Gregor Kamnikar October 23rd / 17-19h / Streets of Ljubljana
39 is solo impro dance project made to say goodbye to Gregor Kamnikar as artist/ic name. After this project (25th april 2011) a person Gregor Kamnikar will use different artistic names with each project he will engage into. 39 is planned to be performed 39 times in 39 diverse spaces/venues for 39 minutes each. The solo is accompanied with Chopin's nocturnes and Riemann's mathematical ideas about multidimensional space. In this particular performance of 39 at Sonica, Gregor will use the tool of Public Avatar in order to dance the piece in space of Real Virtuality.
So the same rules apply as at the Public Avatar project. The difference is that Gregor will use his solo 39 as a way to respond to orders made by users. This way avatar offeres even more space for reflection about virtuality, reality, identity, art, social environment, control, power and transitoriness. And the very transitoriness is the point where the two projects (39 and Public avatar) sync and "synergize". As of question of Real Virtuality, Gregor Kamnikar claims: "Reality and virtuality are questions of resolution of perception".
Artist Talk is an educational and archive platform based on open source and free distribution of ideas and knowledge. It presents a series of lectures by artists, curators, theorists and others working in the field of art, artivism and theory.
It will be an internet portal which will provide open access to high quality video recordings of artist's and cultural worker's talks from all over Europe. Visual, inter-media, sound artists, directors, musicians, writers, poets, composers, architects, designers, animators, actors, curators, critics, cultural activists etc. will be presented on artists talk's website in the form of interviews, recordings of artists talks, lectures, presentations, guided tours of exhibitions.
The website will become a unique referential point for research of subjective and non-academic, personal views on culture and art. ArtistTalk will be a unique collection of video recordings of artists and cultural workers speaking about themselves and their work.
ArtistTalk is an initiative by MoTA - Museum of Transitory Art.
Gabriel Vanegas October 20-24th / 10-17h every day / Moderna Galerija
You are welcome to join the first Botaniq Expedition, a 4 days workshop archiving Media Art through your experience. The Botaniq workshop will be held in the context of the Sonica 2010 Festival done by MoTA - Museum of Transitory Art in Slovenia. We just have 10 free places for the workshop, we will provide you with the necessary tools and you would be able to also enter to the rest of the Festival. Please send your name, profession, studies and motivation. We will confirm the possibility of participating in the workshop.
Requirement: Bring your own laptop. Deadline submission: October 13th 2010 (priority in order of registration).
"Christopher Columbus did not discover the Americas, he Created it, he Remixed it".
Reality is supported through media, the evolution of media has pushed the reality into more efficient, ephemeral and fast ways of development. There is no past, there is only future, which causes a problem to the field of conservation. Botaniq is focused on the experience of the observer/interactor as an artefact that is able to remix reality as a way of preserving it. In the artistic action Botaniq, we will develop illustration workshops, documenting and archiving Media Art and Creative Processes, based on the experience of the Botaniq workshop's participants who observe and interact. Botaniq Workshops are held in parallel with Art Exhibitions or Creative production-process (Media-Lab workshops), serving as a mean of documentation and archiving in real time. Using paper sheets and school supplies as a robust technical support, a group of people without any knowledge of illustration or Media Art will perform, documenting their experiences, their own diary, explaining and preserving a reality that we could only see thought their eyes.
Project by Gabriel Vanegas / Media Artist and Researcher
Alessandro Perini October 20-25th / Opening: October 20th, 21h / Moderna Galerija
"The installation is conceived as a study about a possible relationship between sound, light and space. The core of the work is a looped 4-channels electronic music track, entirely produced using a single impulse (click) as the only source for the whole piece. The constraint of limiting to the extreme minumum the source material calls the listener for a recognition of the narrowest semiotic spaces, where the slightest distinctive feature is pertinent. Dealing with the opposition between global and local, the musical development extracts, from time to time, from the overall mass, the specific characteristics of each single individual, claiming its right to uniqueness.
The click represents all the sonic energy concentrated in an extremely short instant: in other words it is the smallest timeslice of white noise. The concept of "white" is the link that permits to build a theoretical bridge from sound to light: in fact a relationship of identity is established between white light (sum of all colors) and white noise (sum of all sounds).
Anyway, the work is far from the the traditional dualism of sound and visuals as an artificial combination of two different levels of perception, as found for example in cinema, where the usually frontal screen provides images of objects which are spatially unrelated to the sounds they are producing, since the sound system is not the screen, however sophisticated it might be. With this installation the author tries instead to provide the audience with an experience of sound and light as two aspects of a sole entity, related to the same source, as it is also the case for some natural phenomena connected with electricity and fire such as thunders, sparks and so on."
Yann Leguay October 19-25th / Opening: October 19th, 20h / Kino Šiška (Komuna)
Cut '''' is the installation version of the Cutter Off performance project. A blank vinyl record is placed on a turntable. The needle is replaced by a cutter blade, connected to a contact microphone, which will erodes the surface and gradually create the sound. An approach of the limits of the support, in order to reconsider its erosion not as a loss of information, but as manufacture of raw sound.
Yann Leguay October 19-25th / Opening: October 19th, 21h / Kino Šiška (Komuna)
For Sonica, Entartete Electronische will release a new sound performance, in the style they define themselves as "high density" mixing analogical and digital signals to create digital distorted feedbacks of data.
Monochrom October 24th / 10-14h / Streets of Ljubljana
Hackbusses (or mobile hacklabs or hack vehicles) are a low-threshold way of bringing the culture of hacking to the people. They are migratory learning and teaching units, taking the talented hackers and their ideas out of urban centers and bringing them to people who might not otherwise be aware of the possibilities available to them. We follow a long tradition of this nomadic approach to bring self-empowerment to the people. These units can be everywhere. And they should be everywhere. Start one yourself!
Art of Failure October 19-25th / Opening: October 19th, 20h / Kino Šiška (Komuna)
The field of research "Laps" focuses on generating sensible representations of the Internet by using it as an audio broadcasting space. The spatial and geographic properties of the Network are highlighted by broadcasting streams that travel and reverberate trough the web. Listening to these audio streams by using specific processes (very low buffers and no error corrections) allows to make audible an infinity of transformations that modify the sound as it circulates on the web. These alterations are comparable to a form of erosion caused by the network space - they are a key to allow different mental representations of this digital topography.
Process: A sound is sent out over the network and goes through several locations on the web. Captured at the end of a loop by the original transmitter, the sound is played and then resent out with no additional modification through the web. To emphasize the changes caused by the network, the sound used for the startup is deliberately very simple - pure digital silence.
Similar to a physical & resonant space, the Internet network is here used as a broadcasting space where sound gets more elaborated. The audio signal is modified by the inner properties of the network and becomes an acoustic signature of this space. The audio transmission process used here allows to keep all the distortions of the original material that occurred during the process (artefacts, transmission errors, missing data...).
Sally Golding October 19th / 20h / Kino Šiška (Komuna)
Golding deconstructs cinematic materials and apparatus, slipping between materialist investigation, sculptural forms, and bodily intervention. Cracked cinema for darkroom compositions, light bleed, contorted projection sports, dismembered narrative, whimsical instructional and wanton optics.
Face of Another
10 min / 16mm film reel and loop, vintage sound effects
Obsessions with the horror genre manifest themselves onto the filmmaker's own body in a bizarre accumulation of unreality. Notions of "projected" identity, grotesquerie and the uncanny are interrogated in this shifting projector alignment for face(s). A gothic play on presence and absence, the embodied and the virtual, life and death, the work is, like the phantasmagoria itself, neatly situated at the crossroads of science and superstition, philosophy and pulp.
Composted Memorial
5 min / 16mm film reel and loops, optical printed sound, 9.5mm archival orginal film, waveforms, insects, colour wheel and obstructions
A photo-sonic film where the images literally generate the noise soundtrack. Composed entirely in the darkroom. Archival images from Brisbane in the 1920s and 1930s were contact printed alongside found insect waveforms and jazz scores.
Super Grotesquerie
5 min /16mm film reel and loops, optical printed sound, original 16mm science educational and 8mm horror films, optical obstructions and aberrations, stroboscopic light
Does light travel in waves? An optical printed sound and image composition for insect, light particles and horror icons.
Repulsive Society October 19-25th / Opening: October 19th, 20h / Kino Šiška (Komuna)
Presbyacusis 17 500 HZ is a sonic installation, based on the high frequencies commonly used by security technologies for anti-loitering (such as, the Mosquito). The installation range of sounds is above the limits of the human hearing, but the sound remains persistent, making the listener feels uncomfortable. The equipment used is now forbidden in France, Belgium and Germany.
Production by MoTA - Museum of Transitory Art / Coproduction by ArtKillArt, Kino Šiška / Curating by Martin Bricelj Baraga and Kevin Bartoli
Public Avatar / WWW / Public space multimedia internet project
Martin Bricelj, Slavko Glamočanin, Avo Taarinen (Gregor Kamnikar) October 22nd / 17-19h / WWW and Streets of Ljubljana
Public Avatar a project documenting the relationship between virtual reality and our perceptions of self and society. It allows to a global audience to explore real-world locations remotely, and to interact with objects and people in those locations through real-time control of a human test subject. As digital and physical worlds collide, the boundaries between self and other, reality and simulation are constantly challenged and redefined.
The project explores real virtuality, by which we mean the echo of virtual reality in reality itself. It examines the essence of reality and explores the borders between virtual and real.
Although the Internet is full of games, networks, applications, Public Avatar is one of the few projects, which try to redefine Real Virtuality. An individual is able to move and to be active in a real world by using a virtual medium (the web) and a real medium (the body of the avatar). Because the avatar is a human being with its own values, his interaction with the user (whenever and wherever) will generate interesting conflicts and a confrontation of values. What is going to happen when the users will demand unacceptable actions from the Avatar? And how will this change according to the location and source of the user?
Avo Taarinen is a certified avatar in diverse projects. Currently he is involved in project Public Avatar and 39 by Gregor Kamnikar. He is a researcher of physical intelligence coming from the field of contemporary dance. Beside extensive research work he continues to be an active dancer, performer, choreographer, teacher and lecturer. His way of working was, along with the dance techniques, methods, procedures, ways of work, co-formed by the knowledge, such as the physical training in theatre (Teatr Laboratorium), contemporary physics, the Gestalt theory, modern linguistics, philosophy, Rolfing, osteopathy. His work spins around idea of devising a game as a format of performance. This work is realized in project/game Commoveo and its many spin-offs. His research work is contained within project Plasma (training of physical intelligence). In 2009 he has co-established collective Federacija, which is his professional domicil. Since 2008 he is a clown-doctor at Red Noses Slovenia. Since 2011 he plans to stop using his personal name as artistic name. With each new project he will use new artistic name.
To be or not to be (in) Ljubljana / Installation / Exhibition
Scenographies urbaines - (ScU)2 October 20-25th / Opening: October 20th, 20h / Moderna Galerija
"This is an abstract storytelling of a personal event which could be entitled also To be or not to be (in) Strasbourg. Until this summer I lived in Paris, now I am installed in Strasbourg where I was living thirteen years ago. It is a strange comeback that I never thought possible before. I know all the parts of my new-old city, perhaps too much. Living virtually in Ljubljana, a city totally unknown to me, is a way to play and enlarge my perception of Strasbourg, being here and being there at the same time. The installation To be or not to be (in) Ljubljana is a spatial transcription of this virtual vital game and haphazard way to discover Ljubljana, mixing views of Strasbourg with sounds of Ljubljana. The playground is made with overlayed maps of the 2 cities, adjusted on the Google's city marker (in the past this would be a church or the town hall, real references).
The rules of the game are to choose different places in Strasburg for video shooting after mixing the corresponding points on the Ljubljana map with a sound recording and an oral description of the real place found. The spectator of the installation is included in the game, walking on the real-virtual mixed map, visiting two cities in the same space and time."
Les Liens Invisibles October 20-25th / Opening: October 20th, 20h / Moderna Galerija
Seppukoo was a radical project-service of the art collective Les Liens Invisibles, where everyone could cut off Facebook or in other words - commit a virtual suicide. In the first days the number of suicides reached 50.000, which resulted in an immediate action from the Facebook Company - they sued them. The message was unanimous: You can't kill yourself, even in the virtual world. The law firm, which represents also Microsoft, Barack Obama and other "big fish", succeeded to attain the closing of the project. But Seppukoo remains an important boundary in the development of social networks and migration of our communication on them.
The project caught attention also from the art world: the jury for the Transmediale Award 2011 selected Seppukoo as one of the seven nominees out of more than 1.000 submissions. They have been selected "in their search for innovative, original and visionary art works and projects that address, question and artistically contribute to the technological society. These nominated works reflect upon the contemporary relation to, and understanding of the human, in a dynamic, complex and mediated environment, where collaborative practice increasingly becomes a central model."
"Virtual life" is an - often - abused term used to describe the whole of a person's online activities. But as media communications let our second / online / offline identities overflow into real life - and vice-versa - the distinctions between the real and the virtual are becoming more and more confused. Which is virtual? And where's the real? Beyond all those questions only a fact remains: that our privacy, our profiles, our identities, our relationships, they are all - fake and/or real - entirely exploited for a sole purpose: to be sold as a product. But are those lives really worth to be experienced?
Transforma October 19th / 20h / Kino Šiška (Komuna)
Operators is the culmination of a series of recent studio studies. These have been clustered together to form a stage of experimentation with the Operator at the center going about his work. Manipulating the surrounding elements, he creates acoustic and visual signatures which are spliced together to form a narrative. As images blend between artifice and the "reality break", the resulting "film" is juxtaposed against its very own "making of".
In this live performance Transforma and sound artist Markus Hübner create a sound and video stream which treats video, original sound recordings and music in no hierarchical order.
Tukk Sitta October 21-25th / Opening: October 21st, 21h / Lorenka's flat
The first real world exhibition of Wall 2 Wall by the authors of Tukk Sitta. Since September 2008 thousands of Facebook users follow the misadventures of Tukk Sitta, a lovable misfit who exists only on Facebook. He moves through social networks reconstructing memories by adding himself to other people's photos. He often appears passed out drunk, vomiting or in a state of confusion in your favorite family or vacation photo. Facebook users engage in the virtual performance art intervention titled Wall 2 Wall by sending friend requests, commenting on photos and by constructing narratives about the images. During the past 24 months, more then 1000 digital images have been created by the authors and some of the 150 participants in the project.
The first real world exhibition of Wall 2 Wall contains documentation of the project as well as conceptual art pieces that will engage gallery visitors in the Tukk Sitta meme. Gallery visitors who attend the opening exhibition will experience virtual performance art in real time and real world. Wall 2 Wall started in September 2008 with ideas generated by Andrew Hicks (U.S.A.), Teresa Novotny (Austria) and Ernest Truely (U.S.A./Estonia). Stock photos of Tukk Sitta are created by Lea Giardin (Switzerland), Mic Mait (Estonia) and Jaana.Maijala (Finland).
Wall 2 Wall explores virtual space as a location for art production, constructed memory, and the nature of interpersonal relationships between the real and the virtual.
Marika Dermineur, Stephane Degoutin, Gwenola Wagon October 19-25th / Opening: October 19th, 20h / Kino Šiška (Komuna)
What Are You? shuffles representations of lifestyles and social codes to generate an endless number of trends, attitudes and social behaviors. Each click launches a new association of images and sounds describing the trend. In spite of huge investments, designers, marketing experts and trend hunters produce only two new trends a year. What Are You?, thanks to its database of more than 500 past, present and future trends, generates instantly 250.000 combinations, by randomly associating keywords. It is therefore in the position to produce the trends for the next 125,000 years (i.e. until 127005).
This confrontation draws new social labels, in a process that aims to wear out all possible or unlikely fashions or social stereotypes. Moreover, the juxtaposition of these stereotypes questions their respective influence and the boundaries in which they can be defined.
The project will be shown as a book, which is the index of all remaining combinations of the generator.
DJ Sweet Susie October 24-25th / 13-17h / Lorenka's flat
DJ is a modern shaman. DJing is power. But power over whom? Well, over people, for as long as the sound is on. For that time, a good DJ can have fun and make people happy. Obviously, we all know that DJs are responsible for the music selection. But why should it be considered art to put on records or CDs of other people's music? Don't DJs just press the "Play" button?
Learn the technics of bringing people in ecstasy. The workshop is an introduction in DJ-ing with CDs for girls only: What's the work of a DJ? Which equipment it uses? How to handle the equipment? How to make simple cross-fades, cue point setting, beat mixing...
