PIKSEL

Piskel Fest Spill 2019 program

30th of May AV Performance @Piksel Pavilion from 21:00 – 23:00
LIVE CODING Music, Toccata for two keyboards Hlöðver Sigurðsson (IS)
LIVE CODING Visuals with Visual Hifa, Valentín Vago (CH)

Piksel Pavilion – The central info point for Piksel Fest Spill

The 30th of March, Piksel comes back to the Music Pavillion in Bergen with 2 hours of audiovisual live performances. The music pavilion will be electronically updated to host different Piksel artists doing high impact performances as a preview of what is going to happen at the Piksel Festival.

Piksel Pavilion are LIVE CODING sessions focused on sound and visuals.

Hlöðver Sigurðsson (IS) is a computer musician and composer from Reykjavik. His performances has been seen at the Spektrum (berlín), Piksel Festival (Bergen) and Sonic Code Sessions Showcase, part of vorspiel of Transmediale 2017.

Valentín Vago (CH)
In 2016 I decided to create a new software called Visual Fiha which allows the generation of visuals based on live coding and real time audio analysis. I have been performing alongside with international DJs and producers.

31^st of May Workshops @Piksel Studio 207 from 14:00 – 18:00

To sign up send and email to piksel19(at)piksel(dot)no with the subject Live Coding Visuals

Visual live coding in the browser with Visual Fiha by Valentin Vago (CH)

The Visual Fiha web app is a personal and non-commercial project from Valentin Vago (zeropaper) aimed for him to experiment with web related technologies.

It is a free VJing software that runs in browsers. The development of the first version of Visual Fiha begun in October 2016. That first version was based on the amazing AmpersandJS library, it supported live manipulation of THREE.js scenes, HTML5 canvas, SVG, HTML with CSS, integrated the P5 library as well and implemented the concept of signals.Visual Fiha was first used for a live performance in December 2016 and a first workshop took place in May 2017 in Moscow.

Valentín Vago (CH)

In 2016 I decided to create a new software called Visual Fiha which allows the generation of visuals based on live coding and real time audio analysis. I have been performing alongside with international DJs and producers.

31^st of May Workshops @Piksel Studio 207 from 14:00 – 18:00

To sign up send and email to piksel19(at)piksel(dot)no with the subject Live Coding Music

This workshop is an introduction to real-time music creation with emphasis on Csound and Supercollider to a lesser extend. Csound has the ability to run everywhere and on every platform (eg. android, raspberry-pi, Bela, iOS or web-browser) and is relatively easy to learn compared to other computer music languages. I will introduce my own live-coding system Panaeolus as well as other live coding platforms which I have used. Participants will create their own web-based instrument or web-based installation (webstallation), which will be hosted online.

Hlöðver Sigurðsson (IS) is a computer musician and composer from Reykjavik. His performances has been seen at the Spektrum (berlín), Piksel Festival (Bergen) and Sonic Code Sessions Showcase, part of vorspiel of Transmediale 2017.

26^th of May Performance @Piksel Studio 207 – At 20:00

Expirator (reversed vacuum cleaner) by Pierre Berthet (BE)

27^th of May Workshop @Piksel Studio 207 from 14:00 – 18:00

Touching Sound by Pierre Berthet (BE)

To sign for this workshop write an email to piksel19(at)piksel(dot)no

WORKSHOP

Touching Sound, a workshop by Pierre Berthet (BE)

Listen what we touch

touch what sounds

sounds knead ears

ears catch time

Ingredients:

tin cans, water, steel wires, bamboo, plastic bags, tubes, dead plants, D.C. motors, sea shells, snail shells, stones, buckets, filter queen, hooks and gloves, balloons, straws, bottles…

Things own time are objects

they own space, they own time.

We walk with sounds in our hands

on our head

in our mouth, moving tongues while singing

moving lips while blowing

blow blow blow

Official opening 24^th of May from 19:00 – 23:00

Exhibition dates: 25^th of May – 16^th of June (Mondays closed)

Opening hours: 15:00 – 18:00

Bergen 2019

“I remembers the radio broadcasts from London during World War II and Norway’s king stiffening the resolve of his subjects under German occupation. ”
Judith Haaland, 98

The Paraset (Paratrooper radio set) was one of the most notorious of all the transceivers used by the partisan clandestine radio operators during WWII. Often transported in food baskets, suitcases, and other obscure places, it was used for clandestine radio communication primarily in Norway and Europe. The equipment is known as the “Paraset” because it was dropped by parachute for field agents. A fascinating piece of history.

With this exhibition Piksel wants to make an homage to the radio as a device and also to the importance of the listeners. In a historical moment where the FM analogue radio has been shot down and there are voices that claims that “Norway is not prepared for this.” and “Of course there is a lot of nostalgia in radio. That’s one of the reasons this switch is so controversial.” Piksel wants to bring some fresh air doing both, recalling the analogue radio and bringing new low-cost digital technologies to the people, radio-makers and emitters.

SIGNAL TO NOISE
One of the well known examples of Victor Papanek’s “designs for the real world” is that of a radio receiver for the third world. Produced from very simple, “cottage” like materials, such as an used juice can, paraffin wax and a wick as power source, the radio was non-directional, receiving any and all stations simultaneously. “But, as Victor Papanek will comment, in emerging countries, this was then of an importance: there was only one broadcast (carried by relay towers placed about fifty miles apart”. And, as Papanek continues, “It was much more than a clever little gadget, constituting a fundamental communication device for preliterate areas of the world. After being tested successfully in the mountains of North Carolina (an area where only one broadcast is easily received), the device was demonstrated to the Army. They were shocked. “What if a Communist”, they asked, “gets to the microphone?” The question is meaningless. The most important intervention is to make information of all kinds freely accessible to people.”

This story of the non‐expensive, locally adapted produced radio receiver is the starting point for an exhibition and a workshop which deals with different aspects of radio broadcasting: From the way a radio receiver and a radio transmitter are produced to radio infrastructure, and from the delivered information to the means of questioning its accuracy and validity. The exhibition will consider a historical perspective, but will mostly bring into discussion researches related to the present forms of radio infrastructure and radio phenomena, as well as strategies and tactics of radio‐based interventions.

List of works and artists:
Repertories of (in)discreetness
Tincuta Heinzel & Lasse Scherffig

∏‐Node Platform

Embodied RF Ecologies
Afroditi Psarra

Workshop
Do your own radio!
∏-box : streaming and local FM radio broadcasting with a raspberry pi
∏‐Node

Piksel Fest Spill is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway, the Wallonie-Bruxelles International and Rumanska Kultur Institutet.

Repertories of (in)discreetness
Tincuta Heinzel & Lasse Scherffig

Largely used during the Soviet Revolution, the “new” communication mediums of the beginning of 20th century’s played an important role in the Soviets’s propaganda strategy during the 1917‐1918 revolution [3]. The same strategy was equally adopted during the installation of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The policies at the time have encouraged the production and the acquisition of radio devices by a large number in order to ensure the impact of the propaganda, while in the same time, the content of the broadcasting was subjected to a strict control.

Using this infrastructure, the USA and their Western alliances were trying to counter the communist propaganda. The creation of Radio Free Europe aimed to deliver “truth” and “objective” information. In the same way, radio phenomena (like interference) were used as technical interventions.

Repertories of (in)discreetness project has its starting point in the archives of Radio Free Europe from the Open Society Archives in Budapest. It questions the act and mechanisms of archiving “the Other”, with a focus on the European “East”. The project discusses the ways in which information is collected and transferred, the ways in which the East has gained an epistemic body through refraction. Thus we would like to point out the relation between nature of the information, the production of knowledge and its reception.

Radio Free Europe is considered unique in the annals of international broadcasting: acting as surrogate domestic broadcaster for the nations under Communism. It also relied on local official media and informal news in order to broadcast what was considered objective information. Due to their wish to outline an exhaustive portrait of the world behind the Iron Curtain, Radio Free Europe Archives give way to a series of questions:

What did the archives not capture and what rests uncatalogued and unverified? And, if something was indeed captured, how was it transformed through archiving? What parts of this composite portrait sketched by Radio Free Europe still survive today? And is this portrait only a mirror image resulting from the media war between East and West? By raising these questions, our project looks to divert and to put into a sensible perspective the act of collecting, organizing and using information, in order to question the nature of the information itself.

Documentation link: http://ro.tranzit.org/en/exhibition/0/2015-03-18/repertories-of-indiscreetness References: 3. Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality (London: A&C Black, 2004).

∏‐Node Platform

Fig 5. ∏-Node Installation, Orleans (2015).

∏-Node is an experimental platform for hybrid Web/FM radio-phonic composition. As a multi‐dimensional radio infrastructure platform, ∏-Node explores the narrative, involves participation, and imaginary possibilities of radio through the use of both historic and new, digital technologies.

∏-Node aims to explore the many dimensions of radio’s format and diffusion: its physicality (ether, radio waves, and the electromagnetic spectrum), its spatiality (bandwith, frequencies), its infrastructure (network of radio receivers/emitters), its methods of creation and editorial content management (programming boards/teams, recording studios), its methods of metadata reception (RDS/SDR), its history (radios libres and pirate radio movements), its legislation. Most importantly, ∏-Node also wishes to examine radio’s future at a time when everything is moved towards “the digital”.
The interconnectedness of these various dimensions, tools, and networks allow for the establishment of a decentralized and hitherto unseen diffusion structure, where each of the network’s nodes serve to both receive and diffuse information. Such a structure creates a break with the classic one-way radio format, substituting it with a horizontal peer‐to-peer model that creates room to play with new potentials for multi‐ diffusion and superposition, as well as room to rethink the radio network’s topology.

Embodied RF Ecologies
Afroditi Psarra
E-textile installation and sound performance

Following my quest to embody the invisible transmissions that surround us, in this wearable I explore the use of an IC mixer circuit to down convert the emissions from the NOAA weather satellite and make them audible. By continuing my research into textile antennas and fractal geometry as a means to detect radio-frequency (RF) transmissions, I aim to speculate about the body as an agent of power in a post-capitalist world, and to re-interpret transmission technologies through handmade crafting techniques.

Teaser video here: https://vimeo.com/326116349