Inkluderende Digitalt Laboratorium for Eksperimentell Kunst (IDLE) is an innovative artistic and participatory project based on a digitally updated art venue space, Studio 207, in Bergen.
The venue’s audiovisual devices are controlled remotely through a virtual gallery. Artists and audiences can manipulate lights, videos, and sounds, to create different atmospheres through the Internet of Things technologies. The public designs spatial audiovisual experiences for those that are In Real Life at the venue and simultaneously in the virtual gallery!
IDLE intends to offer a creative virtual meeting point for school kids, youngsters, people with reduced mobility who wants to interact with the physical world, and all of those art curious lovers that want to look for new physical-virtual new experiences. The project explores new collaborations and forms of interaction between different art and cultural forms.
IDLE is an innovative project initiated by Piksel, in collaboration with CNDSD, Malitzin Cortés and Iván Abreu, APO33, Jenny Pickett, Julien Ottavi, and Romain Papion and Martin Koch. It is a 3 years project supported by the Municipality of Bergen and the Arts Council Norway.
PIKSELXX AI AI AI is presenting for the first time this experience to the world. To do the premiere in Bergen we have invited the artists and developers of the project CNDSD, Malitzin Cortés, Iván Abreu, APO33, Jenny Pickett, Julien Ottavi, and Romain Papion to create the first sound and visual, physical and virtual experience. Join us at Studio 207 and the @Piksel Cyber Salon on Thursday Nov 17th – 22-23h.
Skogen is a collaborative project between Hillevi Munthe (NO) and Elisabeth Schimana (AT)
“The forest” is a spatial textile installation with incorporated electronics and metal wires with shape memory, so-called shape memory alloy (SMA) or muscle wire. The muscle wire creates programmed movement in the fabric.
In the gallery space, tubes of textile hang from ceiling to floor at regular intervals. They fill the room, but it is still possible to walk between them. The tubes are made of light, transparent silk partially felted with raw wool. The felted surfaces are knotty, bubbly and rough. At irregular intervals, the textile lifts up from the floor and stays there before slowly descending back towards the floor. The promise happens quickly, suddenly, while the denial is slow. It is as if the installation breathes and lives. As the audience moves through the installation, they wear headphones with a field recording from the forest at Druskininkai outside Vilnius recorded with specially built microphones.
Electronic textile
Muscle wire is a metal alloy of nickel and titanium that can switch between two states, activated by heating. When the metal wire is below a certain temperature, it is soft and flexible. At a certain temperature, it contracts to the shape it has been set to “remember” through a precise shaping process. By connecting it to an electronic circuit, I use resistance heat to activate the contraction and can program the intervals. The circuit is partly textile, partly made of traditional electronic components. I construct the textile components myself from conductive textile material. Incorporated into the textile, the muscle wire creates a fluid, organic movement that gives a surprisingly strong physical experience of the presence of something alive.
Textile Felting silk and wool together (nunofelting) makes it possible to work with transparency/opacity and structure in the surface in a completely unique way. In the felting process, the wool shrinks by about 40 per cent, while the silk does not shrink. With a very thin layer of raw wool (untreated wool directly from the sheep), the felted parts will shrink to the maximum and give a structured surface with knots and bubbles. The process is rarely completely predictable. After the tubes are felted, they are dyed with plant colors from leaves, plants and mushrooms. The material’s own color helps to determine the result of the dyeing, so that it is not possible to have full control over the result here either.
Sound The field recording is a displaced auditory memory from a concrete place. The sound recording from Druskininkai was made with a custom-built microphone: a mannequin head on a human-tall pole with the microphones placed near the ears. The sound has been recorded as a human would experience it, in a clear three-dimensional auditory space. In the recording of the forest’s deafening silence, you hear insects buzzing close by, frogs and the wind rustling in the trees. The silence of the forest is full of life.
Hillevi Munthe (NO) has worked with electronic textiles since 2009 on her practical research project on e-textile materials and techniques carried out in collaboration with the Bergen Academy of the Arts titled Soft Technology. “The forest” is a continuation of this work.
E-textiles have become increasingly well known in recent decades and describe both the incorporation of traditional electronics into textile materials and the construction of textile components and electronic circuits. With textile material with current-carrying properties, you can knit sensors, embroider wires or sew entire circuits. E-textile is part of an open source and DIY tradition within electronic art and at the same time in a textile art tradition where knowledge of techniques for the construction of flexible surfaces is crucial for how the circuits are built. An embroidered or sewn circle can be shaped, expanded and stretched to the desired expression, and thus becomes a meaning-bearing unit in itself.
Elisabeth Schimana Schimana studied electro-acoustics and experimental music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, computermusic-composition at the IEM, Graz and musicology andethnology at the University of Vienna. Her work concentrated for many years on space / body / electronic. She has ongoing cooperations with the Austrian Kunstradio. She also focus on research in the field of woman, art and technology. Elisabeth Schimana gives lectures and holds composition workshops all over the world.
<– Tango for Us Two/Too — > is a live coding performance that merges web-programming with the choreographic language of Tango. The script focus on the dialogical nature of Tango, using Google Translate with fragments of texts from interviews with Tango dancers and practitioners. It invites us to a pas-de-deux performed by the online interface and JavaScript functions which randomise search queries and present a series of (mis)translations. An algorithmic dance sustaining glitches between the techniques and poetics of Tango, each breath a step towards the emergence of a new vocabulary for the moving.
Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance. In her practice she interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreography. She researches the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at widening the ways in which digital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She privileges the use of Free-Libre Open Source software, and collaborates with various international practitioners in the fields of art, design and technology on both commissioned and self-initiated projects. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, discussions on gender equality and activism.
We live in the age of screen culture. The screen gives us a job and organizes our leisure time. The largest web services and their metaphors of the user interface are an important part of our everyday life. And our task is to make the familiar — strange.
This web application accesses the source code of the website and interferes with its logic. Each time it is implemented by a unique combination of methods. The algorithm performs about 1000 interventions per second, using 369 151 937 methods.
Dedicated to Netochka Nezvanova. In the 20th anniversary of nebula.m81.
Born in 1994 in Krasnodar, Russia, living and working in Saint Petersburg. Graduated from Krasnodar College of Electronic Device Engineering and the Academy of Marketing and Social Information Technologies with a specialty in “Computing Machines, Complexes, Systems and Networks”. Co-founder and active member of the Kiuss art-group. The main fields of activities are web development and book publishing.
Uploaded to the Cloud is a generative, browser-based work in which a computer imagines a sky made of data. Dynamically generated clouds gently move across the frame of the browser window, representing various types of data that can be transmitted by the internet. The clouds are an abstraction of iconography commonly used to represent data and user interactions on the web: likes, hearts, bookmarks, mail envelopes, chat bubbles, alerts, and more. The work is a playful meditation on the metaphors used to describe the transmission of data and its relation to body and place.
uploadedtothecloud.com
Kate Hollenbach is an artist, programmer, and educator based in Denver, Colorado. She creates video and interactive works examining critical issues in user interface design including data collection and surveillance. Her art practice is informed by years of professional experience and as an interface designer and product developer. Kate is an Assistant Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at University of Denver and serves on the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation.
A multi-layered 8k video dealing with Ideas of Language, Gestalt philosophy and psychology, madness, mental health, artistic mysticism, and images of hands and their prevalence in the earliest known examples of Art.
Gabin Cortez Chance
Born in Fresno, California in 1976. Graduate of The School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Currently living in Los Angeles. Primarily working in Video over the past 10 years. My Videos are multi-layered constructs, digital artificial panoramas. Using a mixture of Hollywood classics, found footage, and video shot by myself to create what I call Super Narratives of the Hyper-Real. My videos generally have a Philosophical, and Sociological twist influenced by the current world political landscape. I am not objective, I most certainly have an agenda. Like many before me, I have Utopian dreams. Dreams that most people believe to be impossible, and unrealistic. And maybe these people are correct, but they are my dreams never the less. My videos are a poor attempt to visualize these dreams for others to appreciate, and possibly learn from. And all though I still have a long ways to go to actualize these dreams, with each video, I feel I get a little bit closer to my goals of Simulacrum.
The Care and Feeding of Your AI is an audiovisual environment cobbled together from various open source facial recognition APIs, facial generation APIs and PureData. The project considers the shape and form of “neutrality” within AI and machine learning schemes and how those neutral ideas can have disastrous effects on various marginalized populations.
Joshua Westerman is a Colorado based interdisciplinary artist and musician who works with installation art, graphic scores, field recordings, appropriated content, improvisation, and video. His work utilizes and critiques emergent media and aesthetics while still showing a fondness for established disciplines. He experiments with algorithmic art and has explored issues like alienation and intimacy in the contemporary social and political contexts brought about by the ubiquity of digital technology.
Josh is a graduate of California Institute for the Arts where received an MFA in Experimental Sound Practices and Integrated Media. He is currently attending the University of Colorado Boulder where he is a PhD candidate in Critical Media Practices. His mentors are Laura Steenberge, Tom Leeser, Clay Chaplin and Andrew Macintosh. He has had works premiered by Iris Sidikman, Thomas Sturm, the Calarts Ensemble, SICPP ensembles and at the New Music Lab in Montreal.
The Audio Composting app is an engine used for decomposing existing acoustic and sonic waste into new organic material to fertilize and improve the sonic imagination. Humans from different backgrounds, identities, and natural habitats speak into their portable microphones (aka mobile phones) to simultaneously feed the system with acoustic content. The incoming sonic material, fed remotely through the network from near and far, is mixed together into an ongoing frippertronic mulching process that is synchronized across all devices. The result is a sometimes rhythmic, sometimes cacaphonic, assemblage of hoots, howls, whistles, stomps, bomps, and thwamps.
August Black is a hybrid practitioner of art, design and engineering. He makes experimental spatial and acoustic situations, often by building his own technological artifacts and instruments in hardware and software. His past work focused on live networked audio, mixing FM radio with user input through online software. His current interests span the fields of the philosophy of technology, software studies, techno-politics, peer-to-peer networking and AI/machine learning. In the past, he’s been a member of arts organizations such as the ORF Kunstradio and the Ars Electronica Futurelab, as well as a former member of the engineering team at Cycling ‘74, makers of Max/MSP. He has shown works at festivals and venues such as Ars Electronica Festival, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Wave Farm, Transmediale, Pixelache, LA Freewaves, Piksel Festival, Polar Circuit and the Tasmanian Museum of Art, among others.He earned a BFA at Syracuse University and was an NSF IGERT Fellow at UC Santa Barbara, where he completed an MS and PhD. He’s taught media and art classes at UC Santa Barbara, University of San Francisco and CU Boulder, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices.
Abstract video animation installastion (1-4 projections on silk cloth) made by Mandelblub 3d with sound (Andreas Nelson og Gyrid Nordal Kaldestad).
Espen Tversland (b. 1970) lives and works in Brønnøysund. Tversland graduated from the Norwegian Academy of Fine Arts 1998-2002. He studied 3d animation and video art under Kjell Bjørgeengen and Dagmar Demming. Tversland has participated and won jury prizes at three different regional exhibitions. He made his debut at the Autumn Exhibition in 2003, and this year is one of the artists selected to participate in the Atomic Exhibition of Northern Norway. In recent years, Tversland’s video works have been shown around the world at various film, art and technology festivals; including “Punto y Raya”‘s world tour with selected video works in 2018, Besides the screens in Brazil in 2019 and the upcoming Noosphere arts Rooftop series We are nature in New York in 2021. He is motivated by science, spiritual experiences, emotions, phenomena, and materials that he collects and processes. He asks big and small questions based on human intervention in nature. The art is process-driven, and the works often take the form of photos and videos.
A bot programmed to read parts of “Futurability. The age of Impotence and the horizon of possibility” (2019) to other chatbots, who answer and progressively learn from the conversation. In this book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi analyzes the global order that shapes our politics and our imagination, proposing that the key to a radical change lies in the cognitive work and its relationship with technologies. “Futurabilities” explores human-automatic conversational possibilities around the current context of connected solitudes. This online action was developed in 2020 and takes as reference a previous project entitled “A connected robot of one’s own”, which was shown in the frame of Piksel Festival in 2014.
Azahara Cerezo researches the particularities and contradictions of the territory, whose physical dimension is liquefied by digitalising processes of global scope. She has exhibited individually at Bòlit Contemporary Art Centre (Girona), Centro de Arte La Regenta (Las Palmas) and MAL (Sevilla). Her projects have been shown in group exhibitions such as “Juntos aparte” (Bienalsur. Cúcuta, Colombia), “Creativate” (National Arts Festival, Makhanda, South Africa), “We are as Gods…” at Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Holland), “Provincia 53” at MUSAC (Leon, Spain) or “Especies de espacios” at MACBA (Barcelona).
