Going into its 5th year, the paraflows festival in Vienna will focus on the interconnection between the programme and the object. Information technology is based on the distinction between hardware and software, and more often than not both systems are treated and discussed as independent of each other. paraflows .10 - Mind and Matter seeks to put on display how hard- and software, content and object in contemporary art not only co-exist, but also condition and shape each other.

What role does hardware play for media infrastructure? how is the net set up, what are the real pillars on which virtuality rests? How does the sculptural process look like, from a technological point of view? What are the effects of technological prospects on physical representation?

What are the challenges that digital art must face, when it comes to conserving its works? Additionally to the applications in question, the corresponding hardware needs to be preserved as well. But how does time affect technology-based works, their conditions of production and their archives?

Mind and body are inextricably tied to each other, yet we are tempted to regard mental processes as independent of their bodily basis. Can thoughts, personality or intelligence exist without a body? Or how does the aesthetic image of technology relate to its context, what kind of interconnections are made?

Our exhibition MIND AND MATTER will present works from the very beginning of media art and also give an overview of current developments that combine programmes with sculpture.

For more information on paraflows .10 - Mind and Matter visit http://www.paraflows.at

We are looking for artistic positions dealing with the issues as afore mentioned. Please send your application as pdf file via e-mail to: mind_and_matter(at)paraflows.at
or ship to: paraflows, Museumsplatz 1, A-1070 Vienna, Austria

Mandatory information for submissions:
1) name, institution (if existing), address, e-mail, phone number, website/s
2) submitted work: title, medium, author/artist, year of production
3) work description: 1 DIN A4-page maximum
4) technical explanation, room/space requirements (hardware, operating system, additional software)
5) biographies
7) documentation of earlier projects, e.g. a link to your website

Language: all submissions have to be in English or in German or need to have subtitles in one of the two languages. Works in any other language have to include a text list in either German or English. We especially encourage international submissions.

paraflows CONTACT
office(at)paraflows.at
Festival management: Guenther Friesinger
Exhibition management: Judith Fegerl
Office: MQ Musumsquartier
paraflows headoffice
Museumsplatz 1
A-1070 Vienna
Austria

Like a typical garage geek, Amit splits his nights and days between experimental and commercial work. In this session he will share recent art projects and discuss how they affect his work as software/hardware designer, user experience freak, and (recent) entrepreneur. This is a free event, please bring DRINKS and snacks to share. It might get hot without cold beers at hand, and Amit recommends one for better UX.

Amits recent projects: Sonic Wire Sculptor :: Rhonda 3D drawing tool :: Smashup Dance Project,

Not so recent projects: Bjork Pagan Poetry and more works at http://insertsilence.com

Texts:

PDF on creating games for children with disabilities. A couple of interviews with Amit on networked_music_review and here.

Bio:

As an artist, Amit Pitaru develops novel instruments and methods for making music, animation, and dance. His personal and collaborative work with James Paterson has recently exhibited and performed at the London Design Museum, Paris Pompidou Center, Sundance Film festival and ICC Museum in Tokyo.

As an educator, he teaches (on and off) at New York University’s ITP and Cooper Union’s Arts department.

Amit works as a game designer, prototype maker (hardware/software), and user experience designer to selected clients. He’s also a recent entrepreneur (startup to be revealed soon). Amit was recently commissioned by the MacArthur foundation to publish his research; making everyday software and video games more accessible to children with disabilities. He is also an advisor for the Institute of Play, who are developing a public school that will use game design and game-inspired methods to teach critical 21st Century skills.

GarargeGeeks is an Israeli based not-profit physical and virtual space for innovative and creative people to introduce, network, expose, create, brainstorm, innovate and build. People that take part in the activities come from different disciplines such as electronics, software, mechanical, art, design, music, hacking and gaming. The spirit of GarageGeeks promotes building non-commercial projects that would otherwise may not have come to life.

The home of GarageGeeks is located in the Holon Industrial Zone, Israel. The garage is 100 square meter space that includes heavy and light machinery tools, electronic components, software development environment and raw project materials.

G.A.P. No. 2 from Dream Addictive on Vimeo.

G.A.P. No.2 is part of a series of electronic prototypes with organic form, designed to simulate generative sound process. The device consists of a set of speakers, amplifier, sensors and Arduino. The organic disposition of elements, like a little sound garden sensitive to movement, stimulates the sensory interaction as a means for manipulating audio.

Also see: Open Source Orchestra, a project that integrates open source digital and analog audio circuits.

Open Source Orchestra / Synt from Dream Addictive on Vimeo.

Other sound sculptures and projects of Dream.Addictive can be found here.

Nicolas Collins presents two hands-on workshops in Hardware Hacking. Assuming no technical background whatsoever, these workshops guide the participants through a series of sound-producing electronic construction projects, from making simple contact microphones, through “bending” toys”, to making oscillators and other circuits from scratch. The workshops end with a performance/installation by all participants, and a party to celebrate the publication of the expanded second edition of his book, “Handmade Electronic Music –The Art of Hardware Hacking“.

April 20: Basic Hacking: Alternate microphones (contact mikes, coil pickups, using speakers and headphone as microphones, tape heads, etc.). Homemade transducers for sending sound through objects for physical filtering (cheap “Rainforest”). “Victorian synthesizer” (making an oscillator with just a speaker and a battery). “Laying of hands” on a radio circuit board (the poor man’s Cracklebox). “Circuit Bending” (new noises from old toys).

April 21: Advanced Hacking: Circuits from scratch: oscillators, tremolo/gate/panner, mixers preamp/distortion, weird analog signal processing.

New York born and raised, Nicolas Collins studied composition with Alvin Lucier, worked for many years with David Tudor, and has collaborated with numerous musicians around the world. He lived most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Visiting Artistic Director of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. Since 1997 he has been editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal. He is a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Collins has the dubious distinction of having played at both CBGBs and the Concertgebouw.

Pure Data (Pd) presents the ultimate, free software environment for sheer audio, video and hardware pluggability, patching and piping. Pd provides the basis for all manner of audiovisual performance and trans-media installation, as well as satisfying the artistic quest for heady experimentation and improvisation. Yet few artists take the time to master a solid foundation in this graphical programming environment.

The three day You’ve got pluggability workshop aims to provide a firm grounding and clear overview of the varied possibilities and paths offered by Pure Data. The first day will introduce Pd and quickly move on to how to create patches which create sounds and noises. The second day will look further at sound, particularly how to work with sampled audio, and will introduce the GEM library for working with live and recorded video. The third day will start with a look at the HID (Human Interface Device) system for getting sensor input into Pd, and venture into to using this input to control the audio and video patches which the participants have already created. No previous experience is necessary to take this workshop.

This PD workshop will be roughly based on the Pure Data FLOSS Manual, written by Derek Holzer, Luka Princic, Adam Hyde and contributors from the PD community: http://flossmanuals.net/puredata

Participants should bring their own laptop running GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or Windows, and with Pure Data Extended installed from: http://puredata.info/downloads

They are also encouraged to bring their own ideas, sensors, USB game controllers, MIDI devices, microphones and video cameras. There will be an opportunity to buy the inexpensive xxxxx-HID sensor input board produced at Pickled Feet: http://1010.co.uk/avrhid.html

Limited places! Please register before 24 August at: m@1010.co.uk

About the Teachers

Derek Holzer [USA 1972] began working with Pure Data in 2001. Since then, he has taught and performed with the program across Europe, North America, Brazil and New Zealand. His work focuses on field recording, networked collaboration strategies, experiments in improvisational sound and the use of free software such as Pd. He is currently writing a beginner’s manual for PureData. http://www.umatic.nl/info_derek.html

Martin Howse operates within the fields of discourse, speculative hardware (environmental data in open physical systems), code (an examination of layers of abstraction), free software and the situational (performances and interventions). http://1010.co.uk

Location:

xxxxx, pickledfeet, Linienstrasse 54, Berlin 10119
U2, Rosa-Luxemburg-Pl. U8, Rosenthaler Pl.
Telephone: 3050187482.

Re Pure Data:

Pure Data
Pure Data (or PD) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. Because all of these types of media are handled as data in the program, many fascinating opportunities for cross-synthesis between them exist. Sound can be used to manipulate video, which could then be streamed over the internet to another computer which might analyze that video and use it to control a motor-driven installation. PD is commonly used for live music performance, VeeJaying, sound effects composition, interfacing with sensors, cameras and robots or even interacting with websites.

The core of Pd is written and maintained by Miller S. Puckette (http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/) and includes the work of many developers (http://www.puredata.org/), making the whole package very much a community effort.

The community of users and programmers around PD have created additional functions (called “externals” or “external libraries”) which are used for a wide variety of other purposes, such as video processing, the playback and streaming of MP3s or Quicktime video, the manipulation and display of 3-dimensional objects and the modeling of virtual physical objects.

PD runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, and there is a wide range of external libraries available which give PD additional features.

From Peter Kirn at createdigitalmusic.com: “8-bit and robots and odd Max and Reaktor patches and custom visual software and visualizations of data packets and sound made from plants and mutant trumpets and gloves for DJing and laptop music – we’ve got quite a lineup here in New York this week.

Friday night, a live audiovisual lineup from the worlds of createdigitalmusic.com / createdigitalmotion.com invades the HOPE conference, aka Hackers on Planet Earth, the three day-long convergence of tech hacking. $10, open to all, 11-2a Friday July 18 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. It’s a live digital, technological variety show in a doomed NYC landmark hotel with an audience of famous and infamous hackers. (Think Kevin Mitnick and MythBusters’ Adam Savage and Steven Levy, all in one place.)

Facebook event page; also on Going.com”

More media and preview videos can be seen at Create Digital Music. 

E.X.S.O. (Emergent Proximity Sensing Object)
Team Members: Scott Barton, Jaime De La Ree, Steven Johnson, Steven Kemper, Kezia Ofiesh

E.X.S.O.

E.X.S.O. is designed for human participation in the production of rhythms. As people interact with the moving arms, the arms respond in an immediate one to one fashion, and additionally generate rhythms played on resonant tubes. The tempo of these rhythms is based on proximity to the device. As the arm moves in relation to the human participants, the pitch of the tube changes. At first, participants will notice a one to one relationship between their proximity and the rhythms produced, but as time goes on, the system will begin to react on its own to the humans in the room–working with them, working against them, or ignoring them completely.

The skin that connects one arm to the next is a sub-structural system intended to create lateral structural stability and also to serve as a generative spatial component. As the arms move independently of one another, the skin takes on several dynamic shapes that conform to the three arm positions. The structural skin can take on many spatial qualities that result from the proximity sensors input. While the Infrared sensors serve the scale of a small scale presentation, the input could work of any type of sensor; this could make the space changing quality of the arm become a more functional component or larger scale design.

Arm movement is controlled by a DC motor attached to gears that interface with the part of the arm that enters the tube. This motor simultaneously changes the tube’s pitch and the arm’s position. A solenoid motor is connected to a beater that strikes the tube to produce sound. This sound is captured and amplified by electric microphones at the end of the tubes. LEDs attached to the arm inside the tube will illuminate when the arm moves, providing a visual trace of each arm’s movement and a visual notation of the sound being produced. The entire process is controlled by a computer running Max/MSP which interfaces with an Arduino microcontroller attached to the sensors, motors, and LEDs. Software parses the data received from the sensors and internal algorithmic processes produce emergent behavior as the arm reacts to its human observers.

Instrument Materials: 1/4″ Plexy, 1/8″ Plexy, 1/4″ threaded rod, 3/16″ nuts and bolts, zip ties, birch wood, wool fabric, ¾” Clear tube. Hardware: 3 24VDC reversible gearhead motors, 3 24VDC Ledex Solenoid motors, 6 ultrabrite aqua LEDs, 3 IR sensors (Sharp GP2Y0A21YK), 1 24V power supply, 2 Arduino Diecimila micro-controllers, 6 LED’s. Software: Arduino running Fermata 1.0, Max/MSP 4.6

Medusa
Team Members: Steven Brummond, Taylor Burgess, Yuri Spitsyn, Jonathan Zorn, Susanna Wong

Medusa

In Greek Mythology Medusa was once the most beautiful woman in the world until she angered the goddess Athena who turned into a hideous monster whose hair was made of snakes. She could transform any active man into stone with a single look. The hero Perseus eventually defeated her by cutting her head off; from which Pegasus the winged horse was born.

Medusa is an emergent instrumental environment which reacts to human force. Medusa depends on a field of modules that are individually activated by the touch of a person. When one module is activated it will change the states of its neighbors. State changes are registered by the humming of the module. The individual modules are comprised of a half spherical acrylic structure, a single solenoid in the center, a drum head, LED lights, a rotating motor on one side and a piezo disc connected to piano wire on the other side. The basic module is triggered when a person hits the piano wire. This in turn triggers the solenoid which hits the drum, effectively changing the state of the module. The state of the module refers to the humming. The humming is produced by a gear which rubs against a guitar string creating vibrations into the drum head generating sound. The speed of the motor is a function of the force a person applies to the piano wire. Once a module is triggered the delay time does not allow for the module to be triggered again for another ten seconds. The emergence of MEDUSA develops from the array of people hitting the piano wire with different forces. The different modules will continuously change state and react with different speeds of the motor. The myriad of reactions begin to develop a pattern of emergence through variation and consistency of reactions.

Instrument Materials: acrylic structure, polyester plastic drum head, guitar string, piano wire, threaded rods, bolts, LED lights, piezo disc. Hardware: 3 Arduino microcontrollers, advanced circuits. Software: MAX/MSP.

Panta Rhei
Team Members: Andrew Hamm, Lanier Sammons, Jen Siomacco, Wendy Stober. Peter Traub

Panta Rhei

The concept of Panta Rhei derives from the philosophy of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher. Translated, Panta Rhei means “everything is in a state of flux.” Heraclitus is well noted for his belief that constant change is central to the state of the universe.

Panta Rhei is an audio/visual instrument capable of displaying an emergent system in light, allowing human interaction with that system, and translating the resulting information into both music and robotic choreography. Human interaction happens within the grid as observers insert their hands to block the flow of light between LEDs and corresponding photoresistors. The sonic elements of the piece are realized with Max/MSP. The brightness levels of individual LEDs (or groups of LEDs) may be made musical in several ways. In the current incarnation, LEDs are tied to a bank of oscillators whose envelope and pitch are determined by the level of light. A Mylar skin manipulated by solenoids provides the robotic choreography. The solenoids also respond to changes in the light level of the LED/photosensor grid. Data from the grid is monitored in Max/MSP and relayed to the solenoids through a microcontroller.

Instrument Materials: Acrylic, piano wire, plastic zip-ties, mylar, metal brad connectors. Hardware: 12 Solenoids, 4 Arduino Microcontrollers, 18 LEDs and 18 photosensors. Software: Max/MSP

Online submission: Web entries accepted from around the world for the Web showcase. Limited entries will be chosen to compete live — To compete for the prizes, those entries must be present at Yuri’s Night Bay Area, Saturday, April 12. Submit DIY music performance projects – using custom software and/or hardware – for a live performance battle at the Yuri’s Night Bay Area party on April 12, sponsored by Yuri’s Night and createdigitalmusic.com. Compete for awards including a Yamaha Tenori-On grand prize.

BACKGROUND: In science fiction and science fact, music has been central to finding a common language to speak to the universe. Music from Bach to gamelan has traveled into space on the Voyager spacecraft. In the digital age, musical interfaces are also often the best way to understand how to interface with technology and information.

Musicians have led many of the most innovative digital technological breakthroughs — the first digital synthesizer (at Bell Labs in the 50s), breakthroughs in modular electronic systems (modular synthesizers of the 60s), pioneering advances in digital storage and processing, unusual wireless interfaces and gestural controls decades ahead of the Nintendo Wii, and touch- and multi-touch tools years before the iPhone and Microsoft Surface. But that’s all in the past. This is a design challenge for the future. We want to hear the best, most forward-thinking, generally coolest, Second Space Age-worthy instruments and digital music interfaces. If aliens land — as they did when met by a classic ARP synthesizer in Close Encounters — we want to be able to give them a great show.

How to enter: We’re looking for designs of “instruments” — whether self-contained, electrically-powered devices or hardware interfaces for computers. That can include tangible interfaces, physical computing, hacked hardware, custom-built synths and electronics, and other gadgets. These must use at least some custom software and/or hardware.

You are limited to one computer and one input device — but the “input device” can be as complex as an interactive table. If that sounds vague, just remember — ultimately, the judges and audience decide. Wow them, and all will be well.

Artists must sign up in advance. We will have a limited number of slots. The best proposals will be chosen by the staff of createdigitalmusic.com to compete in San Francisco at Yuri’s Night.

Set up, plug in. You’ll have a limited set up time.

Play. You have three minutes to perform.

JUDGING: A panel of judges with expertise in music and interaction design will judge the entries — and are encouraged to be biased by crowd response. (If you’ve got friends, tell them to cheer really loudly.)

AWARDS: Winners will be announced at Yuri’s Night, with a grand prize winner and honorable mention awards for each category.

http://yuricdm.com
http://yuricdm.com/2008/03/19/futuristic-music-design-challenge/
http://yurisnightbayarea.net/