Last day at Piksel in Bergen…
In the morning two workshops were open to public at Teknikerkroen: TOB by Jo frgmnt Grys and Seamus O’Donnell and Arduino + PureData by Marcos Yarza and Carlos Lopez.
TOB – Transmitting Object Behaviors, is an experimental home-made radio & noise installation. The workshop focused on the construction of a musical device containing an oscillator (Special Noise Unit), a mini-fm-transmitter and a very simple digital theremin.The Transmitters are fed with sound material coming from DIY complex chaotic oscillators as well as from available radioprograms on air.
Technology is going out of control!
The arduino/pd VJ workshop aimed at creating ad-hoc physical
interfaces to manipulate videos in real time using PD.
During the afternoon at USF the streaming crew presented GISS, Global Independent Streaming Support, a free software based internet broadcast network devoted to free media. Giss is a platform, based on icecast and ogg, supporting an everincreasing global network of streamers. One problem to be solved is anonymisation: icecast localises the streamers’ ip, which can be inconvenient in some political situations. Lluis Gomez y Bigorda and Yves Degoyon recently developed T.S.S, Theora Streaming Studio, a long awaited GUI for ffmpeg2theora which allows double target encoding from the same
source. Initially developed for horitzo.tv, and used during a workshop in Palestina (Sakabuntu live CD), it is a usefull application for streaming video in two
different qualities on two mountpoints, supporting audiences with different bandwidth. Applause!
Dyne.org Foundation , represented by MrGoil, featured BeTV, a media-box for bi-directional streaming of live and recorded contents. Still in early phase of development.
David Cuartielles‘s speech, named HIGH is
FIVE, was meant to discuss strategies for sustainable open s/h projects, starting from his experience within the Arduino group. Arduino can now count two years development; at the beginning the project was self founded, now they sold lots of boards and they are able to finance people who cannot afford their own boards, for example in Mexico.
The group is structured in two levels: the core group, two people, and the development group, thirteen people. David suggested the following main lines of sustainability: teaching; creating a half commercial system that gets money from companies releasing open source code; staring a foundation to access public money and fundings. Yet funds are an unstable source: you can easily run out of money!
Zosen and elpueblodechina made a quick overview on their manufactured toys and wearable electronic fancy accessories: collar and bracelet with integrated radio transmitter, a pink radio bag, beautiful puppets, a terrorist toy for crystal transmission, and masks with noise units. Pueblo quoted the French sociologist and philosopher Henry Lefebvre and his criticism of everyday life; objects have a cycle of life that is programmed, they are built to break… DiyNoiseToys is a research on different ways to adapt circuits to the body, and not the body to the circuits.
Yves Degoyon presented /etc/groups (A Network Graphical Browser), a web application (a java applet using graphML files or a JDBC/SQL connection) for databasing big sets of data,
mainly aimed at visualising groups and organisations and the
relations between them (social movements).
The very last presentation of this year was FLOSS+Art/people.makeart,
by Aymeric Mansoux and Gisle Frøysland. people.makeart is a repository of articles and lecture materials focused on the relationship between FLOSS and digital arts. The FLOSS+Art book is a collaboration between Bek, goto10 and the Digital Research Unit of the University of Huddersfield. The book, scheduled for spring 2008, will be print using OpenMute‘s POD publishing service.
Last night’s performances were simply great; SheepSint by Tom Schouten, Marloes De Valk and Aymeric Mansoux was an intensive 1-bit noise live improvisation using a home grown cheap synth build with PIC chips! The sound suggested me the image of a slaughtered shrieking animal approaching its electronic reincarnation.
Noisehead was a strong, dense and concentrated performative action by elpueblodechina and Zosen. Pueblo activates the noisemask she is wearing with a light source. Zosen is drawing and writing over a pd projected text. Tension was high, electricity became visible: the sound thundered like an incredible, supernatural phenomenon!
VuNhatTan, Marhaug & Fr0ysland‘s audiovisual concert consisted of very good music accompanied by abstract unstable images of analogue and tactile appearance. A refined and erudite show.
Last but not least, the Piksel Noise Allstars improvised a/v set was a liberating interaction between various artists, a generative connection for future collaborations. Away from keyboards, noisers can also sing!