I have finally found a venue to show a decent working version of bitPong, a piece I created some time ago when I was still working on the close relationship with phsyical implementations of data and their aesthetic consequences.
The idea is simple: a two-player game, based on the uber-referenced Pong, here played with 8-bit controllers. When we say « 8-bit controller », we mean literally 8-bit, i.e. 8 buttons, each representing 1-bit of data. Collected together, this byte represents a 256 value variable which is used to control a visual paddle representation within the game. To aid players in the conversion of 1-bit discrete switches into their collective base-two 8-bit value, each button has been labelled: 2^n, i.e. two to the power of zero, two to the power of one, two to the power of two, and so on. This is otherwise known to mere mortals as the values 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128. To move your paddle, you must add each of these values together in order to position it somewhere between position 0 and position 255.
For those who know little about how the computer works internally, this is how the computer moves from the well-known binary 0 | 1 value, to complex values such as the letters you are reading right now: by associating a different value to each bit (the 1 values of « *0 1 0 1 0 1* » get converted to « *0+2+0+4+0+8+0+32* », otherwise known as the value *42*) the computer can use a physically limited scheme (0 or 1, on or off, yes or no, true or false) in order to represent a far greater sum of possibilities (here a number from 0 to 255). bitPong plays off of this configuration and brings its dynamics to the surface of the playing field. In order to take control of your paddle, you will have to quickly master binary encoding.
In this Victor Vasarely inspired version of bitPong, hexagons populate the playing field and create an added diversion. Therefore, bitPong has now turned into something like a two-player bitBreakout. I was actually inspired by the following sign which is posted on the wall just next to my installation, indicating the escape routes out of the museum.
bigPong est un jeu pour deux joueurs, basé sur le célèbre jeu de Pong. Les controlleurs du jeu sont des controlleurs 8-bit, compris dans le sens littéral du terme : 8 boutons, chacun contrôlant une donnée binaire. Prises ensemble, les 8 boutons représentent un octet qui représente 256 valeurs.
As readers of this blog might have noticed, I participated a few months back in Anne Roquiny‘s WJ-S project at the Maison des métallos, Paris. For those that don’t know the system, WJ-S is a multiscreen networked performance apparatus, allowing for real-time mixing of the web, à la DJs and VJs, hence the moniker « WJ-S ». So while I spoke last may on subjects ranging from protocol politics to sleepy surfers, Isabelle Arvers and Anne Laforet clicked and mixed a visual tapestry on the WJ-S system for the parisian audience. Now that talk, along with some 40 other talks from various artists and intellectuals, has been compiled into an illustrated publication.
Here’s the English press release:
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WJ-SPOTS #1 15 years of artistic creation on the internet
WJ-SPOTS is a project that was conceived of and designed by media curator Anne Roquigny, in which artists, critics, thinkers, inventors, researchers, curators, organizers and producers of cultural events are invited to look back on 15 years of Internet history.
The interviews are conducted inside the WJ-S multi-screen environment www.wj-s.org, transformed for the occasion into a space for thought and investigation. Online browsing of a selection of emblematic websites, chosen by the speakers, take place simultaneously on 3 big screens. Real time surfing is like a magnified and augmented thought presentation, offering multiple of points of view while the participants answer a series of 5 questions.
The first WJ-SPOTS took place in Paris, on May 27th & 28th, 2009, from noon to midnight, and was programmed within the framework of two digital events : Futur en Seine and Les Immatérielles.
WJ-SPOTS#1 was a two-day opportunity to discover approximately 40 outstanding figures of the French Internet community and the online content (texts, sound, video, animations…) browsed and downloaded in real time by Isabelle Arvers and Anne Laforet, from the gigantic hard drive that is the web.
The participants commented and analyzed, from an artistic perspective, how the Internet has been progressively taken over as a space of artistic creation, from its beginning until now : online creation, software art, code art, ascii art, flash art, google art, generative art, interactive art, collaborative art, tactical media, locative media, telematic art, network performances, etc.
WJ-SPOTS #1 is the first edition of a series of events and publications that will be organized in 2010 and 2011, in partnership with international media and cultural organizations.
WJ-SPOTS plays on numerous levels of re/transmission and publication.
WJ-SPOTS is a public event where it is possible to interview online artistic creators and surf in real time their selection of Internet sites.
WJ-SPOTS makes it possible to see the live retransmission of the event on the Internet on the Selfworld site.
WJ-SPOTS makes each of the interviews available via video on demand, on the server of Digitalarti.
The installation as well as tomorrow’s lecture are my attempt at a response to Suzete’s invitation to present something around the subject of « computational instinct ». The subject is vast, and this piece is by no means to be considered my definitive response. But it has allowed me to work out a certain framework for thinking the subject of instinct, and from which I’ve come up with this proposition « no.1 » in what could easily be extended into a series.
While I suppose there are a lot of directions one could take the concept of « instinct », I actually decided to avoid the whole innate vs. aquired debate, and focus instead on the environmental conditions of behavior, in other words looking at existence not from the perspective of a subject (transcendental or otherwise) in conflict with its biological predispositions, but instead from the perspective of a being historically embedded in an environment; i.e. a question of « Umwelt » as a formative ingredient to embodiness. From this perspective, instinct is not some contrary force acting against us, but rather the residue of our environmental context that exposes itself through our behavior. From an evolutionary perspective, instinct could then be considered a context within which behavior takes place; it is the behavorial framework that reveals something about the nature of our consciousness and how this consciousness is shaped by our negotiations and inscription within the world.
Which leads me back to this first experiment which like all experiments is about exploring the limits of a concept. While the concept of Umwelt is highly cybernetic in its conception of stimulus and effectuation, I found it more interesting to approach the concept of Umwelt from a purely temporal perspective. So I asked the question: what is our temporal behavior? and its corrollary can we experience other temporal existences? And if indeed the answer to the latter is yes, is our experience of temporally divergent worlds limited to communication or can we also simulate such environments, through immersion or other means?
In « Bohlen’s Experiment No.1 », I have recreated a machine described only on paper in Philip K. Dick’s 1964 science fiction novel « Martian Time-Slip ». In the novel, Dick suggests that communication could be made with autistic children via temporal variation devices:
« There’s a new theory about autism, from Bergholzlei, in Switzerland [...] It assumes a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic individual so that the environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot cope with it. In fact, he is unable to perceive it properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded-up television program, so that objects whizzed by so fast so as to be invisible, and sound was a gobbledygook, you know? Just extremely high-pitched mishmash. Now this new theory would place the autistic child in a closed chamber where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slowed down. Both sound and video slowed, at last so slowed that you and I would not be able to perceive motion or comprehend the human sounds as speech… » – Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip
The novel goes on to discuss an attempt to build such a device, but which ultimately fails for various reasons concerning the intrigue.
Obviously, a similar device has already been made for the image: it’s called « 24-hour Psycho » and « Five-Year Drive-by (The Searchers) », by Douglas Gordon. And stretching the image this way is fairly easy, at least from a technical point of view: just slow it down. But I got to thinking about the sound, which is continuous medium and not discontinuous like the film frame: how could we stretch the sound in a more consistent way while avoiding the chipmunk effect?
In my first attempt at creating Bohlen’s device (Bohlen being the character hired to actually build such a thing in Dick’s novel), I decided to create a purely audio communications device wherein one could communicate in real-time and yet to two divergent scales of real-time. You speak into a microphone, and out the other end your speech is stretched from anywhere to 1x to 100000x. You can adjust the speed with a dial.
Therefore, you co-exist in two temporal scales, and yet both, while temporally divergent, can still be considered real-time in the cybernetic sense; it is merely the biological rythm or scale of that real-time that has shifted. Indeed, as my colleague Jean Cristofol has argued within our various theoretical working groups (cf. « lenteur »), real-time is a temporal form, and not a measure of speed. s
Speed and feedback are in fact two very different temporal forms.
On the technical side of things, this piece is little more than a real-time adaptation of Nasca Octavian Paul’s Paul Stretch algorithm. Basically, it uses FFT to analyze the frequencies of the sound at any single point within the wafeform, and then scrubs through those frequencies indepedently of the temporal constraints of the incoming audio. The result is fully comprehensible speech, no chipmunk effect, and yet stretching on a scale which can go from seconds, to days, and even (if desired) years. As anyone who has heard 9 Beet Stretch knows, the result can be quite beautiful.
While there are some other questions I’m asking as well in this piece, notably the question of consciousness in relation to the speed of computation, I’ll discuss all that tomorrow. This talk will also be reproduced in a publication some time next year. I’ll also try to add some photos to this post once I’ve had a moment to return to the exhibition space with a camera.
Tomorrow I’ll be taking part in a radio debate on the subject of collaboration between artists and technicians, with the opening question: « how do artists and technicians work together ? ».
It is an odd formulation, no matter how commonplace, especially considering the obvious role form and forming play in any production of art. As if the artist came before the forming, instead of the other way around, or (even better) simultaneously. But of course, the idea itself has become so common that we have somehow taken it for granted as if by mere repetition we had somehow forgotten to distinguish temperament and disposition : art and technique are somehow, in some parallel universe that would be simultaneously our own, two disparate entities that after having been separated at birth can now be brought together in some novel embrace. That we still have to disentangle ourselves from such artificial constructs, it’s maddening. Art and the technosciences, two opposing forces brought together at last, how charming an idea — how charming, and how charmingly tedious. When do we get to move on from the preliminaries to the actual nature of our contemporary state of affairs?
I’m posting this quite late, but there are a few hours left in Anne Roquiny‘s latest incarnation of WJ-S, a system she designed for audivisually mixing the web, like a DJ, or a VJ, hence « WJ ». At the Maison des métallos in Paris, Anne, along with Anne Laforet and Isabelle Arvers will be mixing the Internet while speakers of various ilk simultaneously discuss the last 15 years of artistic creation on the web.
Since I couldn’t make it up to Paris (train strikes), I’ve instead posted this pre-recorded presentation which will be mixed in with a series of links I was asked to comment. *Note: My presentation starts at 23h20.
Here are the links I discuss (in their order of appearance):
On Saturday, I’ll be speaking at « code_source », an exhibit organized by Etienne Mineur (cf. Incandescence) as part of the Féstival international de l’affiche et du graphisme de Chaumont. The exhibit will attack the question « what is interaction design? » through a historical survey of software, hardware, theoretical productions and games from this still-emerging field. There will also be a section devoted to the creations of art and design students from France, Colombia, USA, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, China, etc. This is where I fit into the picture, as several works from our Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence will be documented in the exhibit (more details to come).
Several designers, yours truly included, were also asked to discuss the subject of interaction design for the French graphic design magazine Étapes in conjunction with « Code_source ». We were all asked the same set of questions related to the definition itself of Interaction Design as well as the historical landmarks that influenced us. The selected designers were: Geoffrey Dorne, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Jean-Louis Fréchin, Gabriel Jorby, Éric Viennot, Projet Mü, and abstractmachine and have just been published in the May 2009 edition of Étapes (#168). Here are a few photos of my interview.
You can read the article yourself for my full comments, but here are video links to the four historical events I chose to highlight: Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad (1963); Myron Krueger, Videoplace (1972-); Seymour Papert, Logo (1967-); Steve Russel et al., Spacewar! (1962). These are fairly standard responses, I know, but I was dealing with an audience (graphic designers) that often confuse (contemporary) software with the conceptual frameworks that made them possible. From this perspective, some history can do little harm.
Of all the interviews, I thought that Jean-Louis Fréchin‘s list was the coolest:
The dissociation of gold and the dollar, thereby « announcing the birth of a society of immateriality and exchange »
The personal computer (« augmenting people’s capacities and means of expression »)
1969, the year of the moon landing, for its’ introduction of « mass transportation (747), hyperspeed (Concorde) and networks (Arpanet) », i.e. the concerns and constructs of our present world
So, as I mentioned above, several works produced in part at the Atelier Hypermédia over the past 10 years will be documented at « Code_source ». Here is a list of the works (sorry, in French, but at least I’ve included some images/videos) :
Le WebWaste est une poubelle sur Internet. Par l’activation d’un robot-éboueur, ses utilisateurs se font vider automatiquement le contenu de leurs poubelles (sur ordinateur) dans cette décharge collective (Internet). Les document s’empilent sur le serveur de la décharge. En visitant le site web www.webwaste.net, n’importe qui peut ensuite naviguer à travers les images, textes, sons et vidéos dont d’autres auraient souhaitaient se débarrasser. On peut y chercher de l’inspiration, ou y flâner par curiosité — avec la possibilité bien sûr de récupérer des fichiers pour une consommation chez soi. Les règles sont ouverts, on peut y faire ce que l’on veut : jouer, manifester, dire la vérité ou proliférer des mensonges — c’est aux utilisateurs de choisir.
Dans l’Atelier Hypermédia, nous trouvons qu’il est parfois pratique de suivre le principe de « Just Fuck Around® » quand il s’agit d’apprendre une nouvelle technologie. Dans ce visualiseur/jeu, il n’y a pas eu d’autre but que d’apprendre les fonctionnalités 3D de base du logiciel multimédia Director. Ce modéliseur 3D a été le résultat d’une heure d’expérimentation avec quelques heures d’ajustements par la suite. Il n’y a pas réellement d’autre but que celle de l’exploration d’une nouvelle forme.
Le flux télévisuel est pris en tant que potentiel, un potentiel d’images, de mouvements et de signes. Le processus y extrait, de façon automatisée et en temps réel, toutes les parties d’images qui ont changé lors de la diffusion de l’émission télévisuelle. Il les capture et les redistribue ensuite de façon spatio-temporelle sur une boucle de vingt-quatre images. En l’exposant au spectateur image par image, il agit ainsi sur la diffusion elle-même, en gardant en mémoire et en présentant potentiellement plusieurs fois chaque fragment d’image. L’esprit hypnotisé s’habitue aux fragments, voire les attend et tente de les recomposer. Mais cet effet recherché de rémanence n’empêche pas un effacement progressif de la configuration. Car chaque fragment additionné à la boucle est présent et répété jusqu’à ce qu’un autre le recouvre et ainsi de suite jusqu’à sa disparition et son oubli.
Lors de son passage à l’Atelier Hypermédia, Nao expérimentait principalement avec les formes interactives où image, son et jeu se mélangeaient en une seule entité audiovisuelle. Pour ses performances extra-muros, Nao a décidé de créer un instrument nomade qui nécessiterait uniquement une machine connecté à Internet pour être joué.
Tetris adventure est une variation autour du célèbre jeu de réflexion, mais se jouant désormais en ligne de commande. Il faut entrer manuellement les commandes au clavier dans la console pour faire se déplacer les pièces. Ce changement au sein même du gameplay instaure un rapport au temps différent. La réactivité du jeu n’est plus immédiate et impose au joueur de faire preuve de davantage de stratégie et de réflexion.
Il s’agit également d’un hommage aux premiers jeux d’aventure textuels (Adventure ), où le joueur devait entrer en toutes lettres les instructions.
Quelques faits intéressants à propos de Tetris adventure:
-Tetris adventure est déconseillé aux dylsexique, dixlesquique, dyslexiques.
-Tetris adventure est conseillé par le Medef pour former des dactylos plus performantes.
-L’homme qui a 8 doigts à chaque main est également le champion du monde de Tetris adventure.
Liste des commandes:
[gauche] déplacer la pièce à gauche
[droite] déplacer la pièce à droite
[tombe] faire tomber la pièce
[tourne] faire tourner la pièce
Tetris adventure a été conçu et présenté à l’occasion d’Eniarof 0.4, une fête foraine revisitée, qui laisse (entre autres) une large place aux détournements de jeux vidéos.
8=8 est un groupe de 4 programmeurs / 4 compositeurs / 4 VJs / 4 musiciens / 4 artistes. Tout les quatre apportent leur propre sensibilité esthétique et techniques dans un instrument numérique collectif: L’Hypertable. Par le déplacement de leurs mains sur la surface de l’Hypertable, images et sons sont générés, créant une opportunité unique d’improvisation musicale. 8=8 utilise l’Hypertable pour y jouer des programmes / instruments originaux, dans des contextes de concert / performance / demo.
En 2003, Douglas Edric Stanley crée « L’hypertable » – dispositif d’image/surface interactive. En 2005 il invite trois de son atelier à Aix-en-Provence à se joindre à lui : TM (a.k.a. Thomas Michalak), univers grouillant et mécanique ; Naoyuki Tanaka (artiste japonais résidant à Marseille) ; JankenPopp avec son monde teinté de fraises tagada et d’énergie punk ; et enfin l’univers d’ abstractmachine, plutôt sobre et conceptuel. L’hypertable a été co-produit par le CIREN, avec le soutien d’Arcadi, le DICREAM, et le SCAM.
The mashup-machine est un instrument electronique qui prend la forme d’une boite en bois surmontée de quatre boutons lumineux. Chaque bouton de la taille d’une main permet la manipulation et le mixage intuitif de plusieurs sources multimédia aléatoires. La machine est une interface polyvalente, dynamique et expérimentale qui a été utilisée de 2005 à 2007 lors de performances AV et de concerts lives, elle a également été présentée en tant qu’installation sonore interactive lors de festivals et d’expositions collectives (Eniarof 0.2.2, Festival Emergences).
Deux GameBoy reliées par un câble sont posées sur une réplique miniature d’une table de pingpong. Les visiteurs sont invités à jouer a une version classique du jeu vidéo « Pong » (jeu de tennis). À la différence du jeu original la balle n’est pas visible par les deux joueurs en même temps mais passe d’un écran à l’autre en créant la surprise.
Partant du concept de la machine schizophrénique chez Deleuze et Guattari, le « Gameboy nucleus » est une technologie pour laquelle les facultés de commandes auraient été mises à l’extérieur de la machine construisant ainsi une machine en perpétuelle reconstitution. Autrement dit, ce « nucleus » suit un processus de « physicalisation » dans laquelle l’algorithme, le programme, ou le code, s’exprime à travers des objets tirés entre fonctionnement physique et fonctionnement logiciel.
« Objets Orientées-Objet » (workshop), Douglas Edric Stanley avec l’assistance d’Anne-Laure Schneider et de Pierre Rossel, 2005
Workshop avec les étudiants de l’Haute École d’Art et de Design Genève avec la participation de l’Atelier Hypermédia ESA Aix-en-Provence
Ce workshop de 5 jours exploraient différentes possibilités de l’utilisation du dispositif « Hypertable » créé à l’origine par Douglas Edric Stanley pour son logiciel de cinéma algorithmique Concrescence. Trois étudiants et un enseignant ont terminé des projets pour lors de ce workshop : Pierre-Erick Lefvbre, Jana Korcjomkina, Pierre Rossel, Baptiste Coulon (dans l’ordre d’apparition des projets).
« Déplacements » est constitué de 24 ventilateurs formant un rectangle. Chaque ventilateur est « pixel », sa vitesse de rotation et l’intensité de la lumière de ses LED varient en fonction du niveau de gris correspondant au pixel de référence. Cet écran de ventilateurs est piloté par un ordinateur sur lequel tourne un programme simulant un automate cellulaire intitulé « Le jeu de la vie » (créé par John Horton Conway en 1970). C’est un modèle mathématique où chaque ventilateur est une cellule. «Déplacement » en tant que détournement de cet objet, composant de l’ordinateur, devenant image. Il ne s’agit pas d’un « déplacement » physique mais d’un mouvement, d’un flux.
Stefan Piat travaille sur la reconstitution de monuments et d’espaces en utilisant un système de mosaïques photographiques et vidéographiques qu’il relie dans des cartes dynamiques et interactives. Dans Forsinicola, Piat construit le Fort Saint Nicolas à Marseille. S’y mèle non seulement des images de formats divers, mais surtout des images avec des temporalités multiples, allant du cliché instantané à la chronophotographie (Marey/Muybridge) en passant par des ralentissements et des images-panoramiques. Le tout s’agrège dans une forme qui peut se décomposer et se recomposer selon les mouvements du joueur et du programme.
Que nous habitions là où Cézanne peignait, que nous y vivions ou que nous traversions quotidiennement les paysages que Cézanne a peints, nous sommes tous un peu des habitants de ses peintures. Le studio de création Digital Deluxe a conçu et réalisé Le Voyage immobile, une invitation à partager cet héritage commun. Mais de quoi s’agit-il ? D’un module itinérant que l’on va retrouver dans l’espace public : le centre ville, les villages, les lycées, etc. qui va offrir au passant une découverte sensorielle de l’univers du peintre.
C’est le Centre européen de création et de développement culturel (CECDC) qui a lancé cette ambitieuse réalisation en collaboration avec l’association Terre active. Elle permet d’évoquer, sans chercher à la reproduire ni à l’expliquer, l’expérience sensorielle que représentait l’acte de peindre chez Cézanne. Voici donc une promenade interactive, différente, et sans bouger d’un pouce, sur les pas de Cézanne. Une balade qui, du paysage à l’oeuvre, permet d’évoquer le regard de Cézanne sur la nature, de comprendre le passage du motif au tableau.
Production CECDC / Conception et réalisation Digital Deluxe / Itinérance et tournée Terre Active
Le système présenté est une installation venteuse, constituée de 15 ventilateurs disposés en cercle. Chaque ventilateur souffle en fonction d’informations fournies en temps réel par Internet et utilise le flux de stations météo du monde entier pour générer des dessins à la surface d’une feuille.
Chessynthesis est un dispositif sonore qui transforme deux joueurs d’échecs en des musiciens. Chessynthesis analyse en temps-réel les mouvements de chaque pièce sur le plateau, même celle qui se trouve dans la main du joueur. Avec ses informations, il interprète les indices tactiques/stratégiques du jeu, les tensions, les centres de gravité, et les transcode en de la musique avec de la synthèse granulaire.
« Episureo », Stefan Schwabe & Sebastian Neitsch, 2008
développé à l’Ecole supérieure d’art Aix-en-Provence et au Kunstuniversität Linz
The paths we choose to follow each day, to go to work, to move around in our own homes or even the ways we move during our free-time are mostly pre-defined by architecture, human crowds or subconsciously learned behaviours. During all this, the personal space we keep around ourselves depends on the place we are at and the people surrounding us. We all need privacy but also depend on social relationships and so-for on close contacts to other humans. Our aim is to show this never-ending, pulsing conflict and the trails the participants leave in space and time.
To realize this within an interactive installation, we had to find a place where the participants would stay for quite a while and where they would have to move consciously but also relaxed. We wanted the people to naturally communicate to each other so that groups would appear and we needed them to move in a quite large radius. A swimming pool is almost perfect for this. It is like a stage you step on and just by its architectural form, it already pre-defines paths the swimmers usually follow and with which we as authors can play. On top of that the swimming and the water might relax the visitors so that they have the time and mind to concentrate on the installation. This was never been done before, so not only the visualisation of movement and the dynamics of human crowds where our main topics now, but also the difficult task to convert a public swimming pool into a huge interface.
The picture on the ceiling responds via motion-tracking to the swimmers in the water. Depending on their movements, their speeds and their distances to each other, the visualisation changes and with the help of an underwater loudspeaker variant sounds are generated. Abstract graphics slowly appear and get more and more complex after time, showing trails, movements and the group dynamics in the pool. To picture
the whole movement and not only the one of each single swimmer, sometimes a kind of current appears that influences the whole visualisation.
développé au studio Lentigo, ENSBA Marseille avec l’assistance de l’Atelier Hypermédia ESA Aix-en-Provence
La ville est complexe, en perpétuelle mutation. Les flux d’images, d’information et de déplacement superposent en strates. Dans Node City, on se déplace à l’intérieur de ses strates via un système de navigation corporelle : autour de notre corps une projection au sol nous immerge à l’intérieur d’une carte que l’on peut explorer tout simplement en se déplaçant. Via un système de surveillance, on repère les promeneurs et leur propose un carrefour mobile de vidéos à explorer; en se baladant on découvre les différentes strates audiovisuelles de la ville.
shades of white, mêlant danse, images et son, a été pour le festival les affluents au pavillon noir d’aix-en-provence, en collaboration avec bruno péré. l’idée principale est une évolution de la lumière blanche au travers de ses trois composantes colorées : rouge, vert et bleu. les projections sont la seule source de lumière pour les danseurs sur scène. elles sont diffusées au sol, sur le mur du fond, voire les deux.
la majeure partie de ces histoires colorées est programmé, puis exportée en vidéo et montée sur logiciel vidéo. voilà un petit résumé sur ce que l’on a essayé de symboliser par ces temps colorés :
le rouge est le commencement, comme une naissance hésitante et fragile.
le vert correspond à la création d’un espace hésitant, une sorte de paysage sans dimension.
le bleu est le résidu, après l’explosion blanche des trois couleurs réunies.
tantôt au mur, tantôt au sol, la lumière est image. l’image est matière. le mouvement du corps évolue avec un espace coloré qui se raconte peu à peu. rouge. vert. bleu.
For all the English readers out there, I’m sorry, but this one’s going to be en français: the land of « Liberté Égalité Fraternité » is yet again dangerously close to passing what many have been calling a « liberticidal » law, but that might more aptly called a « future-art-killer ». Two days ago, a film opened in New York entitled RiP: A Remix Manifesto; the film has also been distributed under a CC-BY-NC licence and therefore can easily (and legally) be downloaded off of Pirate Bay and other sources; I suggest you see it, and donate to the cause. In it, the filmmakers describe the current cultural battle as a war, and I couldn’t agree more.
With that in mind, here then is my open letter to Christine Albanel, the Minister of Culture, in which I ask her to rethink her position on this current cultural war:
Madame la ministre, demain vous reprenez les débats concernant votre proposition de loi « HADOPI ». Vous nous dites que cette loi est là pour nous protéger, nous les artistes, via une réponse « graduée » et « pédagogique » qui viserait le rétablissement d’un rapport plus équitable entre le public et les créateurs. Il y a eu beaucoup de débats sur cette loi, concernant principalement la question des libertés fondamentales des citoyens et de leur droit d’accès à l’information — autrement dit les conséquences de cette loi en partant du point de vue du consommateur (de la culture). Mais j’aimerais apporter un autre point de vue, partant cette fois-ci du point de vue de l’artiste.
Pour les artistes, cette loi ne répond pas à nos véritables problèmes. Elle en crée même des nouveaux. Ce n’est pas le public en tout cas qui doit nous faire peur, et ce n’est surtout pas le public qui nous empêcherait de créer. Il y a un déséquilibre, peut-être — mais tôt ou tard, nous finirons par nous retrouver. Il serait absurde dans tous les cas d’imaginer un quelconque antagonisme entre les artistes et leur public, encore moins un public de plus en plus demandeur de créations artistiques. Non, la véritable tension se trouverait plutôt entre les artistes et les acteurs qui en vivent — l’industrie culturelle. Il s’agit d’un problème parfaitement classique mais qui nécessiteraient aujourd’hui des renégociations autant sur les nouveaux moyens de diffusion que sur les nouveaux moyens de création. Je dirai même qu’il faut d’abord régler les problèmes du droit de la création, avant de se poser la question de la diffusion. Nous avons besoin de votre aide dans cette rééquilibrage, qui commence par l’arrêt des abus des mêmes systèmes de protection qui étaient sensés nous protéger et que vous déclarez défendre.
L’artiste d’hier n’est pas celui d’aujourd’hui et encore moins celui de demain dont nous ne devinons même pas les contours. Votre loi ne prend pas en compte ces changements; pire, elle fait perdurer un régime d’oppression artistique qui depuis longtemps empêche l’émergence de nouvelles formes qui ne rentreraient pas dans ses modèles de propriété intellectuelle. Où est-il marqué dans votre loi que les artistes du remix, de la détournement des média anciens, seront protégés contre les pratiques draconiennes des industries culturelles qui gardent ces « propriété » tel un cerbère contre toute réappropriation, notamment celle qui leur insufflerait une nouvelle inspiration ? Car c’est ici que les lois supposées nous protéger sont devenues des lois servant à étouffer nos créations. Combien d’artistes doivent être attaqués par les avocats des « majors » avant de réagir en notre défense, en nous proposons des actions (peu importe la forme) qui encouragerait les créations de demain, tout en respectant celles d’hier ? Les formes de censure dont nous souffrons sont avant tout économiques, mais finissent par devenir des formes de censure esthétiques, et qui se transforment même dans certains cas (que je connais malheureusement trop bien) en de la censure politique. L’économie ancienne de la culture nous étouffait, et c’est aujourd’hui qu’enfin nous nous débarrassons de ces lobbies qui ne sont rien d’autre que des défenseurs de la monoculture. Ce sont alors les lois elles-mêmes du droit d’auteur qui doivent être changées, celles créées pour une ancienne forme de création (et de sa diffusion). Et c’est aux anciens gardiens de la citadelle de la culture de s’adapter à la nouvelle donne, et surtout pas l’inverse.
Enfin, ce n’est pas en avançant les dates de sortie des DVD que vous aller inscrire les français dans les enjeux du XXIème siècle. Oubliez la vidéo à la demande, car le public lui-même s’est transformé. La notion de consommation culturelle a muté : ouvrez votre navigateur et vous verrez que l’internaute ne se contente plus de consommer les films, désormais il cherche à en être acteur, se situant quelque part entre curateur, commentateur, et créateur avec une part de moins en moins important de consommation. N’importe quelle loi proposant une harmonisation d’un monde technique et culturel ancien avec le monde nouveau doit commencer par assumer cette nouvelle donne d’une production culturelle en éternelle mutation et bidirectionnelle. Il faut protéger cette nouvelle forme de consommation, cette nouvelle forme de jouissance culturelle, contre les anciens modèles économiques qui sont, malheureusement, incompatibles avec elle. Le public est dans la même posture que nous les artistes, il cherche à créer.
C’est ici d’ailleurs sur ce dernier point que je diverge avec ceux qui prônent la création d’une licence globale : celle-ci est peut-être une solution, mais une solution uniquement temporaire. La licence globale prolonge elle aussi un modèle désuet, basé sur l’idée d’une consommation (passive) des contenus, comme s’il s’agissait de petits paquets de CD ou de DVD, mais distribués sans le support. Alors que l’avenir se trouve plutôt dans des formes audiovisuelles mutantes et algorithmiques qui ne peuvent même pas s’identifier dans telle ou telle copie puisque son raison d’être c’est justement de perdurer dans une adaptabilité permanente. Comment rémunérer correctement ces nouvelles formes tout en encourageant leur distribution ? Nous ne savons pas encore et c’est encore moins votre loi qui nous aidera puisqu’elle est ouvertement hostile aux algorithmes, qui sont suspectés de vouloir détourner ce DRM que même l’industrie culturelle a fini par abandonner. Nous les artistes ont bien moins peur des algorithmes, car nous comprenons que c’est grace à eux que nous oeuvres de demain fonctionneront.
Permettez-moi madame de vous faire une suggestion. Actuellement, vous pouvez téléchargez gratuitement et en toute légalité le film « RiP: A Remix Manifesto », distribué sur Pirate Bay sous la licence Créative Commons CC-BY-SA ou que vous pouvez visionner directement sur le site du National Film Board of Canada. Je vous le recommande très fortement, notamment pour ces valeurs pédagogiques concernant le rôle de la réappropriation dans l’histoire des expressions culturelles. Vous verrez, par exemple, que les droits que vous défendez ne sont peut-être pas aussi propres que vous ne le pensiez. Mais dans ce film, vous trouverez surtout un modèle d’action à la fois politique et artistique, via Gilberto Gil le célèbre musicien et ancien ministre de la culture brésilien : « Nous cherchons toujours à donner aux gens, aux enfants, accès. La nature même de la création, c’est le partage. Tout vient de quelque chose d’autre, c’est comme une réaction en chaîne » (01:12:58). Le rôle d’un ministre de la culture c’est la défense de la culture, de sa création et de son partage. Regardez la magnifique bibliothèque, encore plus grande que celle d’Alexandrie, que les amateurs d’art ont créé grâce au réseau de partage peer-to-peer. Est-ce que les grands industriels de la culture, que vous protégerez que vous le voulez ou non en passant cette loi, peuvent en dire autant ?
Zzzz (a.k.a. Bonne nuit les Tweets, a.k.a. Goodnight Sweet Tweets, …) is a Twitter visualizer built in Processing that tracks Twitterers as they count their electric sheep. It grabs the latest tweets that use “zzz” or “zzzz” and animates them with some simple vector-based graphics. It’s as simple as that.
One of the more obvious things about Twitter is its’ whole zeitgeist vibe. I’m currently fascinated along with everyone else about the evolving nature of this latest fad beast. Twitter is not just one thing, as our recent 140 character sketches hopefully made clear. People are using it as a chat service, I used it last summer as my own private AP wire, it’s used as a link-sharer, a help-wanted system, a job-hunting system, well-wishing, hate-mongering, and so on. Again, this is all the obvious stuff.
One of the knee-jerk reactions to Twitter concerns its’ narcissistic tendencies, à la Flutter — in other words the whole vanity of it all. And sure, this is indeed one aspect of it, as was the case when blogging came along. But as it is an emerging phenonomenon (although perhaps just a fad), I’ve found it interesting to follow pricisely this narcissistic aspect, and noticed as part of this reading the charming human touch of people saying good night not only to their peers, but to the equivalent of the stars, the world-at-large — a kind of mini bottle-to-the-sea. That is indeed pure vanity, vanitas, or vanité from vanus, a.k.a. « empty, void of meaning »; I am going to sleep, I am turning off my communications medium and I am communicating this fact to you. I have nothing to say but merely, goodnight, which is a structural communication or perhaps a close cousin to the speech act: herein ends our ability to communicate. But again, this speech closure ritual has a certain poetic quality in that it is addressed at once to one’s peers, but also in a public medium to a public at-large, as a form of address to ones-not-known. I suppose there are many blogs out there that say “I’m too tired to blog”, and literature is filled with examples of writers on the edge of sleep. But once I’d noticed this trope on Twitter, it was amazing to see how consistent it is, even across languages that do not even share the “Zzzz” form: all day long, people are saying goodnight, and in many different countries. If I had done a map visualizer along the line of Smule’s Ocarina, one would probably be witnessing a steady progression around the globe.
I actually started work on this a few weekends ago, but I didn’t have the time to finish it as Eniarof came around (more on that later) and took all my time. I know the graphics are a little hokey, but I actually like it that way. I originally tried something more sophisticated, but while doodling in a vector graphics program I came up with this idea and it stuck.
Oh, before I forget, I should also mention that there is a stripped-down TwitterSearch code example over at the Happy Code Farm on getting Twitter searches into Processing. It deals with the whole applet sandbox problem which Daniel Shiffman discusses over at Learning Processing. You can start from there in order to make your own Twitter zeitgeist visualizer. If you want something more complex with the possibility of digging into profiles and getting specific tweets, there are some Java objects out there (Twitter4J and Java-Twitter), and Brenda Moon went even so far as to send me an in-progress version of a romeFeeder example she’s working on (thanks Brenda!). But in the end, my needs were far simpler and getting search xml off of Twitter is amazingly easy (despite the fact that I lost a good 24 hours trying to figure it out, RTFM!). It took little more than a simple thread and the type of xml code we worked with in the Programmation Web workshop in February.
And finally, although this visualizer should work with the current Twitter API restrictions, there is no guarentee that I won’t hit my quota since everything is streaming through abstractmachine.net because of the sandbox issue. I’ve tried applying for an API bandwidth increase, but couldn’t figure out the form. It says input IP’s as CSV (Comma-Separated Values?) but something as simple as that of course needs an example for dopes like me. I’ve sent out a request to Twitter, but if someone could explain to me what a CSV is supposed to look like, the comments section is open.
Oh, and for anyone who has not had the pleasure of meeting The Sandman (Ulysse), Gros Ours, Nicolas and Pimprenelle, here is a special accordian-themed « Bonne nuit les petits ». Faites de beaux rêves !
Pinguino is an electronic hardware prototyping platform, loosely based on the Arduino architecture, using PIC microcontrollers with integrated USB. The Pinguino Processing Library allows for communication between this low-cost hardware platform, and the popular visual prototyping language for artists and designers, Processing.
Pinguino est une plate-forme de prototypage électronique ; il est plus ou moins basé sur l’architecture du projet Arduino, mais utilise des micro-controlleurs PIC à la place du Atmel. Il profite également de l’intégration USB de ces micro-controlleurs. La librairie « Pinguino Processing Library » facilite la communication de ces circuits avec l’environnement de prototypage artistique, Processing.
Last week, Stéphane Cousot wrote a basic library for communicating between Processing and Pinguino. While you’ve probably heard of Processing before (since you’re reading this blog) you’ve almost certainly never heard of Pinguino. It’s one of the roll-your-own projects that we are developing here at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art in order to fill our own needs. It is loosely based on the Arduino platform, most of all its philosophy, but redesigned around PIC microcontrollers with integrated USB. In other words, it’s our in-house Arduino.
The project is in its first year of development and experimentation, and a lot remains to be ameliorated, most of all the editor and the installer. But as in the past we have found that the best way to mature our technologies is to use them in our own work as if they already work (or at least as if they will work), we figured that we would just jump in head first and start developing all the various pieces, even while we’re in the middle of building crazy festivals like the next Eniarof. So while Stéphane is here for Eniarof, I decided that it would be best to put him to work on developing a Processing Library to connect up directly with the Pinguino circuits various projects are building for their attractions.
Jean-Pierre developed the original solution using the libusbJava wrapper to libusb. This is not a virtual serial port, but direct communication with the USB bus. Stéphane then took this solution and built the basic library that we will use to further develop the communication protocol between Processing and Pinguino. One of Jean-Pierre’s original ideas for his platform was to build a default mode that would allow Processing, Pure Data, Python or one of the many other languages and environments we use, to directly command the Pinguino. There is something similar to this idea in the current Firmata protocol built in to the Processing Core Libraries. But we’re still a long way from getting there. For the moment we just have a simple protocol to get pin states, change pin states and send/receive more generic, or non-pin related messages.
Some time has passed since my Invaders! installation started something of a $#!¥storm back in August at the Leipzig Games Convention. I tried to give the piece some context and gave a few interviews to responsible journalists, but ultimately the whole thing just blew up as people lost all sense of scale and started taking for granted all sorts of assumptions about the work. Ok, so that’s the backstory, and you can think of all that what you will.
But now that hipster pop acts such as Röyksopp are reportedly referencing the work (I have my doubts) and given that some time has gone by, it is perhaps finally possible to post this video which I have already been showing to crowds at various talks over the past few months. It’s actually not that great of a video, but it does shed a little more light on what actually was going on in Leipzig. As it has been reported elsewhere, there was something of a disconnect between the public reaction to the piece on-site, and people’s reaction on-line. Playing it was apparently very different than just reporting on its visual aspects, especially the types of images at the end of the video, I assume, where you can see the full extent of the damage of the buildings as the game matches ever more closely the historical progression of events (planes, impact, fire, structural damage, jumpers, etc). It would obviously be better to release a more complete video tracing the way in which the game itself mapped the historical events back onto the 8-bit classic, but given that the Games Convention itself wasn’t really the ideal place for this type of analytic meditation anyway, I’ll just go with this video testimony of people playing it, as it was presented. Some people only saw either the Kotaku image, or the Laboral Video, which made for another form of disconnect as people didn’t understand what was actually going on and therefore what the fuss was all about.
Here’s the Röyksopp video by the way:
If it’s true that Röyksopp is referencing my piece, that’s very cool, especially since it’s a great song. Again, I have my doubts since many pop acts don’t really use imagery all that critically, pull $#!¥ in from any direction, and therein pastiche everything into one big self-same pile. It’s always frustrating to see the extent to which music videos often end up whitewashing the images they reference. There is a long history to this tendency, although there is perhaps one recent notable exception: Justice’s « Stress » which was able to reference Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and recontextualize it with a new political charge which it successfully maintained throughout, going so far as to provoke significant debate in France concerning the ontological status of the image (Is it protest? Is it glorification? Is it criticism?):
Pulling all this back to the Invaders! debate, I actually had an interesting public conversation with Louis Bec last november at the Biennale Figures of Interactivity while presenting this work. According to Bec, there are certain complex calculations in mathematics that require the introduction of a « zone d’ombre» in order to be resolved, and that if you do not in fact include this shadow region, the equation becomes incalculable. Bec tried to draw an analogy by suggesting that September 11th had become culturally unthinkable, and that in order to re-render it imaginable so as to process it, a certain « zone d’ombre » is required, which he suggested comes here in the form of a historical reconstruction (or simulation) of the event which reconstructs the violence in a highly symbolic form so as to able to process it. He went on to create similar analogies with animal simulations of violence and combat in play, and so on. That last part is actually part of the general narrative gamers often use defending the role of violence in video games and I don’t know if I want to get lost down that path because the argument hangs on a certain subtlely that often gets lost in translation. But beyond this idea of simulation, for Louis, the ambiguity of this work « on violence » is merely one of the pre-requisites of needing a shadowy region in order to render the violent act re-thinkable.
It’s in French (désolé pour ceux qui n’en parlent pas) and it handles the usual suspects (code, teaching, gaming, and on-line tutorials). As it turns out, a lot of people use my cours sur la programmation dans Processing. So Weecast wanted me to talk about them and tried to convince me to make some videos for their site which is all about online tutorials (en français, sorry). Just last week I had people from Brazil, Spain and two schools here in France describe how they use my online courses. All that’s great, but the classes are kinda old and really need some updating, and most of all, should be video tutorials. The problem is of course that I only have so many hours in the day and I’m in the middle of a gazillion other projects. For me to take time out right now I need some sort of context where I can get paid for the time taken away from other projects. So at first I was very interested at Weecast’s proposal: remaking my Processing tutorials into video webcasts that I can get paid for. Their model is pretty reasonable and the prices are low. But therein lies the rub, and the ethical dilemma. I personally would prefer either some sort of advertising model or some sort of sponsorship when it comes to making on-line classes on Processing, because Processing is ultimately free software (as in freedom as well as in beer). These are all old dilemmas, I know, but I still feel like they haven’t been resolved. As I mention in the interview, imagine having to pay a few bucks to learn how to use sound in Processing. As we say in French, c’est un peu vache (“it’s kinda cow”?). For the moment I’ve suggested to Weecast: hey, find some public funding or sponsorship so that we can make those specific classes free. But I’m not so sure that’s really a model. Hmmm.
I dunno, a sort of ambiguous issue for me. Anyone have any other ideas?
The whole process was a lot of fun, and an excellent pedagogic exercise. We only played around for about an hour, which was probably enough. But I have a feeling we will be doing more « exercises » like this in the future. We do a lot of theory in class, and try to mix that up with play, technical information, project critique, and open discussions. Since what the Atelier Hypermédia basically does is treat code as a « plastic » material, useable in any artistic context (i.e. considering the code itself a possible form of artistic exploration), games like this are really what we are all about. But I was struck by the level of mastery students displayed of the basic rules of Java syntax, and the collective part of the session was a real eye-opener on how good the students have gotten at collective coding. Talking about code is a Good Thing™®, coding with ten or more hands in and Even Better Thing™®. Just afterwards we had a great session with a young artist presenting her project, the exercise being: how would you develop her installation ? There too, the students showed a great capacity at collectively designing the project, even when discussing the complex details of the code. The trick, apparently, is playing such arcane and thick subjects fast and loose, and thereby ignoring the preciousness of the form itself of the code, and doing it collectively, and as a form of play. It’s an intellectual bait and switch which in the end allows for a rigorous form of play.
It’s Christmas, and so, as per usual, I’m releasing a little holiday application: Neige (Mac OS X).
It’ll run at whatever resolution you’re at.
It’s nothing special and I just whipped it up in OpenFrameworks in just a few minutes so don’t expect much. But it makes for a nice background fishbowl sort of thing, especially on a big flatscreen TV. Apparently, the abstractmachine project is moving more and more into interior decoration ;-)
In a couple hours we’ll be starting a four-day workshop using Julien Gachadoat’s Vision Factory platform. This one’s gonna be purely experimental folks, so come prepared with lab coats, flame retardants, and a whole ‘lotta patience. Julien has whipped up a crazy-but-cool server-client system for collective livecoding using a little OSC + Processing client for delivery of the code to the mothership. Should be interesting.
I love Processing Monsters, I think it’s a great idea. I saw it on Code & Form last week, and immediately gave it as an assignment to the 2nd-year students who, for the most part, have never programmed before and had only 3 days to learn the basics. Using Processing Monsters as an objective was great, as it kept us focused on some very basic functions (ellipse, bezier, shape, translate, etc) but which can quickly get out of control without some methodology. Also, looking forward to ENIAROF in March, monsters seems an appropriate theme.
I made the mistake of introducing class/objects on the final day, in a pretty funny class on fur, hair and tufts which I’ll have to reproduce in some form or other. I should have started directly with objects, as we did in the Algorithmic Design project we initiated last month in Orléans. In my experience, it’s easier to learn class/objects from day 1, rather than day 3, or week 5. Once you’ve become lazy programming spaghetti code, it’s too hard to break it off into objects. No matter how ugly it is, once comfort has settled in, it’s simply too easy to get stuck in linear thinking. That must have something to do with the brain’s natural tendencies. However, if you start from day 1, you stay organized, people tend to understand the code better, and probably can make cooler monsters. Alas! We did things ass-backwards, and the students’ code mastery suffered as a result. But a few of the monsters are fun nevertheless :
I’ll be heading to Geneva tomorrow for a talk on Wednesday morning, followed by a mini-workshop in the afternoon at the CCC. We will be discussing the role of algorithms, software, and machines in the changing political landscape of our contemporary societies. There will obviously be some discussion of code and hacking in there, but I also want to discuss the role I think games and/or « electronic ludism » (i.e. the larger context of play and algorithmic machines) can play in future political/citizen intervention.
I’ll be travelling tomorrow to Poitiers for what looks like a very rich roster of speakers discussing… oh yes… the subject of interactivity. Cough.
Oh, and apparently Ségolène Royal will be giving an opening pep-talk (oui, oui, that Ségolène Royal), which probably has something to do with the fact that she is currently the president of Poitou-Charentes where the conference is being held. You might also have noticed that she is currently making a bid to for the leadership of the French Socialist Party, so I don’t know how much to bet on her appearance.
I haven’t completely finished my talk yet, but from what I have so far, it looks like I’ll be sticking with this resumé that I sent a few weeks ago to the organizers:
L’image du monstre
Il y a trois ans, lors d’un précédent colloque à l’ÉESI sur le cinéma et l’interactivité, j’ai argumenté pour une approche “hydraulique” de l’image en mouvement : une approche dynamique autour d’une image fluctuante qui prendrait en compte notamment la fluidification que les machines algorithmiques apportaient à l’image. C’était une hypothèse intéressante, mais qui n’osait pas aller jusqu’au bout. L’épine du problème était une insistance à maintenir notre relation nostalgique avec la trace photographique à l’intérieur de l’image, face à l’horizontalité des nouvelles formes de stockage comme les bases de données qui ont tendance à brouiller les figures qui s’y trouvent.
Depuis, mon optique s’est totalement transformée. L’objet n’est plus pour moi un simple jeu de re-juxtaposition permanente, il est devenu un jeu de mutation, avec des images-croissance qui poussent à partir de n’importe quelle extrémité de la « Chose ». Il se peut qu’il y ait encore des traces anciennes dans cette image, mais ces traces jouent un tout autre rôle, et nourrissent la bête tout autrement. Je vois désormais dans cette image nouvelle une forme de « monstruosité » qui pousse à l’intérieur des images, et descend jusque dans les entrailles du GPU lui-même, ne remontant à la surface de l’écran pixelisé que le temps d’un court affichage.
Accepter le monstre dans l’image, transforme notre approche de celle-ci, et transforme aussi ce qu’on entend par figure, mimesis, et enfin narration. Cela change également les champs d’exploration qui permettent de saisir plus fermement les phénomènes que je considère comme les plus pertinents pour ces transformations, à commencer par les jeux vidéo.
Here is the symposium’s valiant attempt at an English translation, which makes absolutely no sense to me, and I wrote the damn thing. The words are right, it’s just that the meaning got lost in there somewhere. Apparently, my French is hard to translate, or perhaps just plain hard to understand:
Three years ago, during a previous conference on cine-film and interactivity at the ÉESI, I put forward the outline for a “hydraulic” approach to image in motion: a dynamic approach hinged on the fluctuating image ,which, notably, could factorise the fluidising import that algorithmic engines have brought to the image. It was an interesting hypothesis, which was just not bold enough to go all the way. The bane of the problem being insistence on maintaining our nostalgic affinity with the photographic trace within the image, at the hands of the horizontality of the new storing configurations, like those involving data bases, which tend to scramble the figures present.
Since then my assessment has been turned around. I no longer view the object as just a game of constant re-juxtaposition; it has become play on mutation, with image-growth sprouting from just about any appendage of the “Thing”. It is just possible that old traces still linger in that image, now however, they play a completely different role and feed the beast with different fodder. In this novel image, from now on, I can see a form of “monstrousness” germinating within the image, and getting right down to the entrails of the GPU itself, coming up to the pixelized surface of the screen for only a brief moment of display.
By accepting the monster in the image our approach to it becomes transformed, thus transforming that which we understand as figure, mimesis and finally narration. It also changes fields of inquiry which sanction and capture phenomena more securely and which I consider as being the most relevant for these transformations, starting with video games.
I’ll be in Iceland starting tomorrow (cool!), and all through the weekend for the Pikslaverk festival which is part of the Pixelache network. I’ll be presenting the abstractmachine.vb7d8 on Saturday and apparently also talking about the usual (code&art) on Sunday.
Ok, fire up all your Iceland-is-bankrupt jokes and post the best ones in the comments: so far, anyone I tell I’m leaving for Iceland comes up with some lame bankruptcy joke that isn’t even funny. Apparently the mere fact that Iceland went bankrupt is funny. I don’t get the joke, but maybe that’s the nature of this crisis: even the bankruptcy jokes fail? Someone sould collect them all somewhere and do something with them, just as a reminder that jokes should generally be funny. So if anyone wants to give me some good ones…
“The Pikslaverk 2008 conference is the Icelandic component in the international network of Pixelache conferences. It is organized by Lorna (the Icelandic organization for electronic arts) in collaboration with The Icelandic Academy of the Arts and The Reykjavik Municipal Art Galleries. Through a series of lectures, presentations and performances, this year’s conference will continue Helsinki’s theme on education and act as a precursor to Bergen’s them on Free, Libre and Open Source Software by focussing on artists’ use of computer programming code to create works of art. Invited and selected guests will present a variety of views regarding issues relating to artistic applications of computer programming code.“
Last week Gee Magazine sent me this copy of their magazine with a short article based on an interview I gave them a few weeks back. It’s a minor article — this interview with Marie Lechner from Libération is far more complete — but from what I can understand from my weak German, it appears accurate. Here is a link from Spiegel Online of the same article but rebranded.
