PIKSEL

Workshop: Internet Archaeology for Beginners, Duncan Poulton

Piksel Fest Spill 2020
7th of June – 16:00 – 18:00

Workshop
Duncan Poulton working process. Duncan Poulton (UK)
To attend send us an email to piksel20(at)piksel(dot)no

The workshop will happen remotely from UK and at the Studio 207 in Bergen with Piksel assistance and guiding. You can join us at the Studio in Bergen or online. There is a reduced number of subscriptions. 5 people at the Studio 207 and 15 people online. Inscriptions are needed. For those attending online we will send you the instructions on equipment and materials you need to follow it online and how to join us.

Internet Archaeology for Beginners
Join artist Duncan Poulton for a virtual workshop which offers an introduction to techniques for mining and misusing the web for creative reuse. Attendees will visit the depths of the internet that search engines don’t want you to find, and learn to make their own digital collages from the materials they gather.

The workshop will be using the open-source image editing software GIMP. If you want to follow along with the workshop, please download GIMP in advance here: https://www.gimp.org/

Duncan Poulton is a London-based artist working in an expanded form of collage, spanning digital video and image assemblage. Itinerant in nature, his work is currently preoccupied with notions of circulation, digital waste and the copy, as he acts out an ongoing remediation of our increasingly connected world. Working exclusively with found content, his digital works evoke a new visual culture of constant juxtaposition, ambivalence towards images and the collapsing down of history and meaning engendered by the internet. He has shown extensively in the UK and internationally in South Korea, USA, Greece, India, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Russia and New Zealand.

Artist’s website: duncanpoulton.com
Instagram: @duncpoulton

The venues
– Piksel Cyber Salon. Piksel invites you to have a cyber experience and to join us at our hybrid activities. Piksel Cyber Salon will host part of the Copy Paste exhibition, workshops, performances and lectures. Join us!

– Piksel youtube@Piksel Produksjoner

– Studio 207, Strandgaten 207, BERGEN The new Piksel/Borealis space in town for electronic art, experimental music and adventurous listening.

Piksel Fest Spill is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway and ProHelvetia.

Presentation
Authors of the Future (BE). Re-imagining Copyleft. Constant(BE).

Piksel Fest Spill 2020
6th of June – 18:00

Venues:
Studio 207, Strandgaten 207, BERGEN
Piksel Cyber Salon
Piksel Youtube channel

An online presentation of Authors of the Future, with a focus on the Cinemas Sauvage license. This license shows the pitfalls and fun (im)possibility of coming to an agreement with a bunch of anarchist people who do not want to agree on a rule.
Conventional intellectual property law binds authors and their hybrid contemporary practices in a framework of assumed ownership and individualism. It conceives creations as original works, making collective, networked practices difficult to fit. Within that legal and ideological framework, Copyleft, Open Content Licenses or Free Culture Licensing introduced a different view of authorship, opening up the possibility for a re-imagining of authorship as a collective, feminist, webbed practice. But over time, some of the initial spark and potentiality of Free Culture licensing has been normalized and its problems and omissions have become increasingly apparent. ‘Authors of the future’ is an ongoing research trajectory in which we start re-imagining copyleft together.

Can we invent licences that are based on collective creative practices, in which cooperation between machine and biological authors, need not be an exception? How could attribution be a form of situated genealogy, rather than accounting for heritage through listing names of contributing individuals? In what way can we limit predatory practices without blocking the generative potential of Free Culture? What would a decolonial and feminist license look like, and in what way could we propose entangled notions of authorship? Or perhaps we should think of very different strategies?

Constant is a non-profit, artist-run organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology.

Constant develops, investigates and experiments. Constant departs from feminisms, copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. Constant loves collective digital artistic practices. Constant organises transdisciplinary worksessions. Constant creates installations, publications and exchanges. Constant collaborates with artists, activists, programmers, academics, designers. Constant is active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations, counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, extitutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.
Constant – http://constantvzw.org/

The venues
– Piksel Cyber Salon. Piksel invites you to have a cyber experience and to join us at our hybrid activities. Piksel Cyber Salon will host part of the Copy Paste exhibition, workshops, performances and lectures. Join us!

– Piksel youtube@Piksel Produksjoner

– Studio 207, Strandgaten 207, BERGEN The new Piksel/Borealis space in town for electronic art, experimental music and adventurous listening.

Piksel Fest Spill is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway and ProHelvetia.

Live coding Algorave performance Antonio Roberts, Alex McLean.

Piksel Fest Spill 2020
29th of May – 23:00 – 24:00
Live coding Algorave performance by Antonio Roberts, Alex McLean.

Venues:
Studio 207, Strandgaten 207, BERGEN
Piksel Cyber Salon -https://hubs.mozilla.com/qpMLs2c/piksel-fest-spill/

Live coding Algorave performance Antonio Roberts, Alex McLean.
Live coding is a performance practice that revolves around the creation and modification of code and algorithms in real-time. This kind of events are also named ALGORAVE, joining the words algorithm and rave. The 29th of May we welcome the artists Antonio Roberts and Alex McLean and their live audiovisual performance, taking place in parallel at the Studio 207 and at the Cyber Salon.

The venues

• Piksel Cyber Salon. Piksel invites you to have a cyber experience and to join us at our hybrid activities. Piksel Cyber Salon will host part of the Copy Paste exhibition, workshops, performances and lectures. Join us!
• Piksel youtube@Piksel Produksjoner
• Studio 207, Strandgaten 207, BERGEN The new Piksel/Borealis space in town for electronic art, experimental music and adventurous listening.

Piksel Fest Spill is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway and ProHelvetia.

Hackteria / BadLAB
with the collaboration of Kiyoshi Yamamoto.

Engineering is also affecting to molecular biology, posing new ethical challenges that artists investigate through DIY bioart methods. International DIY bio networks and communities encourage the collaboration of scientists, hackers and artists to combine their expertise. Piksel is inviting the main artistic DIY bionetworks worldwide, to establish a collaborative interaction with local artists. Piksel Fest Spill invites the audience for interesting interactions through a DIY or die – Plant Printing Workshop and the Worship – Dinner Performance.

11th of June Worship – Dinner Performance
HackteriaLab & QWAS | Migrating Dialogue
The Performance is based on an exchange of food, gesture, rhythm and sensuality threw online meeting tool like zoom, jitsi, skype, etc. It is a tangible stretch towards how sensuality is perceived in the digital realm threw media.

Worship is a dinner performance created by Maya Minder in collaboration with Almaty based artists Dana Iskakova and Takhir Yakyharov. The Performance is based on an exchange of food, gesture, rhythm and sensuality threw online meeting tool like zoom, jitsi, skype, etc. It is a tangible stretch towards how sensuality is perceived in the digital realm threw media. Elements of #asrm (autonomous sensory meridian response) the tickling sounds of whisper or crumbling paper, walking on snow or stroking hair combined with the elements of new media trend of #mukbang (Korean word for food space) the eating in front of audience recorded with detailed sounds, is probed and performed during an mutual dinner happening. The audience is invited to partake or just to relaxe and concentrate on chatter and talk during the food. People are served with umami rich food, so to give a physical layer of sensual perception emphasized threw food and audio-visual experience.

13th of June Workshop DIY or die – Plant Printing
HackteriaLab & BadLab & Kiyoshi Yamamoto.
You can attend physically at Studio 207 in Bergen or online. Inscription is necessary. We will send you the instructions on equipment and materials you need to follow it online and how to join us.
To attend please send us an email to: info(at)piksel(dot)no
At the Studio only 5 persons.

DIY or DIE Is an transdisciplinary workshop on the topic of coloring fabrics with wild herbs. The toxic impact of the textile industry is the starting point of this workshop. Together we will learn the old technique of dyeing with natural dyes that we find in our neighborhood. The Workshop will be held mutually in Bergen, NW and Zurich, CH under the guidance of a local assistant and threw a virtual meeting with the BadLab project based in Zurich and working at the Theater house Gessneralle during the Naked Transition Project. We will dye fabrics of silk and cotton ourselves, go foraging for wild herbs and work with poisonous substances in small quantities – poisonousness is always a question of dose (Paracelsus) – investigating the toxic side effects of the textile industry.

This workshop is a lot about the playful approach of learning and unlearning, we will follow the art of dyeing by means of DIYbio methods and old knowledge about plant dye and natural coloring. We use plants to dye fabrics and create unpredictable design and patterns. In the framework of the theme of the exhibition „naked transition the aspect of empowerment by DIY and community based work is celebrated threw the moment of liberation – Just do it and Do it with Others. Embroidery hoops stand as a symbol of the time we save, which we take as free time by growing beyond the collective stick tradition of manual work, no longer embroidering the fabric with rules and slogans, but use nature itself, its signs leaves to create traces of stories.

Participants: Paloma Ayala, Lisa Biedlingmaier, Lucile Haute, Anne-Laure Franchette, Corinna Mattner, Maya Minder, Les Plants Sorcière.

Hackteria is a global network active since 2009 of people practicing DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIWO (do-it-with-others) biology, with a focus on art, design and interdisciplinary cooperation. Its goal is to allow artists, scientists, cooks, farmers, philosophers and hackers to collaborate and test various biohacking and bioart techniques, outside conventional settings such as academic laboratories and art institutions. http://hackteria.org

BAD LAB project is a collective laboratory of interdisciplinary ideas and practices around plants. BAD LAB deals with the politics of the invisible, plant migration, the resurgence of oppressed and marginalized feminine knowledge, the creation of solidarious ways in which to narrate space that include rural, indigenous beings, and biota, digging up lost and old recipes around healing and culinary, healthcare and colloquial practices.

QWAS – Migrating Dialogue
The project QWAS – Migrating Dialogue is a transcultural collaboration between the Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK) and the Eurasian Cultural Alliance (ECA) in Almaty, Kazakhstan.The project was launched in 2017 and has so far encompassed two student exchange programmes (for which participants travelled from Zurich to Almaty by train) and two e-learning seminars; with exhibitions taking place simultaneously in both cities.

QWAS was created by Rada Leu and Peter Tränkle. The project is kindly supported by the framework of the International Hub Arts for Change – Arts and Design in Social Processes of ZHdK. https://www.qwas.ch/

Participating artists from HackteriaLab 2020 in Bergen:

Maya Minder (CH/KR) *1983
Artist, Fermentista and Organizer. Lives and works in Zurich. Several exhibitions in local and global spheres. Pro Helvetia, Werkbeitrag 2018, nominated for the KADIST AWARD 2017, Part of the Klöntal Triennale 2017. Several grants and support from Migros Kulturprozent, Pro Helvetia and Gerbert Rüf Stiftung for projects she co-curated. She studied art history at the University of Zurich and helds a MA Fine Arts Degree from the Zurich University of Arts.
Founder of Gasthaus: Fermentation & Bacteria
Active member of the Hackteria – Open Source Biological Art Network https://www.hackteria.org/
Member of Gesellschaft für Mikrobiomik.org https://mikrobiomik.org

Piksel Fest Spill is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway and PROHELVETIA.

Exhibition: Copy / Paste
Piksel Fest Spill
22nd May – 21st June

The exhibition features works by Peter Sunde (FI), Eric Schrijver (NL), Constant (BE), Lorna Mills (CA), Carol Breen (IR), Duncan Poulton (UK), LoVid (US)

22nd May – 21th June
Opening hours (Monday closed): 14:00 – 18:00
Weekends: 13:00 – 18:00

If you are an artist, then you have no doubt copied the work of others. This copying can range from using pages from a magazine in collage, adopting the style of an artist, or simply being inspired by the work of an artist. This natural process of copying, taught to us at every stage of our artistic development, is burdened by a very complex and messy set of laws and social conventions which define and limit how we can use copying within our practices. These don’t take into account exceptions or nuances, and come from a historical world where artworks were scarce physical objects, and don’t translate well into a world where culture is abundant and can be accessed and copied at will.

Being an artist who copies is to be an artist working in this murky grey area of right and wrong.

For those artists, I have curated Copy Paste. This exhibition features the work of nine artists and art collectives who all incorporate copying as a core aspect of their work. Taking the form of a physical exhibition at Piksel in Norway, an online exhibition, and an event and lecture series, the exhibition aims to show that copying is natural.

The works of Duncan Poulton and Lorna Mills exemplify the creative potential of diving into long forgotten archives to uncover obscure works that can be presented in new contexts to give them new meaning. These archives include works housed in libraries and universities, but also forgotten media from long-abandoned websites and broadcast media.

Carol Breen’s practice takes a more inward-facing approach to copying which sees Breen copy, edit, remix, rework and re-edit her work ad nauseam using a variety of methods to reiterate her work.

Peter Sunde’s Kopimashin takes the argument that copying is harmful and turns it on its head, creating an automated machine which copies infinitely but produces nothing.

Both Eric Schrijver and Constant take a more critical and educational approach to copying, examining the current conditions under which we copy and theorising on how we can better create licenses which reflect the nuances of creativity.

LoVid and Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef both present works that use 3D objects as their material, creating new works from publicly available 3D models, and encouraging the public to creatively rework their own work.

Kolmisoppi, Kopimashin, Peter Sunde (FI) @Studio207

The Kopimashin creates an endless amount of copies of a specific audio track (gnarls barkley’s crazy). The audio track is copied to /dev/null, a unix data pipe for avoiding permanent storage. The Kopimashins lcd display consists of three rows of information, the serial number of the mashin, amount of copies created and the dollar value it represents in losses for the record labels (Downtown Records / Warner Music), currently represented by USD1,25 per copied piece. The goal of the kopimashin is to make the audio track the most copied in the world and by doing so bankrupting the record industry.

Peter Sunde (FI)
I’m Peter. I’m of Finnish and Norwegian heritage, born in 1978. I like to travel and try to keep my home base in Berlin. I work mostly with projects that can change society and I have done so for a couple of years. And I deal a lot with questions regarding immaterial rights. I’ve done a lot of projects around it and the most known project I’ve participated in is probably The Pirate Bay. On spare time I play house/techno music and I enjoy learning new languages and traveling the globe.

https://konsthack.se/

Young Antiquities, LoVid (USA) @Piksel Cyber Salon

Young Antiquities, a series of media objects, embraces relationships between time and physical presence, a utopian post-material world and the reality of decomposition. Using an array of 3D capture devices we translated textile sculptures from our Video Taxidermy series into virtual form.

LoVid
LoVid, the NY based artist duo comprised of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, LoVid’s work includes immersive installations, sculptural synthesizers, single channel videos, tapestries, stained glass, participatory projects, mobile media cinema, works on paper, and multimedia performance. Collaborating since 2001, LoVid’s work has been exhibited, performed, screened, and presented internationally among others at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, And/Or Gallery, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Real Art Ways, Good Children Gallery, BRIC, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Parrish Museum, Issue Project Room, Mixed Greens Gallery, The Science Gallery Dublin, The Jewish Museum, MoMA, Lampo (Chicago), Tectonics Festival TLV, The Kitchen, Moving Image Art Fair, Daejeon Museum (Korea), Smack Mellon, Netherland Media Art Institute (Netherlands), New Museum (NY), ICA (London), and International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands). LoVid’s projects have received support from organizations including:Wave Hill, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Graham Foundation, UC Santa Barbara, Signal Culture, Cue Art Foundation, Eyebeam, Harvestworks, Wave Farm, Rhizome, Franklin Furnace, Turbulence.org, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Experimental TV Center, NY State Council of the Arts, and Greenwall Foundation.

http://www.lovid.org/

Copy This Book, an artist’s guide to copyright, Eric Schrijver (NL) @Studio207

Copy This Book is an artist’s guide to copyright, written for makers. At once practical and critical, the book guides readers through the concepts underlying copyright and how they apply in practice. It does so within one compact, contemporary and readable volume, packed with striking examples and boasting attractive, intuitive design.
Copy This Book provides answers to questions like: How do you obtain copyright? For what work? And for how long? How does copyright traverse mediums? And how do you go about integrating the work of others within your own?
Copy This Book also details the concepts of authorship and original creation that determine today’s legal systems. It provides the conceptual tools to participate in the contemporary debate about intellectual property.

Eric Schrijver (NL)
Eric Schrijver is a Dutch interaction designer, artist and author, born in Amsterdam in 1984.
He now lives in Brussels, and works for the Belgian IT company ACSONE, designing and developing interfaces for clients in the public and private sector. Eric directs a group blog called I like tight pants and mathematics, that aims to motivate designers and artists to get more involved in the world of computer programmers. Next to that, beneficiary of a grant from the Cultural Industries Fund NL, Eric recently published his first book: “Copy This Book”, an artist’s guide to copyright.

Pile (Circles), Adventures of the Black Square (Workstations) @Piksel Cyber Salon

e-hoarder (Xerox), e-hoarder (The Fast & the Furious) and e-hoarder (III) @Studio207

e-hoarder series (2019 – ongoing) Each departing from a different online trope – from ‘dumpster diving’ YouTube videos to detailed 3D scans of mundane household objects – the e-hoarder series is an ongoing sequence of digital collage works exploring modern habits of consumption, storage and waste.

Pile (Circles) (2018) Pile (Circles) is an attempt to categorise and map out the artist’s archive of digital imagery; to treat it as a miniature internet to be searched and defined according to arbitrary terms. By layering all the circular images gathered in a single year in chronological order of their creation, Poulton creates an enormous yet invisible stack which traces his habits and rhythms of accumulation across the online and physical world.

Adventures of the Black Square (Workstations) (2019) The anonymous black square of the computer screen becomes the protagonist of this digital animation, in which hundreds of online images of workstations, offices, storerooms, gaming dens, libraries and internet cafes are cut together to create a quivering black shape in the centre of the frame.

Duncan Poulton (UK)
Duncan Poulton is a London-based artist working in an expanded form of collage, spanning digital video and image assemblage. Itinerant in nature, his work is currently preoccupied with themes of simulation, copying and circulation, acting out an ongoing remediation of our increasingly virtual world. Working exclusively with found content, his digital works evoke a new visual culture of constant juxtaposition, ambivalence towards images and the collapsing down of history and meaning engendered by the internet. With productive misinterpretation, intuition and automatic technique as strategies of choice, he aims to produce a body of discrete works that make sense of our hyperconnected and oversaturated reality, one bit at a time.

Recent exhibitions and screenings include Coventry Biennial 2019; Art Licks Weekend, London; OUTPOST, Norwich; MIT Museum, Massachusetts; The Wallace Collection, London; Eastside Projects, Birmingham Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, South Korea; Tate Modern, London; QUAD, Derby; Transmediale, Berlin; Kochi-Muzeris Biennale, India; Flatpack Festival, Birmingham and Athens Digital Arts Festival.

http://duncanpoulton.com/

Ethereal Imperial, Lorna Mills (CA) @Studio207

Lorna Mills
Canadian artist, Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990’s, both in Canada and Internationally. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. Recent exhibitions include “Abrupt Diplomat” at the Marshal McLuhan Salon at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, for Transmediale, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn NY, “DKRM” at DAM Gallery, Berlin, “Dreamlands” at the Whitney Museum, NY, “Yellowwhirlaway” at the Museum of the Moving Image, NY and “The Great Code” at Transfer Gallery, NY. For the month of March, 2016, her work “Mountain Time/Light was displayed on 45 Jumbo monitors in Times Square, NYC, every night as part of the Midnight Moment program curated by Times Square Arts.

She has also co-curated monthly group GIF projections, with Rea McNamara, for the “Sheroes” performance series in Toronto, a group GIF projection event “When Analog Was Periodical” in Berlin with Anthony Antonellis, and a four person GIF installation, “:::Zip The Bright:::” at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, with Sara Ludy, Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva. Lorna Mills’ most recent curation project, “Ways of Something” is a collaborative remake of the 1972 John Berger documentary “Ways of Seeing” episodes one through four, featuring over 115 networked artists.

Lorna Mills is represented by Transfer Gallery in New York & Los Angeles, Elephant in Montreal and DAM Gallery in Berlin.

Shiv Integer, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez + Julien Deswaef @Piksel Cyber Salon

Shiv Integer is a bot making assemblage art for 3D printers. Rummaging through Thingiverse, the biggest online 3D-Print community and a vast archive of user-made models – full of knick-knacks and engineering parts – the bot picks objects at random to conjoin into sculptures and gives them apt word-salad names such as “disc on top of an e-juice golf.” The process follows a lineage of Dadaist readymade and chance art, but also explores the authorship-inheritance of Creative Commons licensing, as well as performing an archiving of an Internet subculture, taking cross-database snapshots of 3D-Print culture.

The bot ran anonymously with only a vague FAQ explanation. Thingiverse users either love or hate the bot; it’s provoked hundreds of comments ranging from fan poetry to hate mail, and sparked a long debate over if it makes art or spam. User’s binding stake in authorship made them fiercely active, forming a key facet of Shiv Integer, which from the outset was an anagram of Thingiverse.

Matthew Plummer Fernández
British/Colombian artist Matthew Plummer Fernández works across sculpture, print, software, and installation. After receiving an MA from London’s Royal College of Art in 2009, he completed his practice-based doctorate at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2019. Plummer Fernández’s interests in copyleft culture, digital fabrication, and social-computational entanglements interrelate to form a varied body of work that is influenced by the artistic traditions of Generative Art, Critical Design, and Internet Art. Plummer Fernández’s work has been exhibited extensively, and commissioned by institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum and Somerset House in London, ZKM in Karlruhe, AND Festival in Manchester. His works Digital Natives and Disarming Corruptor are in the collection of Centre Pompidou in Paris, and in 2014 Disarming Corruptor received an award of distinction at Ars Electronica. Plummer Fernández is represented by Nome gallery, Berlin. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Arts, London, and a visiting researcher at Goldsmiths.

Julien Deswaef
Born in Brussels, Julien Deswaef is a software artist, experience designer and interface developer based in Barcelona. Active both in visual arts as well as in free / libre and open source culture, he has the ability to transform ideas into digital realities. He regularly collaborates with artists in the world of entertainment, music and fine arts. His art practice usually questions copyright, authorship and the impact of technology on our society through generative graphics and social media bots. Deswaef’s work has been visible in multiple art and music festivals across Europe such as Pukkelpop in Belgium, Les hivernales in Switzerland, Les Nuits Blanches in France or Kurzfilmfestival Koeln in Germany. Some of his artworks have been featured in collective exhibitions with institutions including Somerset House, LEAP, ESC Medien Kunst Labor, iMAL, Le Manège, Le Vecteur ou Les Brasseurs.

https://www.plummerfernandez.com/
https://xuv.be/

Still Stillness, Carol Breen @Studio207 @Piksel Cyber Salon

still_stillness is a clusterfuck of copies, a collage of digital interfaces and banal mediations the artist gets lost in, as she continously re-makes her own archive of images.

Carol Breen (IR)
Carol Breen is an Irish artist based in the West Midlands, fascinated by the impact digital technology is having on human agency and vision. Through practice I explore the idea of images as ecologies. I return to my own archive of images and re-make them again and again. This allows me to think about the relations between, images, data and the body. I am currently undergoing a PhD Studentship at C-DaRE, The Centre for Dance Research. I have undergone artistic residencies in Norway, Canada and the UK. Worked collaboratively on funded projects with researchers from a range of disciplines and co-designed BA (Hons) student projects with the The Media Archive of Central England, and The British Film Institute as well as poetryfilm.org. Recent exhibitions include Press on and Play in collaboration with Gemma Jones at Vivid Projects, in Birmingham and Rephotography: Coventry Then and Now, at The Herbert Gallery in Coventry.

http://imagemover.co.uk/

Authors of the Future, Constant

Conventional intellectual property law binds authors and their hybrid contemporary practices in a framework of assumed ownership and individualism. It conceives creations as original works, making collective, networked practices difficult to fit. Within that legal and ideological framework, Copyleft, Open Content Licenses or Free Culture Licensing introduced a different view of authorship, opening up the possibility for a re-imagining of authorship as a collective, feminist, webbed practice. But over time, some of the initial spark and potentiality of Free Culture licensing has been normalized and its problems and omissions have become increasingly apparent. ‘Authors of the future’ is an ongoing research trajectory in which we start re-imagining copyleft together.

Can we invent licences that are based on collective creative practices, in which cooperation between machine and biological authors, need not be an exception? How could attribution be a form of situated genealogy, rather than accounting for heritage through listing names of contributing individuals? In what way can we limit predatory practices without blocking the generative potential of Free Culture? What would a decolonial and feminist license look like, and in what way could we propose entangled notions of authorship? Or perhaps we should think of very different strategies?

Constant
Constant is a non-profit, artist-run organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology.

Constant develops, investigates and experiments. Constant departs from feminisms, copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. Constant loves collective digital artistic practices. Constant organises transdisciplinary worksessions. Constant creates installations, publications and exchanges. Constant collaborates with artists, activists, programmers, academics, designers. Constant is active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations, counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, extitutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.

http://constantvzw.org/

About the curator Antonio Roberts
Antonio Roberts is an artist and curator based in Birmingham, UK. His practices explore what ownership and authorship mean in an age impacted by digital technology.

His work has been featured at galleries and festivals including databit.me in Arles, France (2012), Glitch Moment/ums at Furtherfield Gallery, London (2013), Loud Tate: Code at Tate Britain (2014), glitChicago at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago, US (2014), Permission Taken at Birmingham Open Media and University of Birmingham (2015-2016), Common Property at Jerwood Arts, London (2016), Ways of Something at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017), Green Man Festival, Wales (2017), Barbican, London (2018), and Copy / Paste at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2019).

He has curated exhibitions and projects including GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), the Birmingham editions of Bring Your Own Beamer (2012, 2013), µChip 3 (2015), Stealth (2015), No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017). He is part of a-n’s Artist Council, is an Artist Advisor for Jerwood Arts and from 2014 – 2019 he was Curator at Vivid Projects where he produced the Black Hole Club artist development programme.

Links

Website: http://hellocatfood.com
Instagram: http://instagram.com/hellocatfooood
YouTube: http://youtube.com/hellocatfood

Piksel Fest Spill is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway and ProHelvetia.

22nd May – 21th June | @Studio207 | @Piksel Cyber Salon
Opening hours (Monday closed): 14:00 – 18:00 | Weekends: 13:00 – 18:00
PROGRAM | Copy/Paste Exhibition | Hackteria / Bad Lab / Kiyoshi Yamamoto

The exhibition COPY/PASTE features the work of nine artists and art collectives who all incorporate copying as a core aspect of their work. Taking the form of a physical exhibition at Piksel Studio 207, an online exhibition at Piksel Cyber Salon, two hybrid workshops and a lecture, the exhibition aims to show that copying is natural, an exhibition to re-think the way we create/share/copy and paste.

Along with the exhibition, Piksel is also presenting a DIY bio art program, the “DIY or die – Plant Printing Workshop” on the topic of coloring fabrics with wild herbs and the toxic impact of the textile industry. The “Worship – Dinner Performance” joins performers from Zurich, Kazakhstan and Bergen. It is based on an exchange of food, gesture, rhythm and sensuality threw to an online meeting tool like zoom, jitsi, skype, etc. It is a tangible stretch towards how sensuality is perceived in the digital realm threw media. Due to the travel restrictions brought by COVID-19, these two events will take part at Piksel Spill Fest remotely, from the virtual space, , with base in Gessnerallee Zurich.

Piksel Fest Spill is also premiering the Piksel Cyber Salon, a 3D virtual space where the audience can enjoy a Cyber experience through the virtual activities. Piksel Cyber Salon intends to bring a new realms to the boring but necessary digital tele-presence. Designed by the Mexican artist Malitzin Cortés, Piksel Cyber Salon will be the Piksel Fest Spill neuralgic hub.

Live coding is a performance practice that revolves around the creation and modification of code and algorithms in real-time. This kind of events are also named ALGORAVE, joining the words algorithm and rave. The 29th of May we welcome the artists Antonio Roberts and Alex McLean and their live audiovisual performance, taking place in parallel at the Studio 207 and the Cyber Salon.

COPY/PASTE featured artists: Carol Breen (IR), Constant (BE), LoVid (US), Lorna Mills (CA), Matthew Plummer-Fernandez + Julien Deswaef, Duncan Poulton (UK), Eric Schrijver (NL), Peter Sunde (FI)

Hackteria / BadLAB members: Maya Minder, Anne-Laure Franchette and Corinnna Mattner, Zurich. QWAS artists: Dana Iskakova and Takhir Yakyharov, Kazakhstan and with the collaboration of Kiyoshi Yamamoto, Bergen.

PRESS info: maite@piksel.no gif@piksel.no
PRESS Note + images: