Pixelache Helsinki 08

Saturday+Sunday 15-16 March

Kiasma Theatre

www.antidatamining.net

www.rybn.org

marika.incident.net

Antidatamining by RYBN collective (FR) and Marika Dermineur (FR) is both an artistic research, a socio-economic and a geopolitical investigation, as well as a real-time archaeology process focusing on the data flows which compose a part of our contemporary society.

The goal of the project is to make visible, by using the Data Mining processing, several social and economic imbalance “phenomenas”. ADM seeks to identify and visualize these phenomenas ; and tries to establish a global imbalance cartography.

The work is based exclusively on Internet recoverable data. Internet is then compared to a gigantic database, a “datawarehouse”. The type of recovered data are : geographical, ecological, social, economic, financial and geopolitical. Data are stored in a large database, then processed using DM genetic algorithms. This method allows to establish several « meaningful » – or particularly important – cross correlations.

The wide range of used datas, defines the project's multiple investigation fields, including sociological, geopolitical and economic fields. The multiple extent of this project requires various multifolded skills from external contributors : artists, programmers, economists, journalists, cartographers... Meetings, exchanges and collective work, feed the project – confronting it to many several thinking systems – and allow to engage a transverse analysis, going beyond specialized fields. 

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Saturday + Sunday:
Antidatamining project is exhibited in Kiasma Theatre, while no other programme is going on.
 

Sunday 16 March: 14:00-15:00

Kiasma Theatre

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www.arduino.cc

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Arduino will be presented at Pixelache Helsinki by one of it's main developers, David Cuartielles. 

Pixelache 2008 Helsinki features the first edition of 'Baltic Boxwars: Northern League', initiated by Andrew Gryf Paterson in collaboration with Demian Deadly & Tamsyn Pop Tart of Boxwars UK ; co-produced with Pixelache club organiser Antti Ahonen. Supported by Taidekoulu MAA.

Thursday13th-Friday 14th March: 1200-1800

Workshop led by Demian Deadly & Tamsyn Pop Tart (Boxwars UK)

Hosted on Thursday at Suomenlinna Hostel.

Hosted on Friday at Korjaamo, Töölönkatu.

Friday 14th March: 2000- 

See Call for Participation

Respond before 11th March to: balticboxwars _at_ gmail .com

'Boxwars' is a concept-event involving cardboard-clad 'warriors' who engage in gladiator-style fight-performances, in music-club and outdoor contexts.  Created by cardboard enthusiasts in Melbourne in 2001, Boxwars UK was transposed to Edinburgh in 2006 by Demian Deadly.  He and friends developed the concept within the punk and 'DIY' cultural scene, integrating live music/ club enviroments, as well as outdoor events such as flash-mob-style imromptu battles, and Box-Car Racing.

boxwars.co.uk | myspace.com/boxwars

Bricophone : Is it possible to build an independant mobile communication infrastructure not related to big mobile telephony companies and associated political power ? The bricophone project is an open source mesh network mobile communication device project just started few weeks ago...

www.bricophone.org with the support of www.bricolabs.net and NLnet Foundation www.nlnet.nl

CRASlab: an open source ressource center for interactive art learning:
How to learn interactive technologies ? How to discover and understand the reaction of serinsors, real time dataflow software, actuators and real time media diffusion ? The demo room for self learning of interactive technologies is an open source project. Short video visit here: public-access.org/archives/258

fluXtation : a low cost DIY open source hardware and software project for autonomous audio-video local and global broadcasting.
How to stream on the web with no knowledge on streaming technologies, how to mount a FM radio or TV studio all in a box ? the works on the fluXtation project have started few weeks ago... www.fluxtation.org

Bricophone, CRASlab and fluXtation are presented by Jean-Noël Montagné (FR), as a part of the Open hardware discussion event on Saturday 15th March.

A project by Tampere University of Applied Sciences/ School of Art and Media

People attended to the workshop will produce a performance in public space using equipment and practices familiar to VJ field. The performance will deal with some of the following themes discussed during the workshop: intervention in public space,  media art/activism as a form of audio-visual pranks, new (mobile) media as a tool to create unexpected and temporary meeting places in the public.

In Finland the cityscape isn't yet dominated by big digital advertising screens. In this situation there is a possibility to create alternative video/data projections and media events that have the power to challenge the normative use of digital media in public space. By re-mixing the media sphere of the public space we'll deconstruct the normative ways of using our mutual space, thus creating room for new ideas of the public.

The project will take place in various forms in the public space of Helsinki city during Pixelache Festival.

www.carbonhero.net

Carbon Hero uses existing technologies in a novel and innovative way, without compromising the individual’s privacy, to reveal to its user their own unique Travel Carbon Footprint. It essentially identifies and evaluates the different forms of transport used as one goes about ones business getting from A to B, and then outputs this to the user. The accompanying software has been written in Java to run on pretty much every mobile.

Carbon Hero will be presented in 'Traveling without moving' seminar on Saturday 15 March by one of it's developers Andreas Zachariah.

www.doorsofperception.com  

John Thackara is renowned internationally for his work as director of the design innovation network, Doors of Perception. Doors creates projects and festivals in which designers, together with grassroots innovators and other citizens, develop new services and products for daily life. This unique network of paradigm-changing designers and grassroots innovators is inspired by two questions: 'what might life in a sustainable world be like?'; and, 'what design steps are needed to get us there?'. John has lectured in more than 40 countries and is the author of 12 books; his latest is In the bubble: designing in a complex world (MIT Press 2005).

John Thackara will be moderating the morning session of Pixelache University seminar on Friday 14 March, and will be giving a talk The Face to Face Meeting in The Age of Digital Reproduction in Traveling without moving seminar on Saturday 15 March.

www.kitchenbudapest.hu

Kitchen Budapest (HU) is a new media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams.

What happens to the net once it meets the urban space? How does private space relate to the saturating wireless networks? Where does user created content gain authority? How does our use of cities alter as we get more and more real time feedback of its dynamics? What makes a home smart? Street-smart? We would like to rethink and remix the possibilities of new media in our everyday lives and to augment connections between new technologies and our society.

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Kitchen Budapest at Pixelache 2008:

During whole festival time:
Kitchen Budapest project prototypes exhibited in Pixelache Lounge Exhibition.

Friday 14 March:
Presentation in Pixelache University seminar

Saturday 15 March - 17:30-18:00 

'No Copy Paste' live coding demo in Kiasma Theatre. (see more information below)

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Kitchen Budapest will bring several projects to Pixelache 2008 Helsinki:

www.eternalnetwork.org  

www.esad-stg.net/-ESP-

Friday 14 March

Kiasma Seminar room + Kiasma Theatre

N.I.P. - New Interfaces for Performance

www.newinterfaces.net

N.I.P. is an interdisciplinary touring presentation, network and workshop series, developed by Teresa Dillon of the Bristol based media arts and research collective Polar Produce. As an artists lead initiative, N.I.P. currently exists as a three-year project and involves twelve artists drawn from across the UK, The Netherlands and Portugal. The current focus of the project is on gesture and movement based interfaces within live performance and interactive, mixed media installation.

N.I.P. artists at Pixelache 2008 Helsinki are:

Teresa Dillon (UK), Kathy Hinde (UK), Torsten Lauschmann (UK), Ivan Franco (PT), Rudolfo Quintas (PT), André Gonçalves (PT) and Tom Verbruggen (NL).

Schedule:

17:30-18:00

Kiasma Seminar room 

N.I.P - New Interfaces for Performance presentation by Teresa Dillon 

18:00-18:45

Kiasma Theatre

19:00-20:00

Kiasma Theatre

* BOP by Teresa Dillon & Kathy Hinde
* TokTek (NL)

Saturday 15 March

18:00-19:00

Kiasma Theatre

“When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings – dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behaviour. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialised mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special pre-eminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalised abstraction of present-day society.”

“Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life.”

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967)

Pixelache compilation #1 explores the nature of a spectacle today.

The non-stop stream of information known as ‘entertainment’ can no longer offer any true surprises for us. Instead, it engages us with a steady, hypnotic rhythm that allows us to fall into a passive dormant state, far away from the problems of the ‘real world’. This is not only true for the spectators, but also for the creators of this entertainment, whose are spending hours after hours in front of their computer workstation, fine-tuning the details of digital entertainment.

Team:
Juha Huuskonen (curator), Nathalie Aubret (coordination), Mika Muhonen (dvd compilation)

Pixelache compilation #1 features short videos from: 

Geert Mul (Netherlands), HeHe - Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen (France), JODI (eu/holland/belgium), Kristian Simolin (Finland), Liisa Lounila (Finland), Mike Nourse (US/Canada), Simon Faithfull (UK) and Steven Dixon & Tore Nilsson (Sweden).

Many of the presented videos are only small fragments of work that has a longer duration and/or is normally presented as an installation/performance.

Pixelache compilation #1 was premiered at Etoiles Polaires 07 festival in Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium in December 2007.

Thursday 13 March 

Schedule: 

18:00-19:00
Kiasma seminar room

Short introductions to Pixelache Lounge exhibition artists and projects

19:00-20:30

Kiasma Lobby

Pixelache Lounge exhibition opening

• Camera Lucida by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand (RU/NL)
• Saving Myself by 5voltcore

• The making of Vihreä Pilvi / Nuage Vert (a project by HeHe )

• Public Smog by Amy Balkin

• Several projects from Kitchen Budapest (HU)

• Statistical objects' by Alejandro Tamayo (CO)

• Self-Portrait as a Pataphysical Object by Torsten Lauschmann (UK)

www.portablepalace.com/lucida

The Camera Lucida by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand (RU/NL) is a reminder of the days when the latest innovations of science were presented to people by nomadic gypsies, in a form of mysterious theatre. Evelina and Dmitry are the ceremony masters of this artwork, guiding the audience in a completely dark room to show them a spectacular new discovery in physics.

Created in collaboration with scientific laboratories in Japan, Germany, Belgium, Russia and United States, the Camera Lucida (lucid or light chamber) installation allows one to directly convert sound waves into light by employing a phenomenon called sonoluminiscence: ultrasound within liquid causes micro-bubbles of gas to implode, as which point they become as hot as the Sun and emit light in the shape of sound waves.

Top-shot helmet by Julius von Bismarck allows you to see yourself from the 'first person shoot'em'up perspective' in real world. This viewpoint is used in most of the popular 3D games today.

Top-shot helmet is presented in the Re-mixed reality seminar on Saturday, and also on other times in Kiasma Lounge exhibition. 

www.thepopshop.org : interview at WMMNA.com

v*i*d*a lab projects in 2007 : review at WMMNA.com

Alejandro Tamayo (CO) is an artist-engineer and a teacher working in the intersections of design, art and new technologies. Alejandro has initiated the v*i*d*a lab project at the Aesthetics Department of Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia.

v*i*d*a lab is a special study project for students of industrial design, at Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia. The students explore the question ‘What is life?’ with the aid of 6 visiting teachers from different disciplines (biology, sociology, etc). The students explore the border between nature and technology, between designed and self-organised systems.

Wednesday 12 March
10:00-17:00
Kiasma seminar room
   
Video in Theatre seminar explores how to use video as an intergral part of a theatre play. The seminar language is Finnish.

The workshop is hosted by Ville Hyvönen, who is responsible for the video design of 'Tuntematon Sotilas' ('The Unknown Soldier') currently shown in Finnish National Theatre. The play uses live and recorded video material extensively and the ending scene (in which many important Finnish icons are 'killed') has generated a heated debate in Finnish media.

Workshop participation is free but space is limited so please sign up. ville {{at}} pixelache.ac

www.villehyvonen.fi : www.tuntematonsotilas.com