RHIZOME DIGEST: 4.23.03

discussion

Posted April 22 2003 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 4.23.03

RHIZOME DIGEST: April 23, 2004 Content: +announcement+ 1. Christiane Paul: jihul presents Chico MacMurtrie & Adrianne Wortzel, Wed. May 5, 7 PM 2. Sue Huang: art corruption 3. Bob Wyman: WPS1 Art Radio on the Internet +opportunity+ 4. klaus knoll: New Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Program in New Media 5. Lars Midboe: Call for entries Electrohype 2004 6. Indi McCarthy: CFP // Festival of Independent and Alternative Games +feature+ 7. Lauren Cornell: lauren cornell on r a d i o q u a l i a 8. Ophra Wolf: pixelACHE 2004 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 4.19.04 From: Christiane Paul (Christiane_Paul@WHITNEY.ORG) Subject: jihul presents Chico MacMurtrie & Adrianne Wortzel, Wed. May 5, 7 PM jihui - Digital Salon presents Chico MacMurtrie & Adrianne Wortzel Wednesday, May 5, 2004, 7 - 9 PM Parsons Design Lab 55 West 13th Street, 9th Fl. New York, NY 10011 <a rel="nofollow" href="http://agent.netart-init.org">http://agent.netart-init.org</a> "Robot Works" Chico MacMurtrie, Artistic Director of Amorphic Robot Works (ARW; <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amorphicrobotworks.org">http://www.amorphicrobotworks.org</a>), will present work from his recent retrospective exhibition of over 100 machines, recently shown at this year's European Cultural Capital exhibition in Lille, France. This exhibition included the large-scale Robotic Landscape, Cave of the Subconscious, Too Big Dog Monkey, Floaters, and Skeletal Reflections. MacMurtrie and ARW have toured around the world realizing this society of machines in various performance and installation formats., MacMurtrie will discuss the evolution of his work, recent projects, and the use of vision technology to create ongoing interactive performance in an installation setting. Adrianne Wortzel will show and tell StudioBlue, the telerobotic theater she developed and directs at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, as well as her current work-in-progress there: Eliza Redux, a theatrical scenario in the form of psychoanalytic sessions. The sessions unfold via real-time streaming of a physical robot equipped with an interactive conversational computer program in the tradition of Eliza. Patients visiting the web site will control the robot's motion, and video camera pan, tilt, and zoom in real time. Transcripts of sessions will be archived for future examination. Ms. Wortzel will be joined by James Cruickshanks, a graduate student at Cooper Union whose thesis project was the development of GRASP, a performance control software. Graduate students in Professor Zhang Ga's Collaboration Studio class at Parsons created the web interface for this project. Chico MacMurtrie was born in New Mexico in 1961, and currently resides in New York. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in New Forms and Concepts from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has been awarded four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for Interdisciplinary Artists (individual grants in 1988, 1990 and 1991; a collaborative grant in 1993 for the premiere of Trigram: A Robotic Opera, which was staged at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco). Trigram was a feature story on The Next Step program on the Discovery Channel. He was a Performing Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1989, and in 1990 received the San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award. In 1991, MacMurtrie completed a month long tour of Europe, funded by an Arts International grant. During that time he traveled and performed in Czechoslovakia and presented an award winning performance at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, which appeared on television in Munich, Berlin, and Dortmund, Germany. The tour ended with performances in Amsterdam and an interactive installation at the Kijkhuis, in Den Haag, Holland. A retrospective exhibition of over 100 machines was shown at the 2004 European Cultural Capital exhibition in Lille, France Adrianne Wortzel's work explores historical and cultural perspectives through new technologies. She creates fictive webworks, and interactive robotic and telerobotic theatrical scenarios in both physical and virtual networked environments. Works include Eliza Redux, a robot offering interactive online psychoanalytic sessions; Camouflage Town, a telerobotic installation exhibited in Data Dynamics at The Whitney Museum of American Art (Spring 2001); Sayonara Diorama (1998), intermingling human and robotic actors who tell the tale of a fictive second Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin thirty years after the first; The Ship's Detective, in Cooper Union's Technoseduction exhibition (1997); The Hidden Archivists at the Anchorage at Creative Time's Art in the Anchorage (1997); NoMad is An Island at Ars Electronica97 (Linz, Austria); and Tableaux Vivant Dan Une Monde Parfait in Areale 99 (Baitz, Germany). Her work is documented at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://artnetweb.com/wortzel">http://artnetweb.com/wortzel</a>. As a recipient of the Artists-in-Labs-Award, she will be an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Zurich Artificial Intelligence Lab from July through December 2004. Wortzel is a Professor of Communication Design at New York City College of Technology, CUNY; an instructor in the Instructional Technology Certificate Program of the CUNY Graduate Center; and an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where she is also the Director of StudioBlue, an arena for telerobotic performance productions. jihui (the meeting point), a self-regulated digital salon, invites all interested people to send ideas for discussion/performance/etc. jihui is where your voice is heard and your vision shared. jihui is made possible through the generous support from the Digital Design Department and Parsons Design Lab of the Parsons School of Design and from the Rockefeller Foundation A joint public program by NETART INITIATIVE and INTELLIGENT AGENT + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 4.21.04 From: Sue Huang (it3husu@ituniv.se) Subject: art corruption www.c6.org/nest C6 is proud to announce the release of N.E.S.T The Network Examination of Serendipitous Transfer application The application detailed below is ready for download and installation at: www.c6.org/nest/download.html Join the nest and help us analyse this chaos! The internet is an ordered place of ones and zeros, a logical exchange of packets of data. Math exists everywhere in bytes, bits, addresses and code. C6 has been creating chaotic content online for several years, and now focuses attention on to the raw materials of earlier transmissions: The search and interpretation of chaos online captured with a binary palette. NEST is a network cooperation that examines the corruption of data transfer in virtual space. This is achieved via a community of users passing an audio file around in a ring. Connected by an unreliable method (UDP), the communication becomes prone to corruption, much like the children's game of ?Chinese Whispers?, where each client is linked to their closest geographical neighbour. Passing a ?virtual whisper? around the internet, each link in the chain can create new versions with each imperfect cycle. NEST evolves new audio and cartographic visualisations through errors in data transfer. The constant re-occurrence of corruption causes a progressive audio-visual creative process that the public can capture and upload to the NEST web site. The software will be made open source later in the year to allow artists to develop their own visualisations of the NEST data structure, and these plug-ins will be further distributed via the web site. NEST is specifically designed for the poorly connected, its target being low bandwidth users, rather than high bandwidth commercial connections. There is an increasing technological gap between these two which is reflected in available online content. Often technological or economic factors can limit that bandwidth resulting in a compromise in the experience for both artist and viewer. NEST uses lower bandwidths and the faults caused by them to create new sound, open to the possibilities of random intervention. Users of all bandwidths are invited to experience NEST, however it is the home users connecting via modems on out dated telephony networks that will make the most essential contribution by causing the first corruptions to filter around the NEST ring. NEST consists of two software elements: A server that maintains users within the ring and a client program that runs on the users? machines passing the audio data and updating the server with findings (the client is cross platform). The server identifies the strengths of connections between each user visualizing a map of quick and slow transfers within the ring. C6 - Creating chaos in an ordered world. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 4.21.04 From: Bob Wyman (bobwyman@pubsub.com) Subject: WPS1 Art Radio on the Internet Check out <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.wps1.org/">http://www.wps1.org/</a> WPS1 Art Radio will be broadcasting on the Internet starting at 9:00am April 19 and continuing around the clock. Some of the "highliights" they claim for future programming include: * Richard Prince dreams of a big penis, * Charlie Ahearn visits the great hip-hop DJs, * Walter Abish recalls his Chinese exile, * Chuck Close discovers South Beach, * Matthew Sharpe talks drugs and Jews, * Pat Steir finds romance in dirty blues, * SalmanRushdie returns to form, * and Henry Geldzahler simply returns! Their mission statement is (taken from the site): "P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center announces the launch of WPS1 (www.wps1.org), the world's first internet art radio station. Sponsored by Bloomberg L.P., WPS1 provides an extraordinary lineup of music and talk shows broadcasting 24 hours a day. "The station's programs combine talk and music shows hosted by contemporary writers, artists and musicians with rare historic material that includes the entire audio archive of the Museum of Modern Art. WPS1 will stream to listeners on the Internet only. Its presence on the Web will make the station's unique digital library available to an international audience at any hour, seven days a week. As such, WPS1will become a live audio museum in cyberspace, extending the visual art, book, music, film, video and performance programs that P.S.1 and MoMA are known for in ways previously unforeseen. Here, at www.wps1.org, is the first all-art, all-the-time radio station, where expression of all kinds remains truly free." WPS1 is a project of the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. bob wyman + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome is now offering organizational subscriptions, memberships purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions allow participants of an institution to access Rhizome's services without having to purchase individual memberships. (Rhizome is also offering subsidized memberships to qualifying institutions in poor or excluded communities.) Please visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/org.php">http://rhizome.org/info/org.php</a> for more information or contact Jessica Ivins at Jessica@Rhizome.org. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 4.17.04 From: klaus knoll <knoll@everythingflows.com> Subject: New Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Program in New Media Dear all, The TRANSART INSTITUTE offers Europe's first low-residency MFA program. Students are free to pursue work in any media art-related genre and create their own course of study, working independently and with the support of self-chosen faculty and artist mentors. Three intensive residencies permit students to continue with their professional life while participating in the program. Genres include: Animation, Cyber Art, Experimental Art, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Installation Art, Interactive Art, Interdisciplinary Art, Performance Art, Photography, and Sound/Music. Deadline for receipt of summer 2004 applications: August 1, 2004 www.transartinstitute.org Kind regards, Dr. Klaus Knoll + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 4.19.04 From: Lars Midböe <info@electrohype.org> Subject: Call for entries Electrohype 2004 Call for entries Electrohype 2004 - the third Nordic biennial for computer-based art. Deadline May 31st 2004. Electrohype is pleased to announce this call for entries for the exhibition that will be a follow up to two previous exhibitions Electrohype 2000 and 2002. The upcoming exhibition will be a large scale and broad presentation of computer based and high tech art. The exhibition Electrohype 2004 will be held at Malmo Konsthall, one of the most beautiful exhibition spaces for art in Scandinavia. The exhibition will be presented for eight weeks on 1700 square meters (13 000 square feet). This gives us a unique opportunity to compile a spacious exhibition that gives all works and installations good conditions. Our goal is to present an exhibition consisting of 15 - 20 works of art. The concept of the Electrohype biennial is that it shall be a Nordic exhibition but this does not exclude works by artists from outside the Nordic region. To give the exhibition a broad perspective we are usually working with a 60/40 model, 60 percent from the Nordic region and 40 percent from the rest of the world. Given the opportunity to present an exhibition in this large scale in a space that reaches a large audience (235 000 visitors annually) we have decided to choose the theme PERSPECTIVE for this exhibition. This means that we will not only include newly produced works but also look for artwork that draws a historical line for a rather young art genre. Important dates Deadline for this call for entries may 31st, 2004 Exhibition opening November 27th 2004 Exhibition closing January 23rd 2005 What kind of art are we looking for? Electrohype has since the start in 1999 focused on what we choose to call computer based art. Art that runs of computers and utilizes the capacity of the computer to mix various media, allow interaction with the audience, or machines interacting with each others etc. in other words art that can not be transferred to "traditional" linear media. This might seem as a narrow approach but we have discovered that it gives us a better focus on a genre that in no way is narrow. We are not looking for "straight" video art (even if it is edited on a computer) or still images rendered on computers and other material that refers to more "traditional" media forms. Forms were the traditional tools have been replaced with computers and software. Practical An online application form and a PDF form can be found on our website: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.electrohype.org/2004/entrieinfo02.html">http://www.electrohype.org/2004/entrieinfo02.html</a> NOTE: Please do NOT send documentation material as attachments to e-mail and do NOT send 8 pages CVs. Put your material online and send us the url or ftp address or send us a CD in the mail. Please read the form and follow the guidelines. We receive a large amount of proposals and all of them are reviewed closely. To be able to do this we ask you to follow this structure. Financial We are still working on the fundraising for the exhibition. We will hopefully have final numbers sometime during this summer. We will have to adjust the final selection of works for exhibition according to the financial situation. This is unfortunate but it is also necessary, art is beautiful but financial reality is harsh. We will encourage everyone submitting material to look for possibilities for local funding to help cover costs for transport, travel and rent of technical equipment. In previous exhibitions we have managed to keep a high level both in artistic content and exhibition design, even on a modest budget. It is therefore very important for us to avoid unpleasant surprises, so please keep this in mind when filling out the various posts in the form, especially when it comes to technical requirements, transport weight etc. We are looking forward to see new and interesting works of art. Best regards from the Electrohype team. Anna Kindvall and Lars Gustav Midboe For additional info please visit our web site at: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.electrohype.org">http://www.electrohype.org</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 6. Date: 4.21.04 From: Indi McCarthy (indi@uci.edu) Subject: CFP // Festival of Independent and Alternative Games ALT+CTRL Festival of Independent and Alternative Games <a rel="nofollow" href="http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/gamelab/events/alt_ctrl_04.html">http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/gamelab/events/alt_ctrl_04.html</a> PROPOSAL DEALINE MAY 31, 2004 <a rel="nofollow" href="http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/gamelab/events/alt_ctrl_submit.html">http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/gamelab/events/alt_ctrl_submit.html</a> EXHIBITION DATES OCTOBER 5 - NOVEMBER 24, 2004 The Beall Center for Art and Technology University of California Irvine ALT+CTRL fills a vital niche by providing a juried venue outside the mainstream game industry to showcase the latest independent games to both publishers and the general public. For sponsors it is an opportunity to show their support for indpendent game developers, artists and modders who are trying to push the envelope of what games are and can be. The event will also give sponsors exposure to a projected audience of over 2500 indy developers, game industry publishers, and game fans. Similar to what the Sundance Film Festival does for filmmakers, ALT+CTRL seeks to cultivate a vibrant independent game community, and bring both the game industry and the general public new and novel applications in game design, game genres, methodologies and approaches to game play. ALT+CTRL will include the following components: Exhibition of independent games presented on customized game machines, plus game art related performances Public screening of "machinima" (films made "on location" in computer games.) Conference on game design and culture, featuring creative leaders from the game industry, artists and independent game developers, academics, cultural theorists, and festival jurors (streamed and archived online) Outreach to local middle and high school students Online exhibition archive and catalog, including papers and proceedings from the conference CONTACT : INDI @ UCI.EDU + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + For $65 annually, Rhizome members can put their sites on a Linux server, with a whopping 350MB disk storage space, 1GB data transfer per month, catch-all email forwarding, daily web traffic stats, 1 FTP account, and the capability to host your own domain name (or use <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.net/your_account_name">http://rhizome.net/your_account_name</a>). Details at: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/services/1.php">http://rhizome.org/services/1.php</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 7. Date: 4.23.04 From: Lauren Cornell (lclclc70@hotmail.com) Subject: lauren cornell on r a d i o q u a l i a lauren cornell on r a d i o q u a l i a the work of the six-year-old online art collaborative r a d i o q u a l i a is difficult to quantify: in a trajectory of net art disciplines that reaches just past a decade ? they are both old school and new school, seminal and emergent. This careful dynamic is sustained through a balance of possibility and limitation that exists in both their projects and artistic practice. a certain ratio of play and self-criticism is always built into their work. And perhaps, this is the trick that has allowed them to continue to pioneer online and on-air spaces without running out of ideas or credibility. r a d i o q u a l i a was founded by Honor Harger and Adam Hyde in Australia in 1998. Their work as a duo has been focused primarily on exploring the ways in which broadcasting technologies, such as streaming media and online radio, can produce new artistic forms. The numerous streaming projects produced by r a d i o q u a l i a can be categorized under conceptual net art, software development and sound art. Harger and Hyde have worked independently and as r a d i o q u a l i a to produce and curate various media initiatives including festivals, such as net.congestion (2000), conferences, education programs and exhibitions. Most recently, they have curated <re:play> a show of critical artists? games that was produced for The Institute for Contemporary Art in Cape Town, South Africa and exhibited at L/Bs in Cape Town. Since opening, <re:play> has gone on a New Zealand tour, exhibiting there at Artspace in Auckland and the Physics Room in Christchurch. Unlike the typical computer or video game, the underlying political agendas in the games selected for <re:play> are made explicit. Space Invaders Act 1732 by Andy Deck, Antiwargame by Josh On and Futurefarmers and The Intruder by Natalie Bookchin invert and expose fantasies of imperialism and domination while still inviting that they be played out. Like many artists working now (see C-level or Space 1026), r a d i o q u a l i a break down rigid distinctions between the professional practices of curator/ programmer/ organizer/ artist through the wide range of projects they are invested in. Their multiple creative and organizational identities connect them to a re-emerging professional category that is refreshingly ambiguous. Sharing the imperatives of earlier net.art, r a d i o q u a l i a projects often use the medium of the internet as their material. Free Radio Linux (2002), which was commissioned by Steve Dietz at the Walker Art Center, was an online and on-air radio station that broadcast only a computerized voice reading the source code used to create the Linux operating system. As Vuk Cosic's History of Art for the Blind did for ASCII, Free Radio Linux revealed the otherwise obscure technologies involved in the Linux Operating system and in doing so, rendered them artistic. The Linux kernel, which contains 4.1 million lines of code, took 593.89 days to read in its entirety. Stretching well over a year, this net-based performance was a self-reflexive attempt to grasp what code is and how it can be interpreted. Free Radio Linux proved most provocative in the ways in which its goals were ultimately untenable. With its excessively long, linear narrative and mock authoritative voice, any solid comprehension of the code in this form seemed implausible from day one. Other key r a d i o q u a l i a projects enlist more active participation. The Frequency Clock is an open source software system used to build, program and manage streaming audio and video channels. Unlike other popular streaming media sources, The Frequency Clock provides no content only the medium between the broadcaster and audience. When I first encountered this project in Fall of 2000, I thought for a moment that the model of independently controlled online broadcast it presented had the potential to succeed in the areas where public access television had failed. With no corporate interest to quarantine public time, and shifting, anonymous audiences, The Frequency Clock seemed free of the pitfalls that stymied the former radical promise of public access tv. In response to this parallel to the early days of public access, Adam Hyde listed three problems related to online broadcasting "1. access to technology 2. knowledge about how to use the technology 3. licensing of technologies." He noted: "If you want to talk about democratising media then its better first to acknowledge the politics of access to that media." Hyde situates the net and his work within a larger system of technological and social privilege that necessarily lacks any of the utopian premises held by early tv pioneers. Built simply as a medium that can connect audiences and broadcasters from geographic and culturally disparate locales, The Frequency Clock's potential for future interpretation and use remains open. The Frequency Clock also exists as an installation and has been set up at various sites including Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), the Experimental Art Foundation (Adelaide, Australia), Video Positive (Liverpool, UK), the Sonar festival (Barcelona, Spain). As an installation, The Frequency Clock entails multiple computers be connected to both the internet and to mini-FM radio transmitters. The net radio stations streamed into the gallery are re-broadcast on FM radio. Listeners tune in by wearing radio headsets and moving around the gallery space; their movement becomes equivalent to the tuning of a dial. r a d i o q u a l i a?s latest project synthesizes certain aims and outputs involved in their previous streaming projects. Radio Astronomy (<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.radio-astronomy.net">http://www.radio-astronomy.net</a>), which will launch in August 2004, is a radio station dedicated to broadcasting the sounds of space. Intercepting sounds from radio telescopes, r a d i o q u a l i a will make audible astronomical phenomena, such as planets, stars and radiation from the sun, that are generally only visualized. Composer Pauline Oliveros channeled sounds from space in her 1987 project "Echoes from the Moon" in which people sent their voices to the moon and listened to them return. Oliveros noted people were turned into "vocal astronauts" through this experience. As with other r a d i o q u a l i a work, Radio Astronomy demonstrates a commitment to making different perceptions of information and technology tangible and valid. Throughout their work in the past couple of years, r a d i o q u a l i a continually re-invent their basic concerns with the persistent problems of bandwidth and broadcasting technologies by applying themselves to new terrain (see the cosmos.) In a thread related to streaming art work on empyre, Harger wrote recently: "i guess my whole point was that you don't actually need 'better faster gear' in order to create highly evocative + powerful works of art using streaming media. i don't subscribe to the idea that we need to wait for some unspecified future moment where broadband is ubiquitous, in order to make meaningful works using this technology. there is always going to be bandwidth inequity, no matter how technology + distribution systems evolve in the next few years." Here, Harger asserts action over waiting for problem-free stage. This tactical approach resounds through their work. r a d i o q u a l i a's strength lies in making work within shifting sets of limitations, and allowing these to propel them on. FOOTNOTE Adam Hyde in conversation with Lauren Cornell, 4/23/04. See Pauline Oliveros, "Echoes from the Moon", <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.deeplistening.org/pauline/writings/moon.html">http://www.deeplistening.org/pauline/writings/moon.html</a> Honor Harger, www.subtle.net/empyrean/empyre/ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 8. Date: 4.23.04 From: Ophra Wolf (ophra@pursuethepulse.org) Subject: PixelACHE 2004 On Thursday, April 1, the PixelACHE festival took over the ground floor of Helsinki¹s Kiasma Museum of Modern Art. But to say that this is when the festival began would be misleading: in fact, the festival had opened six days earlier, on a lively ferry ride from Helsinki to Stockholm. There, a group of festival artists were headed for two days of presentations and performances. Back in Helsinki, the Signal Process Workshop had been going on for nearly three weeks, and the Locative Media Workshop was nearing the end of a busy week of collaborations. These hands-on workshops were a major ingredient in the festival¹s mix, as were the many club nights, which took artists and audience out of the museum and into various club venues in Helsinki to get a taste of audiovisual treats such as those of the Swedish collective, abnormalaudio, and German glitch master, Jan Jelinek. For those who were happy sticking to the Museum, interactive installations and nightly performances promised to keep creative appetites well fed. In any case, if it¹s hard to say just when the PixelACHE festival began, it¹s even harder to pinpoint when it came to an end. Sitting in Helsinki¹s Sauna Bar in the wee hours of Sunday, the last of the four days, it seemed like the festival was destined to go on forever the ideas, collaborations, and inspirations that it fertilized are certainly running on. PixelACHE is an annual festival of electronic art, design and technology. It is organized by the Finnish production company, Olento, and its sister non-profit media culture organization, Piknik Frequency. The festival opens in Helsinki, at the Kiasma Museum of Modern Art, and then makes its way around the world last year¹s VJ¹ing themed production made stops in New York and Montreal. This year¹s theme, Audiovisual Architecture, brings together projects that question and experiment on the border between the digital domain and the physical world. More importantly, it brings together artists, engineers, and academics from around the world to share strategies and new possibilities for constructing realities. The PixelACHE organizers dig deep into the world of new media and electronic art not only to find and expose exciting work, but also to encourage and fertilize creative collaborations in what they call the ?gray zone¹ between art, science, and design. The global networks of the new media world those of media activism, the open source community and net art, to name just a few are in fact global research laboratories, and the PixelACHE festival offers both the researchers and curious individuals a chance to experience and partake in ongoing developments. Information sharing, collaboration and a do-it-yourself approach are what fuel this cultural movement, so it is only natural that multi-disciplinary workshops are such an essential part of a festival which is out not only to expose, but to ignite innovation. The Signal Process Workshop was led by Sophea Lerner, an Australian sound artist currently based in Helsinki¹s Center for Music and Technology, which produced the event in collaboration with the MUU Media art gallery and the PixelACHE festival. The workshop brought together participants from different creative disciplines for three weeks of site-specific engagements and explorations around the theme of sound in public space. Looking beyond ?signal processing¹ as a reference to the mechanical or electronic manipulation of an audio signal, the workshop sought to explore how sound might be involved in the social processes and signals we send each other in public spaces, and the kinds of signal processing that might attenuate and amplify the flows of movement and information that emerge in public spaces. After an intensive one-week introduction to selected sound technologies and techniques, participants took their home made contact mics and other such equipment into central Helsinki to record, explore and collaborate on sonic interventions, joining forces with the Locative Media Workshop in the third week. Andrew Patterson of Helsinki¹s MediaLab UIAH, led The Locative Media Workshop at the PixelACHE festival, which was the first in a series of six "Trans-Cultural Mapping" workshops initiated by RIXC Centre for New Media in Riga, Latvia. The term ?locative media¹ has come into use lately in association with mobility, collaborative mapping, and emergent forms of social networking, but in the workshop series it is especially referring to media which is context specific, particular to a given time and location. For one week, twenty-three international participants artists, writers and researchers from the fields of architecture, film, performance, visual and sonic art, and contemporary archeological theory invaded ³Rautatieasema², Helsinki¹s central railway station, in which the local Helsinki culture of mobility, systems and networks is manifested both in physical form and ephemeral movement. The railway station served as the locus for the week¹s activities, a common reference point for the participants to explore the ³relationships between critical fieldwork, site-specific performance, temporality, mediated memory, material culture, psychogeography, collaborative and multiple- perspective documentation.² The week¹s collaborations involved everything from GPS (Global Position System) informed chalk drawings, to face painting, a photo journal enabled by the camera phone and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service, a new technology which enables users to make telephone calls and transmit data at the same time) capabilities of the Nokia 6610, and a trash archive enabled by one archeologist¹s patient insistence. Both GPS and GRPS appeared throughout the festival, in conversations and projections about the future, but also in performances and presentations. The Open Source Architecture presentation, for example, used the camera phones to allow participants to send their subjective points of view of the transforming space in which they were immersed to one another throughout the evening. Perhaps the most intricate use of the technologies was made by ambientTV.NET¹s TRyPTiCHON performance, in which a roaming narrator takes to the streets of Helsinki and texts GPS tagged messages of his journey to the performance space. There, the data is translated into the OSC protocol, enabling it to be both visualized and sonified. The audience, meanwhile, are seated inside an intimate white satin tent, surrounded on all sides by a real-time soundscape, projections of the city and of the narration, and a dancer who is making her own journey just outside the tent through the transforming audiovisual landscape. This was a festival of transforming audiovisual landscapes galore. If it didn¹t offer a dictionary definition of what Audiovisual Architecture might be, it proffered so many possibilities, ideas, and exciting experimentations that it made classification seem decidedly obsolete. What many of the projects did have in common was a focus on integrating technology into the architecture of the design so that it was as much a part of the content as it was of the form. And the most interesting architectural models were often to be found not in the projects themselves, but in the processes and patterns of collaboration that gave them life. Take Australian sound artist, Jodi Rose¹s ?Singing Bridges¹, for example, which sing as much for her dedication to bringing her spirited laughter along as she travels the world in search of bridges, as they do for their beautiful sound recordings. Or Juha Huuskonen, the festival director, whose fervor for bringing people and ideas together made collaborations like Open Source Architecture group possible in the first place, not to mention the crazy cross-fertilization that characterized every moment of PixelACHE. It was at the Sauna Bar on this last Sunday - a group of festival artists and organizers, intoxicated with sauna heat, lack of sleep, and a bit of alcohol - that Juha was explaining his passion for concocting collaborations, his desire to ?interface contexts¹. Behind us, a middle aged, didgeridoo playing DJ was offering his surreal musings on the mating between wolf and man, and suggesting that if our friends wanted to go to the moon, well, we didn¹t have to follow. At that moment, the fact that we are the architects of our own reality was unquestionable, and the possibilities seemed limitless. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Kevin McGarry (kevin@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 9, number 17. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art and be less than 1500 words. For information on advertising in Rhizome Digest, please contact info@rhizome.org. 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