ecopolis

TOKYO and YOKOHAMA
30th August – 21st September

Dislocate is a project which examines the relationship between art, technology and locality.

Designed to facilitate international dialogue between artists, researchers and the public, Dislocate encourages exchange and reflection upon our experiences and perceptions of the interplay between these elements.

Dislocate questions our notions of place and location in the face of perpetual motion through multifaceted environments. The velocity of this passage is accelerated through new technologies, but as a result how does this impact upon our encounter with place and our attempt to communicate this to elsewhere?

Through an exhibition, symposium and workshop series Dislocate will examine this encounter and communication, taking a journey through surrounding spaces and exploring our transient connections.

Excelled through so many spaces with such momentum, mobility brings freedoms but also responsibilities. While in this state of passage how do we decide which spaces to engage with and what is our dialogue with them?

Dislocate offers the space to investigate the creative and social potential of new media to engage us with our direct locality and to ask what is the importance of where we are now?

This first edition of roBOt01 – Digital Shape Festival – aims to produce a collection capable of exploring the musical micro-cosmos defined ‘electronic music’. Its audiences and its production, distribution and how it is used, and furthermore, its limits, experimental approaches, its high points and future panoramas. Three days (18-20 September) of exhibitions, concerts, meetings, performances, workshops and laboratories to narrate the birth and evolution of music born form clubs, and performances from the most important names on the international electronic scene. Names who have transformed this sound into a language capable of overcoming and extending the boundaries of style and musical genre.

roBOt01 presents a selection of the best international digital production, considering the contemporary electronic culture not just as a phenomenon linked to nightclubs, but as a privileged language of artistic forms capable of uniting different media, and creating a space within the European event schedule, with a well known history: Sonar in Barcellona, Transmediale in Berlino, Time Warp in Mannheim, the Ame Festival in Amsterdam, the Roman Dissonanze. All of the shows will be presented in the in the three incredibly beautiful main venues: Palazzo Re Enzo, Manifattura Delle Arti and Cassero. roBOt01 is organized by Shape, the leading association in promoting electronic culture in Bologna with a growing international projection.

18 -21 September PLANETART presents the 5th edition of GOGBOT, the multimedia festival in Enschede. GOGBOT is a platform for new developments in international art, in this year in particular the curious combination of media, technology and pop culture.

Theme: STEAMPUNK
Robotics, virtual worlds, freak shows, macabre laboratories, lectures (in English), interactive machines, electronic music with old-fashioned sounds, enchanting video clips and a lot of steam, because STEAMPUNK is the GOGBOT theme of 2008. At STEAMPUNK modern technology and design is mixed with elements from the Victorian era, when technology was still new and romantic. Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, the 2 most famous sci fi authors and godfathers of Steampunk contributed to the festival GOGBOT.

Participating artists are: Pablo Ventura, Joost Conijn, Tinkebell, Filip Jonker, Arno Coenen, DrGrordbort (Lord of the Rings FXstudio), Christiaan Zwanikken, Bill Spinhoven, Powerplant, e.v.a.

The heart of this free feast is in the center of Enschede, with again a quality collection of modern art: trendy, politic, technical, exciting, spectacular, renewing.
In the area of Roombeek exhibitions are i.e. in the Rijksmuseum Twenthe and the former textile factory Tetem, i.e. with work of 35 art academy graduates 2008.

In Poppodium Atak every night is a booming GOGBOT party with the newest live-muzic from Londen and Berlin. Experiment, break core, electro, drum ’n base, retro-acid, micromusic and more…
Mmv o.a. Noisia, Jason Forrest, Ceephax Acid Crew, Mu-ziq, Teknoist, Gay Against You, DuranDuranDuran, Panacea, Botborg, Mr Ouzo..

Opening:
The GOGBOT festival has a spectacular opening at Thursday 18 Sept 20h, location Oude Markt, with the Singing Tesla Coils from Texas, high voltage on electronic music (European Premiere!), performances with freak shows, Victorian vessels and circus acts, hanging robots, street art, gaming and a lot of steam!

Dresscode: STEAMPUNK!!!

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stay connected, i’ll go there to have a loook and to have a lecture about Utopia&Steampunk, so i’ll blog about this really interesting and underground festival.

next days more info about the program.

Just back from Ars Electronica. It was many years i didn’t go there and i found it a little bit scaled down but interesting as usual.
A lot of professionals and a variety of projects and programs. The main exhibition is really well curated and i also remark also the Ecology of the techno mind exhibition, curated by Juij Krpan of the Kapelica Galley in Ljubljana.

Among the performance i appreciated PV868 of TeZ and Ten Thousands Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid by Domnitch&Gelfand.

About the conferences here some citations from the partecipants at the Symposium A New Cultural Economy, curated by Joichi Ito:

Joichi Ito
“the amateur is the next generation of consumers”
“software is a service not a product”
“the problem about artistic production shift from delivery to getting known”

James Boyle
“We don’t except openess to be useful, we’re scared by openess”
“it’s hard to imagine the benefit of open systems, but we’ve to, also if we don’t understand openess”
“the world will have open and closed systems, we’ve to understand where to apply one structure or the other”

David Weinberger
“the model of the thery of information of Shannon-Weaver is abstract and based on the specific metaphor of the battlefield, but not all human communication happens on a battlefield..”
“In this model noise is the enemy of truth”
“Netty truth: the web is really noisy, but in a network theory of truth the value in the noise”
“the truth is in the differences”
“Truthful network:
- linked
- persistent
- open to all
- open to everything
- sympathetic
- never done”
“the truth is in the sympathetic relations and differences of everyone”

Conferenze: 15 e 20 settembre 2008
Oratorio San Filippo Neri / MIAAO
Via Maria Vittoria 5, Torino

Mostra: inaugurazione venerdì 19 settembre h. 18:30
Aperta fino al 27 settembre
Ex-Chiesa Metodista
Via Lagrange 13, Torino

C.STEM 2008 – BREEDING OBJECTS offre, per la prima volta al pubblico italiano, una selezione di visionari progetti che anticipano i futuri sviluppi tecnologici del design.
Che cosa nasce dall’incontro tra design, progettazione software, strumenti di digital fabrication e l’esigenza di una sempre maggiore personalizzazione dei prodotti?

La mostra presenta oggetti progettati con processi altamente innovativi: abiti tessuti analizzando in tempo reale i flussi di news globali, sedie realizzate a partire dai fotogrammi di un’animazione 3d, ceramiche e gioielli sperimentali modellati online dagli utenti, contenitori di legno che riproducono porzioni di GoogleMaps, lampade disegnate combattendo contro un sacco da pugilato, stampanti tridimensionali in grado di replicare se stesse.

L’evento celebra nuove forme, nuove tecnologie e nuovi processi progettuali per offrire un esercizio di immaginazione che possa essere di stimolo al mondo delle imprese e alla design community.

C.STEM sviluppa uno scenario in cui la capacità dei designer di scrivere il proprio software diventa uno strumento progettuale fondamentale per mettere in comunicazione il potenziale delle tecnologie di digital fabrication (prototipazione radipa, taglio laser, lavorazioni a controllo numerico) con le esigenze di un mercato sempre più orientato alla produzione di massa personalizzata.
Le strategie computazionali applicate al design trasformano gli oggetti statici in processi dinamici e liquidi, capaci di adattarsi e di evolvere nel tempo.
Non più oggetti prodotti in serie sempre uguali ma famiglie di oggetti unici e irripetibili: infinite varianti generate tramite software a partire da un progetto/processo aperto interrogano il ruolo e il pensiero creativo dei designer post-industriali.

C.STEM 2008 – BREEDING OBJECTS è un evento che si articola in due settimane con la mostra presso il suggestivo spazio dell’ex-chiesa Metodista e due giornate di conferenze: un’occasione per approfondire il tema attraverso case studies e momenti di incontro con designer, artisti e architetti provenienti da tutto il mondo.

PARTECIPANTI
AEDS – Ammar Eloueini (Francia, Libano)
Ebru Kurbak & Mahir Yavuz (Turchia)
FLUID FORMS Stephen Williams (Austria, Nuova Zelanda)
The Rep Rap Project – Adrian Bowyer (UK)
Nervous System – Jessica Eve Rosenkrantz e Jesse Louis-Rosenberg, (USA)
MOS – Michael Meredith, (USA)
TheVeryMany, Marc Fornes (USA)
1 / 1 – Cait & C. E. B. Reas (USA)
ISOPT – Susanne Stauch (Germania)
Andrew Vande Moere (Australia)
Fabrizio Valpreda, Cristian Campagnaro (Italia)

Leading multimedia festival in the Baltic states “Plektrum – the Festival of Visual Sound” takes place September 8-14 in Tallinn, Estonia. Together with over 40 international new media artists, theorists and curators, Plektrum 2008 explores the essence of real and virtual space.

„The upcoming Plektrum is more international than ever before. We are very pleased that our program was worked out hand in hand with leading European experts,” commented Marge Paas, organiser of the festival’s art projects. Plektrum 2008 thematic highlights include the seminar “Webjockeys” curated by the internationally recognized media art expert Anne Roquigny (France) and videoscreening series „Hidden spaces” created in collaboration with Alexandra David (France). “For a festival, international co-operation is an important qualitative step,” Paas added.

The whole festival week brings media art exhibitions, cinema screenings, video installations and performances in various locations around Tallinn. Plektrum also offers impressive audiovisual entertainment including a club and concert night, on September 12 and 13 respectively. The educational program consists futher of VJ school, hands on workshops, discussion sessions and artists talks.

“Plektrum- the Festival of Visual Sound” is an international multimedia festival of media art, contemporary and electronic music, diverse subcultures, urban thinking and education for the 21st century homo sapiens. Plektrum is taking place for the 6th time.

Program and information: www.plektrumfestival.ee

The 2008 Ars Electronica Festival is placing one of the core issues of modern knowledge-based society at the focal point of this year’s festival program.
What’s at stake: the value of intellectual property, freedom of information and copyright protection, big profit-making opportunities and the vision of an open knowledge-based society that seeks to build its new economy on the basis of creativity and innovation.
Furthermore, this is a matter of practical, workable rules governing this new reality. Ars Electronica is inviting artists, network nomads, theoreticians, technologists and legal scholars from all over the world to convene September 4-9, 2008 in Linz, where their elaborations in the form of symposia, exhibitions, performances and interventions will proliferate beyond the confines of classic conference halls and cultural venues, and spread across the whole city.

A New Cultural Economy …
Every day, we click our way through the virtually endless expanses of the Internet teeming with texts, images, songs and videos. True to the motto “Do as you like,” we hunt and gather files here and there during the course of our digital foraging and store them on our own hard drives. Files that are the property of somebody or other and, strictly speaking, remain such. Put online, anyone in the world can access them, and, needless to say, that’s exactly what they do without giving much consideration at all to issues like data protection and copyright. And while established lobbies are campaigning against this wholesale data theft, a young generation has come to recognize this as the business of the future …
A phenomenon that’s always been inherent in the technical fundamentals of the Internet is now emerging: a new cultural economy. An economy of sharing in which information can no longer be sealed in or locked out by legal decree, but instead circulates unimpeded. And idealistic advocates of an open knowledge-based democracy aren’t the only ones calling for this; a new economy built upon creativity and ideas absolutely demands more flexible solutions! Trent Reznor, Prince and Radiohead are just a few of the top-name artists stepping forward as pallbearers at the funeral of the Age of Copyright and Intellectual Property—at the head of a procession of a whole generation of users, creatives and businesspeople. It has thus become obvious that the traditional concept of property breaks down in the face of our modern broadband culture.
… when intellectual property runs up against its limits
Nevertheless, even in the wake of the music industry’s billion-dollar debacle, the lobbies of the vested interests still reject any constructive input into configuring this new cultural economy. Quite the contrary: they’re still putting up bitter resistance and uncompromisingly clinging to patent law regulations, some of which go back to 15th-century Venice.
But regardless of the desperate lengths to which this Old Generation goes in its attempt to preserve protective mechanisms handed down from bygone days and to put in place legislation tightened ad absurdum to prevent filesharing and downloads, the reordering of the protection accorded to intellectual property has long since become the Gordian knot of our globally-networked, knowledge-based society.

Extrtacted from the Ars Electronica press document.

“Hunting Trophies” is a project, realized by France Cadet, showing a collection of eleven hunting trophies hung on the wall. These trophies are similar to those that hunters could exhibit proudly in their living room but here they are chests of robots.

Each robot has its own internal program which reacts with its outside environment thanks to its infrared sensor place on its chest. Thus they can detect the presence of one or more persons, but also their movements.

When a viewer is in front of this collection of robot species, the trophies are inactive. Their eyes are turned off, their head held high are still. But when a viewer approaches, the robots start to react. They turn their heads in his direction, their eyes light up, their mouths half-open they start growling.

The robots are able to eye the nearby person and turn their head in his direction. If we come closer the robot suddenly starts to growl and then it becomes more and more aggressive if we are too close.

When a person will walk fast facing this wall of trophies, a chain reaction will emerge such as a wave of protestation following his walk. The robots will remain calm when the room will be quiet or when people will stop moving.

Depending on the public activity the robots will be more or less active and aggressive because it is the point, showing their anger because they have been tracked, chased, killed cut up and exhibited as decorative icons.