The interactive sound installation “PANDEMIC SOUND MAP” transforms the statistical data on the spread of the SARS COVID-19 virus into sound, by means of sonication process based on the number of infected per day per country since January 2020 until today. On a metal political map of the world, 186 switches are located in the center of each country. The installation allows any number of countries to be “switched on” or “switched off” interactively by the audience, forming one common sound picture. This sound representation provides a new perspective on the pandemic, with the expressive means of sound art and digital technologies, reflecting the different approaches to controlling the pandemic, its scale, distribution and current state. The installation is an artistic metaphor for the impact of the pandemic crisis in political, social and cultural aspects, which, as a circuit breaker, almost “switched off” the world economy.
Category: @ Piksel Cyber Salon
De-fragmented Bergen
Carbon Death will transmit a live cinema experience at the crossing between environmental harsh noise wall music and bleak November landscape during Piksel Festival. A machine will received films and sounds to produce a new forms of live cinema based on landmarks and landscapes of Bergen. Defragmentation stands for the transformation of this material based on the analysis of the level of activities in the images and the sounds recorded. The semi-autonomous AI program will re-compose a new landscape with a cold perception of the evolution of the environment in order to creates a new machine anti-perspective view on our world. Man with a movie camera by Dziga Vertov creates a new vision of the cities in the early days of the 20th century industrialisation, 92 years after Carbon Death proposes a machine to reinvest the subject Defragmenting Bergen using no literature, no theater, no cinema, the machine is its author, editor and producer.
Carbon Death – non-collective experience
Carbon Death is a non-collective of artists that offers artistic and scientific research without territorial limits, potentially opposing artists, curators, scientists and academics, by way of a voluntary impertinence towards places and concepts and by revisiting, redefining and reorganising these domains.
The Live cinema installation will be displayed on the Piksel festival website and multiple streaming platform.
Holons & Holarchy
Conceptually rooted in Arthur Koestler’s book Ghost in the Machine, Holons & Holarchy is an expanded body of work that contains prints, interactive web-art, digital objects, and video work. Together, they all reference the concept of Holon, where holos means the whole, and -on refers to the particle or the part. This single concept flattens the duality of whole-part and is an ontological tool to understand the complexity of systems around us. Koestler uses the ancient Roman figure Janus – the guardian of doorways and a symbol of time as a metaphor to explain the duality of a Holon. This body of work pulls these references from Ghost in the Machine and reinterprets them through the lens of creative computation to create artifacts, which refer to systems, time, and the universe.
Amay Kataria is a new-media artist whose practice reflects upon the speed of communication and how it has transformed our post-modern society. It intends to destabilize this pace by putting forth situations for “contemplative understanding.” By using time as material and repurposing processes, his practice advocates that the
mechanization of social experience directly affects the inter-relational space between humans. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously a new-media resident at Art Center Nabi and Mana Contemporary. He has exhibited at Vector Festival, Hyde Park Art Center, Ars Electronica, Electromuseum, amongst others.
We Are Here FM
We Are Here FM is a web-based audiovisual installation and transmission created by Betsey Biggs and August Black. A constantly shifting audiovisual radio station of sights and sounds, it brings together geo-tagged landscapes and audio clips to create unnamed, imaginary, hyperreal landscapes, whose generative musical soundscapes are at times magically experimental and at times utterly mundane. Best experienced at life size projection, the audience must locate themselves within a realistic, yet utterly artificial landscape (both exterior and interior) and negotiate their place within it. Because We Are Here FM is a streaming experience, all listeners form a community experiencing the same landscape. The project was made using free and open-source software such as React, Node, and the Janus WebRTC server. We hope you will enjoy getting lost with us.
Betsey Biggs uses technology to combine image and sound in site-specific works, audiovisual performances, interactive installations, public interventions, relational projects, films and videos, musical compositions and multimedia theatrical works. Her body of work connects the dots between sound, music, visual art, place, storytelling and technology. It also deconstructs and arranges scraps of sound and image to clarify and recreate the experience of place, as well as
adapting the technology of our contemporary world – mobile audio, digital video, interactive electronics – to engage people creatively with the physical and social worlds around them. Her work has been presented at ISSUE Project Room, the Abrons Arts Center, Roulette, the Conflux Festival, MASSMoCA, Brown University, Harvard University, Sundance Film Festival, Hong Kong’s Videotage and on the streets of Oakland, CA and Brooklyn, NY. She has collaborated with Pamela Z, Margaret Lancaster, Evidence, The Now Ensemble, The BSC, So Percussion,
Tarab Cello Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble, Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble and filmmakers Jennie Livingston and Amy Harrison. Biggs earned degrees in English Literature and Music from Colorado College and Mills College respectively and a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University. She has also held fellowships at Brown University and Harvard University, and taught at Princeton, Brown, The Rhode Island School of Design, and
the University of Colorado, where she currently serves as Assistant Professor.
August Black is a hybrid practitioner of art, design and engineering. He makes experimental spatial and acoustic situations, often by building his own technological artifacts and instruments in hardware and software. His past work focused on live networked audio, mixing FM radio with user input through online software. His current interests span the fields of the philosophy of technology, software studies, techno-politics, peer-to-peer networking and AI/machine learning. In the past, he’s been a member of arts organizations such as the ORF Kunstradio and the Ars Electronica Futurelab, as well as a former member of the engineering team at Cycling ‘74, makers of Max/MSP. He has shown works at festivals and venues such as Ars Electronica Festival, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Wave Farm, Transmediale, Pixelache, LA Freewaves, Piksel Festival, Polar Circuit and the Tasmanian Museum of Art, among others.He earned a BFA
at Syracuse University and was an NSF IGERT Fellow at UC Santa Barbara, where he completed an MS and PhD. He’s taught media and art classes at UC Santa Barbara, University of San Francisco and CU Boulder, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices.
Dasein of Others
“Dasein of Others” is a generative habitat of algorithmically created entities. Each of the visual elements in the space have a self-role on its own. Field of stars, sentinels (self-wandering objects), a land created with minimal surface algorithm. All these visual cues have a mutual behavior to create a linear story. They need a life energy and a reason to interact with each other. In this sense, sound is the kick start of this universe. The flow of the story becomes alive to the viewer when the sound starts. While the low audio frequency range metamorphoses the minimal surface that affects the movement of the sentinels (wandering particles). Sentinels are kind of observers to create connections with similar structures. The visual elements in this generative audiovisual composition depend on each other in some way to build the whole story.
Alp Tuğan works on creative coding, generative arts, interaction design and sonic arts that explore the relationship between computation, art, and movement. Since 2008, he has been contributing various exhibitions, projects and events with his interactive installations. Between 2006-2009, Volume magazine published his articles
focused on audio recording technologies. In 2013, he co-founded the Filika Interactive with Selçuk Artut, a studio building interactive systems involving software and hardware components. Recently, he’s creating audiovisual performances with RAW live coding duo. Besides, he’s teaching graphics programming, creative coding, and sound design classes at Özyeğin University.
Island of Doubt
The little cars Wally, Dory, Mortimer, Ferguson, and Baxter move back and forth in different combinations on the wood curvy tracks. They report their location to the brain of the system that functions as a communication line between all of them. The brain remembers and communicates the position of each sculpture to the other that is in proximity. For instance, when Wally and Dory are the farthest from each other they might realize they miss each other and therefore go into a certain state of behavior that reflects their sadness while if they are closest to each other they might mingle. Once every so often, they move together or towards each other. The tracks never cross so the sculptures can never touch each other unless they are already tangled together, coupled, from the beginning.
When the visitors walk they first see the movement of the fabric sculptures and then realize the tracks. All of the electronics in the ceiling are somewhat hidden because the tracks are designed to blend into the architecture and become an appendage to it. The very complicated system on the ceiling is reflected by not so complicated movements at eye-level. While the tracks blend into the architecture, the vertical sculptures jump out and drool onto the floor as if they are reaching for the audience. The piece facilitates a physical relationship between the architecture and the residents in it.
As the visitors enter the installation and walk through they have to change their behavior in the space according to the sculptures or interrupt the system. They may choose to interrupt the system by pushing the pieces out of their way, pulling them, or just holding them. This physical interruption by the audience interrupts the relationships within the system. Every time the audience chooses to hold one of the sculptures a second more than the sculpture is supposed to stay in that place, the counter in the brain that remembers and reports where the sculptures are or what they are supposed to do next gets interrupted and confused. As a result, the relationships between the objects alter.
In contrast, the audience is also interrupted by the sculptures. When placed in a cramped space where the audience has to walk through the sculpture to get to the other side, visitors that do not want to touch the pieces will have to navigate around the pieces and walk in a zigzag like pattern or get hit by them.
My aim in this project is to investigate relationships between mechanical objects that have physical qualities within a closed system and the system’s relationship to the architecture and the audience. It is a meditation on how two very separate entities like the visitor and the art piece can affect each other physically but not be aware of the unseen consequences that may follow their physical interaction.
Berfin Ataman is an Artist, Designer and researcher. Her artwork has been materialized as wearables, installations, and other soft, kinetic, sculptures. Over multiple series and projects, she has explored humans’ relationships to their environment and the non-human.
Berfin Ataman was born in Izmir, Turkey. She went on to get her BFA in Theatre Design from the University of Southern California, her Post – Baccalaureate degree from the School of Art Institute Chicago, and her MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts. She has shown her work in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Korea and Istanbul in galleries and museums.
Sympathetic Motion
Sympathetic Motion includes four large-scale sculptures that are detailed in fabric design and in their movements. Each sculpture inherits distinct characteristics that formally and technically distinguishes them from the other pieces in the series. They also have different spatial relationships in regards to one another. While developing this project, I was interested in systems that make up and surround the artworks which concern interconnectivity, logic, memory, emotion, and interaction. The sculptures and the systems they create become a part of the architecture and an extension of it for the audience to interact with. All of these elements give the audience a sense of liveliness. The way I think about systems in sculptural form is influenced by nature and natural creatures. It will become apparent that my pieces visually resonate with the underwater world through the spaes and colors that I use. The various colors, shapes, and movements in my artwork direct how the audience perceives the sculpture and the site that surrounds it.
Berfin Ataman is an Artist, Designer and researcher. Her artwork has been materialized as wearables, installations, and other soft, kinetic, sculptures. Over multiple series and projects, she has explored humans’ relationships to their environment and the non-human.
Berfin Ataman was born in Izmir, Turkey. She went on to get her BFA in Theatre Design from the University of Southern California, her Post – Baccalaureate degree from the School of Art Institute Chicago, and her MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts. She has shown her work in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Korea and Istanbul in galleries and museums.
Kube y su conjunto
A visual-sound performance work with experimental-noise characteristics combining electronic music, programming languages, real-time projections + an immersive experience using virtual reality (360).
The project was one of the winners of #PlataformaFuturo, a program for emerging artists with a jury made up of Daniel Melero, Gely Gonzalez, María Negroni, Claudia Del Río, Anibal Buede, Pichon Baldinú, Nicola Constantino, Emilio García Wehbi and Vivi Tella .
The video was made 100% in Blender on Gnu / linux
Links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9pJIvHVUo
https://archive.org/download/4k_20200817/4k.mp4
INFOTOXICATION
INFOTOXICATION, Infobesity or Information Overload is a concept that describes a state of paralyzation caused by the excess of data. The question is ” How much information we can handle?” or ” What kind of changes are we facing in our perceptions and aesthetics to support the continuous increase of audio-visual information?”
From this starting point, I produced a Video-art work creating an imaginary language based on ideograms.
The same way, the spoken language was created through artificial means (Voice Generator, Vocoder, Audio manipulation) and presented in a vertiginous pace to create an atmosphere of chaos and claustrophobia.
André Perim is a musician, composer, and multimedia artist from Brazil.His work is a melting pot of influences ranging from the ethnic futurism, Afro-Brazilian Rhythms, ambient, psychedelia mixed with a radical criticism of technology. He releases the Albuns Dágua (2014), Dágua ao vivo (2018) and “Side Effects”(2018) this one produced inside an hospial during a treatment against cancer desease. Since 2018 he is also working with sound art and multimedia producing the Video art works “INFOTOXICATION” (2018), I.D. (2019), TAMBOR (2020), and BROKEN RAINBOW (2020).His work took part in several festivals around he world such as the Digital Art Festival 2019(Bulgaria) and ADAF (Athens Digital Art Festival) (Greece) 2020. In 2020 his work received a review in a special edition of ART HABENS Contemporary Art Review Magazine.
Dystopia Trilogy (WebVR)
Dystopia Trilogy is a WebVR composition consisting of three movements inspired by the author’s experiences during the seven months of social restriction in 2020. These memories are interpreted and developed as narrative ideas and divided into three major pandemic episodes—infectious period, lockdown, and new-normal.
Three virtual environments were created to simulate the actual events to manifest the narrative notions, in which sound recordings and 3D scanning assets made during and after the lockdown are utilized to construct the virtual space that functions as memory lines connecting between the past and the present over the digital domain. The symbolism approach is adopted to contextualize the usage of visual elements in conjunction with the narrative idea.
The first movement displays human figure videos and animated COVID-19 models, whereas, on the second movement, the 3D model of human bodies (legs and hand) is placed within a square format to restrict the user’s locomotion. At the environment’s center rests a human heart model that is randomly beating and rotating infinitely, which symbolizes the desperateness feeling. The third movement is structured upon the distorted objects of 3D scanning surrounding Melbourne after the lockdown. These decimated 3D objects portray the lifeways changes of new normal where conjointly with video footages offers a twofold visual presentation.
A specific compositional strategy that utilized Hubs’ spatial sound feature was applied within this piece. Instead of fixed-structured music, pre-composed materials are placed within particular premises with specified distance values, meaning each sound is only hearable at a given range according to the user’s location within the virtual environment. Therefore, the musical structure and experience become subjective matters for each user based on their interaction (spatial location) when exploring the digital space.
Born in Makassar 1988, Patrick Gunawan Hartono is an Indonesian electroacoustic composer and intermedia artist. He earned a BMus in Composition (Cum laude) from Rotterdam Conservatory with Minor Study at The Institute of Sonology, MMus in Sonic Arts from the University of London, Goldsmiths, and Live Electronic Course from IRCAM, Paris. In 2017 he won the ICMA audience award for his generative audiovisual piece “Matrix Studies” and the 1st Prize for WOCMAT 2019 International Electroacoustic Music Young Composer Award.
Patrick’s art and musical interest are to use technology and scientific approaches as creative tools. He is also interested in 3-D sound spatialisation, analog/digital synthesis, psychoacoustic, visual music. Most of his works use the sound of Indonesian traditional music instrument, computer generated sound/images, field recordings; transformed, rearranged, modulated by mathematical rules, real-time interaction, and controlled random operations.
His music has been internationally performed at the festival, conference, and venue such as ICMC [2014, 2016, 2017, 2021], YCMF [2007, 2008, 2010], WOCMAT [2012, 2013, 2019], Sound Bridge Festival [2013, 2020], ZKM [2014, 2015, 2019], IRCAM [2014], NYCEMF [2014], Sines and Square [2014], ACL [2014], Sonorities Festival [2015], ACMC [2020, 2021], BEAST [2021], CCRMA [2018] etc.
Patrick is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, to pursue a doctoral degree at the University of Melbourne while actively involved in local and international electroacoustic/computer music communities.