Press Note
Piksel is an annual festival for artists and developers working with free and open source
software, hardware and art. This November the festival will be arranged for the 12th time,
gathering more than fifty international artists from Indonesia, Canada, Germany, France,
Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain, Norway, Spain, Russia, Poland and Austria for two
exhibitions, a series of workshops, a day of discussions and presentations, in
addition to live performances and concerts in the evenings.
The term BioArt was coined by the artist Eduardo Kac in 1997, and has been an
increasingly practiced form of art in the 21st century. The genre, which involves creative
tinkering with organic tissue, life processes, live organisms and bacteria, has often been
enveloped in controversy due to its apparent lack of ethics. The 2009 edition of Piksel
invoked strong reactions in the local press because of the BioArt workshop
HackteriaLab – one local paper ran the scandalous notice “Protest against bioart”.
Some were dissatisfied with the idea that small living creatures, such as earthworms,
should be (ab)used for obscure artistic purposes.
Now, five years into the future, the same bioartists and biohackers return to Piksel and
Bergen to give yet another BioArt workshop. Under the moniker PiksteriaLab, they
endeavour to teach how to build a DIY (or, as they prefer, DIWO – Do It With Others)
kitchen sink or rucksack laboratory, guiding participants into the realm of Bioelectronix –
splicing the living and technological – wherein one may try out techniques such as fish and
plant hacking.
PiksteriaLab will commence Monday 10th of November, three days prior to the core festival.
November 13th – 16th more workshops will be held in addition to lectures and
presentations, concerts and performances in the evenings – for example Davide
Bevilacqua and Alberto Boem’s URSUPPE (German for primordial soup), where
synthesizers will be processed through organic matter such as apples and oranges instead
of traditional, electronic effect boxes – and exhibitions at two different venues, where can
be seen Robert B. LISEK’s Schrödinger’s Cat-like QUANTUM ENIGMA, utilizing random
signals from radioactive material (such as thorium, Norway’s high-potential post-oil natural
resource) to control a seemingly uncontrolled installation of flickering lights and sound
impulses.
All that and much more…
Get infected, be the cure, be\O/art.