Without a Traceroute

I swore I would get caught up, and by god, I intend to get caught up even if I have to keep writing all night (it’s currently 4:41 am and I’m in Zagreb, Croatia). After HAIP, I got a ride from a girl I’d been couchsurfing with to Koper, which is one of the coastal towns in Istria. Funny sidenote about driving in Slovenia: I made some off-handed remark about renewing my driver’s license, and my kind driver was confused,
“Huh? You have to renew your license?”
“Yeah, about every 5 years. When do you have to renew yours?”
“Um…2062?”
“WHA…?”
It’s true. The Slovenian government issues driver’s licenses good for 70 years, and my CS host’s license has a printed expiration date of January, 2062. Hilariously, it includes a photo. What good a 50-year-old photograph will do when she gets pulled over in 2050 I couldn’t begin to fathom. I just hope the licenses are also valid for hovercars.
I told one of my American friends about the Methuselah-esque Slovenian licenses, and his theory was that it was the Slovenian government’s way of positively asserting that they will exist in 2062. I guess I just can’t imagine what it would be like to hold a document with an expiration lifetime almost four times longer than the history of the nation-state that issued it.

From Koper, it was cheap and easy to catch a bus to Pula, Croatia. This was the first time on this trip I’d left the Shengen zone. The border guard who boarded the bus at the border (I just want to see how many variations of the word “board” I can get into once sentence), asked me if I was carrying any alcohol or tobacco, but he was bored by my books and computer equipment. I did get a passport stamp, finally!

I was in Pula for almost a week, but luckily it was mostly really boring so I should be able to cover it in one or two posts. Pula is a seaside summer vacation spot, and in November it’s a virtual ghost town. I stayed at a somewhat-depressing Youth Hostel about 3 km outside the city center. Most nights I was the only guest there, and the internet cost 30 Croatian kuna (about €4 or $6) per hour, so I didn’t pay for that. The hostel’s only redeeming values were its proximity to the beach (the water was freezing the one time I tried to swim) and the adorable, friendly kitten that lived there as well.

The only good thing about the hostel

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Monday were some “harder” tech talks and also my own presentation.

A guy named Paule Ečimović gave a talk about “Hacked Varieties of the Pong Computer Video Game Experience,” which was really cool. He showed the original version of pong, some of the later ports, and then some modern “hacked” versions, including my personal favorite, Plasma Pong. It used to be hosted here, before the author was sued by the withered husk of Atari (who somehow still have a legal department?), but you can still download it here and I highly recommend it. You’ll need a medium-decent computer though, Plasma Pong re-imagines the game of pong if it were played on a colorful, fluid field of plasma. It incorporates a pretty heavy-duty fluid dynamics model and fancy graphical effects.
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The final presentation on Friday was my favorite one of the entire festival, by far. Even if you haven’t watched any of the videos of the other presentations, I would really suggest watching this one. At least the first half, the audio gets a bit wonky in the second half.

The presenter is Johannes Grenzfurthener (who wears a literal black hat) from the Austrian group Monochrom. He describes the nine members of Monochrom as, “electrotechnicians and designers and linguists and philosophers”. Monochrom started in the late 1980s on the FidoNet BBS, then later published a sort of print fanzine/yearbook about “technology, politics, art crap, whatever we thought would be interesting,” and later expanded into a variety of other formats: robots, short films, t-shirts (“I was a copyright violation in a former life”), musicals (“We really did a musical  about computer programs who check the credit rate of an Austrian criminal”).

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Friday was probably my favorite day as far as the lectures were concerned.

The first presentation was from Anders Carlsson of the blog Goto80 (eye-searing color scheme warning). He talked about the 8-bit demoscene and about chip music. He gave the presentation on an actual Commodore 64, and showed off some demos from the early 90s (keep in mind these are running on hardware less powerful than your phone). He talked about the demoscene as a “bounded culture”. They’ve been around since at least the late 1980s, but there’s been no real academic or journalistic interest, and very little crossover into the mainstream art or music worlds. Demos are shown at “demoparties”, not in art galleries. Occasionally, mainstream musicians will sample from the demoscene, but that’s about it.

Mr. Carlsson said that the focus in the demoscene was “craftsmanship, not art,” which I thought was an interesting distinction between the art scene and the more hacker-focused demoscene. The goal of a demo (especially in the 8-bit scene) is to push limited hardware to its absolute limit, and show off what an amazing programmer you are. To squeeze the maximum performance out of obsolete hardware means coding at a very low-level, in assembly or machine code (‘bare metal’ coding) and taking advantage of undocumented features of the hardware.
Another interesting thing about the demoscene is that authorship is protected by ostracizing offenders, not copyright lawsuits. As Mr. Carlsson explained, it would be “lame” to take somebody else’s code, or try to copy something that somebody else was doing. Recently Nelly Furtado and producer Timbaland sampled tunes from Finnish Amiga/C64 demo and have incurred the wrath of the Demoscene.

Another presentation was from a group called “Time’s Up” based in a waterfront warehouse in Linz, Austria. They seemed really cool. They’re a non-profit group with members from many different backgrounds interested in the “intersection between art, technology, science and entertainment”, and they construct “experimental situations”. They showed video of exhibits from their 2003-2004 “Sensory Circus,” which had a lot of different sort of mechanical and electronic constructions that visitors could play with. The goal of the Sensory Circus was to sort of disconnect people from their ordinary interactions with their senses and force them to approach the world in a new way. So, for instance, they’d have people walking around wearing a video-helmet with a camera facing backwards. Or a mechanical bicycle-like contraption that responds in unfamiliar ways to riders attempts to pedal forward, or steer it. The presenters explained that they were interested in creating “social hardware” and were more concerned with “the relational ‘why?’ than the technical ‘how?’” (To a true hacker, this is heresy: the how is the why)

The real crux of the presentation, however, was an uncompleted projected entitled “Twixtville”. The idea behind Twixtville was something like town-as-art. As explained in the presentation, Twixtville was to have been a “temporary, lived-in, ongoing, interactive, open, semifictional, proto-urban space, without governance.”
It would be a sort of make-believe town, inhabited by artists and fictional characters (or artists playing fictional characters?) with back stories and histories, and real and fictional conflicts. There would have been parties, workshops, and symposia (“I love symposia!”).  There also would have been some sort of online component to allow people to interact with the denizens of Twixtville.

Sadly, the project is now on hold indefinitely.  The main reason being an inability to secure a suitable location to host Twixtville. It’s too bad, because it seemed like an interesting idea. There are some examples of sort of temporary art communities, such as Burning Man in the United States, but the Time’s Up people said that they really wanted Twixtville to different, because it would be residential in that “people would really live there,” as opposed to a sort of festival.

The next couple days were a mix of lectures and performances. I’d kind of given up on my camera for the rest of HAIP, but there are photos of most of these things available on the Kiberpipa website. Day 3 is here, and Day 4 is here.

Sheena Macrae talk:

Wednesday was a lecture from a Canadian video artist named Sheena Macrae. One of her big things is taking films or TV shows and finding ways to condense them or re-present them. She showed a sped-up version of Pulp Fiction: the entire film accelerated to play in 5 minutes, set to Misirlou, of course. It was actually surprisingly watchable. She also showed an accelerated version of Gone With the Wind, with pauses for the moments when Scarlett O’Hara says “I’ll think about that tomorrow,” a line she repeats three times in the film. Ms. Macrae also presented a compressed version of one whole season of the TV series Dallas. Rather than simply speeding it up, she layered all the episodes on top of one another, so you’d wind up watching an entire season in the time of a single episode. She showed another little pastiche with the characters from Dallas constantly drinking.

She said she’d chosen to work with Dallas because it was such a universal cultural touchstone, and popular all over the world. This may be true, but it’s also totally before my time. I’ve never seen the show and know next to nothing about it (Who Shot J.R. was from Dallas, right?).

A Small Contribution to the Genesis of Everyday Life:

Afterwards, was a performance entitled “A Small Contribution to the Genesis of Everyday Life”. This was another sort of glitch-feedback project, that involved hooking the performers up to electrodes and then having them move around and touch things. The results were displayed on the projector, but also on a CRT monitor, which puts out a lot of E&M, further contributing to the feedback. Also the output was apparently “fed-back” to the performers themselves: in other words, they would receive electrical shocks depending on what they were doing.

PASH:

On Thursday, there was a presentation by Martin Kohout of some of the artworks by a group called PASH (for novelty’s sake, their website has “opening hours”. The time-check is implemented in javascript and based on your local system time. If you want to get in “after hours” you can just change your clock). They seem to do a variety of real-life exhibits and purely digital pieces.

They showed video shot by some visitors to an installation of theirs called Ombea, which I thought was really good. Basically it’s a spooky/atmopheric room, with the lights (and some hidden speakers) wired to computer control. They use a couple cameras to monitor how much guests are moving around in the room. The more they move, the darker the room gets, and the louder and more frightening the sounds from the speakers become. The effect is actually quite scary. In order to get the room to be bright and quiet, participants have to overcome their natural inclination to run around frantically in response to the frightening stimuli (there’s also an “emergency” killswitch, to stop the program, if it’s too overwhelming for somebody).

I also liked the fact that as part of the presentation, Kohout talked about some of the technical challenges they faced. For example, using the cameras to monitor movement, they had to figure out how to not have the system be affected by the changes in lighting levels.

Another artwork they presented is called Moonwalk, and the medium is actually YouTube. It’s basically an infinitely-receding set of YouTube progress bars. Sadly, YouTube has added an extra button to their interface since the video was made, so it kind of breaks the illusion a bit. Still worth a look, though.

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