PIKSEL 08
code dreams
mixed media
12.12.08 - 25.01.09
Anaisa Franco | Øyvind Mellbye | Aymeric Mansoux & Marloes de Valk | Federico Bonelli & Robert Fisher |
Pall Thayer | aka Bjørn Magnhildøen
How does code dream? What are the dreams of code?
Piksel08 examines the other side of code, an alternative side to a hard-coded reality of work and play. Open hardware and free software project a utopic vision, yet exist within economies of capital, the dream factory of mainstream technology. Within the chance meeting of sewing machine and umbrella on the dissecting table, hardware and software are flattened.
Piksel08: code dreams explores the dreams of this soft machine; bachelors coding for pleasure, reverse engineering paranoiac constructs of the real, automatic coding practice, soft hardware, and everyday magic.
Piksel is an international network and annual event for electronic art and technological freedom. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing hands-on workshops, evening program of live art performances, interventions in the center of Bergen, and several exhibitions and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free technologies.
Anaisa Franco (BR)
Expanded Eye
Expanded Eye is an interactive light sculpture composed by a big transparent eye suspended from the ceiling. The big eye looks to the user, but it’s in fact user’s eye which is projected. The sculpture recognizes the user’s eye blinking and generates an interactive animation based on it. Each blink of the user multiplies the number of eyes in the projection in a fragmented, hexagonal and dislocated way.
[www.anaisafranco.com/expandedeye]
Øyvind Mellbye (NOR)
Hologram
Mellbye’s installation presents a low-resolution electro-mechanical volumetric display. This project wants to question a linear idea of technological development by fusing technology and aesthetics from the past and the future to create the hologram which was first postulated in 1912. The Hologram is controlled by a binary program made by adhesive plastic foil on a loop of sheet metal that is pulled through a mangler past 125 sensors.
Aymeric Mansoux (FR) & Marloes de Valk (NL)
Hello Process!
Hello Process! shows a machine doing what it does best: deleting, copying and moving blocks of data. The installation consists solely of a computer and a printer. The computer functions as it usually does, like a black box theater of processes. The only output comes through the printer, giving us clues about the activity inside, while in the background, the raw noise of the machine creates a sound scape, a sonification of this theater of naive computation.
[archive.bleu255.com/metabiosis]
Federico Bonelli (I) & Robert Fisher (USA)
Zeitgeist (freedom in/poetry out)
The Zeitgeist Poetry Machine, or a Pneumolisolemmigraph (wind breaking word writer) is a kind of transformer. The machine reacts when the volume is below a limited value, and an image is taken by a web cam pointing at the words lying on the bottom of a transparent box. This image will be processed by the Pneumolisolemmigraph with a custom designed algorithm using carefully chosen symbolic images, from ancient manuscripts and children drawings.
Pall Thayer (IS)
Exist.pl
Exist.pl is an exploration of the metaphysical and ontological qualities of a computer program. It is designed as an intro-spective analysis conducted by the program itself, producing no output in the process. It begins with a Cartesian reduction. Through a traditional version-based evolution of software, a single program is provided with increasingly complex methods for examining and perhaps understanding its own existence and state of being.
aka Bjørn Magnhildøen (NOR)
Gaps (I am from the gaps in my thinking)
Noemata is working with different kinds of e-poetry, e-litera-ture and procedural art.This installation represents a data program that is mixing, remixing and filtering information from the Internet, like mainstream social net communities. When typing the keyboard, the screen will display new and combined fragments of text on the computer screen. In this way the spectator stays in a middle position between the meta world of the Internet and the real life in general, and may reflect over this situation.
[ekunst.net/portfolio/bjorn-magnhildoen]
[piksel.no/2008/11/14/piksel08-code-dreams-bergen]