Month: November 2022

memoryMechanics

by Karen Eide Bøen, Mads Høbye, Lise Aagaard Knudsen, Maja Fagerberg Ranten and Troels Andreasen.

memoryMechanics is an interactive sound installation that explores how we as humans embody memories.

The installation is based on an archive of memories that are collected from different people, by guiding them through sensory experiences and into physical poses that trigger embodied memories. Their recorded memories are then stored in the installation for retrieval through imitating their initial poses.

Artificial intelligence is used to record and retrieve memories from the archive. Through the installation, a synergy between human memory and computer memory appears. Artificial intelligence creates a mediated physical space in which the audience can walk around, position themselves in poses and hear the intimate stories of previous participants.

Participants: Dansers and anyone interested on interactivity and technologies.
Duration: 1 hour
Venue: BIT Teatergarasjen office (Strandgaten 205)
Date: 18th – 12-13h

memoryMechanics

memoryMechanics is a collaboration between exocollective and the duo Knudsen Bøen under the group umbrella term memoryMechanics.

exocollective is a research collaboration initiated by researchers at Roskilde University. The main agenda is to develop an experimental approach to researching the potential of new technologies and materials: Speculative explorations in interactive design, art, and technology. Maja Fagerberg Ranten, Mads Høbye, and Troels Andreasen. (https://www.exocollective.com)

Knudsen/Bøen is the collaboration between the two artists Lise Aagaard Knudsen (actor and MA in Theater & Performance Studies) and Karen Eide Bøen (dancer and choreographer). They work with body memory and exchange of memories between artists and participants, and the transformation of memory material into various artistic formats in their project called “I remember…”.

memoryMechanics was initiated as a part of “Staging the Future of Technologies vol. 2” with the following partners: Click festival, Catch, Haut and Roskilde University Center. Sponsored by Bikubenfonden & Copenhagen municipality.

Mads Hobye holds a PhD in interactive design from Medea, Malmö University and is a co-founder of illutron collaborative interactive art studio. He is conducting research into the potential of digital material exploration within art and technology. He has a keen interest in maker hacktivism and experimental electronic upcycling. He is an Associate professor at the Department of People and Technology at Roskilde University Center.

Lise Aagaard Knudsen is a performer and theatre practitioner, based in Copenhagen. In her practice she explores the archive of the body alongside a close relationship between the performer and her audience. She works internationally, mainly in Scandinavia and the UK, teaches performance theory as an external lecturer at University of Copenhagen and works a producer at the dAnish residency center HAUT.

MA in Acting from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London, and MA in Theatre and Performance Studies from University of Copenhagen.

Futura Tropica

Sarah Grant, Juan Pablo García Sossa

| Futura Trōpica | is an intertropical decentralized network of grass-root local networks for lateral exchange of local resources and other forms of Knowledges, Designs and Technologies. It plays with the narrative of the Wood Wide Web and the way trees are interconnected, communicate to each other and redistribute nutrients with the help of fungi as mycellium. It uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol to connect Rhizomes in Bogotá, Kinshasa and Bengaluru. Each Rhizome is composed of a raspberry pi-based wireless access point and web server in combination with a USB based distribution system similar to ‘El Paquete Semanal’ in Cuba.

Sarah Grant is an American artist and professor of new media based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her teaching and art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Artfrom UC Davis and a Masters in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.

Juan Pablo García Sossa — jpgs / Futura Trōpica Netroots (*Bogotá, COL) is a Designer, Researcher and Artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grass-root popular culture in tropical territories. His practice explores the development of cultures, visions, realities and worlds through the remix and reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (Tropics as Region and Mindset). JPGS has been part of diverse research institutions and design studios and currently is a design research member at SAVVY Contemporary The Laboratory of Form-Ideas’ Design Department in Berlin and Co-Director of Estación Terrena, a space for Arts, Research and Technologies in Bogotá.

Coping Strategies, Sarah Grant

Curator Sarah Grant will introduce us to the special program “Coping Strategies” and guest speakers on the first talks sessions of the festival.

Sarah Grant is an American artist and professor of new media based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio. Her teaching and art practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Fine Art from UC Davis and a Masters in Media Arts from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Since 2015, she has organized the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for critical investigations and creative experiments in telecommunications.

Coping Streategies Curatorial Statement

By now we begin to understand the extent to which our personal and professional interactions are mediated by the digital, from user interfaces to data harvesting networks of surveillance. As digital captives, we have little agency over our membership and the extent of our participation within these obfuscated systems.

Additionally, our dependency upon these systems leaves us vulnerable in a way that can lead to crisis, in the event of critical communications infrastructure or platforms becoming unavailable or unsafe to use.

How can we put some space between ourselves and these dominant structures? How can we push back and reclaim agency over the narrative that is written about ourselves and our communities by these intrusive technologies? How do we mitigate digital crisis?

Coping Strategies is a program of works, including presentations, workshops, and performances, that demonstrate artist-led approaches to recasting our role in the asymmetrical relationship between ourselves and the dominant providers of information technology. They exemplify:

Building infrastructure that centers community- versus profit-driven values

Creating datasets that seek to remove bias against marginalized communities

Reclaiming ownership over our digital selves

Restoring emotional intimacy to digitally mediated personal relationships

Creating new ways of encoding information in service to political activists

Prioritizing existing infrastructures that elevates knowledge and access above commodification and surveillance

By demonstrating concrete actions that we as individuals and as communities can take in response to these domineering information systems, Coping Strategies hopes to provoke excitement and reassurance that we don’t have to passively accept the default settings of our digital lives.

VFRAME

Adam Harvey

VFRAME.io (Visual Forensics and Metadata Extraction) is a computer vision toolkit designed for human rights researchers. It aims to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art artificial intelligence used in the commercial sector and make it accessible and tailored to the needs of human rights researchers and investigative journalists working with large video or image datasets. VFRAME is under active development and was most recently presented at the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) Mine Action Technology Workshop in November 2021.

Adam Harvey (US/DE) is an artist and research scientist based in Berlin focused on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2010) and is the creator of the VFRAME.io computer vision project, Exposing.ai dataset project, and CV Dazzle computer vision camouflage concept.

Coding : Braiding : Transmissions

Isaac Kariuki

CBT (Coding : Braiding : Transmissions) is a collaboration with Tamara Clarke-Brown as an experiment in speculative technology, combining the DIY practices of coding and braiding. CBT explores these two practices as tools for sending encrypted messages to escape totalising surveillance of black communities globally. The performance installation comprises of women braiding each others’ hair with a GoPro camera attached to their heads. The camera and accompanying software translates their hand movements into encrypted messages that the women send to each other throughout the performance.

Isaac Kariuki is a visual artist and writer whose work centres on surveillance, borders, internet culture and the black market, in relation to the Global South. His work has taken the form of image, video, lectures, writing and performance. He has exhibited at the Tate Modern, Kadist (Paris) and the Kampala Art Biennale among others as well as holding lectures at the Tate Britain and Yale University.

Sensors and Pd

Kris Kuldkepp

Lecture and workshop on sensors and motion capture in new music and
multimedia performance.

The performer’s body is classically considered secondary in presenting a
musical piece. After all, the composer’s name and the idea of self-contained
artwork are predominantly the reasons for a concert visit rather than particular
performer(s) and their performing modes. Thus, for a classically trained
musician, it presents a conflict of being essentially a practical tool in the
service of a composer rather than a creative agent. However, the research in various music performance studies has resulted in a diverse quest for the importance of musical gestures and performers’ physical movements in transmitting the meaning. Do some movements or gestures of a
performer make the music meaningful? How could one classify musical gestures? How is acousmatic music perceived? How to understand electronic music in which the sound production is decoupled from physical gesture? … These and more are the open questions that circle in musical gesture research.
The focus on the importance of musical gestures has influenced composers and performing musicians to create pieces and improvisations that experiment with motion capture and various sensors to create musical experiences. The lecture introduces the usage of sensors and motor capture systems in new music and multimedia and discusses the philosophical concepts motivating the
research.

The lecture is followed by a practical workshop for absolute beginners in Pure Data (Pd) and programming for movement sensors.It will introduce the first steps for processing the data and the necessary algorithms.

The participants should bring their personal computers and preinstall Pure Data Vanilla (https://puredata.info/downloads/pure-data) as well as external libraries “Cyclone” and “else”.

In order to install the externals, please start up Pure Data and use Pd’s own external download manager:
— go to the “Help” menu
— choose the “find externals” option under the Help menu
— search for “cyclone”.
— Then click on the link to download the “cyclone” to your computer and specify the search path. (By default it should be ~/Documents/Pd/externals).
— Do the same process with the “else” externals.

Now the external libraries are installed in your computer

In order to load the libraries at the startup:
— go to “Preferences” menu in Pd
— choose Startup”,
— then click “New”, type “cyclone” and hit OK.
— Do the same with “else” library.
— Next time you restart Pd, the libraries will be loaded and ready to use.

Also, please download this folder with sound files into your computer. We use these sound files during the workshop as examples.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12znhQbAJnaXWWrMLFPtIS6CZ9h85QhPP

As sensors, we will use our smartphones, and participants should also preinstall an app PdParty (iOS) or
Sensor2OSC (Android) on their phones. A computer mouse can be used to
stimulate the data stream.
During the workshop, we will build examples in Pure Data that introduce the
first essential steps in creating music with sensors and what to do with the raw
data. No previous experience with Pure Data is required.

Kris Kuldkepp

Kris is Hamburg based free improviser performing on double bass, bass guitar, and live-electronics. She is a feminist performer and artist. Kris is currently completing doctoral studies at Hamburg University of Applied Science where she researches spatial sound, free improvised music, and posthumanism. She is an active soloist and ensemble performer and has participated in festivals such as StimmeX, Blurred Edges Festival, and Bruital Furore in Hamburg, LjudOLjud in Stockholm, Tallinn Music Week, St. Petersburg New Music Festival reMusic, Estonian Music Days, she has also been invited to collaborate in various constellations within Europe and throughout South-America.

Kris is also part of the free improvisation quartet ‘double bird’ that recently released an album ‘favourite galaxy’ and is active with the quartet EMN concentrating on performing graphic scores and performative compositions. Kris is a close collaborator of opera director Lisa Pottstock with whom she develops feminist performances focusing on finding new way of dealing with body, materiality, and sound.

Piksel KidZ Lab Ewasteroid by Paul Granjon (UK)

Piksel KidZ Lab: Ewasteroid by Paul Granjon (UK)

November, Friday 18th and Saturday 19th, 10:00 to 13:00 h
Duration: 3 hours.
Age: 10-100 years old.
Place: KUNSTSKOLEN I BERGEN,
Marken 37 i Bergen sentrum, Bergen City

Gratis verksted for barn/unge i alderen 10-100 år for påmelding: piksel22(at)piksel(dot)no
Piksel KidZ Lab is supported by Bergen Kommune and Vestland Fylkeskommune.

Ewasteroid

The beauty and the ugliness of electronic waste fight it off in this workshop for curious people. Starting with a pile of electronic waste items such as printers, pc towers, DVD players the participants will build a spinning asteroid made of out of date components and found timber, mining the old machines for intricate and complex parts. The resulting temporary sculpture is both celebration of human engineering and sinister indicator of an extractivist civilisation gone in overdrive.

Expect improvisation, technological creativity, freestyle wiring, collaboration and low-tech solutions. In line with Granjon’s current methods, the machine will work off-grid, be made of 90% recycled or found components and use open source technology controllers (Arduino).

The Ewasteroid belongs to Granjon’s extensive practice of Wrekshops, participat. The events combine hands-on, fun making with grassroots conversations inspired by the material, its abundance and creative potential.

The participants do not need to have prior knowledge of electronics or programming, start age 7 (under 12 accompanied by an adult). The workshop can run for a few hours or a whole day or 2, with participants coming and going, or booking a slot. Max 7 participants at a time with 1 assistant.

The Ewasteroid will be exhibited as an installation after the workshop, before its parts return to the recycling plant.

The first Ewasteroid was tested during the Deershed Festival in the UK in July 2022, more info at https://www.zprod.org/zwp/ewasteroid/

Paul Granjon (UK)

Paul Granjon is interested in the co-evolution of humans and machines, imagining solutions for alternative futures and sharing his experience of creative technologies. He has been making robots and other machines for exhibitions and performances since 1996. Granjon’s work became known for a trademark combination of humour and serious questions, delivered with absurd machines that made use of recycled components. His Sexed Robots were exhibited in the Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. He performs and exhibits internationally, with recent commissions in Garage Museum Moscow and Azkuna Zentroa Bilbao. He regularly delivers Wrekshops, public events where participants are invited to take apart electronic waste and build temporary new machines from the bits they find. Granjon’s current work is driven by an ecologist and participatory agenda. He teaches Fine-Art in Cardiff School of Art and Design, UK and completed a practice-based PhD in robotic arts in 2022.

Piksel KidZ Lab

In 2015, Piksel Festival, the Bergen festival focusing on new media art and open digital culture, introduced Piksel KidZ Lab, an artistic laboratory for kids to understand and build new media artworks. After 8 years of experience working with kids and technology, the program is rooted in the autumn schools program.

Piksel kidz lab 2022 proposes three new workshops: Creating Audio and Visual effects with Code – LIVE Coding! with @Antonio Roberts, Messaging with lights in a not internet era! with Sarah Grant and Ewasteroid by Paul Granjon.

All the workshops are free attendance. To particpate send us an email to: piksel22(AT)piksel(DOT)no.

Ewasteroid

Paul Granjon

The beauty and the ugliness of electronic waste fight it off in this workshop for curious people. Starting with a pile of electronic waste items such as printers, pc towers, DVD players the participants will build a spinning asteroid made of out of date components and found timber, mining the old machines for intricate and complex parts. The resulting temporary sculpture is both celebration of human engineering and sinister indicator of an extractivist civilisation gone in overdrive.

Expect improvisation, technological creativity, freestyle wiring, collaboration and low-tech solutions. In line with Granjon’s current methods, the machine will work off-grid, be made of 90% recycled or found components and use open source technology controllers (Arduino).

The Ewasteroid belongs to Granjon’s extensive practice of Wrekshops, participat. The events combine hands-on, fun making with grassroots conversations inspired by the material, its abundance and creative potential.

The participants do not need to have prior knowledge of electronics or programming, start age 7 (under 12 accompanied by an adult). The workshop can run for a few hours or a whole day or 2, with participants coming and going, or booking a slot. Max 7 participants at a time with 1 assistant.

The Ewasteroid can be exhibited as an installation after the workshop, before its parts return to the recycling plant.

The first Ewasteroid was tested during the Deershed Festival in the UK in July 2022.

Paul Granjon is interested in the co-evolution of humans and machines, imagining solutions for alternative futures and sharing his experience of creative technologies. He has been making robots and other machines for exhibitions and performances since 1996. Granjon’s work became known for a trademark combination of humour and serious questions, delivered with absurd machines that made use of recycled components. His Sexed Robots were exhibited in the Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2005. He performs and exhibits internationally, with recent commissions in Garage Museum Moscow and Azkuna Zentroa Bilbao. He regularly delivers Wrekshops, public events where participants are invited to take apart electronic waste and build temporary new machines from the bits they find. Granjon’s current work is driven by an ecologist and participatory agenda. He teaches Fine-Art in Cardiff School of Art and Design, UK and completed a practice-based PhD in robotic arts in 2022.

Power&Bytes

Jerry Galle

‘But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition – affinity, not identity.’ Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway

This film bundles statements that were partly realised with an artificial algorithm, to which the question was repeatedly asked: “What is to be done?”. The film tells an ambiguous story through a multitude of ‘personalities’ that seek affinities between very different perspectives. Not a single voice but many voices making what they want from the material they are placed upon, taking meanings in their own direction. The images refer to the false intimacy we develop with digital devices and the self-correcting behaviour that sometimes results from this. The shapes that appear behind the sentences are generated with visual feedback systems.

Jerry Galle explores idiosyncratic uses of image and language that are co-created with algorithms. The mediation of the world through ever profiling, falsifying and quantifying images and texts that are both bot and human generated, have had a dramatic impact on conceptions of art, humour, absurdity, politics, economics and language itself. His practice critically reflects this mediation using websites, drawings, electronics and manipulated texts, presented both offline and in the public space of the Internet.

His work has been shown in Muhka, Bozar, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, British Film Institute, Wiels, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF, International Film Festival Hamburg, Museum Dr. Guislain, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Ars Electronica among others.