institute of Public Health of the Rep. of Slovenia.
Hacked Varieties of the Pong Computer Video Game Experience
Copyrights Atari (left) and Steve Taylor (right)
Summary: Several versions of the classic computer video game Pong will be presented with a view to exposing varieties of the experience of the well-known video game. Pong game variations considered include changing the playing field, the ball, the paddle, and ways in which these are controlled. All of these modifications to the classical scheme of the Pong video game are presented as “hacks” leading to various game worlds which have no place in the “real world” outside the computer scheme in which they are simulated, thereby constituting genuine Utopiae in Thomas More’s sense, albeit generated by hacking and hence “hacktopiae.”
SHEENA MACRAE
Sheena Macrae (1972, lives in London) works the art of compression by playing with our societies’ fascination with speed, entertainment, information and nostalgia. She manipulates the product of the cultural industries, takes possession of it and, twisting the principle of post-production, becomes a sort of VJ (Video-Jockey), somewhere between Christian Marclay and Douglas Gordon, appropriating and parodying standardised forms of narration, Hollywood clichés or economic constraints underlying all-powerful entertainment. Through a series of procedures, the material of film, a real ready-made, is emptied of all narrative content and returned to its superficial essence.
Lecture about the artists work
My work deals with the art of compression, exploring the modern fascination with speed, nostalgia, information and entertainment. By focusing on popular culture media through digital advances in technology, the work appropriates the ready-made formats of cinema and television. The work parodies and reconstructs the dynamics of Hollywood clichés, collective memory and standardizing of film narratives, using the syntax of film language to develop alternative meanings in a post-production remix.
Sheena Macrae
Sheena Macrae’s videos might best be described as ‘compressions’: her massive feats of editing remix films into miniature, yet unabridged sagas: Pulp Fiction reduced to exactly one minute, Gone With the Wind crunched from 3.5 hours down to commercial break size. Their effect is something like speed-reading: images fly by in rapid sequence, focusing on only the key elements of action… Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.
Patricia Ellis, excerpt from Flatpack TV, 2005.
ELEONORA MARIA IRENE OREGGIA aka XNAME
Eleonora Oreggia, Lecture in Rome on the topic “Pure Data and the Useless Machines”
Xname is a media artist and performer. Born in Milan, she lived in Bologna, Amsterdam and London. She is interested in classical literature, philosophy, visual arts, semiotics, electronic music, programming, and software culture. She is currently a researcher of Design at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht with the project Virtual Entity, and is starting a PhD at Goldsmiths in London. Her work, mixing different practices, talks about social and individual identities, and their interfacing with reality and imagination. [this story is to be continued …]
http://virtualentity.org
http://xname.cc
Virtual Entity
Metadata system project
This infrastructure presents a non-compulsory possibility for releasing digital files, allowing identification, communication, and exchange. It is a form of decentralised archive whose growth will be peer-driven, spontaneous, and uncontrollable.
Concept
Digital entities are nature, they do not belong to anyone. The net is a morphing distributed body mirroring current human culture. Any digital immaterial creation can be instantiated in an infinite number of copies identical to the original native file. Culture has no owners.
Virtual Entity is an attempt to:
- track the history of digital media art on the net, the transformations, work-chains, artists (mapping);
- allow direct connection and dialogue between users, creators, viewers, artists, listeners, voyeurs, and people in general;
- contain instructions and suggestions on best usage, digital file destiny and fate;
- provide feedback on art and communication, develop discussion about content, aesthetics, philosophy, art;
Development
Virtual Entity is a technical implementation of the concepts of ontology and identity within the digital domain. It will be a fast, uncontrollable system based on simplicity, efficiency, and spontaneous participation. Virtual Entity is an evolution of software that provides the possibility to twin any file with a “Soul”. The “Soul of a file” is a set of metadata plus an editable and unlimited space for information exchange. The “Souls Repository” will be both centralised and decentralised, using both a chain of servers and peer to peer propagation. Every instance of a file will contain an address pointing to the Soul, accessible via browser or command line. Any addition to the Soul will be visible from every existing instance of the file entity.
THE SOUL OF A FILE = KERNEL + LOGS
kernel = basic metadata, written by the file creator, machine-readable, permanent, global, possibly language-independent
aura = logs, editable by anybody
The basic metadata is editable only by the original creator (when there is an absolute creator). The Aura is similar to a wiki, open for comments, logs, and documentation; this space can be edited by any user of the file. Virtual Entity is a non-compulsory possibility: no user is obliged to read or edit the Soul. Since the Soul is separate from the file instance, every file copy has to contain the key pointing to the Soul. The main technical innovation of Virtual Entity is its method of coupling a file instance and the Soul. The main advantage lies in the separation of the file and its metadata, which implies universal access to new content and the possibility for progressive editing of the Soul (Aura expansion). File integrity can be authenticated, and the Aura will contain an interactive code to prevent spam, the Anti-Poltergeist System (APS). The use of this system allows for mapping of genetic relations and inheritance between files (digital DNA): every single Soul can point to all the Souls of the parent-files that are contained in it, and every file created can propagate in sub-files. Widespread use of the software will create a self-generating media data history and archive. Since Virtual Entity is a new, simple answer to the problem of attribution of digital creations, it can also be thought of as a licence: it is a technical system which represents each work as a peculiar, non-unique entity, manifesting specifically what specific is.
ANDRAŽ SRAKA
Andraž Sraka
Open source enthusiast and one of the conceptual contributors to the Cyberpipe multimedia hack-centre; for the past couple of years he has been running Cyberpipe’s Open Sessions (Pipini odprti termini / http://pot.kiberpipa.org), while among other things devoting some of his free time to the kiberpipa.net project – the Ljubljana open wireless network.
:: kiberpipa.net :: Ljubljana Open Wireless Network
An open wireless network is developing in Ljubljana, using widespread wireless technology, an innovative approach, and above all cooperation to connect all the public, art and cultural, production, educational, and other interested spaces and individuals of Ljubljana into an autonomous and independent wireless network across Ljubljana, offering sufficient space, freedom, and opportunity for new content, interaction and communication, exchange of data, services, and alternative access to Internet content. Thus a new medium is being developed, one that is freely accessible and whose usage possibilities are limited only by imagination and creativity.
The idea certainly isn’t old – it started to materialize at the HAIP06 festival, where it was also supported by the members of FunkFeuer (0xFF) who are upholding a similar project in neighbouring Austria.
ALESSANDRO CARBONI aka OOFFOURO/NPA OFFICINA OUROBOROS
A multi-disciplinary artist, he distributes his varied expertise between exploration of the body and movement and the relation with space. For a number of years his work has focused on the study of an original method of choreographic composition based on mathematics and systems theory. He teaches “Methodology and Performance Practice” at the Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, while at the same time working as choreographer and dancer with OOFFOURO/N.P.A. Officina Ouroboros, with which he has collaborated on a number of projects, e.g. Epigenesi and others.
OOFFOURO/N.P.A Officina Ouroboros divides its artistic activities between various multidisciplinary practices focused on exploration, research, and systematic study of movement, choreography, and sound. The Association NPA Officina Ouroboros was founded in 2000 in Sardinia with the intention to investigate and to work on the problem of human evolution in contemporary society through deep and multidisciplinary research of art and science. The workgroup Ooffouro is part of the association and is composed of Alessandro Carboni (choreographer and dancer) and Danilo Casti (musician).
http://www.ooffouro.org/ita/RESEARCH/WBNR
http://www.ooffouro.org
WBNR – What Burns Never Returns
CPU video visualisation with the instructions for the dancer (Videoprojected in the scene-scape)
Project, research, choreography, and dance: Alessandro Carboni , development strategies: Alessandro Carboni and Danilo Casti,
sound landscapes: Danilo Casti, generative code: Riccardo Mantelli, walker urban trajectories: Lorenzo Tripodi, organization: Alessia Meloni, in collaboration with: Marta Anatra, Elena Morando, Silvia Bottiroli, Cinzia Nieddu, Antonella Sanna, Barbara Cadeddu, Valentina Saiu, and WBNR– Laboratorio su densità e trasformazione urbana – Cagliari
WBNR is the second phase of a three-year research project ABQ: from quad to zero.
The project is an extensive investigation of the body and the city, of an organism, a doubly mutated system in which deformed territories, structural glitches, and uncontrolled code cohabit with each other. They create new dynamic maps of places in continuous transformation. Through the creation of a work Platform, several researchers work to apply a method of analysis and composition to choreography focused on the specific urban context of the city and the theatre stage in which the performance takes place. Proceeding analytically from space in its different typologies, from the territory of the body, the flows, dynamics, agents, and movements that constitute it are quantified and codified. The process of exploration and generation of the flows is assigned to the dancers who, through data collection systems such as GPS, motion capture, and sensors, interact in real time with diverse spatial levels: the town, the stage, the body, the machine. The aim is to elaborate a single system of choreographic composition, capable of interpolating all the collected data into a set of choreographic instructions. WBNR is an immeasurable choreography between body and territory, an exploration of the city and the body, reimagining new modalities of analysis and new paths of investigation in order to reflect on the anthropological and socio-cultural transformations of the individual, and on how technology, infrastructure, places, and people are organized in the contemporary urban space.
/RADIO FRO 105,0 MHz/MICHAEL SCHWEIGER
Community Radio & Transcultural Platform
Radio FRO is a free, non-commercial radio station, which works according to the open access concept. Roughly 400 programming providers turn out over 100 radio shows in more than 15 languages. Areas of emphasis are informational and public service programmes by NGOs and local initiatives, diverse language shows, a cultural and educational channel, broadcasts from young people as well as senior citizens, and a variety of music programming. Radio FRO initiates participatory cultural and social projects on a local and international level.
Community Radio as an Open Source for Expression
Michael Schweiger, photo Radio FRO
The lecture will discuss community radio as an open source for expression, and therefore focus on some aspects of open source and open access in general and their links to certain special aspects of open source. This notion of open source does not only focus on open source hardware or software, but stresses the sense of open source as a way of life and thinking. The lecture will thus feature a short presentation of the idea and concept of the cultural broadcast archive (http://ba.fro.at), point out the idea and especially the need for YARM (Yet Another Radio Manager – a free, open source radio programme management system and GUI), and last but not least, line out the open source character of community radios like FRO and of course the need for more open source applications and systems to maintain the openness.
MARTIN KOHOUT aka PASH*
Born in Prague in 1984.
Awards: 2006 – Lab.Award for Ombea project at Lab30 festival in Augsburg, Germany
Solo exhibitions: 2007 – Slany, Benzinka, We Make Boxes 280407; 2008 – Prague, A.M. 180, As Soon as You Occupy Me I Infiltrate You
Selected collective exhibitions: 2006 – Prague, 4+4+4 Days In Motion festival, Leipzig (DE), Augustplatz, Flour ‘n’ Sugar, Brno, Festival of Digital Culture Zoom 2006, Augsburg (DE), Lab30 festival, winner of Lab.Award for Ombea installation; 2007 – Internet performance Last Tag Show, Multiplace 2007 festival, Budapest (HU), Art in Box, Amsterdam (NL), Streetlab, Vienna (AT), Paraflows: UN Space, Prague, Enter3: Web 2.0 Generation; 2008 – Prague, CIANT Gallery, Therapy, Prague, Karlin Studios, INTRO 518 TEDˇ 69 TEDˇ* TEDˇ 180 BONUS Q TRACK!
Selected online texts and appearances: 2006 – Palo Fabus: Moving Sounds of Ombea, Furtherfield.org; Valentina Culatti: Ombea, a Paradoxical Physical Interaction, Neural.it;
2007 – Nathan Lovejoy: review of Last Tag Show, Furtherfield.org
Miscellaneous: 2007 – Famu Fest 2007: concept and festival director of the student film festival in Prague (with Advancedesign and Pebe)
Currently lives and studies in Berlin.
http://www.lostpostservice.net
Pash*/Presentation of selected works by Pash
Tags: new media, simplicity, interaction, space, web 2.0, hack and bending
Part one will discuss an example of horror documentation. Its subject is Ombea so you can expect two disoriented teenage girls screaming loudly and surrounded by noise and fading lights, a program with “behaviour”, and a potentially meditative experience. Ombea from 2006, mostly labelled as an installation, is rather a temporary intervention occupying a space, oscillating between being a conceptual construct and a physical experience. Tested on humans.
Part two will discuss a show and a timeline. It will also cover selected interventions into Web 2.0 by hacking or recycling services such as Last.fm or Youtube.
DANIEL TURING
Daniel Turing and his touch table at the opening in Cyberpipe (2007), from the Cyberpipes photo archive
Daniel Turing conducts empiric research in post-intuitive interfaces and other novel techniques for human-computer interaction. He strongly believes that trying too hard to be easy is what got us into the desktop metaphor mess in the first place.
http://xinf.org/
http://danielturing.com/
“It is my main “integration point” where I plug together different technologies to do experiments in Human-Computer Interaction. In the presentation, I will show off some of the things I actually use it for.”
Daniel Turing
Xinf
Xinf (Xinf Is Not Flash) strives to provide a unified SVG-oriented API for graphics programming in haXe. Using Xinf, your application can run on Adobe’s Flash Player (Version 9 up), our own ‘Xinfinity’ runtime, and (with limitations) on standards-compliant web browsers like Mozilla Firefox - from the same source code. Most of it’s cross-runtime magic is owed to the excellent haXe language and compiler and the neko virtual machine. Xinf adds abstracted implementations for rendering and user-interface events, and a cross-platform (Linux/Windows/OSX), OpenGL-based runtime environment (dubbed Xinfinity). Xinf tries to leverage the broad distribution of Adobe’s Flash Player to things more exciting than animated ads. It provides a rich, versatile, standards-based environment for interactive graphics, both on Flash and it’s own open, extensible runtime.
ANDERS CARLSSON aka GOTO80
With roots in catchy as well as extreme music, seeing Goto80 perform is like getting an 8-bit uppercut that tastes of blood and candy. Who said that pop, grindcore, and jazz can’t be mixed using bleeps and vocals? In 2007 alone, Goto80 released 100 songs and performed 50 gigs, so he is far from finished with his experiments in crappy programming, glitchy sound-chips, and musical history. In 2007, he also introduced chip-music to Israel, was one of the three nominees for best C64 composer ever, and celebrated 10 years in the C64 demo-scene.
Goto80’s revived view on purism has led him to explore the uniqueness of making music with 8-bit technology as opposed to trying to make similar music with modern equipment. At the moment, he is using unreleased software that combines the maximisation programming style of the demo-scene with previously unexplored terrains of the C64 sound-chip. So you can expect (still) more weirdness from this master of chip disaster!
From Goto80 blog about chip-music
We want to start publishing more material about 8-bit creativity that is not about videogames and pop-music but rather about art, the demo-scene, noise, performance and man machines. This stems from our belief that the production, consumption, socialization, and distribution in the 8-bit communities has features that are unique to the 8-bit world.
Music is probably the 8-bit field that has gained the most attention in popular culture. 2007 proved to be an interesting year with probably the world’s biggest chip-music festival ever (Blipfestival in USA), and there was plenty of interest in the art world for a documentary about art, music and videogames (8 bit). The biggest stir was probably caused by Timbaland’s extensive sampling of GRG and Tempest’s chip-tune Acidjazzed Evening. However, the general tendency of treating chip-music as a musically simplistic, technically complex form of pop has continued. Viewing chip-music as a form and judging from popular places such as 8bitpeoples, modland or micromusic.net, this is the norm. However, from a technological perspective, chip-music does not have a form and there’s a wide range of alternative music that happens to be produced with lo-tech computers and consoles. The Chip Music is Dead manifesto is one example, albeit more radical than most, of this perspective: “We have reached the point that some of us had feared. VSTi and diffusion started to become our enemies, cloning of ideals initiated mutation and blending.”
ROSA MENKMAN
R▲▲S’ photostream via flickr/Glitch 2
Presentation of Research into Glitch-Art
Every technology has its own accidents. Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, we would like to emphasize their positive consequences. We feel that in this day and age we need systematically distorted communication, because this opens up
possibilities for discussing technologies and their internal politics. The way to establish such systematically distorted communication lies within the technique of the void. The void is not only a means to perceive, it is primarily a lack of meaning, often a place where a medium is used in an inverse way and where the message of the medium is destroyed. In this space, one is primed to reflect upon conventional frames, to criticize the flow that we have taken for granted and through which we are conditioned to take part in the spirit of our time.
– from the In-between manifesto by Lievnath Faber, Tim van der Heijden and Rosa Menkman
