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.
Piksel KidZ Lab workshop: Creating Audio and Visual effects with Code – LIVE Coding!
Tuesday 25th – Friday 28th October 2022: 15-18h
Duration: 3 hours, the workshop repeats every day. Age: 10-18 years old. Venue: Studio 207, Strandgaten 207, Bergen Gratis verksted for barn/unge i alderen 10-18 år for påmelding: piksel22(at)piksel(dot)no
Piksel KidZ Lab is supported by Bergen Kommune and Vestland Fylkeskommune and Fana Sparebank.
The internet is full of ‘open-source’ free software that we can use to create exciting sound and visuals. This workshop for children aged 10ish will introduce Live coding to the kids. Live coding is an audio visual performance practice that revolves around the creation and modification of code and algorithms in real-time.
Antonio Roberts will introduce the group to the Estuary live coding platform, with the aim of writing computer programs “on the fly”. The fast feedback loops and improvisatory spirit of live coding can result in complex and encouraging sound and visual effects. Throughout the 3 hours workshop the kids will experiment programming with very simple code sounds and visuals. The workshop intends to de-mystify technology and reveal its design decisions, limitations, and creative potential. Kids will produce a final performance all together at the end of the workshop.
Antonio Roberts (UK)
His work has been featured at galleries and festivals including databit.me in Arles, France (2012), Glitch Moment/ums at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2013), Loud Tate: Code at Tate Britain (2014), glitChicago at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, US (2014), Permission Taken at Birmingham Open Media and University of Birmingham (2015-2016), Common Property at Jerwood Arts, London (2016), Ways of Something at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017), Green Man Festival, Wales (2017), Barbican, London (2018), and Copy / Paste at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2019).
He has curated exhibitions and projects including GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), the Birmingham editions of Bring Your Own Beamer (2012, 2013), µChip 3 (2015), Stealth (2015), No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017). He is part of a-n’s Artist Council, is an Artist Advisor for Jerwood Arts and from 2014 – 2019 he was Curator at Vivid Projects where he produced the Black Hole Club artist development programme.
