jenny

ShadowPlay

Dan Wilcox

ShadowPlay is an exploration of the architecture and light in outdoor spaces through sound. Using a bicycle-mounted smartphone as a brightness sensor and a bluetooth speaker, the mottled patterns of light and shadow become the musical score as one rides along city streets.

The project is realized as an open source iOS application which uses one of the device’s cameras as a brightness sensor. Custom audio scenes generate live sound in response to the changes between light and shadow detected by the smartphone. You can even create your own sound scenes using the Pure Data computer music environment.

Dan Wilcox is an artist, engineer, musician, and performer who combines live musical performance techniques with experimental electronics and software for the exploration of new expression. He grew up in the Rocket City, and has performed in Europe, Asia, and around the US with his one man band cyborg performance project, robotcowboy.

Digital Culture & Cyborg Bodies

Idun Isdrake

Through a counter tactic perspective, with planetary accountability, Isdrake’s work and research prototype diverse human computer interfaces and narratives, aiming to limit bias in the development of new technologies and science (fiction). This includes working with datasets for AI systems, diverse narrative design, testing environment friendly solutions for powering and disposing of used technologies, as well as proposing inclusive interfaces.
The presentation will include Isdrake’s process for work with diverse and accessible design, and demo of a few of their art works.
The demos will mainly focus on implanted interfaces based on Near Field Communication technology (NFC. Isdrake has a couple of audiovisual experiences linked from its body, some developed with other organic or inorganic entities. Creating an endosymbiotic relationship between human flesh and other entities, an intimate dialogue only accessible through consent. Games, music and other expressions can be communicated through body modification, a human practice with ancient history, often connected to identity expression but also trauma and oppression. Embodied technologies and digital art as a voice for the silenced voices and disabled bodies, is one of the strongest motivations behind this work. The format is best live in a room, with soundsystem and projectors, where the audience can come close to see and demystify the hardware, and have a dialogue with the artists. Depending on budget and resources the demo can include a video installation. Research documentation https://imperceptible.space/

Idun Isdrake is a game designer, film, stage and transmedia director, moving in the inbetweens and unknowns, hacking forced power structures. Inclusion and diversity is at the core of its productions, ranging from computer games linked from its body, to film noir and landscape photography. Isdrake is the founder of Swedens first game and transmedia lab, The Collaboratory, as well as first game art gallery, Epic Unidragon. Their work includes many years of building a better infrastructure for digital culture in Sweden and globally, in dialogue with communities in hacker labs,  makerspaces, museums, libraries, the EU Commission, academia and various industries. Currently Isdrake is doing PhD research at Concordia University Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

Live collaborative radio with Mezcal

August Black

Mezcal is a web app for collaborative sound and live transmission that I have been prototyping and building in collaboration with https://wavefarm.org and multiple artists (such as Anna Friz https://nicelittlestatic.com/, Betsey Biggs https://www.betseybiggs.org/, and Peter Courtemanche http://absolutevalueofnoise.ca/?now).  In this 1 hour workshop, I give an overview of the software, its design intentions and practical implementations, and then split the group up into sections to create a live experimental radio session on-site. (note: this software is not YET free software, but lives in the web as a free service for free cultural institutions such as radio libre in Medellín, Colombia https://red.radiolibre.cc/ and Sound Camp in the UK https://soundtent.org/, among others)
https://august.black/mezcal/

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.

https://august.black

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.

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.

Tango for us Two/Too

Joana Chicau

<– 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.

Web deformation

Max Alyokhin

Aesthetic processor of html-code

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.