blink (hc gilje 2009) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

The digital network, where we all spend ever more of our time, is a vast infrastructure of generality. It deploys a system which is standardised, formally defined, highly structured, and internally consistent. If I send you an email, I do it trusting that the interlinked systems of hard- and software, the protocols for data encoding and transmission, the network switches and servers, will all hold together so that the email you receive is the same as the one I sent. Perhaps I’m in Australia, and you are in Norway: we could say that the network generalises our two points in space - for the network, they are the same. As I draft my email it exists as a pattern of voltages and magnetic flux inside my computer. To transmit that pattern effectively, the digital network must erase or resist any local errors or inconsistencies that it might encounter along the way, so that it does not matter if the pattern travels by optical fibre or copper, or in radio waves, or if a boat anchor cut through a cable near Indonesia. It does not matter that your computer is made of different atoms to mine. Those are specificities - local, material events and instances. Digital culture, and networked space, absorbs specificities, compensates for them, rectifies them into generality. Wireless broadband and mobile computing make us into human nodes, bathing in shared connective protocols.

The aesthetics of digital media flow from a related generality, where sound and image are encoded as fields of data. If a pixel is a number, an image is a grid of pixels, video a stream of images, and each of these numbers can take any value at all, then formally, an aesthetics of digital video is only a matter of finding the right values - fishing around in a space containing all possible digital video. If digital media creates this generalised space, anything at all, the media arts are faced with unavoidable questions: not only what to make - which values to choose, but how to choose them, and why?

242.pilots live in bruxelles (2002) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

HC Gilje’s work arises from a moment when the anything-at-all of digital video was just opening up, thanks to a combination of new real-time tools, cheap computing power, and some key interdisciplinary influences. Drawing on experimental sound and music, improvisation and performance became important solutions; working live in a specific situation, artists would gather, process, generate, and recombine material. In work from the late 1990s and early 2000s, from Gilje and his collaborators in 242.pilots, as well as video ensembles such as Granular Synthesis and Skot, the result is abstract and intense, a flow of layered digital texture. In performance it saturates the body and senses; big screens, big speakers. Instead of the narrative transport of cinema, which takes us somewhere else, this work creates - and is created in - an intensified sense of presence, what Gilje calls an “extended now”. This methodology is vital; it focuses the open-ended generality of digital media in to a point: on this, rather than anything-at-all.

This moment relies on a circuit, a close coupling between artist and media; data flows become experienced events - sounds and images - which in turn inform new data flows, and so on. Audience and performers share a digital-material situation. The specificity of digital media comes forward; for of course these media are always specific, always local, always embodied; but that specificity is usually suppressed by the functional logic of generality. At the same time though, the processes underway here depend on exactly that generality, on the machine’s ability to rapidly transform data and shift it between instantiations - from the voltages in video memory to the patterns of projected light.

In nodio (2005-) Gilje creates a system of networked audiovisual nodes that process and share image material. Each node generates sound derived from its image, in a process of automatic translation. On one hand this translation is another demonstration of the abstract pliability of the digital - its ability to transform anything into anything (generality); on the other, its tight audiovisual correpondences generate sparks of material intensity - real events, rather than digital effects (specificity). With these distributed nodes Gilje deploys audiovisual materials in space, creating flows and juxtapositions that function as dynamic sculpture. Of course the formal model of nodio echoes our most ubiquitous generalising paradigm: the network. Once again, the artist applies this digital tendency for generalisation in order to cultivate instances of specificity - the texture and sensation of the here and now.

drifter (hc gilje 2006) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

From drifter (2006) (above) to dense (2006) and shift (2008) (below), Gilje’s audiovisual nodes map out a developing exploration of specificity. drifter deploys standard computer hardware, formed into sculptural modules; in passing material between nodes Gilje begins to break the frame of the screen, creating an implicit inter-space. In dense, the hardware moves out of the sculptural field, and the screen is further deconstructed. Instead of the frontal configuration of the cinema / computer, these suspended fabric strips are illuminated from both sides with a video “weave”. The familiar architecture of the screen as a blank (general-purpose) substrate containing or supporting image content, is reconfigured here; the specific materialities of screen and content overlap. Even more so in shift, where the nodes are now wooden boxes, illuminated with precisely controlled video projections. As in earlier nodio works sound and image are directly related. Here Gilje extends this fusion to the sculptural objects; each node is also its own speaker-box, so that the digital articulation of sound and image is realised, and grounded materially, in the nodes themselves.

shift v1, prototype (hc gilje 2008) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

These works drive towards a spatial materialisation of audiovisuals: dynamic constellations of AV intensity, fields for what Gilje calls “audiovisual powerchords”. The projectors, speakers and networks of the nodio works present one means to this end, deploying existing media technologies. Again we find an interplay of generality and specificity, as Gilje adapts generalising systems - projectors, computers, networks - to realise materialised instances. The Wind-up Birds (2008) (below) represent another angle of approach; Gilje sets video aside, and creates materialised, local, sculpturally autonomous nodes from electronic and mechanical materials. In these robotic woodpeckers digital media and sculptural embodiment are further enmeshed. The birds communicate using digital radio, and their behaviour is programmed in a custom chip; but their sound is simply percussion - a mechanical switch, tapping on a specially constructed wooden slit-drum. Again this is specificity over generality: a loudspeaker is an acoustic shape-shifter, a technology which promises any sound, in the same way that the screen promises any image. By contrast the Birds produce only one sound, their sound, a specific conjunction of solenoid, timber and vibrating air.

wind-up birds (hc gilje 2008) from hc gilje on Vimeo.

The Birds will run for a month on their own batteries, strapped to trees, calling to each other and any other creatures nearby. These nodes are unplugged: they begin to come away from the technological support system of mains power and the shelter of the gallery or studio, and move out into the world. As in the artist’s other work the engineering here is inseparable from the artistic agenda; the Birds are in that sense a realisation of Gilje’s spatial and formal aims, an autonomous constellation of intensities. But they also literally expand from there; where the nodio works explore the composition of spaces within a network of intensities, the Birds move outwards, creating points of intensity in the wild, and evoking a spatial alertness - a way of being in and listening to the world - that extends beyond the well-marked edges of an artwork. The Birds are more like an experimental intervention, a digital-material overlay in a complex field of the living and non-living.

Similarly the Soundpockets works (both 2007) make small sonic interventions in urban spaces, pursuing local intensification and juxtaposition through directional soundbeams and micro-scale radio transmissions. Once again we find this interplay of the general - the anything-at-all of the digital - and the specific, the here and now. The “extremely local radio stations” of Soundpockets 2 form a sort of folded juxtaposition of three layers: globalised network infrastructures and protocols, the traced or mediated locations of field recordings, and the specific time and place of the transmissions. Just as Soundpockets 1 uses exotic soundbeam acoustics to perturb urban spaces, Soundpockets 2 shows how we can draw in technological infrastructures in order to reconfigure the real environment, creating flows and distributions that form intense moments of difference and specificity.

In this reading Gilje’s work is partly critical. Pursuing specificity, and an intensified, material experience of the here and now, it pushes against the generalising tendencies of digital media. By the functional logic of the network, each node is formally identical, and must be effectively insulated from its environment. Ubiquitous computing promises us “everyware” - total connectivity, the complete interpenetration of the network and our lived environment [2]. But if the network is a generalising force, if it erases differences between places, what will life in “everyware” be like? Gilje’s work suggests a utopian alternative: networks that are always local in time and space; nodes of right here, right now. Gilje’s work strives for what Hans Gumbrecht calls “presence”; a way of knowing the world that is characterised by intense moments of encounter or revelation - aesthetic experiences that place us in the world, and of it, rather than observing from the intellectual distance of interpretation.

The beauty of Gilje’s work though is that it not only suggests this prospect, but demonstrates it, makes it happen; and in that sense the work is constructive, rather than critical. In emphasising the specificity of media technologies, Gilje’s work shows us a different way to frame those technologies; as always material, always in the world with us - a view I have called transmateriality. As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, “computers … are material machines dedicated to propagating a behavioral illusion, or call it a working model, of immateriality.” Gilje shows us both sides of this statement, the functional illusion - generality - and its material foundation - specificity. It shows us a way to reframe the network, too; as always local, always specific; a tangle of real flows and propagating patterns; and endless possible ways of reconnecting the world with itself. Finally Gilje shows us one crucial role for the artist, in this context: seeking out configurations that intensify, rather than dilute, our sense of being in the world.

The Police Car Quartet was the first of nine public happenings by acclaimed Mexican artist, Lázaro Valiente, including the Tamal-Car Orchestra, muchos Mexican barrel organs, visual concerts at red lights, public radio Interventions, and many others. Each is a suggestion on how to control traffic in public spaces. Please join us to hear Lázaro speak, perform, and distribute works of art.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL7UfzI9k8A

The event is a collaboration between Flux Factory and the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York.

Internet access is not conditional. Everyone who owns a website has an interest in defending the free use of the Internet… so has everyone who uses Google or Skype… everyone who expresses their opinions freely, does research of any kind, whether for personal health problems or academic study … everyone who shops online…who dates online…socialises online… listens to music…watches video…

Millions of Europeans now depend on the Internet, directly or indirectly, for their livelihood. Taking it away, chopping it up, ‘restricting it’, ‘limiting it’ and placing conditions on our use of it, will have a direct impact on people’s earnings. And in the current financial climate, that can’t be good.

The internet as we know it is at risk because of proposed new EU rules going through at the end of April. Under the proposed new rules, broadband providers will be legally able to limit the number of websites you can look at, and to tell you whether or not you are allowed to use particular services. It will be dressed up as ‘new consumer options’ which people can choose from. People will be offered TV-like packages - with a limited number of options for you to access.

For more… see: http://www.blackouteurope.eu/

This is not just a European problem. The struggle between an open Internet and one controlled by the big cable and phone companies that control access is ongoing in the US. The cable and phone companies want to be gatekeepers; they want to decide which Web sites and services you can use depending on which companies have paid them the most. They want to turn the open Internet into a closed, private toll road. For those who know little about the struggle for a free and open internet, here’s a beginner’s guide: http://www.freepress.net/resources/beginners_guideTo keep up with what is happening on a daily basis, and learn how you can help, read the Free Press Media Reform Daily.

wind-up bird(s) from hc gilje on Vimeo. About >> [via Neural]

“The Farther we emerge from the inner city, the more political the atmosphere becomes. We reach the docks, the inland harbors, the warehouses, the poor neighborhoods, the scattered refuges of wretchedness: the outskirts. Outskirts are the state of emergency of a city, the terrain on which incessantly rages the great decisive battle between town and country. It is nowhere more bitter between Marseilles and the provençal landscape. It is the hand-to-hand fight telegraph poles against agaves, barbed wire against thorny palms, the miasmas of stinking corridors against the damp gloom under the plane trees in brooding squares, short-winded outside staircases against the mighty hills. The long rue de Lyon is the powder conduit which Marseilles has dug in the landscape so that in Saint-Lazare, Saint-Antoine, Arenc, Septèmes it can blow up this terrain, burying it in the shrapnel of every national and commercial language. Alimentation, Moderne, rue de Jamaïque, Comptoir de la Limite, Savon Abat-Jour, Minoterie de la campagne, Bar du Gaz, Bar Falcutatif - and over all this lies the dust that here conglomerates out of sea salt, chalk, and mica, and whose bitterness persists longer in the mouths of those who have pitted themselves against the city than the splendor of sun and sea in the eyes of its admirers.” Walter Benjamin “Marseilles - The Return of the Flâneur, 1929″

Using “The City”, as a cyborg organism, driven by the interchangeable machinery of flesh and concrete in equal measure, steered by progress and technology into previously unreachable dimensions, Open Scripts will attempt to amplify the permutations of the city’s interior reactions to its shifting techno-meaderthalls or human glitches in its well oiled machine.

Participants will be asked to embark on the journey of a modern day flaneur as they navigate, observe and impose on the city. These observations, inflections and/or interruptions caused to the natural ebb and flow of the city’s are to be transmitted across the city from a plurality of points. A live mix from these data streams will be returned to each derive / flaneur and simultaneously broadcast across the net, both producing and reproducing the city and its flesh.

Equipped with mobile phones, the participants can team up to create and organize their own derive - their desired path into the belly of this city. During these expeditions into the city’s inertia, our techno-meaderthalls would connect to the pulsating brain of our server - the grey matter of this operation - with its nervous system of mobile phones stimulating its neurons with sensory data - voices, chattering, street sounds, text messages / poetics, videos and images. Information which has designs on the attention of our “deriver” will be collected, manipulated, transformed , reproduced and broadcast. This information may be a description of a situation, place or sound that the participants capture, record or produce and may take the form of a discussion or interview just as easily as being that of an image or text.

Meanwhile, the server, our automated system, will collect the data received from our Derivers and transform this into an audio- visual composition of the city through processes akin to that of Burrows’ cuts-up, the digital design of this neural stem will be both controlled by the participants and/or online users. This automaton will broadcast the data stream over web-radio. By allowing the possibility for anyone to access and to manipulate the data input by our techno-meaderthalls (text, photos, videos, etc) the city will multiply and transform inside-out, outside-in, both virtually and through its physical embodiment!

As a perpetual mirroring of the machine and its participants, a psycho-geographical mind-mapping is created through the flux of desired data yielded from the city, in order to produce, reproduce and reflect a new vision of the city, viewed via the techno-meaderthall’s own path, journey, derive, performance, action and interpretations. A techno-pirate’s geographical disassemblage, a dissemination of interconnected points of views that are all the time crossing over with each other and with themselves. Each path begins from the singular, but become multiplied through the potential of reinterpretation as driven by the machine and/or other derivers. Their ubiquitous presence, catching the real without closing it, opening nodes of bilateral trans-communication, the “deriver” swims in the streets of his own memory and the memory of his fellow city derivers.

Marching to a different beat, The Scie Protocol builds a continuity in the cycles (derive / performance / live stream / archives / interaction) of the city. The workshop is constructed by the exchanges made with individuals or groups desiring lines through the city - maps are to be re-interpreted, re-played whilst the machine will continuously accumulates, archives and processes information given or sent by the participants - this data is then re-injected into the next, new collation of the following day - thus, the past is visibly and sonically returned to the present to create the future.

By J. Pickett & J. Ottavi

more information:

http://www.noiser.org
http://www.mobilefest.com.br

in collaboration with APO33

A10LAB LONDON

As part of Area10 Project Space the new medialab platform is being introduced to facilitate the development of research and art practices using new technology in the media arts.

Electrofringe presents an annual festival and year round program of experimental electronic arts and culture dedicated to skills development and artistic exchange. The program focuses on uncovering emergent forms and has an emphasis on encouraging exchange between emerging and established artists. Electrofringe Festival 2008 is the festival’s eleventh year and will be held over five days from 2nd - 6th of October 2008. The program presents workshops, panel discussions, masterclasses, presentations, exhibitions, screenings and interventions. Full program at: http://www.electrofringe.net/

Scheduled to take place with regularity in Bucharest, involving with each edition new curatorial formats, Ars Telefonica is conceived as a temporary platform for exhibition display which proposes a re-reading of the connections settled in a specific context between art, its venue and audience. The decision of the curators to appropriate for this edition a temporary space for exhibition display – the phone booth – responds to the actual request of the local art scene to search for new contexts of dissemination of contemporary art and to establish a community of interest for this cultural sector.

The question dropped by the project is to which extend a temporary platform of this kind can disturb the behavior of the art public, the accidental public or of the partners participating directly to contemporary art production? Do these spaces have a potential in facilitating or in speeding up the process of social and cultural exchange?

Centre for Visual Introspection is an independent platform for research, artistic and theoretical production founded in Bucharest by a collective of artists and curators. The Centre opened its doors with a series of site-specific art interventions displayed in the phone booths in the central district of Bucharest between September 23 + 27, and an accompanying program of lectures, sound performances and a special exhibition, grouped under the title Ars Telefonica. The artists’ proposals involve means of expression belonging to connected cognitive fields, giving to the passers-by the possibility to choose new coordinates to orientate in the city. The relationship of the artistic projects with the community life, the cultural memory of a place and as well with another model of communication, provoked by the appropriation of an unconventional venue, settles a change in the public expectations as far as the way art is exhibited and comes into dialogue with the spectator.

Participants: Studio Basar (Bucharest); Luca Frei (Malmő); Carl Michael von Hausswolff (Stockholm); Dőrte Meyer (Berlin); Roland Schőny (Vienna); Bernhard Schreiner (Frankfurt); son:DA (Maribor); Jiri Skala (Prague); Nasan Tur (Berlin); Joanna Warsza (Warsaw); Adnan Yildiz (Istanbul/Berlin)

Special Event: Let me hold you hand by Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum (Rotterdam); Opening October 2. Let me hold your hand consists of old telephones, salvaged from the obscurity of second-hand shops. Each with its own peculiar character, derived from the ever changing trends of commodity design, seems to represent a voice of a different epoch. If these objects could talk, what would they say?

Today’s radio spectrum is predominately utilized by the military and governmental organizations, with government regulating bodies doling out expensive licenses to corporations for the right to broadcast en masse in public space. These powerful “one way” broadcast licenses have come to be understood as ‘radio’ versus the initial conception of radio as a “many to many” communications medium. Except for a small fraction of frequencies allocated to amateur operators, who only need to pass a simple exam to receive the right to use the spectrum, there is no other way for the public to gain any access to this resource, arguably one of Earth’s most important, and only inexhaustible resources.

Our situation today is far from Guglielmo Marconi’s visions of radio’s ability to save lives and enlighten humanity, or Velimir Klebnikov’s ‘Radio of the Future’. Instead, today’s radio spectrum is a tightly controlled, profitized commodity. In this light, DAREDX seeks to re-establish the public’s presence and right of occupation within the radio spectrum. While there exists an active and progressive amateur radio community worldwide, it is out of sight from the general public. DAREDX will expose and access the radio spectrum by aurally re-broadcasting nightly explorations throughout the radio spectrum. Activating the evening air of Cabot Square in order to re-establish the connection of the spectrum to public space. DAREDX will allow the public in the square to hear the signals we are enveloped in. Re-invigorating the words of an infamous amateur operator in the early 1900s when told by the US Navy to remove himself from a particular frequency: “Say, you navy people think you own the ether. Who ever heard of the navy, anyway? Beat it, you, beat it.” The spectrum will no longer remain closed to the ears and eyes of the public, and instead will become part of the natural landscape of Cabot Square.

Matthew Biederman, working under the call sign VA2XBX/P will be operating a high frequency transceiver in the open air of Cabot Square. He will be attempting long-distance communication with as many different operators as possible over the course of the intervention. Each complete communication will be logged and mapped creating a diary of the airwaves every night (radio.dare-dare.org). Additionally, DAREDX will attempt a set of digital communications, in order to receive SSTV (SlowScan Televsion), WEFAX (from NOAA Satellites) and many more. All of the actions’ audio will be played in Cabot Square, creating a sonic landscape of the electromagnetic spectrum in real time. All of the audio will be archived and made available under a creative commons license. The aggregation of these actions build into the overall DAREDX project.

Originally from the United States, Matthew Biederman (Montréal) has been doing performances, installations and exhibitions since the mid-1990’s. www.mbiederman.com www.spectralecology.org.

Jessica Thompson will present Freestyle SoundHack, a collaborative performance in the form of a workshop. The performance / workshop involves building Freestyle SoundKits – wearable sound pieces prototyped by the artist – that generate and broadcast electronic beats as users move through the urban environment. During the performance, the artist will give her project to the public by teaching workshop participants how to make their own Freestyle SoundKits, which they can distribute as they wish, using whatever sounds they choose.

The workshop begins at Video Pool with a Freestyle SoundKits building session, followed by live sonic and movement-based interventions in the public spaces of the Exchange District. Thompson regards her transmission of open-source technological skill as the core component of the performance. She is interested in sharing technological knowledge so that the sonic transformation of public space becomes less of a specialized artistic activity and more of an ordinary occurrence.

The workshop/performance is open to anyone aged 14 years and older. No previous electronics, hacking, coding or performance experience is needed – just a desire to experiment and play.

Enrollment is limited to 10 participants and is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

The fee for the workshop is $40, which will cover the cost of workshop materials. Participants should bring their own snacks/ lunch to the workshop.

This workshop is presented by Video Pool Media Arts Centre as part of the performance festival, (in)visible Cities, which is a co-presentation of aceartinc., Urban Shman Gallery, and Plug In ICA. For more information, visit invisiblecitiesperformance.blogspot.com.

ADDITIONAL EVENT – Please join us on Friday, September 12 at 300-100 Arthur Street from 7:00 - 8:00 p.m. for an artist talk presented by Jessica Thompson during which time she’ll talk about her past work, current projects, and future ideas.

ARTIST BIO — Jessica Thompson is a new media artist whose practice encompasses sound, performance, and mobile technologies. Her projects enable audience members to create user-defined spaces and situations within urban environments. Her projects have been shown in exhibitions and festivals such as New Territories (ARCO 2005, Madrid), MACO (Mexico City), dp003 (Dundee, Scotland), ISEA 2006 (San Jose, CA), the 2006 Conflux Festival (New York), Kunsthallen Brænderigården (Denmark), and InterAccess Artist Run Centre (Toronto). Her project, SOUNDBIKE, was featured at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2005 and, more recently, she was one of five international artists invited to participate in Reinventing the Wheel, a residency held at *.artlabs in Sibiu, Romania. For more information, please visit: www.jessicathompson.ca.

These exhibition is presented thanks to generous financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Winnipeg Arts Council.

VIDEO POOL MEDIA ARTS CENTRE is a non-profit artist run centre dedicated to advancing the discipline of media art by providing media artists, non-profit organizations and community groups with access to professional video and media equipment, training, distribution, and programming. Video Pool strives to be a national leader fostering innovation, experimentation, critical dialogue, and advocacy in media arts.

Contact:
Cam Woykin, Education Coordinator
300-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg MB R3B 1H3
videopool.org // videopool.blogspot.com