ecopolis

Lift09 (Geneva, 25-27 Feb. 09) will look back to look ahead, exploring topics like change, solidarity, love, or design, during three days of intense networking and inspiration themed around a simple question: “Where did the future go?”

We were told the future would be about mechanization, computerization, 1984-like nightmares or robots. What did and did not happen? What can we learn from the predictions that never materialized to better look at the future?

Lift gathers international entrepreneurs, artists, managers, researchers, investors, CEOs, designers or ethnologist, people who come to be inspired and meet those who make a difference.

Hylozoic Soil, was realized realized by Philip Beesley in 2007 in Canada, and has won the VIDA 11.o AWARD. The glass-like fragility of this artificial forest, built of an intricate lattice of small transparent acrylic tiles, is visually breathtaking. Its frond extremities arch uncannily towards those who venture into its midst, reaching out to stroke and be stroked like the feather or fur or hair of some mysterious animal. In keeping with Beesley’s own description, his enchanted environment complies with the laws and cycles that determine the millenial assembly of a coral reef, with its cycles of opening, clamping, filtering and digesting. Capacitance-sensing whiskers and shape-memory alloy actuators create a diffuse peristaltic pumping motion, luring visitors in to the eery shimmering depths of a forest of light.

Hylozoic Soil implements a distributed sensor network driven by dozens of microprocessors, generating waves of reflexive responses to those drawn into its vast array of acrylic fern stalagmites. Different levels of programmed activity encourage the emergence of coordinated spatial behaviour: thirty-eight controller boards produce specific responses to local action, while a bus controller uses sensor activity collated from all the boards to command an additional “global” level of behaviour. The forest thus manifests a haunting, breathing organicity, as it stirs to envelop and charm its human explorers. In keeping with the tradition of biologist artist Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe (1899), which traced actions of organic and inorganic nature alike back to natural causes and laws, Beesley’s Hylozoic Soil stands as a magically moving contemporary symbol of our aptitude for empathy and the creative projection of living systems.

Since the Internet became popular in the late 90′ies of 20th century, the software program “FLASH”, once developed and prepared for the commercial market by Macromedia, and now owned by Adobe, represents a vector based developing environment which enables the creator to combine different media and develop vector based animations especially for the Internet. .swf data file extension became a standard for animations online and offline, and Flash video and its .flv file format stands for “videostreaming” on the net.
As soon as the Internet started, artists captured it for artistic purposes, and the same is good for certain software used for the net, particularly Flash is predestined for developing artistic creations due to its intuitive use. It became one of the most popular software tools for the net, computer based animations and interactive applications like games. Flash based artworks entered media festivals, even festivals solely based on movies created in Flash are organised.

After Cinematheque – streaming media environments – explored in 2007 the capabilities of “Quicktime” as an artistic medium in the comprehensive show
\\Slowtime? Quicktime as an artistic medium// – its now the time to explore in 2009 the artistic potential of Flash in its own way in a big online show, as well.

Cinematheque is looking for the best artistic Flash movies created since 2000.
Please find the regulations and entry form on here.

LightMobile, a Wolkwagen Beetle covered with 1659 computerized lights

Radio Barkas, a live radio into half a car

the live revival of Verne’s imaginary by the Abacus Theatre

and more photos here

GOGBOT 2008 – Steampunk edition opened yesterday in Enschede.
First of all look at the photos and the videos to see how this media art festival encompass usual cultural events, deliberatevely mashing up every kind of genre, style, language, situating the whole main exhibition in Oude Markt, where the pieces presented create a world between Julius Verne and Alice in Wonderland, but framed in a quiet and central plaza of a classical town in Holland.
Among all this wizardry the ArcAttack Performance, which created the Singing Tesla Coils, a special technology that let them generate a electrifyng audio visual set.

In the same plaza there was the Kubic’s Cube installation of Pablo Ventura, presented also last July in ISEA 2008. This piece is constituted by a long aluminium robot that hangs from a ceiling and dance according to the music and the movement prepared by the artist. It’s interesting to note that due to sensors and randomic organization of the interations and of the movement the piece seems to live a independent life.

Inside the church in the middle of the plaza performed 02L, The Shaidon Effect, a musical wizard techno mash-up that brings motion tracking to the audience.

Taking advantage of the little dimension of the festival reign good time between all the people involved and also the locals seems to be interested by this strange kind of technological circus landed in town.
It’s a real steampunk festival, first of all because as Bruce Sterling wroted on the Steampunk Gogbot essay “steampunks are modern crafts people who are very into spreading the means and methods of  working in archaic technologies“, and now in Enschede it’s full of people the “know their job”.

“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.

One of the world’s most celebrated artists, Pipilotti Rist, draws together a body of work that explores what it is to be human. In her trademark heady mix of bright light, lush colours and zany feminine energy, the work in this exhibition explores the loss of innocence. It challenges viewers to look at art differently: whether lying on the floor, peering into a small dark crack in the floor or perched on oversized furniture, Rist’s work creates an “Alice in Wonderland” feel to the exhibition

Exploring the third element of FACT’s 2008 Human Futures programme: my world, Pipilotti Rist examines our relationship with the natural environment. Often playing the lead within her films, sh re-works the well-worn cliche of woman as a symbol of nature, and man as a symbol of culture.

Opening the show, Pipilotti turns FACT into a screen, playing on the building’s purpose and natural environment. A previously unused still from one of her most famous works, Open my glade (2000) – originally commisioned to be shown in New York’s Times Square – is presented on the front exterior window of FACT. Pipilotti Rist’s first public art project in New York, Open My Glade was composed of 16 one-minute video segments at a quarter past every hour.

Transported to the UK for the first time, the work will also appear on the BBC Big Screen in Clayton Square, bringing a new dimension to the piece.
In Gallery 1, the UK premiere of Gravity Be My Friend (2007) sees a re-working of the site-specific installation originally designed for Magasin 3 StockholmKonsthall in 2007. A visual and sensorial experience, the visitor lies on a “carpet landscape” to watch the work projected above. “I have always been interested in how the body moves in the roomin relation to the work of art. The viewing ritual and physical posture appear almost to be given facts,” Pipilotti Rist, Congratulations! (2007)

In Gallery 2, FACT presents a selection of Pipilotti Rist?s finest work fromthe last 15 years including; Exploring the third element of FACT’s 2008 Human Futures programme: my world, Pipilotti Rist examines our relationship with the natural environment. Often playing the lead within her films, she re-works the well-worn cliche of woman as a symbol of nature, and man as a symbol of culture.
Opening the show, Pipilotti turns FACT into a screen, playing on the building’s purpose and natural environment. A previously unused still fromone her most famous works, Open My Glade (2000) – originally commissioned to be shown Ever is Over All (1997), Blood Room (1993/98) and Your Space-Capsule (2006). These works show the artist’s progression and her ongoing fascination with viewing spaces, moving image sculpture and ideas around femininity, artistic production and creativity.

In FACT’s interactive space, the Media Lounge the installation The Room(1994-2000) makes the viewer feel childlike as they sit on oversized furniture watching TV.

CTM.09 – club transmediale’s 10th anniversary edition – takes place in Berlin from January 23 – 30, 2009 under the theme STRUCTURES – Backing-up Independent Audio-Visual Cultures. Our partner festival transmediale will take place under the Theme DEEP NORTH from January 27 to February 1, 2009.

The joint Call for Entries by club transmediale and transmediale is out now. As leading international festivals for art and digital culture as well as adventurous music and related visual arts, respectively, transmediale and club transmediale are calling for submissions for both festival’s program, to the transmediale Award competition and the Vilém Flusser Theory Award.

Deadline for submissions is September 5, 2008 (post stamp).

transmediale.09 – DEEP NORTH peers beyond the evolving alarmist scenarios of catastrophe prevalent in the often contradictory global warming debate.transmediale.09 shifts this focus to the global artistic, cultural, societal andphilosophical consequences that the presumed imminent collapse of the polar ice barrier may trigger. Are we about to reach another historically succinct moment of unavoidable and cataclysmic change – a point of no return leaving in its wake uncontrollable global transformations? Does climate change elicit cultural change, ashifting of extremes or a collapse in established, systemic and network norms? DEEP NORTH becomes not a fixed location, but a paradigm transforming loss, scarcity, inertia and rivalry into urgent and revealing states of being and expression.

With STRUCTURES – Backing-Up Independent Audio-Visual Cultures, club transmediale.09 presents projects that spring from the critical, interdisciplinary and experimental practice at the intersections of sound and other art forms. In recent years, a new breed of hybrid projects and initiatives that merges experimental audio and media cultures has developed in the convergence-zone between pop culture, science, arts and media technologies. This still remains primarily the domain of committed individuals and small, self-organised groups or networks that, often in the most precarious of circumstances, provide the supporting platform for these new artistic articulations and experiments. In its 10th year, CTM looks into the current state and potential development opportunities of these independent structures.

Together, transmediale and club transmediale invite the submission of works and projects that respond to these challenges and embody contemporary notions of art that embrace, question and enrich digital culture. Submissions of art works for both festivals participate in the transmediale Award 2009 while theoretical abstracts, papers and critical artistic positions are invited for the Vilém Flusser Theory Award, with prizes totaling ca. 10.000 EURO.

transmediale will handle all practical issues concerning the submission process, as all submissions do participate at transmediale’s award competition – no matter if they are for transmediale or club transmediale. All details are to be found in the PDF form, which is available for download here.