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.

AlgoNoiseOrchestra

The orchestra, the Network and the Performance
Direction: Jenny Pickett and Julien Ottavi (APO33) with Marinos Koutsomichalis and Madlab
Visuals performance: Maite Cajaraville and Gisle Frøysland

AlgoNoiseOrchestra is a live coding open group started by Apo33 in 2018 to create a bridge between workshop participants and the stage performance as a way to create an orchestra (ONline/OFFline) using only code as tools to make music. The Algorithm combines to noise music with the collective aspect of an orchestra bring together new ways of creating electronic music together. AlgoNoiseOrchestra does not intend to bring you a rave party but rather to create listening works and physical experience without a specific rhythm or any idea to make you dance. Visualisation of the live code in process is not a primal requirement, it could be displayed but other visualisations are also integrated such as live cinema or 3D video live.

For the AlgoNoiseOrchestra the orchestral format is coming as natural as it is for musician to meet in group and play together, except here we formalised it in this old ideas of the orchestra to pervert it in another direction that have been given by the Cambridge english dictionary: “a large group of musicians who play many different instruments together and are led by a conductor”, here we play only one instrument (if computer could be an instrument?) with multiple codes and possibly multiple live coding software. As for the conductor it is not a necessity but will depend on the performance, as it could be a machine, a general direction, or an improvisation or a form of horizontal organisation. Since early 2000’s numerous ensemble have been created where computers is the main tools to produce music (From Mimeo to Goo, Linux Computer Orchestra or Offal), the objectives of this orchestra is to set up a common ground to play AlgoNoise as an ensemble in order to formalised this practice and to proposed a space for composition open to all composers or not. The orchestra is also composed of different members who come across and join the introduction workshop that introduces participants to the practice of live coding and noise music. AlgoNoiseOrchestra involved members through workshops but proposed performances afterwards in different contexts, from live situations in a venue to online performance and hybrid concert (ONline/OFFline). Network and internet as a place of diffusion became for the last years (2020/2021) a common ground for many musicians, AlgoNoiseOrchestra embraces network practices as one it’s main relation to concert and performance, also because it might not always be accepted or involved much interest from promoters but mainly because live coding is also interesting in a context without the pressure of the stage. If the AlgoRave proposes evenings that are fun, sometimes playing noise music seems not very fun for the organisers or some part of the public making the performance rather unpleasant for everyone. You need to find the right venue for this type of music. Network also brings a useful methodology for automated direction and different forms of composition including the ones that involve chats instruction or live composition (as for improvisation but with a sort of conductor even if that one is multiple). By consequence the performance of live coding noise music (AlgoNoise) explore a different relationship to the stage, noise musician knows perfectly but less coders or workshop participants, the online performance allowing a distance from the stage in order to open new practitioners in both practices: noise music and live coding.


JULIEN OTTAVI Doctor in Arts, Composer, Artist, Curator.
A mediactivist, artist-researcher, composer / musician, poet and tongues destroyer, experimental film maker and anarchitect, founder and member of Apo33, Julien Ottavi is involved in research and creative work, combining sound art, real-time video, new technologies and body performances. Since 1997, he develops compositional works using voice and its transformation through computer.

JENNY PICKETT is a member of the artists’ collective APO33 (art and technology research lab) in France, where she
works on projects ranging from interactive installations to experimental music and performance. She forms part of the duo Solar Return with Julien Ottavi and is phd candidate at Cyprus University of Technology where she is attached to the Media Arts and Design Research Lab (MADlab). Her research interests include critical approaches to music and technology, interactivity, hybrid and participatory practices in art.

Marinos Koutsomichalis

Gisle Froysland

Maite Cajaraville

APO33 is an interdisciplinary artistic, theoretical and technological laboratory that develops various collective projects
combining research, experimentation and intervention in the social space, based in Nantes, France. Apo33 works within the dynamics of the free software movement: a modular space, initiating open collaborative projects and creative processes and exploring new modes of artistic and creative production, transmission and dissemination.

Madlab

The Unsyncable

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by Wolfgang Spahn
Face the Unsyncable, expand your horizon and sync beyond all limits!
The Unsyncable is a sonic vaccination of digital devices with an excerpt of analog electronics. These so injected devices become immune against binary infertility and all kind of digital sterility and they are cured from the ordinary stereotypical monotony.
Syncing signals is a tricky task but with a tiny surgical intervention it turns out to be a Kinderspiel. Just hard-wire all
your electronic hearts and cores, avoid to ground yourself and enjoy the so gained immunity.


Wolfgang Spahn is an Austrian-German sound and visual artist based in Berlin. His work includes interactive installations, miniature-slide-paintings and performances of light & sound. His art explores the field of analogue and digital media and focusses on both their contradiction and their correlation.
That’s why he is also specialized in re-appropriated and re-purposed electronic technologies. Spahn’s immersive audio-visual performances merge the technically distinct production of images and sounds. In this respect the data stream of a digital projector becomes audible whereas the sound created by electromagnetic fields of coils and motors will be visualised. Spahn is facculty member of Sound Studies and Sonic Arts of Berlin University of the Arts.
Spahn presented his work in national exhibitions, Biennales and Festivals.

KHIPUMANCY

Paola Torres Nuñez del Prado(PE), Patricia Cadavid H. (COL)


We are the Technokhipumancers, also called Khipunks or Neokhipumancers, part of the extended movement of the now called Neokhipukamayoqs; whose name refers to the ancient Andean experts of the Inca period, the Khipucamayoqs, the specialists who once could decipher and code the content of data with knots, within the rope-based devices known as Khipus, memory-storing instruments that today played with our hands, they sound alive, reading and re-coding with the sounds of the knots a future that reclaims the past and the memory.


I developed the ML:Knot() Khipu for this performance, which is a knot-based sonic instrument that consists of a knot-recognition system using Machine Learning + Computer vision to do a “Live Coding” act referencing the Khipus (andean fiber notation devices).



Paola Torres Núñez del Prado es artista e investigadora de la transdisciplinariedad: trabaja con esculturas blandas, textiles y bordados, sonido sintético y voz humana, texto, pintura, medios digitales, arte interactivo, inteligencia artificial, performance y video. Su trabajo es esencialmente complejo: comienza explorando los límites de los sentidos, examinando los conceptos de la interpretación, traducción y tergiversación, cuestionando así la construcción de la hegemonía histórica, en especial en lo relacionado a la historia de la tecnología. Recibió el premio de Google Artists + Machine Intelligence en el 2019 y el primer puesto de Vivo Arte.mov de medios móviles en el 2014.

Es representada por el Consejo de Arte de Suecia y el Museo de Arte de Malmo. Ha mostrado tanto su obra como su proyecto performático de “Textiles Sonificados” en festivales de Arte como el Lofoten International Art Festival, Piksel Festival, Pinta Art Fair y Al Aire Fest y en diversos países como Noruega, Suecia, Luxemburgo, Francia, Italia, Inglaterra, Estados Unidos, México, República Dominicana, Brasil, Chile y Perú.

Two Body Orchestra

“Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.”

  • Deleuze/Guatarri

“Orchestra (n.), area in an ancient theater for the chorus, from Latin orchestra, from Greek orkhestra, semicircular space where the chorus of dancers performed.”

  • etymonline.com

Two Body Orchestra is a hydrid concert/dance performance, centering around our bodies as multitudes – as networks of organs, impulses, technologies, and fictions – as orchestras in and of themselves.

We blur the distinctions between bodies and technologies to the point where even very subtle movements – breathing, tiny shifts of posture – influence and create the sound space.

Two Body Orchestra is the outcome of Roosna & Flak’s ongoing research into connecting sound and movement with the help of sensor technology. In this performance every sound is produced by the performers in real time.

We are balancing on the borders of magic and science, leaving a space for intensity, vulnerability and wonder, inviting the audience to notice and create their own stories.

Press

” Sound and movement interconnect – and two bodies makes a world of both! This evening our audience had the absolute pleasure of meeting an entire TWO BODY ORCHESTRA – and it was intense! Külli Roosna and Kenneth Flak aka. Roosna & Flak transported us into an experience where the physical and audible join eachother – where every sound is produced by the performers in real time. This performance has so many layers to offer, and reminds us that there still is so much play and wonder in our own physical beings.” – Hammerfestby.no

Om prosjektet

Two Body Orchestra (TBO) er en hybrid dansekonsert for to utøvere. Bakteppet for prosjektet er nye teknologier som problematiserer hva det betyr å være et individ og å ha et selv, noe som i sin tur gjør det vanskelig å vite hva man snakker om når man sier “kjenn deg selv.” Det som tidligere var dype etiske og filosofiske spørsmål er nå i ferd med å bli konkrete utfordringer for ingeniører og softwareutviklere.

Forestillingens kjerne er idéen om kroppen som et mangfold; som en vev av organer, impulser, fiksjoner og teknologier; som et orkester i og for seg selv. Vi leter etter måter å håndtere presset, instabiliteten og friksjonene dette medfører, i tillegg til den sporadiske harmonien det åpner opp for. Vi undersøker det motsetningsfylte og intime forholdet mellom orkestrets deler, og forsøker å skape rom for intensitet, sårbarhet og forundring i en situasjon hvor man ikke lenger kan skille mellom kjøtt og maskin.

Forestillingen er støttet av Kulturrådets prosjektstøtte for scenekunst/dans, men vi betrakter den i like stor grad som et musikkverk, hvor grensen mellom det kroppslige og det auditive er uklar: Hvor går grensen mellom lyd produsert av en instrumentalist og lyd produsert av en bevegende kroppsdel via en bevegelsessensor og et dataprogram? Når kan en instrumentalists bevegelser kategoriseres som dans? I TBO sirkler vi tilbake til bevegelsens nødvendighet i et kroppslig-algoritmisk gesamtkunstwerk.

Vi tar utgangspunkt i at digital teknologi er legemliggjorte tanker. Vi bruker teknologier som åpner opp for sanseerfaringer som ellers ikke ville være mulig. Kjernen i dette er bruken av bevegelsessensorer i nesten alle forestillingene våre siden 2014. Sensorene gjør det mulig for utøvere å kontrollere og påvirke lyd og lys i sanntid. Vi skriver programmene for dette i SuperCollider, et open-source programmeringsspråk for algoritmisk musikk og live interaksjon.

Musikk

Musikken kan fungere som en forlengning av utøvernes kropp, som en partner med en egen vilje, eller som et landskap.

Lyden baseres på manipulasjon av opptak, syntese og kombinasjoner av disse. Vi er spesielt interesserte i måter å skape syntetiske lyder som føles organiske, samt å uvirkeliggjøre lydopptak. Det viktigste verktøyet for dette er granular syntese, hvor lyden kan manipuleres på mikro-nivå til å produsere alt fra uendret avspilling av lydopptak til ekstreme lydskyer som ikke likner på noe som helst i naturen.

Koreografi

Vi tar utgangspunkt i grunnleggende bevegelsesprinsipper: finne felles pust; slippe og fange; oppløses og stivne til; falle og ta i mot; dytte og dra. Vi henter inspirasjon fra både kampkunst og klassisk akrobatikk for dette. I tillegg til partner-arbeide kommer vi til å utarbeide solostrukturer basert på indre bilder i kombinasjon med algoritmiske strategier.

Vi nærmer oss koreografiske strukturer ved å lytte til rommet vi er i.

Dramaturgi

Dramaturgien oppstår i en nedendfra-og-opp prosess, hvor vi tar utgangspunkt i relativt enkle ideer: FM, sinus-toner, granulering av korte lydopptak, transponering av stemmen. Innenfor disse leter vi etter potensialet for noe ut over og dypere enn kompositoriske øvelser. Vi leter også etter slektskap mellom lyder. Hvordan kan disse fungere sammen med bevegelsene? Hvordan oppnår vi en sammensmelting av det kroppslige og det auditive?

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