Piksel Savers

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.

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.

Drought

The climate catastrophe is causing rains to fail in various places. When wet mud dries, it shrinks and cracks, exposing more surface area to the drying air. In this way the cracks multiply, culminating in dust blown away on the breeze.

Claude Heiland-Allen is an artist from London interested in the complex emergent behaviour of simple systems, unusual geometries, and mathematical aesthetics.
From 2005 through 2011 he was a member of the GOTO10 collective, whose mission was to promote Free/Libre Open Source Software in Art. Since 2011, Claude has continued as an independent artist, researcher and software developer.
His current main projects include various deep zooming tools for 2D escape time fractals, and musical performance live-coding sounds in the C programming language.

https://mathr.co.uk

Futurabilities

Azahara Cerezo

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).

Hope springs eternal

Espen Tversland

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.

The Care and Feeding of Your AI

Joshua Westerman

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.

To Show One’s Hand.

Gabin Cortez Chance

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.

Uploaded to the Cloud

Kate Hollenbach

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.

Journey to the Planet of nuclear Chewing Gum

Vera Sebert

How can we characterize the cinematic narrative, which is in a netbased environement no longer tied to chronological sequences? How does actual information deform under the manipulating influence of the viewer? The webproject JOURNEY TO THE PLANET OF NUCLEAR CHEWING GUM is formally based on experimental film, poetry texts and interactive netart, arranged in several layers. Digital images of different objects are assembled in the picture’s foreground and overlapping found and newly assorted footage. They can be rearranged randomly by drag and drop. Each movement of an object is linked to one individual sound snippet and a random subtitle. By interacting viewers create a strong varying narrative form which manifests in the space between text, image and film.

Vera Sebert, *1987 (DE), Media Artist
2007- 2015 Fine Arts at University of Fine Arts Braunschweig and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. 2015 – 2019 Language Arts at University of Applied Arts Vienna. Artistic works in the border areas of visual media, language, film, computer programs: Computer code allows the adaptation of all other media whose properties are imitated, fragmented and reassembled in virtual space. The hybrid exposes the categorical separation between artistic image and text production and creates a space for experiments that explore the mesh of code, image, sound and language in a digital environment. Most recent international exhibitions and screenings: Hamburg International Film Festival (DE), Vector Festival Toronto (CA), House of Electronic Arts Basel (CH), Eclat Festival Stuttgart (DE), Cairotronica (EGY).
2017 Artist in Residency at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen (DE). 2018 Hannsmann-Poethen Grant for Literature (DE), Styria Artist-in-Residency (AT). 2019 Subnet Artist-in-Residence, Salzburg (AT), 2020
https://verasebert.com

Boogaloo Bias

Jennifer Gradecki, Derek Curry

Boogaloo Bias is an interactive artwork and research project that addresses some of the known problems with the unregulated use of facial recognition technologies, including the practice of ‘brute forcing’ where, in the absence of high-quality images of a suspect, law enforcement agents have been known to substitute images of celebrities the suspect is reported to resemble. To lampoon this approach, the Boogaloo Bias facial recognition algorithm searches for members of the anti-law enforcement militia, the Boogaloo Bois, using a facial recognition algorithm trained on faces of characters from the 1984 movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. The film is the namesake for the Boogaloo Bois, who emerged from 4chan meme culture and have been present at both right and left-wing protests in the US since January 2020. The system is used to search live video feeds, protest footage, and images that are uploaded to the Boogaloo Bias website. All matches made by the system are false positives. No information from the live feeds or website uploads is saved or shared. Boogaloo Bias raises questions about automated decision making, public accountability and oversight within a socio-technical system where machines are contributing to a decision-making process. Facial recognition technology allows for the quick surveillance of hundreds of people simultaneously and the ability to automate decisions using artificial intelligence, establishing a power structure controlled by a technocratic elite. Rather than providing a solution for how to improve facial recognition, the project pushes the logic behind the current forms and uses of facial recognition in law enforcement to an extreme, highlighting the absurdity of how this technology is being developed and used. Boogaloo Bias is made using only open source software, including OpenCV, Flask, dlib, Pillow, and the Python face-recognition module.
https://www.boogaloo-bias.art/

Jennifer Gradecki is an artist-theorist who investigates secretive and specialized socio-technical systems. Her artistic research has focused on social science techniques, financial instruments, dataveillance technologies, intelligence analysis, and social media misinformation. Gradecki has presented and exhibited at venues including Ars Electronica (Linz), ISEA (Barcelona), National Gallery X (London), NeMe (Cypress), ADAF (Athens), International Symposium on Computational Media Art (Hong Kong), and the Centro Cultural de España (México). Her research has been published in Big Data & Society, Visual Resources, and Leuven University Press. Her artwork has been funded by Science Gallery Dublin, Science Gallery Detroit, and the NEoN Digital Arts Festival.

Derek Curry (US) is an artist-researcher whose work critiques and addresses spaces for intervention in automated decision-making systems. His work has addressed automated stock trading systems, Open-Source Intelligence gathering (OSINT), and algorithmic classification systems. His artworks have replicated aspects of social media surveillance systems and communicated with algorithmic trading bots. Derek earned his MFA in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2010 and his PhD in Media Study from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Boston. https://derekcurry.com/