Performances at transmediale.08: CONSPIRE – festival for art and digital culture, Berlin: Moving Forest by AKA the castle:: February 1, 2008, 11.00 am – 11.00 pm, all day performance at HKW and several locations in Berlin’s centre: Moving Forest is a 12-hour 5 act sonic performance operating with public wifi and mobile technology – an expandable citywide operatic manoeuvre/intervention. Derived from Kurosawa’s film version of Macbeth, Spider Web Castle, Moving Forest renders the film’s final sequences (12 minutes in length) into a 12-hour ‘sonica’ of grand scale. Moving Forest reinvents a modern edition of a Castle Central (here: the House of World Cultures) and a city in revolt. Inside the castle, the downfall of the assumed power; outside in the city, the mobilised urbanites march with generated sounds of insurgence towards the imaginary Centre. Moving Forest collaborates with sound artists to compose acts and scores, at the same time, drafts a PD (pure data) conspiracy scheme, performing live with citywide performance transmitted by wifi.

Valve / Membrance – Naoyuki Arashi (jp), Keisuke Oki (jp), Minoru Sato (jp) :: January 31, 2008; 9 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium Nominee for the transmediale Award 2008 – Valve / Membrance is a series of electronic and non-electronic music pieces with traditional Japanese and Chinese valve instruments. The music bridges historical and regional differences of technological and musical forms. It focuses on cultural and technological elements from ancient Asia, the industrial revolution and the electronic age.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e30xL1yiqoI[/youtube]

hystere – Satoshi Shiraishi (jp), Alo Allik (ee), Yota Morimoto (jp), ibitsu (pp/ee) :: February 3, 2008; 8 pm :: House of World Cultures, Auditorium – hystere is an experiment in improvisation within premeditated boundaries in which the ‘e-Clambone’, a custom-made electronic wind instrument, provides the sole source for the ensuing multimodal environment. The visual aspect seeks moments of convergence and divergence with live video feed from the performance and is implemented as a library of OpenGL classes that listen to Open Sound Control messages over the ethernet.

10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid – Evelina Domnitch (by), Dmitry Gelfand (us), Andrey Smirnov (ru) :: January 30, 2008; 10:00 pm :: Zeiss-Planetarium, Prenzlauer Allee 80 – The performance 10,000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid visualises the fascinating surface structures of soap bubbles by using laser light. Dmitry Gelfand and his partner Evelina Domnitch create sensual immersive environments that bring together physics, chemistry and computer technology. The audio part of the performance is contributed by Andrey Smirnov, the director of the Theremin-Center in Moscow.

d.v.d. – Itoken (jp), Jimanica (jp), Takashi Yamaguchi (jp) :: January 29, 2008; 9:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global – The drums duo Itoken and Jimanica together with visual artist Yamaguchi Takashi are presenting their ‘interactive live installation’. With their drumsets the musicians are controlling game-like animations which are generating additional sounds. In turn their drum-play is dependent on the structure of the animation. The show at transmediale.08 is the kick-off event for d.v.d’s first europe tour.

DIGIT – Julien Maire (fr/de) :: January 31 and February 2, 2008; 1:00 pm :: House of World Cultures, Cafe Global – DIGIT is a living work of art – a writer sits at a table writing a text. The printed text appears through the mere gliding of his finger across a blank sheet of paper. Spectators can come very close to the writer and follow the emerging text. DIGIT is located between cinematographic process and the process of writing, while also making reference to the surrealist tradition of cutting and rearranging texts. His work DIGIT received an Honorary Mention in Ars Electronica 2007.