Multiplace Festival

Slavo Krekovič

Multiplace is network-in-movement of people and organisations interested in interaction between media, technologies, art, culture and society. Network activities culminate every year into the festival, that is happening parallely at several locations in the world. Its program is open to workshops, installations, discussions, concerts, performances, exhibitions, presentations, screenings and especially new forms of creativity. Original focus on the new media culture has been evolving since 2002 and besides the technological aspect of digital media in art, the focus shifted also to questions related to its aesthetical, social, cultural, legal and political issues. The aim of the festival-network Multiplace is to create the fertile ground for media art, to support the creativity in an open and collaborative environment and to encourage critical reflection on the life in the culture shaped by technologies. Multiplace emphasizes the experimentation with the possibilities of collaboration and networking among particular nodes in the network, but also with new ways of audience participation and involvement.

Bio: Slavo Krekovič (SK) is a founding editor-in-chief of of ¾ revue and co-organiser of Multiplace festival.

Terra Incognita. Mixed reality as experienced by users

Rariţa Szakáts and Laura Codreanu

“Terra Incognita” is a series of real/virtual exploration events developed by AltArt between 2000-2006. The projects were conceived as multiplayer game platforms, commenting social changes in Romania. The four editions of “Terra Incognita” covered issues like traveling via telepresence, the fading communist heritage, urban legends or local/european values. The presentation gives an overview of the user experiences that the various mixed reality platforms of Terra Incognita has enabled. The level of audience participation and their direct experience varied from one edition to the other: in “TI1” – virtually exploring remote territories and uncharted cultures by guiding a team of real travelers; in “TI2” – moving around avatars in order to re-immerse in the past by getting to know communist cultures similar to their own; in “TI3” – active input of personal stories and experiences that became landmarks in the “urban community map” they created on the game platform; and in “TI4” – creating their own avatars and virtually traveling around European cities while at the same time competing with each other and cooperating with each other in discovering the European values.

Bio: Rariţa Szakáts (RO) works as arts manager and cultural policymaker. She graduated the University of Arts and Design in Cluj, Romania (2003) and holds a second BA in Journalism at Babes Bolyai University Cluj, Romania (1997). During the past ten years she worked in fields such as culture, media, democracy and minority rights in different nongovernmental organizations: AltArt Foundation, Ethnocultural Diversity Resource Center, Soros Foundation for an Open Society Romania. Rariţa Szakáts is part of the AltArt creative team and the executive director of the foundation. Born in 1975, Rariţa Szakáts lives and works in Cluj, Romania.

Bio: Laura Codreanu (RO) was born in 1976 in Cluj, Romania. She currently works as arts manager and editor. She graduated the University of Arts and Design in Cluj, Romania (2003) – photography – video and computer image section and the Babes Bolyai University Cluj – Spanish and English Language and Literature (2003) and Journalism (1997). She worked in book publishing, advertising, culture, media, illustration and design (for Saga Publishing House, Echinox Magazine, Netsoft Systems, AltArt Foundation, Soros Foundation for an Open Society Romania). She is presently working as project coordinator in the AltArt Foundation.

AltArt Foundation: Among the cultural phenomena we witness in Romania during the last 10 years, digital culture is the field with the most spectacular growth. Its manifestations – opens source culture and file sharing, chat, net art, gaming, blogs a.o. – are more and more present in the life of the community, generating debates, opinions, social and economic imapacts, loss and gain, so to say …progress. AltArt is commited to supporting the development of digital culture in Romania. AltArt work includes urban exploration projects, exhibitions, professional development for artists and cultural managers, workshops in animation, film and the creative use of new technology, public screenings and debates, research and policy development. AltArt runs in Cluj the Binar Centre – a lab for arts and technologies that offers resources in the field of digital culture through a documentation collection, open workshops and a showcase of European new media arts projects.

ARS ELECTRONICA: Diversity of “New” Audiences of Media Art

Barbara U. Schmidt

This presentation is related to the research project “Operating System Ars Electronica”. By using the terms “operation” and “operating system” that were introduced into the field of arts in the early ‘90s, this project specifically refers to discussions from the area of institutional critique which questioned strategies of the presentation and appreciation of art. The term “system” also refers to a primarily cultural studies approach, which serves to describe and analyze, how the Ars Electronica Festival was initiated and how all of its components function and interact. The program of the Ars Electronica Festival is outstanding, because it offers the audiences a great variety of events and approaches. But its structure is not neutral, rather it positions the events in distinct sequences, at special times and locations. These parameters have a great influence: they signalize the ‘importance’ of events, they separate contents from each other, they get along with distinct behaviors and dress codes, they indicate whether the event is rather entertaining or instructive. Thus there is a broad variety of topics and events but at the same time there is also a clear system of classification, a system which also implies a differentiation between audiences: between lay persons and experts, insiders and outsiders, artists and amateurs. In my paper I would like to ask whether these distinctions – which are significant for the field of media art in general – still meet with the practices, the interests, and the self-concept of all groups of audiences; because due to the mediatization of society there is a wide range of visitors who do not fit into these binary patterns: they have for instance expertise in programming or web-design concerning to their professional background, others are creative and well informed media-amateurs or game aficinados. My paper is based on interviews with visitors of Ars Electronica in 2006.

Bio: Barbara U. Schmidt (DE) is researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research. in Linz (A), where she directs a research project on the institutional development and objectives of the Ars Electronica. She studied art history and German language and literature at the universities of Bonn and Munich. From 1995 to 1998 she was an assistant to the Women’s Representative of, and a lecturer at, the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. She was also active as a curator (exhibitions, multimedia projects, conferences, and film events, among others for Kunstraum München and the Künstlerwerkstatt Lothringer Strasse, Munich) as well as an assistant lecturer at various Austrian universities. Between 2003 and 2005, Schmidt worked as an assistant professor at the Institute for Media/Media Theory at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz and as director of the research project “New Media Images,” supported by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture.

ADD soundsystem in Context

rRadim Labuda

ADD soundsystem project is a sound installation conceived as an open system and tool for other artists to realize their own sound content.

It can become a space for live music production or performance, it can be used as a sound installation or a sonic playground for a workshop. The aim is to create a specific social context, space for encounters, communication and participation. ADD soundsystem oscillates between different types of sound production and perception. It decentralizes the position of musician / performer and obliterates both creative and physical gap between the creator and the audience. Installation is designed to be transparent, easily understood and operated for any audience member. See more.

Bio: Radim Labuda (SK) has studied at the Faculty of Architecture of the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studios of Prof. Miloš Šejn and Prof. Michael Bielický. In 2004 he spent a semester at San Francisco Art Institute. In 2005 he has become a finalist for the Oskár Čepan Award in Slovakia. Graduated in 2006. Since 2004 his work is focused on the medium of video. Exhibited nationally and internationally.

Art Recognition in the Information Age

Bojana Romic

The presentation will address two problems that in connection with the position of being a Serbian artist, and more general question about possibility of art recognition in the information age.

Being a multimedia artist of today, demands quite a financial investment, and often lot of research. In Serbia, there are just a few NGO’s and other organizations that may provide funding, but under specific circumstances – for example, only for the projects that are made in cooperation with artists from the country that organization represents. During 90s, artists from Serbia were more likely to get funds from such organizations if their artwork deals with current political situation in the country. The result was that many young artists started making artworks that address the political context, even if they had completely different area of interest, just in order to get funding, and because they hoped they could make themselves “visible” in terms of European market. As information age and development of nano-technology affected the current art practice in the world, it became fashionable to make experiments with touch-sensitive fibers, sonic sculptures, wearable interactive textile and the like – unfortunately, that sort of art practice is not likely to be developed in countries like Serbia, just because the technical equipment for such works is so costly. On the other hand, art groups sometimes produce low-cost works that deal with video gaming and net art, and are usually made by artists and programmers who work together on voluntary-basis. Internet seems to offer infinite possibilities: you may think that now, when you have such perfect tool to express yourself, you can beat the traditional pathway in building your career, and avoid showing off at traditionally important festivals/meetings/biennials in order to become a recognized artist. We need to have on mind that we’re all facing information overload, to many data, too poorly organized – and we CAN imagine that cyberspace is “perfectly democratic place where it makes no difference whether you’re man or woman, black or white”, and that only good idea matters, but as Tim Jordan points out: “power is pre- and postpolitics, pre- and postculture and pre- and postauthority – power is the condition and limit of politics, culture and authority /1/”. So do you (in the information age) can get recognized even if you avoid art establishment, or you still have to get recognized by the curatorial “owner of the gaze/ owner of the power” via traditional sources? In short, what is fundamentally changed in such system with the information age? Personally, I’m closer to the opinion that information age didn’t bring a huge change in this economy of power/technopower in curatorial praxis until now, but yet I still think that Internet offers nice opportunities for selfpromotion. Manuel Castells points out that spaces of places are connected with space of flows /2/ (interactive network), which means that topological map of today should be changed up to distinctive level. On that behalf, there is a potential that New York-London-Berlin axis should share more/less the same relevance with virtual spaces in curatorial praxis in future. If that’s the case, it would be useful to discuss how to what are the rules of the game in this new, augmented reality.

/1/ Tim Jordan, one of the participants of <eyebeam> forum, later published in Interaction – artistic practice in the network, edited by Amy Scholder with Jordan Crandall, Distributed Art Publishers, New York, 107, /2/ Manuel Castells “Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age” in The Cybercities Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2004

Bio: Bojana Romic (SRB), visual artist and theoretician, graduated at the department for visual arts at the University of Fine Arts in Belgrade. Right now on PhD studies on Theory of Art and New Media Department, University of Arts, Belgrade, with the main field of intertest in cybercultures.

seeMe.ath.cx

Honza Svasek

The talk will concentrate on grassroots new media art production and will try to get some of the 1984 Unix Hacking spirit across to the audience.

seeMe.ath.cx is an Experimental and Interactive New Media Artwork In Progress. It is a Open Source Software Mosaic consisting of imgSeek: a. Content Based Image Retrieval System, a hacked version of Motion: a Software Motion Detector, Apache, PHP and Firefox in kiosk mode and some scripts, running on a hacked Packard Bell laptop under Ubuntu. Currently this artwork can be seen and interacted with at the Katendrechtse Lagedijk 461 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where it is usually mounted in the door of Werkplaats LUNA-TIKS, an art production facility run by Honza Svašek and friends. This work displays a matrix of 20 images which are visually similar to the current image. Usually the current image shows the observer of the artwork as observed by the artwork. If the current image does not change for some time, the system goes in sleeping mode and starts dreaming: a random matrix of the past gets displayed. The artwork demands user participation, and has been on display in a relatively poor area of Rotterdam.

Honza Svasek (NL)

http://www.HonzaSvasek.nl, http://kansenzone.blogspot.com

Playfulness of Public Space

Sonja Leboš

In this presentation, the main point of reference is the possibility of interaction of media and random audience in public space.

In my opinion, media art could release a sort of dynamic power which should enable playfulness of content in public space. While now we are having a dictatorship of commercial substance in mediascapes of public spaces, this presentation emphasizes the importance of drafting (even the smallest of the scale) projects which use public space as its playfield. In the presentation I will be talking about few of such projects, where playfulness of virtual space (expanding that notion to its wider referential field) clutches into dull and instant mediascape of a city, while transforming streets and squares towards some new forms of a less sullied urbanity.

Bio: Sonja Leboš (CRO) is cultural practitioner, living and working in Zagreb. Trained as architect and set designer in Zagreb and Prague, and educationist in art and craft in Stuttgart, she rounded her formal curriculum with mastering Cultural Anthropology and Hispanic Languages and Cultures at Zagreb University. As the chairwoman of AIIR (Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research) she initiated, produced and implemented various project, as e.g. some recent ones: ‘Cybercinematography – Semantics of Cities’ Retrodynamics’, on-going project, ‘Return to the City (of Dubrovnik)’ – 30’ documentary in cooperation with CroatianTV, 2007, ‘Space of identity, space of interaction, space of change’, research in urbanity, 2006-2008, on-going, ‘Body as a Site of Alteration: Croatian cinema d’auteur of 60’s and 70’s of the XX.Ct’, investigations in the history of the Croatian cinema, 2007; in cooperation with MM Centre, Student Centre Zagreb, 2007, ‘Narrative structures and the notion of subject: space of identity in the Croatian cinematography in the middle of XX.Ct’, investigations in the history of the Croatian cinema, 2006.

Point of Centre

Paul Wilson / Liquidiser

The presentation will aim to answer the key question of ‘who cares about art in the information age’ by suggesting audiences be given a reason to care, through both participatory and inclusive methodologies and being shown how new media art can reflect aspects of their lived experience.

The ‘Point of Centre’ is a project centred around a series of experimental documentary narratives – short films attempting to record places in transition; environments at a point of major or traumatic change. The ‘Point of Centre’ attempts to make use of new media art practise within documentary or journalistic traditions and contexts: using first-person reportage and access gained through discussion and negotiation with those individuals and groups affected by, or undergoing, such change. This information is then reprocessed in order to explore the fragmented and fragmentary nature of contemporary urban experience. Between late 2006 and mid 2007 Liquidiser gained access to four such spaces in Northampton (UK), each in the process of change: a hospital, cemetery, (produce) market and transport nexus. We aimed to record them all at this point of trauma and demolition or transition to another use. The Point of Centre project is a record of gaining such access and the potential for communicating documentary narratives alongside a means of connecting decisions made regarding space and place with users, stakeholders and citizens. In terms of audience, Liquidiser seeks to explore new methods to reconnect the subjects / participants / inhabitants with their respective spaces (work, healthcare, transport etc). In particular, ‘Head and Neck’ documented the closure of three operating theatres in Northampton General Hospital (UK) and was forged from a close working relationship with workers in the health profession. This film’s audience was built through ongoing liaison in terms of making, presentation and discussion of work-in-progress via blog and small-scale viewing. The audience for such work was first and foremost targeted as those effected by closures in this healthcare institution and was developed through participation in public meeting and grass-roots political engagement. The nature of the work itself – experimental, exploratory and resolutely non-commercial – was enriched by the ongoing involvement of participants in the local democratic and activist community. Liquidiser aims to find and develop new audiences in the East Midlands region of the UK through a determined vision of building communities around it’s new media projects: whether curating grass-roots new media events or participating in awareness-raising activities in order to make connections and forge new links with members of local communities. It believes strongly that audiences for new media exist within the everyday, within those effected by and subject to decisions made in the political process. While it doesn’t aim to give a ‘voice’ to specific communities, it prefers to allow them access to a means of communicating a shared understanding of their experiences. The presentation at ‘New Media Art Audiences’ would outline the remit and scope of Liquidiser’s ‘Point of Centre’ project and focus, in particular, on the ‘Head and Neck’ film as an early attempt to build new audiences for new media through a determined focus on workers, participants and – most importantly – those whose lives are effected by decisions made regarding the use and function of public and / or private space.

Bio: Paul Wilson / Liquidiser (UK) is a grass-roots, experimental new media community arts organisation based in the East Midlands region in the United Kingdom. It has emerged from a long-running experimental audio workshop whose key aim was to forge links within the creative communities within Northamptonshire (UK). In the last six years it has grown into a regional voice for new media arts development and has forged strong links with previously disparate groups whose major interest centres around improvisation, experimentation and the making of new work through a range of media formats and technologies. Between 2003 and 2006 Liquidiser hosted and curated ‘Beta Testing’, a ground-breaking series of seventeen new media laboratory sessions whose aim was to present the rich and diverse new talent within the region. From this Liquidiser gained funding to produce ‘Point of Centre’, an ambitious multimedia package consisting of film, sound and text aiming to chronicle the rapid pace of change overtaking their town. This CD / DVD / Print publication is due for imminent release in mid 2008. www.theliquidiser.co.uk

CYNETart_07encounter: Various Degrees and Possibilities of Including the Audience and Communicating Media Art Works to the Public

Thomas Dumke and Anja Dietel

TMA (Trans Media Academy) Hellerau is dedicated to the setting up, promotion and realisation of intermedia art projects. It essentially represents an experimental platform for the use and linkage of various interface systems with a new quality in space-time, social and synaesthetic dimensions. The classic notion of “art” with a separation of social space into producers and audience as well as the real-time dimension are being questioned by ways of technology-based interaction. One of the highlights and focal point of work of the TMA Hellerau is the international festival of computer-based art and inter-disciplinary media projects called CYNETart taking place annually. The CYNETart festival presents media performances, networked virtual environments and interactive installations. In the realisation of its media art works the festival builds on dimensions of the human body as baseline for authentic perception and communication. In most of the projects the participation of the audience is accomplished by their direct performative technically-un-mediated interaction. Thus the quality of the “work” and the intention of the artist can only be experienced in correspondence with a direct action. Selective examples of the CYNETart_07encounter festival will be used to demonstrate the various degrees and possibilities of including the audience and communicating media art works to the public.

Bio: Thomas Dumke (DE) studied history, sociology and cultural management. Since 1999 he has been involved in CYNETart festival, in 2006 he has become its director. In 2000 he initiated together with Matthias Härtig the »microscope session«, a series of A/V events. He is a member of the art collective DS-X.org and a founding member of TMA Hellerau which was established in 2001.