PIKSEL

Update 8. oct:

In the light of the online debate generated in social media after Medialab MX launched the public manifesto of support to the volunteer, we believe it is the time to rethink our position and line of action regarding what happened. First to publicly express a firm commitment from Piksel and its community in preventing any attack on freedom of the individual and against all violence, especially against women. And secondly, we want to point out the principles of transparency and community that guides the management and activities of Piksel, principles that we followed in our initial management of the incident, but unfortunately seems to have not been satisfactory for the volunteer according to her later complaint letter.

Piksel will again apologise to our volunteer for any inconvenience or discomfort caused by the publishing of the video and her participation in the performance. We are deeply sorry that our initial effort did not meet the expectations of the volunteer. At no time have we wanted to avoid our responsibility in this matter and for that reason we have taken this into consideration. We may not have had enough sensitivity to handle something this difficult. We live in a patriarchal society that sometimes puts our belief systems and values to the test, which does not stop being oriented towards equality and the elimination of any type of violence.

Acknowledging the request from the volunteer, we are therefore removing the video and images of the performance showing an alleged harassment during Piksel Festival 2017. This is done to avoid any more inconvenience and possible identification for the persons involved. The video and images will still be kept in our private archives as documentation in a possible police or court case.

Piksel takes everything that happens in the festival very seriously. We believe, both cultural organizations and artists must learn how to deal with this kind of situations, and that the only way of dealing with it must be based in the principle of transparency. Transparency must work in a bi-directional way, only like that we will be able to identify and to learn how to deal with this kind of cases.

Following that principle, Piksel has contacted experts to help us cope with this situation, with the aim of learning to identify possible inappropriate situations that may occur in the course of an artistic intervention (or similar) and thus, continue growing in creating artistic spaces that generate fair, equal and equitable synergies.

Piksel is working to develop an ethical framework that provides clear guidelines for acceptable behavior during the festival development in order to ensure a good working environment and safe festival experiences for all involved. Piksel will publish this ethical framework when it’s ready in our webpage.

Chronology:

About the warning case at Piksel Festival 2017 which involved one of the artists and one of  the Piksel volunteers during her collaboration in the artists performance.

It has come to our attention that Medialab MX has published a report on their website containing serious allegations against Piksel and alleged sexual harassment during this performance. Piksel is against any harassment, inside or outside the festival frame and we believe that this is implicit in the Piksel values and that the Piksel community knows that. Here is our version of the case.

17th Nov 2017

• Piksel handled the case in its full magnitude immediately after it happened in a public internal meeting involving the artist, the volunteer, other participants and Piksel representatives.

3rd Feb 2018

• Piksel has on several occasions contacted and talked to the volunteer about the situation and the volunteer did not signal any further measures. She was satisfied in how the case was handled.

26th of June 2018

• Piksel was contacted by the Norwegian Embassy in Mexico about the case and agreed with them that the volunteer should request action from the police to re-open the case.
• Piksel did not receive any further request from the volunteer or the police to re-open the case.

17th July 2018

• The volunteer address our sponsors with a sexual harassment report and other documents.

31st of July 2018

• Piksel receives an email from Medialab MX and recommends again to them and the volunteer to ask for police action if they think the case should be re-opened. We had no answer back.

28th of August 2018

• We received documents stating serious sexual allegations against Piksel from our sponsors in Norway.
• In these documents the volunteer request our sponsors to cut all financial support and also requires an economic compensation.
• There is also a letter from women participants at Piksel that was never sent to Piksel, instead we got noticed about it directly from the Arts Council in Norway.
• Medialab MX or the volunteer did not send any documents to Piksel.

2nd October 2018

• Medialab MX considers that the case is not closed but instead of asking in a formal letter to re-open, they publish a public document on internet with false allegations against Piksel.
• Neither Medialab MX nor the volunteer make a formal request to the police to open an investigation, as Piksel recommended in our email to them.

current status

• Piksel has carried out investigations of the case asking external experts on gender issues and sexual harassment, and also getting legal advice.
• Based on these investigations, Piksel sees no grounds to re-open the case.
• Piksel takes all notices of critical circumstances seriously and we are concerned that both employees and participants of the festival have safe and healthy working conditions where mutual respect and openness are important factors for creating a good working environment.
• Piksel is working internally to develop an ethical framework that provides clear guidelines for acceptable behavior during the festival development.
• Piksel will publish this ethical framework when we think it’s ready for publication.

edit: The first version of this statement contained a link to a video of the performance. This link has now bee removed as it can lead to the identification of the persons involved in the case. This version also contained the first name of one of the persons involved. This has now been removed. Piksel apologises for any disclosure of identity caused by this.

PIKSEL17 – We Take EmoCoin!
The 15th annual Piksel Festival for Electronic Art and Free Technologies

– Wokshops
– November 13st-16th, Bergen (NO)
– http://17.piksel.no

The 15th edition of the Piksel Festival takes place in Bergen (NO) November 16th- 18th 2017. We Take EmoCoin! The Piksel17 festival slogan points out to the new capital: our emotions. The interest of the human beings can be captured through emotions, and therefore can be monetized.
Emotions has become the new coin. Emotions can be measured, monitorized and monetized in almost real time. Together with our use of social networks, technology is also investing in bio-sensing the body, using small components and microcontrollers we can collect our bio-data.
So, we ourselves with our public online behaviour and our stored bio-signals, visualized and interfaced, create a direct link between emotions and money.

PIKSEL17 – We Take EmoCoin!

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Workshops Programme:

All workshops are free to attend.
To sign up send an email to:prod(at)piksel(dot)no

BioSIGNAL Sensing Workshop by Cristian Delgado
16th Nov
Building: Piksel Studio 207
Date: 14:00-18:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=72

In this workshop the participants are going to use small components and microcontrolers to make biosignal sensors, to record pulse, muscle and cardiac activity to conect it to instruments and visuals, working with the sense plants response, electromiography and oxygen in blood to control both visuals and audio software with body signals and interaction between bodies.
The result is a colective exhibition made by the participants and the invited artist.

Bergen PD Meeting
16th Nov
Building: Piksel Studio 207
Date: 14:00-16:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=72

PureData is an open source visual programming language for music and multimedia creation, oftenly used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers and artists to create performances and installations.
This first PD meeting will try to gather the Bergen PD community around regular meetings in order to discuss and learn about PD, what it is, how do we see or use it, but also a place to discuss about electronic music and open-source culture.
The meeting is run by artist and composer Arthur Hureau with the support of Piksel.

From E-waste to Sound Device by Toni Quiroga
17h Nov
Building: Piksel Studio 207
Date: 11:00-18:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=230

During this workshop you will learn how to turn parts of e-waste and trash into functional primitive sound devices. Through the vivisection of dead media devices you will learn how to extract valuable components (like motors, VU meters, integrated circuits, transistors and other raw materials) and reuse them in order to build a primitive and idiosyncratic instrument. We will build fully recycled electronic gadgets powered through alternative and ecologically sustainable methods integrating our own body residuals into the process (if you want to). The idea is to get a better understanding of new media through the excavation of the old and obsolete by highlighting the nonlinear history within those devices.

The Praxis LIVE – Hybrid Visual IDE for Live Creative Coding by Neil C. Smith
17h Nov
Building: Piksel Studio 207
Date: 14:00-17:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=69

Praxis LIVE is an innovative and powerful new way to work with OpenJDK and tools like Processing. It is a way to create projections, interactive spaces, custom AV instruments, or live-coding performances.

The workshop will introduce basic project building and patching with Praxis LIVE.
The participants will be able to continue to experiment with visual patching, or learn how to “drop down” to the built-in code editor and live recode components using Processing / Java or OpenGL. They will be able to explore Praxis LIVE’s support for physical computing, including prebuilt integration with TinkerForge open hardware, or GPIO on the Raspberry Pi.
www.praxislive.org |www.neilcsmith.net

A Recipe for Destruction: Secure Hardware Data Erasure by Nikita Mazurov
18h Nov
Building: Piksel Studio 207
Date: 11:00-13:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=227

This workshop propose the question that how securely delete data nowdays has become an important thing.
Exists a huge number of software solutions which advocate wholesale drive encryption, but software solutions are woefully inadequate for the task. So this piece propose a demonstration of a pragmatic hardware solution: secure device destruction via open source recipes.
Will demonstrate and walk attendees through creating homemade recipes to securely get rid of their devices, whether tablets, laptops, phones, or even desktops.
The ultimate goal of this non-traditional workshop is to illustrate that for our digital data to truly become ‘renewable’ it must be liberated from the prison of the physical form, exorcised from the demon of the hard drive.

Sonified Textiles by Paola Torres Nuñez del Prado
18h Nov
Building: Piksel Studio 207
Date: 14:00-18:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=78

The Shipibo-Konibo, from the Peruvian rainforest, openly link their traditional singing (Ikaros) to the designs they draw on vessels and their bodies, and the textiles they use as decoration and clothing. They consider that their designs can be sung.

The workshop includes an introduction to various sonification methods, ranging from databending to code, using different open-source softwares (Audacity, Gimp, Hex editor) and programming platforms for mapping sounds on visual data (images and video).
An explanation on how glitch is related to the designs behind the artworks from Paracas Culture from Perú, the Chincheros Textile Masters from Cusco, and the Shipibo-Konibo.

Biotransmissions by Colectivo Electrobiota
18h Nov
Building: Piksel Studio 207
Date: 14:00-18:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=72

An experiment with electronics and biology seeking to explore different forms of interspecies communication and relationship with nature.
Introduction to biointeractivity and electronics to build our own biosensor that will allow us to make latent the potential voices of the different forms of life that inhabit the rhizosphere.

Vector Synthesis by Derek Holzer
November 27 – November 29
Date: 14:00-20:00
http://17.piksel.no/?p=81

VECTOR SYNTHESIS is an audiovisual, computational art project using sound synthesis and vector graphics display techniques to investigate the direct relationship between sound+image. It draws on the historical work of artists such as Mary Ellen Bute, John Whitney, Nam June Paik, Ben Laposky, and Steina & Woody Vasulka among many others, as well as on ideas of media archaeology and the creative re-use of obsolete technologies. Audio waveforms control the vertical and horizontal movements as well as the brightness of a single beam of light, tracing shapes, points and curves with a direct relationship between sound and image.
http://macumbista.net/?page_id=5000

Piksel17
The 15th edition of the Piksel Festival takes place November 16th-18th 2017.
We are now open for proposals.

***** Deadline 1st of July 2017. *****

Submit your proposals here!