Cascade | Live coding by Raphaël Bastide

Cascade is a live-coding utility allowing to create a sound and visual language for installations and performances. Cascade turns web pages into sound, interpreting the web standard Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) into MIDI signals. It is free software, source code and documentation are available on raphaelbastide.com/cascade.


Anemone Actiniaria

Anemone Actiniaria is an algorithmic improvisation duo consisting of Graz-based sound artists Hanns Holger Rutz and David Pirrò. Beyond a purely performative agenda, Anemone Actiniaria is also an artistic research project, aiming at subjecting the seemingly well-defined concept of algorithm to a new reading, questioning human command and machine obedience. Mutual observation and overwriting is initiated between our open source computer systems, “Wolkenpumpe” and “rattle”, rooted in physical modelling and in the generation of parametric models based on machine learning. Through the coupling of these two heterogeneous systems, an overall new behaviour arises, and the boundaries between the formerly separated systems begin to vacillate. Anemone Actiniaria have performed at several venues since its founding in 2014, including IEM Graz, BEAST FEaST Birmingham, ZKM Karlsruhe, impuls festival and academy Graz, elettroAQustica L’Aquila, xCoAx Bergamo, km28 Berlin.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/220792/220793


Hanns Holger Rutz

Rutz’ artistic work ranges from sound and installation art to digital art, intermedia and electronic music. In all of his work, the physicality of sound and its interaction with the development and research on software and algorithms plays an important role. He is interested in the materiality of writing processes—processes where the time in which a work is written by a human or the machine is interwoven with the performance / exhibition time—and trajectories of aesthetic objects as they travel and transform across different works and different artists.

David Pirrò

David Pirrò is a sound artist and researcher based in Graz, Austria.
His works include interactive compositions, sound installations and audiovisual pieces in which performative aspects are central. Departing from a radical inclusive point of view, he seeks ways of composing by which the work of art is constructed through mutual interaction of the agents involved in its performance. David works at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics as lecturer and researcher.

LURU

action-reaction between the murmur made into poetry, and being a voice echoing to the hemisphere of your heart, your mind in its hole reason wanders.
Your / The body has an ephemeral shape tonight, barefoot you come to see the verse being linked to a synaesthetic vice, electrical pulses that transform reception into a mutation of new echoes.


Juancarlos Salazar Yalta

Janelas Afetivas: frameworks for absences

Janelas Afetivas: frameworks for absences

the sensation of emptiness in everyday life, in routines, in excesses, in the repetition of confinement, and in the endless losses. This audiovisual performance is performed live using the OBS free stream software, used to make the live mixing of a virtual chat carried out by the jitsi meet free software. The proposal of the actions of the participants is developed by the theme of each meeting of the series Janelas Afetivas (Affective Windows).

With each new screen opened in the browser, in its pages, in the various functions delegated to the software, we face the emergency of delimiting actions and time, which converge in framings that mean everything and, sometimes, nothing.

The choices of the fragments of a previous experience to this current condition, generates the potentialization of the traces of an existence, transforms the online meeting, exposed to the world, into a new experimentation of the meaning of each one’s emptiness.

A meeting in the present between open memories, which manifest themselves in details, in simple gestures, so as not to forget to remember a presence.

Credits:
Janelas Afetivas: frameworks for absences (2020-2021)

COM.6 (Agda Carvalho, Clayton Policarpo, Edilson Ferri, Daniel Malva, Miguel Alonso, Sergio Venancio)

Performers:
Agda Carvalho
Clayton Policarpo
Daniel Malva
Miguel Alonso

Edition:
Sergio Venancio

Sound design:
Daniel Malva

In memory of Edilson Ferri


The COM.6 collective, created in 2017, is composed of Brazilian artists and researchers. Working in the fields of art, technology and design, the collective discusses themes of corporeality, orality and materiality. Recently, they have been
exploring remote and collaborative creative processes of artistic works and academic texts. The group production present a critical positioning on the merging issues of the body, culture, behavior and technology. Their works include the installation “Sala dos Milagres” (2018-2019) and the series of online performances “Janelas Afetivas” (2020-
2021).


Agda Carvalho:
Visual artist and curator. Post Doctoral Internship at Media Lab – UFG in Digital Humanities. Post Doc in Arts – IA Unesp. Doctorate in Communication Sciences (ECAUSP), Master in Visual Arts (lA – UNESP). GIIP member. Professor of the Design Course at the Mauá Institute of Technology. . E-mail: agdarcarvalho@gmail.com


Clayton Policarpo:
PhD student (Capes scholarship) and Master in Intelligence Technologies and Digital Design (TIDD), PUC-SP. member of the research groups TransObjetO (TIDD – PUC-SP) and Realidades (ECA – USP). E-mail: clayton.policarpo@gmail.com


Daniel Malva:
Visual artist and master in PPG in Arts at IA-Unesp, São Paulo. Member of the research group c.A.t – science / ART / technology and GIIP – (IA-Unesp). E-mail: info@malva.fot.br


Miguel Alonso:
Visual artist and art educator, PhD student at PPGAV – ECA / USP. Master by the PPG in Arts of the UNESP. Technology and Arts Educator at SESC – São Paulo. Graduated in Visual Arts and Bachelor of Arts at UNESP. Works directly in the areas of Multimedia, Engraving and Three-Dimensional Development. E-mail: miguelalonso@usp.br


Sergio José Venancio Júnior:
CAPES Proex. Master in Visual Arts (ECA USP). Member of the Realities Research Group (ECA – USP). Professor of the Specialization Course in Graphic Design (IA Unicamp) and the Postgraduate Course in Digital Architecture (Belas Artes SP). E-mail: svenancio@gmail.com

Glitch Vacations

Glitch Vacations is an audiovisual performance by Flor de Fuego and Naoto Hieda – a journey through open-source webpages and platforms created by the artists and the community members. The generative video and sound consist of minimal elements – geometric shapes and sinusoidal waves – yet the modulation and collision of each element result in complex forms, namely a glitch. In the livestream, the artists perform as navigating through web pages, which are interlinked with each other; optionally, audience members can open a provided URL to participate in an interactive experience on their browser.


Concert for Smartphone Network

Concert for Smartphone Network is at the same time a music composition, a piece of distributed computer software and a collective improvisation practice. The work is for a networked smartphone ensemble where a custom made distributed software system combines the individual music lines of different performers into one music flow. The performers develop the music together and use the system to explore new ways to connect with each other through collective music making. The software synchronizes the individual performers’ inputs, mitigating delays over large distance networks, while the small size of the handheld devices leaves the body free to move. The work, composed and
programmed by Andreja Andric, features fast and intense loops of synthesized sound, exploring repetition, variation and sound color in a natural (non-tempered) scale and low (1-bit) sound resolution. The work has been mostly performed as a livestream where the performers play from three different countries: Denmark, Serbia and Switzerland. Members of the ensemble are: Andreja Andrić (DK/RS), Małgorzata Żurada (CH), Maja Bosnić (RS) and Marija Šumarac (RS).


Andreja Andric (born 1973) is a Serbian composer and computer programmer, living in Aarhus. He uses computer programming as key means of artistic expression. Enjoys exploring mathematical processes and chance. Also active in the fields of computer music, video and software art.

The Rose Walks

This is a proposal for the premiere at Piksel of a work by Tim Shaw and John Bowers that will combine live steamed and recorded video and sound installation, walking-exploration around the city of Bergen, field recordings, and spontaneous open-air sound performances throughout the duration of the festival. The work builds on pieces the proposers have shown before at Piksel in its engagement with the local environment of the city in an open, participatory fashion, crossing the boundaries between installation, performance and the walking arts: notably Bergen Invocation at Piksel 2015 and LOOPS at Piksel 2020. The current proposal extends those pieces by incorporating mobile live media streaming and improvised sound manipulation together with novel strategies for coordinating exploration, performance and exhibition.

The Rose Walks will present itself as a two screen installation with a four channel sound system, with stereo sound for each screen. Shaw and Bowers will live-stream video and sound with one screen and stereo speaker pair associated with each of us. We will each carry a camera which can be variably mounted (on our bodies as we walk or showing a selected scene) and a stereo pair of high quality microphones which will feed mobile sound processing software we have created using the open source language Pure Data. The mobile sound processing, video and live streaming apparatus we will use builds upon Shaw’s Ambulation system (see elsewhere in this application for further details).

We will set out on coordinated walks across the city of Bergen and the surrounding area. Each walk will start by the screens and sound system we are using in our installation at the Piksel exhibition space, go live there, and return there, when the stream will finish. We will record each walk and when we are not walking the installation will show the set of recordings that have been made since the opening of Piksel 2021, looped. This set-up will provide the basis for incremental experimentation throughout Piksel.

We will experiment with multiple possibilities for what happens between the start and end points of our walks. We might walk together in which case the screens/speaker pairs will present related views/soundscapes, albeit ones which might be disjointed through varied network delays. We might walk in opposite directions from the exhibition space in which case, for example, the screens might show contrasting visual intensities and shadowplays as we orient in opposite directions to the low winter sun. We might intertwine our walks, coming together and parting, and experiment with how the view in one screen references the other. We might find a scene or object of common interest and explore it from different angles and pick up the ambient sound from different, yet related locations. We might stay within the exhibition space and, self-referentially, stream the exhibition to itself, and include a classical feedback interlude as we apply this principle to our own piece. We can contrast rest with motion. We can walk at varied times of day. There can be long and short walks. And so forth.

Embedded within each walk will be improvised performances where we live process environmental sound. Some of these might also involve the construction of ad hoc instruments from found materials we encounter along the way. A big stick that is dragged as we go, railings that can be played as a found metallophone, pedestrian crossing audio warnings that we can process to make a found synthesiser. And so forth.

For at least some of our walks, we would welcome being accompanied by other attendees to Piksel. This need not be scheduled formally within the Piksel program. We could invite people in an ad hoc fashion or post start times for our walks where the installation is shown. Co-walkers would also be invited to contribute to the improvised performance embedded within the walk.

As the days of Piksel unfold, the ‘archive’ of recordings shown in the exhibition space will grow. We would also add to the exhibition space in at least two other ways: with found objects scavenged from our walks and with drawings and mappings of our routes.

The Rose Walks is a deliberately open work. In many respects, it has a documentary character while gently referencing questions of liveness and its technological mediation, the relationships between performance and fixed media, and the place of the exhibition space in relation to the outside world. As all our perambulations will have a ‘circular walk’ form, starting and finishing in the same place, as they accumulate, they will create a classical symbol when mapped: a rose-form with many loops of different sizes issuing from and returning to a centre. As well as giving us a title, the ambiguity of the rose as a symbol within ‘the language of flowers’ expresses an openness to what we might find on our walks through Bergen, from the red rose of passion and solidarity, through the blue rose of mystery, the white rose of naivety, and the black rose of death.


Tim Shaw is an artist and researcher working predominately with sound and new media. His work uses a variety
of self-constructed technologies to playback and manipulate recordings to create complex sonic environments and
by appropriating communication technologies to explore how these devices change the way we experience the
world. Shaw’s background in recording sound led to his creative use of field recordings. Particularly interested in
the relationships between site, sound and technologies, Shaw presents work through electro-acoustic audio
performances, installations, walks and site-responsive interventions. His practice attempts to expose the
mechanics of systems through sound to reveal the hidden aspects of environments and technologies. His practice
is situated within sound and media art.

John Bowers