Transmediale.10

Click on the link to see a video of the Transmediale.10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27qIoyC5gXo

Clocking the Clocks

Rob Squirrel and Matt Davenport listen to the Clocks in "Coincidence Engine 1" by The User.

Discussion -The Creative Economy

Documentation of the discussions in the Identity of Cultural Enterprises debate -part of the strand of thinking covering the development of new models for the creative economy.

DISCUSSIONS

New Media Facades(Urban Screens). The same old issues of control, access and aesthetics are still being wrestled with as the screens proliferate. The New Media Facades Festival -a set of organisations organising a festival across Europe mounted a full day of discussions.

A parallel Image --Gebhard Sengmuller

More Elektrolab..

Rebecca has already mentioned the Elektrolab performance but just want to add what a great idea and visually engaging. I was talking with Rob about the performance and I think we both agreed that it would have been more effective if the noises generated by the chemistry had emanated from the active location as opposed to the sounds from 3 separate 'Labs' being channeled through one set of speakers. This would have made the effects of the actions more obvious to the audience and easier to appreciate. Still a great concept and show the whole experimental feel to it made you feel like a true witness to innovation.

Result of the Awards ceremony

Michelle Teran won the Transmediale Award for a piece of work BUSCANDO AL SR GOODBAR made in Murcia in Spain. A brilliant concept, it documented a coach trip around the city to the sites where youtube videos had been shot in the town and a chance to chat with the "stars" and see where they had shot their moments of fame.They were located by their position on Google maps.

It returned the digital world back to the physical and was all done with tremendous good spirits and sociability. I found the frantic camera work of the documentation a bit trying with the two screen format of the remix. But its a great piece, and Michelles work is well known in Nottingham as part of the group of artists related to Radiator and the Performing Space initiative.

In fact I think she is coming back to the city soon in connection with the Tracing Mobility seminar which will be at Nottingham Contemporary on 14-16 May 2010.

The Vilem Flusser Theory Award was won by Warren Neidich for his project Neuropower which investigated the process by which the neuronal networks of the brain reconfigure themselves through cognitive activity. His works are kind of thought experiments -and he spoke about them to Steve Benford from the Nottingham University Mixed reality lab in their section of The Long Conversation.

I am going to add a few images from the day .

Frank displays his culture

This was the end of our first night and it was difficult to know what to expect from the festival. There was so much to see and in some senses choosing what events to attend got a get a bit like choosing a holiday from a brochure. The good thing is there's plenty to experience and it seems ok with everyone to drop in and out of sessions. I'm back in the UK now while Berlin is set to plummet to minus 15 on Sunday night!!!
A great escape for me!

More to come when I've unpacked.

Awards Night at Transmediale

Sitting with Matt Davenport at the awrds for digital arts at Transmediale. Difficult day today. We could not get into sold out perfomance this evening.The Theory Award is also being given -quite how they decide on award worthy theory. There is a Jury who decide.

1. TRANSMEDIALE AWARD

1500 entries from around the world.

Villem Flusser Theory Award 100 entries. -with the University Der Kunst. and Villem Flusser Archive.

DISCUSSION with Conrad Wolfram/questions

Question.How do we teach people how to ask the right questions. How can we question the formation of knowledge.

answer. 1. teaching questioning rather than processes.

2. we know that answer is right through corroboration. The author and reader of the document must be more interrelated.

Question . How do we get sources of clean and reliable information?

The naive questioner will not understand the impact of slight differenes of emphasis in the question?

1. Trying to put assumptions based in the questions back to the questioner in order to interrogate what the questioner really meant. We need to get etter at questioning.

Question. An example of something which was able to be done by Wolfram/Alpha which could not be done before?

Answer thinking about it.

Question . Will you let us know the algorithms behind your system, or will you, like Google, leave us ignorant of how answers are generated.

A.No reason to hold back info about algorithms as it does not goven monetization via ranking.

Ideologies and futures of the internet. Conrad Wolfram keynote

At this moment watching the introduction to the Keynote at the Future Observatory Conference. Information, computation and the new era of knowledge

Big themes in the future about use f knowledge and computer power.

Showing us WOLFRAM/ALPHA a knowledge Engine. Like a search engine but generates knowledge in real time.

He asked it about the fall of the Berlin wall and it told him what would happen to his bodyif he fell off the Berlin Wall.

Explains the maths of it. Turn input question into symbolic maths. Address this to a set of knowledges and work out how to display the knowledge.

The semantic web-based on tagging of information.

Need to know what do we mean by knowledge.

1. Massive improvement in democratisation of information retrieval.

2. Now need to democratise computational knowledge tasks.

3. Knowledge is system of facts ,method and interpretation.

4. SEARCH is KNOWLEDGE.

5.What about method and interpretation.

Underlying maths. Maths underlies major aspects of our knowledge. The world has become more computational.

Knowledge assets being made available but how can citizens access it without being computer database experts.

We need to change the way our education works.

We are forcing our population to learn, e.g. maths -things like hand calculation of equations.

Most of time spent on calculation -and a little spent referring it to the real world.

Ends by talking about "The Computational Knowledge Economy"

where people have access, as a form of service, to the processes of undestanding knowledge via computational systems.

day one...

Well, it’s my first ever Transmediale Festival and my first day at Transmediale 10 Futurity Now.Haus Der Kuturen Der Welt feels like the perfect venue for the international, energetic, collaborative festival of live art, installation, digital performance, talks and films.

After a fairly short day my head is already swimming [and spinning] with ideas, sounds and words captured throughout my first encounter with Futurity Now…
I first came across ‘White Noise’ by Zilvinas Kempinas, which illuminates a darkened room with a magical white stream of videotape. At first glance it looks like a large pixelated TV screen, but as you get closer you can see the individual strips of tape and hear the fans creating the flickering.
‘Electrolab ‘was an amazing experience, the artists Rachida Ziani and Dewi De Vree performed in four points scattered around the café stage, among the beer swigging festival goers, which instigated movement and discussion. They played with batteries, test tubes, liquids, energy and performance.


I then experienced the graceful and hypnotising sounds of Jem Finer’s ‘Longplayer’ through headphones in a yellow-lit comfy corner of HKW. [it also plays live in the toilet – which must have been why there was such a long queue!]

‘POWEr’ by Artificiel was truly a powerful performance due to its volume, speed and duration (an hour that felt like two), and the framing stage of the impressive auditorium. A Tesla coil created live visuals and sounds; these grew in complexity and built layers, some fascinating but others unbearable.
As we walked back through Tiergarten to the Hauptbahnhof station we were struck by the rainbow lasers emitting their colourful beams of light though the foggy dark skies of Berlin. This is ‘Global Rainbow’ by Yvette Mattern, the seven-colour laser projection connects the city’s former West and East architectural sites, and references the traditional symbolism of the rainbow as a motif for social diversity, peace and hope.

Looking forward to another jam packed day at Transmediale tomorrow…
Rebecca

REVOLUTION NOW -PREMIER of New Gob Squad work

Rosa Luxembourg, along with Karl Leibnicht, were the executed leaders of an abortive workers rising, a German revolution of the 1920's which was cut off in its prime when the people failed to rise and rally sufficient support.

The Volksbuhne Theatre stands on Rosa Luxembourg Plaza in Berlin, a prestigious house theatre for experiment where the Gob Squad, a band of live art performers from Germany and the UK, have based themselves these last few years. Rather than performing in the smaller laboratory theatre of the Prater, the Gob Squad are now premiering in the large 300 seat main house -and, as always in their work, the venue becomes a major player.

After locking the audience in the theatre (with disturbing echos of the Moscow theatre hostages of 2002)-a theatre from which all the seats had been removed and replaced by white plastic bean bags and the elaborate walls draped with black plastic bin liner fabric- they then undertook a series of actions explicitly designed to get us in the psychological position to be ready to bring about a change. Luxembourg and Liebnitz were theorists of workers power schooled in the debates of marxism. The Gob Squad owe more to the school of theatrical power, lying somewhere between Living Theatre and Simon Cowell.

Having got all wound up and ready to go they dispatched one of their number , in a now familar pattern, on a video accompanied extra-theatrical walk in the Rosa Luxembourg Plaza. As we watched on large screens the company attempted to persuade or cajoule members of the Volk to join us in leading "the change." The show derived its dynamic from a theatrical conceit which Gob Squad have now become masters of manipulating.

As the public traversed the snowy waste of the Plaza on a particularly cold and miserable night an audience urged on the pantomimed activists of the Gob Squad to persuade one of the Volk to allow their lives to be transformed by theatre for one night.

As Rosa Luxembourg might well have said, the struggle is never easy and you are going to encounter some difficulties on the way. With their sheer nerve and skill at the manipulation of situations and theatrical resources the squad handled a series of extra theatrical encounters which teetered on the edge of failure, embarrassment or worse whilst characteristically engaging with a number of extraordinary citizens who you found it astonishing to believe were not "set-up" as part of the show.

It was becoming fraught when one of the Volk, I think it was "Claire", finally succumbed to the call of the people and agreed to lead them in revolution by throwing a Molotov cocktail at the wall of the theatre.

Did their struggle paralleled or illuminated the struggle of Leibnicht and Luxembourg?"Claire" entered the building waving the gold flag of theatre and was toasted in vodka after being serenaded by 12 riffing guitar heroes chosen at random from the audience.

The show perhaps celebrated a later call to revolution - a call from the other end of the twentieth century -"fight for the right to party".

WHITE NOISE Zilvinas Kempinas 2007

Promised picture of House of world cultures

Arrived Berlin Mid day 3rd February. Snowy but not too cold. Taking care not to slip over. Lots of snow in the street.

Transmediale Festival which is art based but also has scientists and social theorists and technology thinkers in train, is taking place at theHouse of World Cultures in Berlin. Very appropriate place for the theme of the Festival , which is the about the sense that the notion of the future in the present is actually feeling quite of the past. The building itself is "futuristic" with a sweeping roof which appears quite old fashioned now and not really of the future at all. (picture tomorrow).

It was dark by the time I got there, picking my way through the snowy paths of the Tiergarten . I now know to use the 100 bus.

Met lots of people, including a chap from Nottingham Trent Fine Art of a few years ago Will get his name today -he lives and works in Berlin. Also Anette Schafer, co-curator of Trampoline and Radiator, and her two lovely little twins, who were experiencing their first digital arts festival. (but, I suspect, not their last)

Lots of people here. The evening event was a concert, Pattern Recognition.

The whole thing was completely sold out and started late because they had to get so many people in. (maybe 800-1000)

The First hour was a rather ponderous laptop sound and video projection piece,Materia Obscura by German artists Jurgen Reble and Thomas Koner, which was visually stunning but ran out of ideas early on and could not sustain itself.There also seemed to be no sense of "performance" about it -and it felt like watching a pre-recorded film.

The real star -and I suspect the reason why everyone was there was the premier of TEST PATTERN by Ryoji Ikeda who had come across from Japan to perform it. Yes, I know the title doesn't sound like much fun, but it was a terrific performance in which he stood in front of a giant screen operating his laptop which controlled audio signals converted into black and white barcode like symbols which were projected behind him in sync with the sound. The analogue clicks and crackles and tones of TV were put together into fantastic patterns of sound which sometimes resembled radical club beats and sometimes firework displays. Beautifully controlled.

Tonight going to the Premier of the GOB SQUADS new work, REVOLUTION NOW, at the Volksbuhne Theatre.