I’ve just returned from an exhausting but fun Pure Data workshop in Beograd, Srbija for the last few days, and I’m currently getting ready for the next round of activities in Berlin, Copenhagen and Tartu (Estonia).

The Copenhagen/Tartu series will be the first installations of a new workshop/collaborative performance called Ouroboros Orchestra, based on the creation and performance by participants and intermodulation live by myself of simple, small electronic sound/noise circuits, all planned accrording to a graphical score. I’ll be posting more on this soon. Please get in touch if this workshop/performance sounds interesting for a venue near you!

The Berlin event is co-organized with Martin Howse for Club Transmediale as a public laboratory in the Kunstraum Bethanien over 9 days from 23-31 January 2009. Info below.There should be some actions/performances at the workshop space on the opening night, Friday 23 January from 19:30-22:00 featuring some of the artists involved. Hope you can make it! Otherwise, drop by the workshop between 12:00-22:00 the rest of the days of the festival to revel in ther chaos!

xxxxx_temporary_structure for Club Transmediale 2009

Tracing a clear line of development from both xxxxx_workshops: [in]tolerance during CTM.08 examining the material basis of technology and a series of life coding events in Norway and Germany, xxxxx hosts an experimental nine day structure widening the scope of construction and constructivism to embrace the social and economic structures of production and performance. Public interface is to be made explicit, inviting participation, visit and conversation.

xxxxx_temporary_structure presents the expansion of both known and less familiar constructive procedures and apparatus, for example software (Pure Data, Python) and hardware (waves, circuits, simulation) into novel territory. Software becomes script and social pragmatics, hardware expands into optics, architecture, graffiti, elaborate kinetics and novel interfaces to the world addressing biologic and physical processes; a play of light, resonance and transmission.

The relationship between structure and system is playfully opened, with the modelling of systems as core activity within the temporary lab space; simulation within both code and analogue electronics, the embedding of an internal observer allowing for a play with agents and agency.

A concern with materiality and construction forms the base for an energetic examination of all manner of diagrams, public interface (reading space, discussion), bio-computing (plant life, EEG), world interface (practical endophysics), everyday technologies (light, food), code, transitions and translations. Such disciplines branch out mushroom like, revealing instabilities and new structures across nine days, in one space, publicly accessible throughout.

xxxxx_temporary_structure is inherently experimental and interdisciplinary, inviting practitioners and artists who are well able to prise open the gaps between reified disciplines to actively create new social and constructive apparatus within the xxxxx space.

A playful laboratory is proposed which does not mark boundaries between forms and between disciplines – which rather exposes and opens up social and artistic structures for sublime experience.

Info: http://scrying.org/doku.php?id=xxxxx:ctm09

Participants

Oswald Berthold [AT/DE]
Berthold (web.fm) describes himself as a semi-autonomous social particle commissioned in Graz in 1976. His interests lie in media, programming, and networks. He is associated with xdv, farmersmanual,
and gullibloon.
Keywords: software-defined radio, sniffing, wide spectrum measurement of EM intensities, practical investigations of a brain equation, societal mapping.

Derek Holzer [US/DE]
Derek Holzer’s work focuses on capturing and transforming small, unnoticed sounds from various natural and urban locations, networked collaboration strategies, experiments in improvisational sound, self-made electronics and on the use of free software such as Pure-Data.
Keywords: drawn sound, optoelectronic synthesis, systems for collaboration, more open than source, life outside the box

Martin Howse [UK/DE]
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).
Keywords: resonance, relativity and wave-length in space and architecture for varying wave phenomena, measurement and mapping of electromagnetic(EM) field strength intensities as archaeological conceit

Martin Kuentz [DE]
Martin Kuentz (Unkuentz) is a Berlin based freelance artist. He founded the Salon Bruit, a concert series on improvised, electroacoustic and noise music, and has been involved in the Dienstbar series, Transmitting Object Behaviour (T.O.B.), Berlin free radio campaign, Blind Operators, Unkuentz vs. Trodza and apostrov recordings.
Keywords: expansive kinetic constructivism, crashed kitchen sink and bath-tub chemistry, homemade fireworks, long-term transmissions

Rob Mullender [UK]
Rob Mullender is an artist and maker living and working in London, U.K. His current preoccupations mostly concern the possible inter-relationship between sound and light; in other words using one to help find out things about the other. This has proved to be an unexpectedly complicated and fertile subject, especially when seen as an artistic rather than a scientific or engineering pursuit.
Keywords: auditory cameras, photophonics, ultrasonics, Enigma machines, sonification-as-synthesis

Shintaro Miyazaki [CH/D/JP]
Shintaro Miyazaki is interested in the epistemology of software/hardware of consumer electronics. He works as a curator, media theorist or artist in Berlin and performed solo and with ensembles in Tokyo, Leipzig, Krakow, Palma de Mallorca, Frankfurt, Basel, Zürich and Berlin.
Keywords: epistemology, sonification of software/hardware processes, eavesdroping.

Julian Oliver [NZ/ES]
Julian Oliver has given numerous workshops and master classes in game-design, artistic game-development, object-oriented programming for artists, UNIX/Linux, virtual architecture, interface design,
augmented reality and open source development practices worldwide. In 1998 he established the artistic game-development collective, Select Parks.
Keywords: environmental steganography, Python code expansion, data forensics and augmented reality softwares

Yunchul Kim [KO/DE]
Yunchul Kim studied music composition in Seoul and media art in KHM Cologne, Germany. His work has been shown in Ars Electronica, Transmediale, NewYork digital salon and Medialab Madrid amongst many others. He has been living and working in Germany since 1999 and is a guest lecturer at the Merz Academy, Institute for New Media, Stuttgart.
Keywords: chaos elaboration, interface exploration, physical code trafficking, pataphysics, imaginary pathologies

Dorotha Walentynowicz [PL/NL]
Dorotha Walentynowicz is an artist and performer who works withphotography, video and sound, as well as modified game engines andother interactive media.
Keywords: exposure, manipulation and voluntary oppression in gaming,performative communications strategies, “black box” as camera obscura

Otto Roessler [DE]
Otto Roessler reveals the power and cruelty of the rationalist project as first invoked within a dream of Rene Descartes. Through elaboration of endophysics, a science of interiority, the world as interface is implemented within potential practical, scientific and artistic experiment.
Keywords: practical endophysics, discussion of mute sperm whale communication, impending technocratic disaster analysis

Danja Vassiliev [RU/NL]
From the middle of 90s, Danja Vassiliev has been actively engaged with internet, computer and digital based visual and installation art. His most recent research and works are concentrated around topics of digital networking, internet and stereotypes of the digital age.
Keywords: literal UNIX pipes, shared communications systems, terminal VJ, swarmed networks with traffic/person as information carrier

Valentina Vuksic [CH]
Valentina Vuksic explores a highly individual articulation of hard and software mediation; the processes in such intermediate space as action thus implying actors rendered audible through novel intrusion.
Keywords: exploration of computational process as actor/staged on physical substrate (audio) rendering, comparison of crash spectra

+ participants from the public selection:

Georg Holzmann
Jonathan Kemp
Lars Lundehave Hansen
Lindsay Brown
Shintaro Miyazaki
Verena Friedrich
Walter Langelaar
Will Scrimshaw

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