Digitalarti Mag #10 (English)

#10 The International Digital Art Magazine Artists - Festivals - Innovation and more

www.digitalarti.com

DAAN ROOSEGAARDE July-August-September 2012 - 6 € / 8 $ US

digitalarti #10

TECHNO-POETRY & INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE SIGHT & SOUND NEW YORK CITY’S DIGITAL ARTS SHU LEA CHEANG CONNECTED BODIES ELEKTRA - INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL ARTS BIENNIAL MANIFESTE 2012 BAINS NUMÉRIQUES PANORAMA

JULY/AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2012

DAAN ROOSEGAARDE, DUNE 4.0, 2006 - 2011. © Daan Roosegaarde / Studio Roosegaarde www.studioroosegaarde.net

#10 EDITORIAL

FEATURES 03 EDITORIAL 04 NEWS info, blogs and links / digitalarti.com

07 CHRONICLES Michel Serres, Jean-Paul Fourmentraux…

08 DIGITAL ART

CONNECTED BODIES, AUGMENTED BY THE SUN This summer, you have several options to give your body a makeover: run it through the beachside skate parks on the U.S. West Coast, sublimate it into an online avatar, or implant it with various devices (robotics, chips, etc.) in order to increase its potential. This 10th issue of Digitalarti presents artists who use technology with a cyberpunk/ cybersex agenda to explore our “cyborg future*”. The artist Daan Roosegaarde, on the cover, offers us “intelligent” dresses made of aluminum that become transparent according to our heart rate (Intimacy 2.0) or the approach of another (Intimacy).

strolling through New York

12 PANORAMA the fourteenth

14 SHU LEA CHEANG interactive mythologies

16 CONNECTED BODIES and artistic phantasmagorias

18 DAAN ROOSEGAARDE techno-poetry & interactive architecture

22 MANIFESTE 2012 international festival & multidisciplinary academy

Also featured is an informative stroll through New York City’s digital arts production and exhibition venues, as well as reports from festivals and exhibitions in Montreal, Tourcoing and Paris. For travelers landing in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, Digitalarti has installed Miguel Chevalier’s virtual gardens, Sur-Natures 2012, in the brand-new international terminal (CDG 2E), invited by Aéroports de Paris.

And we invite anyone who will be in Paris this summer to visit our Art Lab, where we’re currently making the prototype of Julien Levesque’s “Connected Shell”, which will let you hear all the seas of the world in real time…

The new Digitalarti website is now live. Under Magazine, you’ll find all the previous issues, including all our in-depth articles.

Please feel free to send us your comments or feedback, as we continue to improve and develop this online magazine.

24 BAINS NUMÉRIQUES when digital arts reinvent the city

26 SIGHT & SOUND systems of symmetry

28 ELEKTRA international digital arts biennial

32 AGENDA exhibitions, festivals…

The month of September will be rich in events: in the U.S. with the ZERO1 Biennial in Silicon Valley and in Europe with Ars Electronica in Linz, TodaysArt in The Hague, Scopitone in Nantes…

Happy travels and happy reading.

ANNE-CÉCILE WORMS * This theme was also developed in Art et Culture(s) Numérique(s), Panorama international, a book published by Centre des Arts d’Enghien-les-Bains and edited by Musiques & Cultures Digitales.

Digitalarti is producing the e-book for release on September 20.

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DIGITALARTI NEWS

DIGITALARTI.COM Find all of this information, blogs, links and other news on our site HALL EFFECT, INSTALLATION BY JASON COOK Hall Effect is an interactive installation by Jason Cook, produced in Digitalarti's Artlab.

When someone is climbing stairs, he's followed by color changing lights. The installation is located on Digitalarti's premisses. In this video, you can see how the artwork was made.

More on Digitalarti TV. < http://www.digitalarti.com/tags/dm_videos >

MEDIALAB-PRADO

Focus Blogs

MCD MCD, the magazine dedicated to Digital Arts and Music, invites the reader to decode artistic practices and innovative uses related to digital creation. Quarterly thematic issues presents an indepth investigation on topics and intersecting viewpoints from artists, scientists, businessmen, sociologists, intellectuals, etc. MCD promotes this artistic, cultural, scientific and industrial mesh. For every topic, it offers an overview of active participants, analyzes the issues, confronts points of view, unveils novelties and questions possible evolutions.

< http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/mcd >

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Medialab-Prado is a program of the Department of Arts of the City Council of Madrid, aimed at producing, researching, and disseminating digital culture and focused on the area where art, science, technology, and society intersect.

Many workshops for the production of projects, conferences, seminars, meetings, projects exhibitions, concerts, presentations, etc. take place in its versatile space.

All activities are free and open to the general public. Our primary purpose is to create a framework where both research and production processes are permeable to user participation. < http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/medialab_prado >

INCITE/ incite/ is an Hamburg-based audiovisual electronic duo formed

by Kera Nagel and AndrÊ Aspelmeier. Mixing eye-catching experimental audiovisual art with dynamic distorted IDM grooves, the duo criss-crosses art and club worlds, creating intense experiences for eyes and ears. Fragmented electric junk, fragile bursts of static noise and extra-charged sub-bass-kicks join abstract monochromatic imagery. incite/ plays seriously weird glitch and quasi-danceable grooves in synced conjunction with intense grayscale visuals. incite/´s audiovisual creations focus on quantum-physical references applied to daily life. The distorted visuals are mostly unrecognizable, masking the underlying stories an exciting expedition for the audience. < http://www.digitalarti.com/blog/incite >

Agenda MCD International digital festivals guide OUT NOW! In this edition, find more than 400 festivals dedicated to electronic music and digital arts, including, this year, a special focus on audiovisual festivals.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_1 >

incite/ live @ Sineztezija Festival, Montenegro. incite/ live at Sineztezija Festival (Herceg Novi, Montenegro) on July 21th, 2012.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_2 >

Last Call: Screengrab (Australia).

The 2012 Screengrab New Media Arts Award and associated exhibition is looking for challenging creative works by media arts practitioners working in screen based media to submit works on the theme of CONTROL.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_3 >

ISEA 2013 (Sydney) Open call.

ISEA2013 will be held in Sydney from 7th to 16th June 2013 and will consist in exhibitions, performances, symposium and public events. It will also support residencies and associated events throughout regional NSW and across Australia leading into and out of the core event.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_4 >

Artists La Baraque Foraine 6.1 @ Mapping Festival 2012.

La Baraque foraine 6.1 is a visual, sound and sensitive experience which takes the viewer into his own intimacy, where time stands still. This device created by Virgile

Sani-Gémonet and complemented by Claire Fristot aka A-li-ce for the video, is a piece of work on sound frequencies through the body and mind.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_5 >

The Montanas (and friends).

The Montanas are quite our "cathodic family". But it is more than that! It is... our world! It is... us! Yes it is!!!! We are just wondering which of these is the craziest…

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_6 >

several thousands of people around DIY latest innovations and trends.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_9 >

ZKM, Transmediale, Ikeda and Bartholl.

At ZKM in Karlsruhe, the “The Global Contemporary” exhibition recently analyzed the effects of globalization on the world of art while that of the Media Museum, entitled “Digital Art Works”, addressed the conservation of digital works.

The Immortal Life-support machines have solved the death issue: the human body

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_10 >

Revital Cohen had a strange "bigger than life" idea. And we love this kind of ideas.

Thinking about life-support machines, he reckoned that the only thing that failed about immortality was the human part of the death issue.

Innovation

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_7 >

MINDPIRATES present Mike Hentz' TABLEAU VIVANT Hentz works tend to be a process-oriented happening and a pool of existential test arrangements.

Introduction to Arduino.

If you have already met Jason Cook, our Artlab manager (lucky you!), you know how much he likes Arduino, the worldwide famous electronic component maker.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_11 >

MET museum offers 34 3d-printable sculpture models.

Festivals, Art Centers

The Metropolitan Museum of New York just made a big move. Always keen on democratizing art culture, notably thanks to new technologies, the MET recently spotted the opportunities offered by 3D printers.

Gamerz Festival.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_12 >

Devoted to game and diversion in contemporary creation, GAMERZ yearly gathers French and international artists, researchers and professionals in Aix-enProvence, so as to invite the public to a recreational and cultural journey.

ZeroN: MIT MediaLab says no to gravity.

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_8 >

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_13 >

< www.digitalarti.com/en/m10_7 >

MIT MediaLab can't stop surprising the digital innovation world. Their last creation, named ZeroN, looks promising: a weightless small ball made of metal, linked to a smart system.

[catch-up] MAKER Fair Bay Area 2012 The 2012 Bay Area Maker Fair, a kind of artistic and engineering carnival, gathering

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This publication was co-edited by the Centre des arts d'Enghien-les-Bains & l'Institut Français With the support of Ministère de la Culture & de la Communication Editorial conception: Centre des arts & Musiques & Cultures Digitales (MCD) Editorial contributions: Yves Michaud, Louise Poissant, Caroline Seck Langill, Peter Murvai & Dominique Scheel-Dunand, Dooeun Choi, Jean-Luc Soret, Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Marco Mancuso, Zhang Ga, Jean-Marie Dallet, Annick Rivoire, Anne Laforet, Dominique Moulon, Maurice Benayoun…

Participation of: Fred Forest, Edmont Couchot, Guy Tortosa, Geert Lovink, Jakob + MacFarlane, Hiroko Tasaka, Malcom Levy, Alif Riahi, Bruce Benderson, Michel Jaffrenou, Martine Neddam, Emmanuel Guez, Anne Huybrechts…

w w w. b a i n s n u m e r i q u e s . f r

NEWS BOOKS

PORTRAIT OF THE MUTATING ARTIST Following his scrutiny of net-art, the sociologist Jean-Paul Fourmentraux is now questioning the links between artistic creation and technological research.

This "new alliance" challenges the borders between art and science, and questions the very status of the artist.

Artistic creation and technological research, which formerly constituted clearly distinct and quasi-impenetrable fields, are so entangled today that any innovation within one triggers an interest from the other and influences its development. The "creative class" thus saw lab artists emerge. Visual artists assisted by engineers, video artists "supervised" by industrial groups, etc. Everything was carried out according to a duly budgeted "project logic"…

From this came less hierarchical forms of fragmentation and attribution of works, staged and regulated through renewed co-signed devices.

We are very far from the solitary artist, somehow inspired by muses, surviving thanks to benefactors and showcases…

This union between art and science is however hiding discrepancies. Both poles do not necessarily "coincide". For a start, the pace of their intrinsic logic varies between the rhythm inherent to the production of an original work of art and the more evolving and incremental characteristic of scientific research so does their supposed aim.

The whole difficulty lies in the possibility of articulating the points of tension that direct and divide the research/creation towards artistic, technological and commercial interests.

The different steps that sequence the production and display of digital art disintegrate the work that no longer presents itself in an aesthetic singularity, but in a plurality of meanings, values and formats. In some cases, the artist/computer engineer rapprochement aims at implementing a collective situation of enunciation and operation no longer directed towards a single result – the work of art – but embedded in an evolving and incremental process within which

these participants invest individually and collectively a “border-work”. […] This fragmentation of the creative process also generates plural modes of designation of the nature of an artwork: successive installations and devices can thus be diversely referred to as "products" dissociable from the artwork as fragments of software applications or computer algorithms, or as a "global work" integrating the computer program.

This must be added to a culture, if not a cult, of the unfinished, of the "work in progress", the "generalised prototyping" which permanently breaks away from the old artistic paradigm.

The concept of the prototype therefore introduces the idea of an unfinished version of the creative project, given or submitted to the expertise of those peers who are most capable of assessing the aesthetic scope and the innovative character as concerns its insertion in the history of artistic practice.

The latter becoming more collective and interdisciplinary, we understand that the communication of the project before its public release constitutes a guarantee "of artisticity" […] Therefore, works no longer constitute the ultimate goal of artistic research as in this instance the regime of exclusive purpose of the artwork is undermined.

The "worst" might be that the mythology persists, the artist remains surrounded by an aura linked to the magic of creation while this act has become collaborative... The figure of the artist continues to be (over)valued and tends to contaminate the whole of a mutating professional world which magnifies more than ever the virtues of entrepreneurial freedom and the power of innovation or "creativity" on which the artist still seems to hold a monopoly…

Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Artistes de laboratoire: recherche et création à l'ère numérique. (lab artists: research and development in the digital age).

Forewords by Pierre-Michel Menger (Hermann Éditeurs).

Info: < www.editions-hermann.fr >

AT THE BECK AND CALL...

The new technologies of communication, and especially Internet, solidify a kind of reactionary thinking. A resentment which increases with age... Inversely, some old wise people, whilst acknowledging "the decline of the West", of paper and writing, support another vision of the digital world. This is the case of Michel Serres who is raising a different voice, not of discord but of concord, about the generation whose thumb is clenched on the touch screen of smartphones...

Michel Serres has given us the "extended" version of his analysis that had begun in an article published in Libération. The first observation is that the book, as a support and a model of

knowledge, is part of the problem. Our complexities come from a crisis in writing […] Something must change. The computer enables this shift. But is it really the end of the Gutenberg civilisation? The page format is dominating us […] new technologies have not escaped from it.

The computer screen mimics it […] Innovators are seeking the new e-book, whilst electronics are not yet freed from the book itself, although it implies a very different thing from the book, from the trans-historical format of the page...

We nevertheless observe a fundamental breach: the end of a world validated by the middle of the last century with a complete disruption of all our reference points, whether they be physiological, sociological, technological, or metaphysical. Through travels, pictures, canvases and horrendous wars, almost all of these collectives exploded. The remaining ones are slowly disintegrating. We now live in a multi-cultural and urban society that has barely anything to do with that of our grandparents. A new human is born...

The language, the vehicle of knowledge, is also subject to unprecedented transformations. Knowledge itself is evolving towards a new form of circulation. It is the end of the crushing knowledge from big hats which luckily is being replaced by a distributive, not concentrated, open-source knowledge from the network. Indeed, but what to pass on?

Knowledge? It is everywhere on the Web, available and objectified... But not necessarily objective... to pass it on to everyone? Nowadays, all knowledge is accessible to all. How do you pass it on then? Without being specific, the answer is to look for in the impact that will continue to produce our cognitive extensions: our phones and laptops through which reality has steadily been coded, "mediated", reified... Today, objectivity, the collective, the technological, the organisational are more subject to this cognitive computational or procedural and declarative abstractions (of) philosophy...

Better still, this very coding protocol is now the philosophy itself. I exist therefore I am a code, calculable, incalculable as a gold needle added to the haystack where it is buried and which conceals its brilliance. One or two generations might be enough for this "great digital transformation" to be completed... This small book is not a study but an overlook, a caring look: I see that we are living in an era akin to the dawn of the paideia, after the Greeks learned to write and demonstrate an argument...

At 82, Michel Serres observes the "Petite Poucette" (Thumbelina) with kindness: I'd like to be eighteen […] because everything is to be created again, everything is to be invented.

Michel Serres, Petite Poucette (Éditions Le Pommier! / coll. Manifestes)

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DIGITAL ART NEW YORK

STROLLING THROUGH NEW YORK CITY’S DIGITAL ARTS In the digital age, everything is fusion: art and media, technology and gaming, experiences and spaces, installations and urban architecture. Take a digitally artistic, historical and geographical stroll through New York City to see the sparks.

Let’s start from the beginning of the history of “technological arts”: the moving image. Established in Queens in 1988, The Museum of the Moving Image occupies one of the 13 original buildings of Astoria Studios, built by Paramount in 1920 to produce hundreds of silent and early sound films.

In 1989, this pioneer museum was the first to present an exhibition dedicated to video games (Hot Circuits: a video arcade); in 2004, it collaborated with Ars Electronica on the exhibition Interactions/Arts and Technology.

The museum recently re-opened its doors after a renovation and expansion in January 2011. Today, we’re just as likely to find ongoing exhibitions of both vintage and specialeffects props from Hollywood as we are to find virtual or augmented reality installations, electronic music concerts, mischievous collections of retouched images or animated graphics lifted off the Web… 08 - digitalarti #10

Our historical digital itinerary continues on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Known for its eponymous Biennial, it was the first museum dedicated to living American artists in 1931 and the first New York museum to present a major solo exhibition of a video artist (Nam June Paik) in 1982.

In 2011, this human-scaled, bauhausinspired block of granite presented a generous retrospective of the young digital artist par excellence, Cory Arcangel.

Not far south is one of the most famous, most visited and no doubt the trendiest museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Located in bustling Midtown, MoMA welcomes tourists, professionals, amateurs and students all day, all year round. More than conscious of its cosmopolitan popularity, this art institution takes very seriously its

mission to connect tradition and modernity, ancient forms and new media. Besides actively commissioning and hosting often spectacular digital installations, in 2011 the museum presented the exhibition Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, where we could find, for example, a minimalist game interface next to plastic animal figures that transform respectively into the Japanese kanji character representing them (Mojibakeru).

Given its simultaneously institutional and popular status, it was MoMA that the artists Mark Skwarek and Sander Veenhof chose to “invade” in October 2010 with their Augmented Reality intervention We AR in MoMA a virtual exhibition of uninvited artworks visible only through AR-ready smartphones, floating in the galleries of the museum itself. The opening of this pseudo-hactivist art show took place during the annual Conflux festival, which explores psychogeography through projects as simple as QRcode safaris and as zany as dogs walking humans.

South of MoMA on 6th Avenue, Big Screen Plaza is a 10,000-square-foot outdoor plaza dominated by a 30x16foot HD-format LED screen. Since 2010, the big screen has showcased a number of video and animated works,

© PHOTO D.R.

High Line, Gansevoort Street. including by students of New York art schools, as well as independent short films and Hollywood classics, for an atmosphere that ranges from artsy to family to mainstream. In early 2012, the French artist Maurice Benayoun was in the spotlight to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Streaming Museum with his digital series Occupy Wall Screen and Emotion Forecast.

Continuing southwestward, we wander into Chelsea, the gallerista district where Manhattan earns its reputation of showcase among the boroughs.

Here reside not only the big-name galleries from New York’s traditional art world, with their street-level storefronts and white walls transposed into an industrial setting, but also smaller spaces upstairs, often hidden in a labyrinth of corridors, where we’re likely to find a bit of everything and anything, including digital artworks, among other bizarre objects, concep-

tual projects and shock installations.

There is also Bitforms gallery, which is dedicated to contemporary art and new media, representing over a dozen artists.

No doubt the new “downtown” Whitney, designed by Renzo Piano and scheduled to open in 2015, will radically change the face (and visiting demographics) of the neighborhood.

In the meantime, we always appreciate the High Line, the city’s famously linear elevated park converted from an abandoned railway, which extends from 12th Street to 30th Street above West Chelsea. Throughout the year, the High Line hosts in-situ artworks, of which the most harmonious was Stephen Vitiello’s A Bell for Every Minute, a sound installation that emitted into an already animated urban soundscape the ring of a different New York bell on every minute of the hour.

Chelsea’s gallery district is also home to at least two important art centers.

Electronic Arts Intermix, one of the first nonprofit organizations in the United States dedicated to video art when it was founded in 1971, pursues its mission to develop video and digital arts through resources, education, screenings, distribution and preservation. Since 1997, Eyebeam Art+Technology Center offers residencies and grants to artists and technologists working in digital media, in addition to exhibitions, workshops, performances and other public programs.

In 2011, Eyebeam’s exhibition space on 21st Street hosted the annual Blip festival of chiptunes, or 8-bit music all the pioneers of the genre were duly represented, as well as younger talents from the post-console generation, from Bit Shifter to 4mat, from vintage electronics to acoustic instruments to purely digital, all in favor of a massive geek rave.

> digitalarti #10 - 09

© PHOTOS D.R.

Stephen Vitiello, A bell for every minutes (detail).

>

Immersive surfaces, videomapping @ Manhattan Bridge.

Dumbo Arts Festival 2011.

Down in SoHo, former bohemian art district now dominated by brandname fashion boutiques, occupying a few rooms on the 6th floor of an old building on Broadway effectively located just south of Houston Street, is Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center. Founded by a group of artists in 1977, the nonprofit organization exhibits digital artworks in its compact space, while offering workshops, artist residencies and public performances in order to educate and promote the use of new technologies in art. Harvestworks also organizes the annual New York Electronic Art Festival, which showcases digital installations, electronic music concerts, multimedia performances, etc., in several venues around the city.

Just beyond NoHo in the East Village, The Stone takes the concept of minimalist DIY to its purist extreme.

Founded and art directed by John

Eyebeam, West Street.

Zorn, cult musician of the New York avant-garde, The Stone is above all a space, purposely diminutive and devoid of all accessories save a Yamaha piano, a few amplifiers, a few dozen folding chairs and a table on the cemented ground floor of an anonymous building on the corner of Avenue C and 2nd Street, like a secret enclave where the initiated gather to listen to purely avant-garde and experimental music. Actually, the venue is open to anyone, curious or converted, who comes to appreciate a dedicated set in exchange for the modest contribution of $10 at the door of which 100% of proceeds go directly to that evening’s featured artist(s).

No stage, no cocktails, no beer, just live acoustic, electronic and electroacoustic music to enjoy in the intimacy of the venue. The lineup includes many musicians with their cellos,

trombones, accordions or percussions, often augmented by electronics, but also some of New York’s most experimental contemporary composers: Laurie Anderson, a pioneer in her genre; or the young Tristan Perich, always fascinating (if not hypnotizing) with his synthesized, “electro-organic” compositions inspired from math and computer code, such as his famous “1-Bit Symphony”.

Crossing the East River, we leave Manhattan to land in Brooklyn, or more precisely Dumbo, that little waterfront neighborhood “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”. The abandoned industrial zone once occupied by squatter artists has more recently been gentrified with Starbucks, West End, historic buildings converted into luxury condos… and a cluster of start-ups and small companies working with digital technologies in the fields of design, gaming, mobile applications, communication, editorial, etc. Indeed, they operate inside the same buildings where entire floors are occupied by galleries, art organizations and artistin-residency studios. The result is a curious cohabitation, as these parallel worlds tend to collide most often during more mainstream events and activities held around the neighborhood.

© PHOTO DUMBO ARTS FESTIVAL

It’s certainly the case of the Dumbo Arts Festival, which transforms the cobblestone streets into a spring carnival with outdoor performances by day and projections by night, while studios open their doors, and technology is recontextualized by art exhibitions that include digital works.

The festival highlight of 2011 was the 20-artist video-mapping spectacle Immersive Surfaces projected onto the Manhattan Bridge, where fluid images seemed to tremble under each passing subway. True to the social-networking trend, viewers were encouraged to 10 - digitalarti #10

© PHOTO D.R.

Imprimante 3D, Makerbot Industries. tweet photos of the installation; these images could then be seen through smartphones, floating around the bridge in augmented reality.

Another neighborhood hot spot known for its cocktail culture and “Floating Kabarette” over its interior artificial lake every Saturday night, Galapagos Art Space organizes presentations and panel discussions around the digital media industry. Occasionally it even hosts live performances of electro-acoustic music, such as those

by Tristan Perich or the Hong Kong composer-programmer Samson Young, who often integrates 8-bit sounds into his compositions for orchestra.

Penetrating further inside the borough, beyond Brooklyn Heights into Boerum Hill, The Invisible Dog Art Center is an oasis of artistic creation contained in a former warehouse of stiff plastic leashes for “invisible” dogs. Just barely retouched, this raw space of three floors and a basement is inhabited by several permanent artworks directly inspired by the building, visual and performing artists in residence, eclectic exhibitions and live performances by emerging artists, provocative installations and mini festivals for all manner of experimental arts. Among the works augmented by digital technology was Prana, conceived and realized in situ by Chris Klapper, a glowing installation that reacted to approaching visitors and ambient vibrations like a beating heart, or at rest like a breathing lung.

Four blocks east, on the 4th floor of a low-rise building on 3rd Street, we enter NYC Resistor, a space shared by a collective of multidisciplinary hackers. One of the more practical inventions headquartered in this hackerspace is MakerBot, a commercialized series of open source 3D printers.

Other residents include the Micro-

controller Study Group, which works on projects using Arduino and other applications of embedded electronics, and a professional laser. NYC Resistor also offers initiation classes and workshops for various techniques, so any interested collaborator is welcome to join in the jam.

The stroll ends where personal exploration begins, through trends, communities, alternative and underground cultures. When it comes to independent games, the Babycastles collective, founded by Kunal Gupta and Syed Salahuddin in December 2009 to coincide with the Blip festival, relaunched the concept of the new-generation indie arcade, giving renewed exposure to an avant-garde culture of DIY games played socially in retrocyberpunk spaces.

After leaving venues which turned out to be not permanent, their hand-decorated arcade cabinets are currently spread out in several different venues: Death By Audio and Public Assembly in hipster’hood Williamsburg; Secret Project Robot in emerging art’hood Bushwick; and NYU Game Center, the showcase gallery of the very serious course in game design as a creative practice, located on the campus of New York University in downtown Manhattan. The future development of Babycastles is to be continued in fall 2012… At a time of the new arcade, Arduino, video mapping and augmented reality, to each her own digital arts itinerary through the urban jungle of the Big Apple.

Chris Klapper, Prana @ Invisible Dog Art Center.

CHERISE FONG

FURTHER INFORMATION: Babycastele: < http://babycastles.tumblr.com > Big Screen Plaza: < http://bigscreenplaza.com > BitForms: < www.bitforms.com > Blip Festival: < http://blipfestival.org > Conflux: < http://confluxfestival.org > Dumbo Arts Festival: < http://dumboartsfestival.com > EAI (Electronic Arts Intermix): < www.eai.org > Eyebeam (Art+Technology Center): < www.eyebeam.org > Galapagos Art Space: < http://galapagosartspace.com >

Harvestworks (Digital Media Arts Center): < www.harvestworks.org > MoMA (Museum of Modern Art): < www.moma.org > Museum of the Moving Image: < www.movingimage.us > NYC Resistor: < www.nycresistor.com > NYU Game Center: < http://gamecenter.nyu.edu > The High Line: < www.thehighline.org > The Invisible Dog (Art Center): < www.theinvisibledog.org > The Stone: < www.thestonenyc.com > Whitney Museum of American Art: < http://whitney.org >

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FEEDBACK PANORAMA

PANORAMA THE FOURTEENTH Le Fresnoy, or the National Studio of Contemporary Arts, is structured around a school directed by an artist, Alain Fleischer, who invites others to train still others. This year, the curator of the exhibition, Benjamin Weil, whose international experience is well known, took up the challenge of revealing a common meaning in more than fifty artistic proposals ranging from performance to film through installations and apparatus.

© PHOTO DOMINIQUE MOULON

Monsieur Moo & Louise Drubigny, Yolande, 2012.

Production: Le Fresnoy.

Warding off bad luck It is said of ships that, “if they have not tasted wine, they’ll taste blood!” But why christen ships with champagne when you can do the opposite? It is 7:30 pm and the public is getting antsy on this inauguration day for the fourteenth Panorama exhibition. Monsieur Moo, in collaboration with Louise Drubigny, has been preparing for months for what will last less than a second. He has called upon a local crane operating company to suspend Yolande, which is the name of the boat, more than fifteen metres above ground.

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The broad swath of coloured light that surrounds the spectators is then swept aside by the rhythms that evolve, accelerate and then slow down. We might all be passengers on a space ship, which makes us think of the endless transition in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: a Space Odyssey, another voyage only in colour.

It would seem that the more abstract the work, the more one projects oneself by injecting the souvenirs they trigger in us.

In space

Together they have piled a few thousand bottles of sparkling wine against a cinder block wall. Around 7:45, the wooden hull is released to come crashing against the bottles that it explodes before causing the cinder block wall to collapse. The first shock is crystalline, while the second is duller. Monsieur Moo and Louise are happy and the public is overjoyed. As for the spectators who come to the site of the performance later, they can only observe the traces: Yolande washed up on a floor strewn with bottles of Blanc de Blanc that are mostly, but not all, broken. Like members of a scientific police unit, they attempt to imagine what has happened here, to reconstitute the scene without however grasping the motivation behind such an artistic inversion.

Entering now into the space of the exhibition, all the works dialogue with each other, as this is what the curator wanted.

There is no black box, except at the entrance where the work Mol by Ryoichi Kurokawa is a bit apart from the others.

Two projections that are practically the same suggest to us that there is perhaps a parallel world to ours where everything is similar, or almost. The images literally float in the space without our knowing exactly where they come from. Two parallelepipeds, just for an instant, evolve in the emptiness before fragmenting into innumerable particles cut like diamonds.

As in weightlessness, they are subject to the sonic accidents of a music of noises.

The three-dimensional monoliths that we have seen are still in our minds before our eyes without our being able to identify them in the visual chaos that the sonic accidents struggle vainly to organise.

These particles that float in the spaces of the images without support remind us that emptiness dominates in the universe, from the infinitely small to the infinitely big.

Only colour

In the invisible

In 1921 Alexandre Rodtchenko covered three canvasses with primary colours one red, one yellow and one blue.

The immersive voyage entitled DSLE -3that the Dutch artist Edwin van der Heide offers us on the film studio could be considered a homage, by transition, to Rodtchenko’s monochromes. In the beginning there is red light all around and in the end, there is blue light all around.

The sound at the beginning of the voyage is as pure as the light, but gradually becomes more complex to the point of becoming granular, disturbing the image.

In the centre of the exhibition, there is a card that announces the installation Hand-held by David Rokeby. More than all the other written explanations, this one stands out because the work is invisible. In order to activate it, spectators must enter into its space that one can imagine, a posteriori, is cubic. In this cube of nothing, our bodies trigger the projection of images of hands, playing cards and other objects. So naturally we reach out to receive these images. By moving up and down, you can make the image sharper.

© PHOTOS D.R.

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Edwin van der Heide, DSLE -3-, 2012.

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Ryoichi Kurokawa, Mol, 2012.

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David Rokeby, Hand-held, 2012.

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Arthur Zerktouni, In memoriam, 2012.

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Maya Da-rin, Horizon des événements, 2012.

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Dorothée Smith, Cellulairement, 2012.

Production: Le Fresnoy.

The artist obviously knows the frescoes in the San Marco convent in Florence where Fra Angelico painted disembodied hands.

But this is also a reference to those who walk in the street staring at the telephone they are holding in their hands. Within the cubic space of his work, the Canadian artist has piled up images so that others will look for them and find them.

Does he even know himself where he has hidden them, as one might hide a treasure the better to forget about it? The spectators comment on the images that appear in the palms of their hands amidst choreography improvised for the occasion.

They inhabit the space of the work that the artist has cut out of nothingness.

Mirrors of rain Art history is filled with mirrors, from Velasquez to Pistoletto and Arthur Zerktouni, with his installation entitled In Memoriam, prolongs the list of gleaming artistic surfaces. But here it is in the droplets of a screen of water that spectators are reflected. Close up, they are like red, green and blue pixels. From afar they form a mirror that reflects our image with a certain latency. Our silhouettes, defined in relation to something else, are definitely fluid and there’s a lapse in time before they disappear. Arthur’s mirror seems to act on time, to slow it down a little.

For this reason we can play with the shadow of this other that we slightly precede.

Spectators perceiving this latency make lateral movements as though to test this decidedly interactive installation.

The water, which we imagine is in a

closed circuit, ceaselessly refreshes the image of those who are observing it while also evoking the participative video artworks of pioneers like Peter Campus and Dan Graham.

Lost in the city There are apparatus in the domain of prison architecture that allow one person to survey many. It is called panopticon and dates from the end of the 18th century, whereas the satellites of today, be they civil or military, authorise a few men to survey all the others. The audiovisual installation Horizon of Events by Maya Da-rin functions around GPS technology, which stands for Global Positioning System, which we know was invented by the military. Starting from a hilltop in Marseille, she is fitted out to communicate her position in real time to the camera she has left there. The camera, constantly informed by satellites, follows the artist as she walks away towards the shoreline below.

The spectators try to follow her with their gaze, but are limited to guessing where she is, hidden as she is by the buildings of the city. We can imagine her in the centre of the frame, which moves intermittently.

The passer-by is also equipped with an audio sensing device that allows the spectator to match up information to better guess the position of she who knows she’s being tracked. But are we not all permanently under surveillance from a constellation of invisible, silent satellites?

When we look in the sky, we might imagine he or she behind their screen possibly spying on us without even knowing who we are.

Human warmth Lastly, there is Cellulairement, an installation of an apparent complexity that functions around a simple concept: merging the heat of two distant bodies without contact. The space of the work is occupied by equipment that includes a thermal camera allowing spectators to discover representations of themselves through the quantities of heat they generate. But this data is archived and sent to the artist who perceives the heat of the other via, she tells us, an implanted electronic chip.

The idea that we can correspond with another person through the body heat we emit without actually controlling it is interesting because communication from a distance quite often implies accepting filters by words as much as by silences.

Whereas here, we can imagine sharing the heat we give off and that keeps us alive and merging with that of another person who has become its host.

DOMINIQUE MOULON

FURTHER INFORMATION: Le Fresnoy: < www.lefresnoy.net > Panorama 14: < www.panorama14.net > Monsieur Moo: < www.monsieurmoo.com > Edwin van der heide: < www.evdh.net >

Ryoichi Kurokawa: < www.ryoichikurokawa.com > David Rokeby: < www.davidrokeby.com > Dorothée Smith: < www.dorotheesmith.net > Cellulairement: < http://cellulairement.net > digitalarti #10 - 13

PORTRAIT SHU LEA CHEANG

INTERACTIVE MYTHOLOGIES Š PHOTOS JOAN TOMAS

From early days, Shu Lea Cheang, the Taiwanese multimedia art pioneer, has been building interactive fictions borrowing from the major themes of our time, gender, sexuality, science fiction and media.

Her mythological fictions draw on intimate as much as public matters, questioning her own story whilst inviting the spectator/visitor to participate.

IKU, performance.

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What is mostly remembered from the multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang is her famous and ultra-commented film, I.K.U. revealed in 2000. A work that did as much good as harm to the Taiwanese woman since what the most transgressive art lovers and the majority of critics have retained from this futuristic and erotic-pornographic -"cyberporn", even- feature film is the sole scandalous aspect, ultimately overlooking a whole side of her work

and its themes. If Shu Lea Cheang is a pioneer in the field of media art, she is above all a true multidisciplinary and activist artist whose work spans from film to net art and performance (online, in galleries) and video installation, alone or through collaborations.

Shu Lea Cheang, from one media to the other Currently based in Paris, Shu Lea

Cheang considers herself a nomadic artist (she has lived throughout Europe, Asia and the United States) whose themes become obvious as she travels and wanders on. Cheang has truly emerged as a major artist during the last decade and she has quickly risen as one of the most important voices in the field of "media arts".

Through the full array of contemporary tools and technologies made available to artists, her work has been exploring many social and political ("i.e. ruling humans") issues, through singular aesthetics and extremely intimate concerns inherited from her personal path. Her participatory vision of art, her commitment to the interaction of the viewer and her collaborative production modes have set an example in the now encumbered field of multimedia artists. She started to work in this area very early on and was quickly recognised as a pioneer of the genre. As a member of the Paper Tiger Television collective, as early as 1981, she produced work for the national satellite television network channel. She created many video installations for art galleries and started directing 35 mm films.

© PHOTO ROCIO CAMPAÑA

IKU, performance.

Cyberporn, virus and futuristic mythology Her most noticed work undoubtedly remains the essential I.K.U. (orgasm in Japanese), the history of the seductive Reiko, a (cyber) mechanical doll in charge of collecting the greatest possible amount of data on human sexuality. A deliberately pornographic film inspired by key scenes of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (the final scene in the elevator is I.K.U.’s initial scene) This parodic cyberpunk set was followed by UKI viral performance, an apocalyptic cyber and biopunk prequel started in 2009 (on which noise artists were invited to perform in March 2012 at the ElectroPixel Festival in Nantes). If I.K.U. is purely cyberpunk, UKI was inspired by science fiction biopunk, forecasting the collapse of the internet in the future and the creation of a biological network (bionet) that would infect blood cells and DNA by creating the Organismo, a virtual and chemical orgasm triggered without any physical contact. The project itself was a commission of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, presented under the title Brandon and produced online

between 1998 and 1999. Fascinated by the prominent gender war on the internet, home of unclear identities, Cheang became interested in cyberfeminism and connected with the Australian women group VNS Matrix.

Brandon used to be presented as a website (inaccessible today even though screens copies are available) and was inspired by the story of Brandon Teena, a transsexual murdered in 1993 in Nebraska, after her identity was revealed. This was the first internet work commissioned by the famous Museum. Shu Lea Cheang said she wanted to present the tragic story of Brandon Teena in an experimental way that would express all of the fluidity and ambiguity of gender and identity in contemporary societies and on the net.

At the "roots" of eco-conscious art Her latest project, La Graine et le Compost (The Seed and the Compost) unveils yet another facet of the artist and her concerns. Folowing UKI which already was dealing with our "biological future" and the impact of the environment on the human body, Cheang is reversing the equation in

an atypical way and launching a cyber-organic project. Organized by la Gaîté Lyrique (+Petit Bain) in May 2012, La Graine et le Compost proposes to change the current economic paradigm by imposing composting and recycling as a new currency.

Waste is therefore meant to replace the Euro as a currency. Cheang proposes to turn the city into a compost farm by dispersing containers throughout the city, inviting citizens to get involved in pirate gardening ("hacktif" gardening) in urban areas and to set up groups to remotely monitor and look after the new shoots through various networks.

This eco-citizen, technical and artistic performance carried out under the aegis of the Greenrush and Re:Farm The City collectives illustrates the "Aboriginal hi-tech" (as she likes to name herself) side of Shu Lea Cheang, an artist who has apparently not ceased to amaze us.

MAXENCE GRUGIER

FURTHER INFORMATION: < www.mauvaiscontact.info >

videos: < http://vimeo.com/user5349216 > digitalarti #10 - 15

DIGITAL ART CYBER

CONNECTED BODIES © YANN MINH

AND ARTISTIC PHANTASMAGORIA Yann Minh, Nooscaphe X groupe.

Human bodies that are technologized, hybridized and connected have haunted imaginations and representations for decades.

In novels, artworks, mangas and comics, film and advertising, these images have sensibly moved from the realm of pure fiction to projections of near futures. The phantasmagoria of these figurations of technological virtuality is now doubled by incarnated virtuality, currently brewing in the very real world of laboratories and enterprises.

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Some artists tackle these issues in such a way that this crucial aspect is often relegated to the background, if not altogether absent. Meanwhile, the enhanced bodies of science-fiction literature and films are confronting political ideologies and industrial techno-scientific powers.

In this regard, the cyberpunk world exemplifies this exploration of possible dystopias through the technological invasion of bodies and minds. The novels are set on our devasted planet, in a highly technological but poor society (a category reinvented by sociologists to describe the situation of Japan after Fukushima), excluding those who control the high-tech industries and have power and money.

In this world adrift, technology has triumphed, leaving humans in misery.

Looking closely at Yann Minh’s work, we can only be struck by the gap between his chaotic and often post-apocalyptic societies and the distressed cyberpunk world he claims to be a part of. The gap is not only in form (clean-cut 3D for his films or Second Life and his retro video-game esthetics), but also in content, which is very optimistic about the ongoing transformation.

The fusion between human and machine is perceived as a useful and necessary development. Techno-acceleration (cyberpunk concept of machines overtaking humans) is erased in favor of bodies with augmented capacities, as if this were obvious.

However, watching his film Noogenesis, for example, calls to mind a scene of The Matrix showing the non-life of humans, used as energy by the machines, which have taken control and induced people into a programmed dream of life in the real world, rather than the powerful erotic trance, full of freedom and torn away from the industry, portrayed in his fiction.

Cybersex is one of the themes that inspires these artists (another example is Shu Lea Cheang’s I.K.U.). It’s also a theme that should raise important questions about what makes us human, not only as pure matter and organism, but also as a being with desires and emotions.

Here as well, the thought-process is short-circuited. In these projections, the fusion between human and machine in the aspects of intimate pleasure seems to result in a double hybrid, with both mechanical humans and humanized machines. But the powerful idea of the miserable object devoted to its master, which we saw in Blade Runner, for example, is absent. Instead, we have an ecstatic acceptance a bit morbid in my opinion of mechanized sexuality, not to mention paying for it.

Yet many thoughtful arguments have been expressed on this topic, even dating back several years. Of course, there is Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985), which has the advantage of being independent and considers the matter of humans becoming machines from political and social perspectives that have largely been reinforced since it was published.

Haraway imagines a technological future that would accelerate understanding and action, especially by breaking the binary grids of world analysis in order to reveal the creative complexities that lie in the cracks. Much more recently, Thierry Hoquet’s Cyborg Philosophie is accurately subtitled “thinking against dualisms”.

I believe that this is indeed the core of the issue: getting rid of binary representations in order to bring into focus and appropriate techno-industry babble, without being dumbstruck by the evocative power of possible worlds generated by contempo-

© YANN MINH

Yann Minh, Le Scanner.

In this way, Cyborgs in the Mist, a film by Gwenola Wagon and Stéphane Degoutin, is particularly successful and enlightening.

Instead of creating a new fiction from the concept of cyborgs or connected bodies, they explored the effects of a “cyborg future” on a street in Saint-Denis outside Paris. The machines’ power of action is demonstrated by a simple guided tour of the various places and activities on the street: the first house made of reinforced concrete, a data center, an animal flour factory, an evangelist church.

The voiceover analyzing these images offers a critical explanation of what links these apparently disparate spaces in particular the LOPH (Fight against Pro-

Yann Minh, Media ØØØ méduse.

Yann Minh, Athanor.

grammed Human Obsolescence) Laboratory, which works on Transhumanism.

This is where all paths lead: to a posthumanism decided by some and perhaps tomorrow suffered by all. It’s a structurally intense, robotic and chemical project of transformation that shifts humanity into another future, another entity. Taking Timothy Leary’s idea of “enslaved body” literally, Transhumanism explores the feasibility of a “body-without-organs” as a pure cyborg. Cyborg is not the machine. (…) Strictly speaking, it would be the organism directed by the machine (Thierry Hoquet). This is the figure that seems to clearly emerge.

As a philosopher who is especially interested in sciences and techniques, I was nourished by authors who attested to the

possible end of humans confronted by their own creations (from Gunther Anders to Jacques Ellul). Despite the deep respect I have for these often intense and prophetic analyses, I have also moved far away from them, as pessimism will get us nowhere. Nonetheless, the dumb fascination with technology that we see in certain artists leaves me more than dubious.

We may think that Man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks (F. J. Ossang), but is that enough? I believe that when an artist’s dream calls upon the realities of our time, she must also confront the difficult exercise of critical thought.

Otherwise she runs the risk of being an illustrator, or even worse, the bearer of the techno-industry’s sugar-coated message regarding the extreme experiences that are changing our world.

MANUELA DE BARROS

Yann Minh, Neuro-Portrait.

© YANN MINH

rary science. It’s up to the artists to interpret, clarify, disambiguate and reappropriate the propaganda.

digitalarti #10 - 17

Daan Roosegaarde, Dune 4.1 Maastunnel, Rotterdam, 2007.

THE TECHNO-POETRY OF DAAN ROOSEGAARDE © PHOTOS DAAN ROOSEGAARDE / STUDIO ROOSEGAARDE > WWW.STUDIOROOSEGAARDE.NET

Walls of “intelligent” aluminum flowers, digital plants that light up and react to passers-by, “wired” clothing… The works of Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde convey a strange synergy between technology and humanity, with a backdrop of organic architectural poetry. Interview with the creator. nously to sounds and passers-by is very representative of your work, as it delicately mixes digital elements with organic references. This idea of interactivity in public space can also be found in your work "Interactive Landscape". What is it about this approach that interests you?

How has it been influenced by your background, your taste in architecture, and more precisely architectural design?

Daan Roosegaarde

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Daan, your tactile and high-tech projects initiate interesting encounters between the city, nature and people—in particular the "Dune" series, which you first developed in the Maastunnel, an underground passage outside Rotterdam. This installation of digital “plants” reacting lumi-

I’ll go back to when I was 16 years old and still in high school. Our class went on a field trip to visit the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), which was presenting a big exhibition of incredible wooden models made by Arata Isozaki. I was completely fascinated. It was at this moment that I understood that I wanted to “make things”, to be somehow in touch with the world. My first interest was in concepts of scale and space, in particular the relationship

between the body and its immediate environment. A few years later, I became interested in time and the calculations that go with it. That’s when I started working on concepts of interactivity.

In 2008, I went to Japan to meet the curators of YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media) regarding our interactive piece Liquid Space 6.0.

As soon as I got out of the taxi and saw the museum, I recognized the building as one of Isozaki’s models.

So we invited him to the opening, and he came. I have a photo of Isozaki and me at the heart of Liquid Space, talking about how architecture can create a link with the public in terms of real-time experience. He was passionate about the subject, which evidently stimulated his always sharp thinking. For me, this conversation was like coming full circle.

MEDIA ART DAAN ROOSEGAARDE

That said, before that decisive visit to NAi, I always loved buildings and making things. I grew up in Holland, surrounded by dams and water. Some of these dams were especially steep, and my sister and I had fun putting wheels on cabinets and racing down the slopes. When I think about it, it was pretty dangerous. We couldn’t really brake; we could have broken our necks. But like all children, we were fascinated by the wild side of nature around us. We made our own improvised equipment, like pulling a cable across the swamps. Already at that age, I thought about how I could adapt to my environment.

Today, it’s true that technology plays big a role in my work. In my studio with my team, we spend a lot of time developing all this. But at the same time, we don’t just put on a display of machines and computers. We try to use technology to personalize or socialize a space.

The question is how to marry nature and technology? I’m always asking myself how we can improve this analogue world, with the idea that it can be an extension of what we are. For me, the key is to reinvent, to “update” reality in short, to make it more human.

But beyond this idea of updating reality, most of your pieces, such as "Dune", function as a series, with versions that evolve over time. It’s as if code becomes your DNA, inspiring "works-in-progress" with a touch of poetry, for example "Lotus", the organic and reactive wall strewn with “intelligent” aluminum flowers…

Yes, I would say that most of my works function as sequences of inter-

active stories. I have this wish that art will go on forever. That’s the main reason why I’ve been using technology since I was old enough to open a can of food, and that the viewer is a direct element of the artistic identity of my work.

Dune was directly inspired by a trip I made to Morocco when I was in my twenties. I was watching the horizon line of the desert. At first sight, everything seemed completely static.

But I finally noticed that this line was constantly interrupted by mov-

ing silhouettes of nomads crossing the landscape. The hot air of the desert totally blurred the silhouettes, producing a curious effect in form.

This fascinated me, and I always wondered how this would render in our urban environment, in a city such as Shanghai, for example.

How could we blend this natural tactile sensation of objects with technology in futuristic landscapes that would remain emotionally connected to us? My idea is to reconciliate this interactivity and this poetry with our senses. So I thought of pieces such as Dune and Lotus as possible future “landscapes”.

Another important point about the idea of a series is that you don’t just cut and paste the same piece when you rework it for a new exhibition venue. I’d say it’s more like “copymorph”. It’s also a way of learning from our previous shows, from the different interactions with the visitors. This feeds our updates.

So if we show Dune in Shanghai, the interactive experience will be slightly different from the previous one in Hong Kong, for example.

I believe it’s these little details that create a real interaction with the public.

Nature and technology have a lot in common. However they evolve, the components of these two entities live and die. That’s why I like to re-situate elements of nature using new approaches, both futuristic and organic. This sort of “new nature” is at the heart of my work. It’s a form of techno-poetry.

TO READ: Interactive Landscape, Daan Roosegaarde, Adele Chong, Timo de Rijk (éditions NAi Uitgevers, 2010)

> © PHOTOS DAAN ROOSEGAARDE / STUDIO ROOSEGAARDE > WWW.STUDIOROOSEGAARDE.NET

Daan Roosegaarde, Lotus 7.0, 2010-2011.

Daan Roosegaarde, Liquid Space 6.1, 2009.

digitalarti #10 - 19

© PHOTOS DAAN ROOSEGAARDE / STUDIO ROOSEGAARDE > WWW.STUDIOROOSEGAARDE.NET

MEDIA ART DAAN ROOSEGAARDE

Daan Roosegaarde, Marble, 2012.

of your works, movement seems to > Inbeersmany at the heart of the interactivity: viewmoving around the work as in "Flow 5.0" (which was included in the "Imagine" exhibition this spring at Stedelijk Museum Den Bosch); or the work itself moving, as in the series "Liquid Space", where the piece physically interacts, growing, shrinking or lighting up like a kind of choreographed robotic ballet…

The concept is the same to update our senses by reconnecting them with nature. We need this “new grammar”, because the general rhythm of our lives is affected daily by our overexposure to multiple forms of media.

I’m interested in what happens when technology comes out of the screen to become an integral part of our walls, our cityscapes, even our bodies.

What would a Facebook plaza look like?

Could we create “intelligent highways” capable of generating their own electricity? These are all topics that interest me, always with the same idea of making the world more interactive, more sustainable.

So it’s not surprising to find you working for a program dedicated to interactive sound and light pillars such as "Sensor Valley 8.0", commissioned by the cultural center of Assen in the Netherlands.

You had already developed object-forms of this caliber for the projects "Lunar" and "Marbles"…

Sensor Valley is the largest-ever concentration in Europe of pillars using sensors to trigger light and sound sequences that interact with the public.

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The people of Assen call them “knuffelpilaren” [literally, “hug pillars”], as they react directly to not only movement but also touch.

The city has a long history with sensor technology. Studio Roosegaarde’s experience in social design and innovative LED research won us a place among 125 other projects selected to be on permanent exhibit in the entry hall of the new cultural center. It’s an interesting project, because it contributes very concretely to this idea of improving the world through the daily behavior of residents, using these tactile landscapes that integrate the city, light and the population. It’s very stimulating. There’s even a restaurant that put a dessert representing these luminous pillars on its menu.

One of your more recent projects is related to the fashion field. "Intimacy" references “wired” clothing with dresses composed of “intelligent” aluminum leaves, which become transparent by virtue of these infamous principles of interaction…

Intimacy explores the relationship between intimacy and technology in the form of a second skin. The question is how far we can take this experiment, while remaining true to the idea that this use of technology makes us more human. These dresses were an incredibly quick success.

We’re already working on the 3.0 series. It’s fascinating, because I’m not familiar with the fashion world.

It’s great to be able to enter it through this project.

Great painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens also worked within artistic communities. It’s ideal for transcending the visionary and technical approach. I totally adhere to this concept, even if the period is different and the medium has changed.

The studio is a super tool for developing and expressing the emotions or ideas that I can have with my team of designers and engineers.

We are very enthusiastic about creating special things. Within the team, some are devoted to developing our proprietary system Microchip, for the controllers and the software, while others are specialized in hardware and interactivity.

Managing a creative studio when you’re an artist is like following a balanced diet. If I chose to focus exclusively on lucrative projects, while neglecting the creative parameter, the resulting pieces would be boring.

On the other hand, if I only focus on

artistic activities, I won’t be able to develop the technology that feeds them. Harmonizing these two approaches creates the necessary tension. It’s a kind of suspense that leads to a magical side, a bit like a dream lab.

Where will the dream manifest itself next?

Currently we’re working on several large-scale, long-term interactive installations in the cities of Shanghai, Eindhoven and Stockholm. But my latest baby is the “intelligent highway” that I mentioned earlier. It’s an interactive, sustainable project developed with the company BTP Heijmans.

We’re also working on a few on-site installations, of which the most intriguing is no doubt the renovation of a big mining tunnel for the Sydney Art Biennial, where we’ll show all the versions of Dune.

Daan Roosegaarde, SDF (Sustainable Dance Floor), Sustainable Dance Club, 2008.

INTERVIEW BY LAURENT CATALA

FURTHER INFORMATION: site: < www.studioroosegaarde.net >

Daan Roosegaarde, Flow 5.0, 2007 (TodaysArt) - 2011.

© PHOTOS DAAN ROOSEGAARDE / STUDIO ROOSEGAARDE > WWW.STUDIOROOSEGAARDE.NET

You often use the pronoun “we”.

Even though you’re known as a solo artist, your core of collaborators at Studio Roosegaarde seems very important…

Daan Roosegaarde, Intimacy, 2010-2011.

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FEEDBACK MANIFESTE

MANIFESTE 2012 As the first symbiotic festival between IRCAM and Acanthes Center, Manifeste 2012 has become the new venue for bubbling creativity in art and contemporary music…

Echo-Daimonon

MANIFESTE 2012 festival académie, 1er juin - 1er juillet, ircam, Centre Pompidou

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June 1. Opening night in La Salle Pleyel brought a common perspective to the works of Ligeti, Manoury and Mahler.

Ligeti first, with the Paris orchestra’s magistral interpretation of his Atmosphères, a micro-polyphonic work composed in 1961 and directly inspired by electronic music. It was a delight from the first chord, nine minutes of nuanced ascension, as the orchestra became an organic, polymorphous, rustling and evolving space, capable of a refined, perfectly mastered and spatialized sense of detail in sound matter.

Manoury was next with Echo-Daimonon, concerto for piano and orchestra and real-time electronics. This virtuoso piece for solo piano was a truly epic race between the piano and its digital avatars four ghost pianos. The orchestra served as a backdrop, surrounding the piano, which diffracted as the ghost pianos took over, multiplied and invaded the space, only to surrender at the end, but not without having first taken possession of the pianist. The piece was wild and free, all in energy.

The second part of the program featured Ligeti’s Lontano directly followed by the Adagio of Mahler’s 10th, creating a parallel between the perpetual feeds induced by the cannon of the former, with the alternating melodies never identical and progressing without end, resolving

themselves like a fallen raindrop of the latter. The art of polyphony was honored in all its forms.

Workshop MIR and Creation June 2. An all-day workshop held at IRCAM devoted to MIR (Music Information Retrieval) gave an overview of the center’s current research using MIR in processes of listening to, analyzing and creating with sound. Gérard Assayag, who heads IRCAM’s Musical Representations research team, presented the concepts of analysis and retrieval managed by the extraordinary real-time improvisation software Omax and its new version B.OMax. Diemo Schwatz, research developer of the Music and Real-Time Interaction group, presented the CataRT software and the concepts of concatenative synthesis by corpus.

This concept of very high-level granular synthesis is gradually gaining recogni-

Night: Light June 3. One show, three artists.

Choreography by Alban Richard, music

by Raphael Cendo and lighting by Valérie Sigward. The idea was to repossess IRCAM’s famously mythical Espace de projection and to revisit its expressive possibilities.

Night: Light is part concert, part installation and part performance. Totally stripped down, minimalist, even sterile mise en scène, incarnating a sort of gigantic panic room where the padded

Alban Richard, Night Light.

© PHOTO AGATHE POUPENEY

This year, the spotlight was on French composer Philippe Manoury. Still relatively unknown to the general public, he was able to demonstrate throughout the festival the immense richness and creativity that inhabit his works.

Manoury’s presence literally dominated Manifeste 2012. A brief overview of the Festival (part one), which preceded the Academy (part two).

tion, allowing artists to work with textures and soundscapes, instrumental synthesis, audio resynthesis and all sorts of explorations of interactive syntheses. The morning session concluded with Philippe Manoury discussing the various procedures of audio description used to make acoustic and electronic sounds interact coherently while developing a piece.

This workshop, as well as the day of study devoted to Manoury’s works or the excellent “Producing Time” symposium, were generally open and freely accessible to the public. One shouldn’t hesitate to venture inside IRCAM to benefit from these generously shared experiences.

© PHOTO LUC VLEMINCKX

Thomas Hauert & Fabian Barba / Cie ZOO. You've Changed.

dancer, carried away in perpetual movement, attempts to dialogue with the sounds and light.

The original intention of the piece disorienting the audience by immersing it in a pool of sensations worked perfectly in itself. As the piece progressed, the three channels diverged, sometimes becoming completely estranged from each other, creating a truly tangible schizophrenia inside the space.

Tolerable for some, less tolerable for others.

You’ve Changed June 7. An intriguing performance by the Swiss choreographer Thomas Hauert and Fabian Barba for the dance company ZOO, You’ve Changed is an extension of the previous performance

by Thomas Hauert Accords, in which he and his dance company explored the idea of group organization as an autonomous entity.

You’ve Changed is the continuation of this research and reinforced this impression using management criteria for group interaction: control, letting go, links, paths. It also stages a dialogue between the dancers and two layers of video screens, creating a temporary mirror effect while diffracting the space on stage.

The overall picture is a series of strange compositions, featuring virtuose dancers in pajamas, halfway between Teletubbies and Care Bears. The music composed by Dick Van der Harst and Peter van Hoesen builds an ambience where almost lyrical seventies jazz-rock overlaps with electroacoustic bits and very refined minimalist electric guitars.

Digital June 8. An evening dedicated to hybridizing acoustic instruments and the use of electronics as a means of augmentation. Outstanding from this program was the now-historical piece Pluton, which in 1988 led Philippe Manoury to develop his basic concepts of following and detecting the musician’s instrumental play thanks to the intervention of computer programming.

His collaboration with Miller Puckette produced Max, the most famous modular programming software in the world.

Created 25 years ago, Pluton still surprises with its freshness, its lyricism, and especially its great mastery and finesse concerning the balance between the initial instrument, the piano and its spatialized digital projection.

Manoury will similarly enchant us with Neptune on June 9 at La Cité de

la Musique. Piece for three percussions and interactive system composed in 1991, Neptune is based entirely on instrumentalists controling synthesized music.

Synapse and Inferno June 13. Along with Philippe Manoury, Yann Robin closed part one of Manifeste 2012 with the final evening “Real/Virtual” at La Cité de la Musique.

First, Manoury’s Synapse: a complex work on the transformation of information using evolving motifs, managed solely by the orchestra, recalling Jeu de la vie developed by Conway in artificial life.

Second, Yann Robin’s Inferno, for grand symphonic orchestra and real-time electronics. The composer transfigured the orchestra in a spectacular adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, both graphic and organic. Borrowing touches of filmic sound design, with particular attention given to low frequencies, Robin gave body and power to the vertiginous fall imagined by Dante.

A very fine success.

CHRISTINE WEBSTER

FURTHER INFORMATION: Manifeste: < http://manifeste.ircam.fr > digitalarti #10 - 23

FEEDBACK BAINS NUMÉRIQUES

WHEN DIGITAL ARTS REINVENT THE CITY The social and political issues of digital arts in public space were at the heart of the professional talks at Bains Numériques 2012, held from June 9 to 16. On the agenda were topics such as “new city and civic practices” and “reconciling public and private interests”, all inviting international players to share their experiences, confront their perspectives and present their projects. Participants included Weigong Liou (member of the Cultural Affairs Commission of the government of Taipei/Taiwan), Jean-Paul Fourmentraux (sociologist, lecturer at

The 7th Bains Numériques biennial organized by Centre des Arts d’Enghien-les-Bains questioned the relationship between digital arts and the city. The integration of "digital culture" into the urban fabric and the new practices implied by this "investment" are opening up countless possibilities both locally and globally, as this artistic and technological revolution takes place in our increasingly interconnected world.

Lille III University in France) and Malcolm Levy (artist and curator of the New Forms Festival in Vancouver, Canada). Their diverse profiles and rich experiences were expressed in these debates moderated by some of our contributors (Dominique Moulon, Véronique Godé...) alongside glimpses of festivals and art projects relayed by RAN (Réseau des Arts Numériques).

Theory and practice were literally only a stone’s throw away, as Bains Numériques offered an itinerary of

© PHOTO SIMON JONES

Simon Jones, Perfect vehicule (2006), exposition MACHines @ Bains Numériques 2012.

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artworks spread out across Enghien.

Most pieces were interactive, prompting viewers to mime strange gestures in front of giant LED screens that triggered a waterfall of words (HP Process, Words City), or to animate a “theater” of 3D shadows to which other “avatars” could respond through the magic of telepresence (Joseph Hyde, Me & My Shadow), or to displace dots forming a stylized silhouette of a digital ghost (Zhan Jia-Hua, Soma Mapping II).

This last installation was awarded during the festival’s international competitions, which aimed to reveal and support new talent in three distinct disciplines: sound arts, visual arts and choreographic arts.

One of the most moving moments in the last category featured a “pas de deux” between a dancer and a little robot created by Emmanuelle Grangier (Link human/robot, ≠1 territoires). It was indeed refreshing to see dance in the spotlight of a digital arts festival rare, but perfectly legitimate, as Dominique Roland, director of Centre des Arts and Bains Numériques, believes: In the field of performing arts, choreography was the first to use technology for esthetic purposes: Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and more recently, Carolyn Carlson and Michèle Noiret…

© PHOTO NICOLAS LAVERROUX

Carl Craig pres. 69 @ Bains Numériques 2012.

The pillar of this year’s festival was the MACHines exhibition, co-developed with the Elektra festival.

Its pan-Canadian selection of artists challenged humans’ ambiguous relationship with the technologies they develop. As suggested by the title of the exhibition, it featured devices and artifacts that were basically dominated by sound, airwaves, resonance and speed pieces that were sometimes disorienting or quite simply amusing, low-tech or high-tech, designed by Steve Daniels, Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Nichola FeldmanKiss, Adad Hannah, Graeme Patterson, David Rokeby and Pavitra Wickramasinghe. Counterpointing the theme of the title, the centerpiece of the exhibition was more “in praise of slowness”: Simon Jones’ Perfect Vehicle, designed to rotate slowly as it is being “blown” by the driver (lying down, enveloped in a

blue-green suit), evoked a steam engine drowning in a desert of sensations… The ultimate paradox was that the images recorded for the video version of this retro-futuristic project were shot in the famous Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah, USA, which have provided the setting for so many land speed record runs…

On another level, we could also discover, if not experience, Étienne Rey’s Tropique, all in light and sound waves. Oppressive, like (almost) all immersive works, this project invited viewers to step inside a “dark room” transpierced by three diffracted light rays. Disorientation and sensory troubles immediately guaranteed it’s no coincidence that this device was designed with support from neuroscience researcher Laurent Perrinet. Finally, like any selfrespecting festival, Bains

Numériques included a music component with live shows (Lucky Dragons), DJ sets (Pilooski, Matthias Tanzmann, Very Mash’ta) and audio-visual performances (Collectif Mu, Livecode Performances).

High points were the opening and closing concerts with Carl Craig wearing at the beginning of his set a mask reminiscent of La Commedia dell’arte to reiterate his prestigious past (Planet E productions under the pseudonym 69) and Arnaud Rebotini in a flood of sound and lights (tri repetita) reflected in the still black water of the lake under the stage.

LAURENT DIOUF

FURTHER INFORMATION: Website: < www.cda95.fr/programme/bains-numeriques > digitalarti #10 - 25

DIGITAL ART EASTERN BLOC

SIGHT & SOUND © PHOTO J. GUZZO DESFORGES

From the 23rd to the 27th of May, Sight & Sound festival explored the theme of “systems of symmetry” through a series of works from 15 Canadian and international artists whose practice is situated at the intersection of art and technology. Eastern Bloc, a New Media production and exhibition centre located in Montreal, organized this fourth edition of the festival.

Eliane Ellbogen, the centre’s Artistic Director, speaks about the festival, and several of the artists presented — chdh, Valentina Vuksic, Robyn Moody — discuss their work.

Robyn Moody, Wave Interference, @ Sight + Sound 2012.

Sight & Sound takes place in between two important digital art festivals in Montreal. In which way is Sight & Sound distinct within the festival circuit?

Eliane Ellbogen: Sight & Sound situates itself, not in opposition to Elektra or Mutek, rather as a complement to both festivals’ programming. What is specific to our festival is the fact that we present new projects, at times still considered “works in progress,” which have not yet made the run of the festival circuits. We present works by young artists, less established artists, and artists whose practice is fundamentally experimental and process-driven. A large part of our programming is to put forth a vision

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of digital art, which is based in the visceral experience, the material exploration, and the exploitation of the physical limits of digital media.

chdh, you presented your performance "Vivarium" in 2009 and 2011. You have since been presenting "Égrégore".

In which way have your aesthetic considerations evolved?

Does the festival formula allow you to present certain works that a media art centre would otherwise not present in the course of its regular programming?

chdh: The performance that resulted from the project Vivarium focuses on the use of audiovisual instruments. Each one of those instruments revolves around an algorithm representing a specific behaviour, controlling both image and sound, in order to create an abstract creature with its own unique possibilities of movement.

The temporal development of the performance is based, on the one hand, on the manipulation of these instruments, on the other hand, on their superimposition and flux.

The basic premise of Égrégore is the exploitation of mass behaviour.

We make use of algorithms, which are inspired from natural phenomena, for example, a school of fish or a flock of birds. As such, there exists only one global form: a macrostructure that is born of a mass of micro-elements, creating a visual and sonic space. The composition is thus an evolution of these interactions, one single movement from disorder to harmony.

Eliane Ellbogen: A festival is the perfect context within which to present ephemeral, transitory or performance-based works. However, it can also be difficult to give the artists and their work the necessary amount of breathing room because of the festival’s time constraints.

Have you noticed amongst the larger museum institutions in Québec openness to emerging art practices?

Eliane Ellbogen: We are starting to see some very established artists in the field be included in larger museum shows. Not yet, however, within museum collections, as these works are often intangible, difficult to present as well as to upkeep or conserve.

I have noticed a greater openness to including works by New Media artists within the established art institutions in Europe, than I have in North America.

© CHDH

chdh, Égrégore (2011).

Valentina Vuksic, you define your work as the "real" computer music.

Can you explain in more detail what you mean by this?

Valentina Vuksic: Transducers pick up electromagnetic radiation from computers that are in use and make those electromagnetic fields audible.

The source of the sounds lies within the physical material from which the electronic devices are made of, but also within all the different kinds of software that is running on them.

From very low-level firmware, via the operating system with all its device drivers, all the way up to office software and the user’s mouse clicks.

The previous and current usage by the user influences the sounds, which is why I call it "real" computer music.

Robyn Moody, in several works, technology is used in a covert way, rendered almost invisible. In your installation at Eastern Bloc, however, the technology is made evident. How do you employ technology and more precisely electromechanics to create your work?

Robyn Moody: What aspects of the technology to reveal is a question that I am always debating, as I never want the work to be about the technology I use to make it function. It's like puppeteering, in that the effect is often seen together with the cause, but we as the audience choose to ignore the puppeteer and be fooled. There is always a danger of having the mechanisms too present in my work, because they are novel, and beautiful in their way. This is where one has to make the sometimes-difficult deci-

sion to take that very clever mechanism you designed out of the spotlight. In all my works, the mechanisms are available for the curious to see - and in this way I think of it a bit like the potential for scientific enquiry. That there are answers available to the curious, but we can (and unfortunately often do) choose to see only the surface and believe in magic, despite a physical explanation being within easy reach.

INTERVIEW BY AURÉLIEN MORLOT

FURTHER INFORMATION: Eastern Bloc < www.easternbloc.ca > Sight & Sound < http://sightandsoundfestival.ca > chdh < www.chdh.free.fr > Valentina Vuksic < http://harddisko.ch > Robyn Moody < www.robynmoody.ca > digitalarti #10 - 27

FEEDBACK ELEKTRA

INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL

ARTS BIENNIAL The first International Digital Arts Biennial began in April 2012 in various locations around Montreal including the Museum of Fine Arts, the Contemporary Art Museum, the DHC and the SAT. Alain Thibault, its founder, is also the artistic director of the Elektra Festival and the instigator of the International Digital Art Market. In May, the Syncretic Transcodings symposium organised by Hexagram CIAM was added to the events taking place in Montreal. Here is a review of some of the highlights.

Too human The Black Box of the Hexagram research laboratory at Concordia University is among the spaces invested by the International Digital Arts Biennale (BIAN).

The robotic creations of the artist Bill Vorn can be found there. Metallic bars obstruct our movements in a space invaded by machines. Those that can be found around the perimeter of the room seem to express the desire to communicate while those located in the centre appear more menacing, because they are

far as to name the troubles of which they’re still blissfully unaware?

Vibrational Sculptures Crossing the rue Sainte Catherine we reach the Belgo Contemporary Art galleries where we can find another partner of the BIAN: the Centre des Arts Actuels Skol. Peter Flemming has placed four large sized sculptures here that are in fact resolutely low-tech speakers as they are apparently ‘unplugged’.

Peter Flemming, Instrumentation, 2011.

© PHOTOS CONCEPTION PHOTO, D.R.

Bill Vorn, DSM-VI, 2012.

more human; perhaps even too human?

The lower limbs of the robots on the floor flail about desperately in the emptiness while they continue to scrutinise the space with their luminous heads. The title of the exhibition DSM-VI is a reference to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the version V of which is awaited with impatience by as many users as there are detractors. We should perhaps reconsider our relationships to the robots that invest our societies. But must we go so

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Š PHOTOS PAUL LITHERLAND, D.R.

Zimoun, Prepared DC-motors on cardboard, 2012.

The title Instrumentation for this sonic installation made of objects put to another use takes on its full meaning when one enters the adjacent room, as itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s there that sounds emerge from this strange instrument. Piano wires are made to vibrate by a complex device where sensors and activators rub shoulders with found objects.

The music of noises that plays out during the time we listened seemed to have been composed, with the machine adding its randomness and where wood, as in the other room, is predominant. The oversized scale of the speakers, the non-amplified music of noises and the predominance of wood all evoke the audacity of another era â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that of the inventor artist Luigi Russolo and his Intonarumori of 1913.

distant thunder, but upon coming closer, it is more the sound of a hailstorm that this multitude of electrical devices is generating. The sum of all this pitterpatter is constant but it is also progressive depending on where we are in the space. Observing an instrument, much like in an orchestra pit, means to hear it, whereas looking away we can lose the sound. This sound humbly participates in a sonic chaos, from which a rhythm sometimes emerges that is precisely here and now, its timing still a few beats ahead or behind. After a while, it seems as though everything is in harmony, unless it is our perception being altered by our desire, even unconscious, of wanting to bring order to chaos.

Perpetual revolutions Musicality in numbers If one goes up a bit into the Montreal heights, you will find the Oboro Centre where one of the galleries has been partially lined with cardboard boxes by the Swiss artist, Zimoun. And inside each module there is a direct current motor with its metal shaft stuck with a cork ball on its end. From a distance, one thinks one is hearing the echo of

An entire exhibition came from the Ile de France region to participate in this first BIAN. It is entitled Out of the Blue / Into the Black and was presented in the former Fine Arts school. Here the twenty-four wires of the light-kinetic sound installation called Tripwire by JeanMichel Albert and Ashley Fure ceaselessly turn vertically and their oscillations in space produce as many shapes.

We know that they are only lines, but we nevertheless see objects that are comparable to those obtained by 3D applications. The installation seems to be stuck in time, even though the sound composition is there to alert us to its possible mutations. Tripwire, when you look at it closely, is only comprised of transitions going from one position to another. The relative instability of the sinusoids from which it is composed give it a suppleness that time only seems to stretch. As for the light, it participates in the spectacle in a manner that could be qualified as being close to pre or post cinematographic.

Jean-Michel Albert & Ashley Fure, Tripwire, 2011.

> digitalarti #10 - 29

© PHOTOS CONCEPTION PHOTO, D.R.

Projet Eva, Cinétose, 2011.

This machine that becomes increasingly invasive thus threatens our personal space. Consequently, we hope it is not in the least autonomous. Among the public, there are those who remain standing, braving the threat, while other more serene spectators stretch out on the floor to enjoy the show without any, or hardly any apprehension.

The right scale

Alva Noto, univrs, 2012.

Ulf Langheinrich, Hemisphere, 2006.

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> Infernal descent

The Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) was recently equipped with a dome, a Satosphere that Ulf Langheinrich covers in images for the time it takes to present his audiovisual performance called Hemisphere. The noise, which has an intense heat in the image

as in the sound, is one of the essential elements in this creation dating from 2006, which has been optimised for the occasion. A simple look at those around us, who are all comfortably lying down and totally absorbed, is enough to tell us of the work’s influence on the body as well as the mind. Midway, the Satosphere seems to lift up, to literally take off, thus initiating the endless fall of our bodies, which simply surrender to the experience. Images and sounds participate in gradually propelling us downwards to the same degree our now uncontrollable flesh becomes heavier.

Hemisphere is a sensorial experience that has to be lived and is enough to justify the construction of such a special screening space that other artists, such as Luc Courchesne, have already started to invest in ones similar.

During the BIAN, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art offered one of the walls of its Black Box to the German artist Carsten Nicolai who hastened to extend it infinitely with a system of mirrors. And for one evening, the audiovisual installation Unidisplay became the theatre for the performance of Univrs given by the same artist, but under his stage name, Alva Noto, which is well known to minimalist electronic music lovers. The sounds during the day are barely perceptible whereas he practically shatters our eardrums in the evening.

The uncluttered colours of the day are more pure in the evening and the inherent slowness of the Unidisplay installation are replaced by an uninterrupted stream during the performance of Univrs.

There is nevertheless a common point between these two works that are presented like landscapes of propositions over which a virtual camera moves to magnify them one after the other.

It is thus a voyage in time and space that Carsten Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, offers us where inevitably entangled sounds and images evolve according to sequences that are more and more radical.

An aesthetic of oppression

Profound mutations

In the evening, it is at Usine C hosting the Elektra Festival that the public attending the BIAN and the participants of the International Digital Art Market (MIAN) find themselves. In the small space there, the collective Projet Eva give their robotic performance Cinétose.

The spectacle takes place above our heads through what architects refer to as a ‘false ceiling’. The metallic plates that make up this artwork are similar to scales in the way they combine with one another. But it is not long before this suspended skin starts to come alive to the rhythm of the powerful metallic sounds it generates. The light filtered by the movements of the beast participates in oppressing the spectators when the entire ceiling comes close to their heads.

The Elektra Festival ends with the performance Sirens given by Ryoichi Kurokawa and Novi Sad. Right from the start, in the image and the sound, there seem to be several levels of activity based on multiple temporalities.

In detail, the media is extremely unstable as though animated by tiny perpetual radiations. With a bit of distance, it appears that the fragments of bodies, monuments and entire landscapes slowly liquefy. There is noise in the image as there is grain in the sound of a music that combines the digital treatment of economic data with the use of more traditional instruments. The world that offers itself to us is a world in transition where metamorphoses follow upon one another to the rhythm of the tableau that succeed one another.

FEEDBACK ELEKTRA

And the frenzy in the detail is in no way opposed to the slowness of what liquefies, breaks up or dries out on a larger scale. But how can we not interpret the research of these two artists, one coming from Japan and the other from Greece, two countries undergoing profound change in a world seeking solutions to energy problems and the other, sustainable economic measures, as possible references to current upheavals?

Ryoichi Kurokawa & Novi_Sad, Sirens, 2012.

Condemned to disappear The Elektra Festival is over, but the BIAN 2012 carries on through mid-June.

Our final destination is the Frontenac Cultural Centre to attend an audiovisual performance given by 1000W bulbs that produce more heat energy than light. This is primarily the reason why they’re gradually being phased out in a growing number of countries, which will cause, in the long term, the disappearance of the installation Condemned Bulbes. These condemned light bulbs are emitting their last gasps one after the other according to a composition written by the members of the Quebecois collective who power them with electrical current conceived especially for this purpose.

The bulb’s filaments, whose exaggerated size we have already mentioned, progressively begin to vibrate like instruments in an orchestra. Only full light makes them silent, without any vibration. And when all of them are lit, it is the end of the show, which announces the beginning of another, for a little time still.

DOMINIQUE MOULON

FURTHER INFORMATION: Elektra < www.elektrafestival.ca > BIAN < http://bianmontreal.ca > Alva Noto < http://www.alvanoto.com > Artificiel < http://www.artificiel.org > Ashley Fure < http://www.ashleyfure.net > Bill Vorn < http://billvorn.concordia.ca/menuall.html > Carsten Nicolai < http://www.carstennicolai.de > Hexagram < http://hexagramciam.org > Jean-Michel Albert < http://www.jmalbert.com > MACM < http://www.macm.org > Novi sad < http://novi-sad.net > Oboro < http://www.oboro.net > Peter Flemming < http://peterflemming.ca > Projet Eva < http://www.projet-eva.org > Ryoichi Kurokawa < http://www.ryoichikurokawa.com > SAT < http://www.sat.qc.ca > Skol < http://www.skol.ca > Ulf Langheinrich < http://ulflangheinrich.com > Usine C< http://www.usine-c.com > Zimoun < http://www.zimoun.ch >

© PHOTOS D.R.

Artificiel, Condemned Bulbes, 2003.

digitalarti #10 - 31

EVENTS COMING SOON

(AGENDA)

>>>

>>> >>>

NEW FORMS FESTIVAL Montréal, Canada September 13th to 16th < www.newformsfestival.com >

A-PART FESTIVAL Alpilles, France July 5th to 31st < www.festival-apart.com >

H2T Helsinki, Finland September 14th to 18th < http://h2t.munstadi.fi >

CELLSBUTTON Yogyakarta, Indonesia July 15th to 23rd < www.natural-fiber.com/cellsbutton/ >

NAME FESTIVAL Tourcoing & Dunkerque, France September 15th to 22nd < www.lenamefestival.com >

FESTIVAL FUTURA Crest, France August 22nd to 26th < www.festivalfutura.fr >

SCOPITONE Nantes, France September 19th to 23rd < www.scopitone.org >

BOUILLANTS #4 Bretagne, France March to august < www.bouillants.fr >

ARS ELECTRONICA Linz, Austria August 30th to September 3rd < www.aec.at >

FILMER LA MUSIQUE Paris, France September 20th to 23rd < www.filmerlamusique.com >

DIG@RAN Val d’Arran, Spain Until July 8th < www.digaran.org >

CITY SONIC Mons, Brussels, Belgium August 31st to September 15th < www.citysonics.be >

TODAYS ART La Haye, Netherland 21 & 22 septembre < http://todaysart.org >

LES TRANSNUMÉRIQUES Bussels, Mons, Belgium May 2nd to July 15th < www.transnumeriques.be >

GOGBOT Enschede, Netherland September 8th to 11th < www.gogbot.nl >

DECIBEL 9 Seattle / Washington, USA September 26th to 30th < http://dbfestival.com >

FESTIVAL DIÈSE Dijon, France July 2nd to 7th < www.festivaldiese.com >

ZERO1 BIENNALE San Jose, USA September 12th to December 8th < www.zero1biennial.org >

THIS IS NOT ART Newcastle, Australia September 27th to October 1st < http://thisisnotart.org >

SOUND ART. SOUND AS MEDIUM OF FINE ART Exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany Until January 6th, 2013 < www.zkm.de > FORM SPECIAL Exhibition at CAM Raleigh Raleigh, USA Until October 8th < http://camraleigh.org > FORM@TS Exhibition at virtual space of Jeu de Paume Paris, France Until September 9th < http://espacevirtuel.jeudepaume.org >

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WHO’S Digitalarti Mag Digitalarti is published by Digital Art International.

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