Without a Traceroute

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.

What Burns Never Returns:

The next talk was a presentation called “What Burns Never Returns” by Italian choreographer Alessandro Carboni. This presentation was kind of all over the place, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. He started out talking about visiting different cities around the world, particularly in the Guandong region of China, looking at differing levels of density. He talked about “Rarefaction and hyper-density” and “Generative Dance and dynamic space”. Then, abruptly, we were back in Europe—London, to be precise. There was some stuff about Brownian motion and wanting to “explore the city in a methodological way”, which didn’t really make sense to me, because what they were doing wasn’t really a Brownian random walk.

As near as I could figure, they gave a guy a little box which randomly said “turn left” or “turn right” at random times, and sent him out to wander around London. They tracked his motion with a GPS device There was also some stuff about using a cube as an approximation of a human body, and they had a parallel project where a dancer was given randomized instructions about moving his body at the same time as the walker was wandering the city, the dancer was moving around the dance floor in response to these commands, like some kind of teched-up game of Twister. There was another version of this with several dancers where there were like 5,000 little wood blocks set up on the dance floor as well. The dancers would knock the blocks over as they moved.

Near the end of the presentation there was some stuff about memory formation and mirror neurons. As a neuroscience major, these are things I actually know a little bit about. I have no idea what they had to do with any of the other stuff in the presentation.

The description given in the program is this:

WBNR is the second phase of a three-year research project ABQ: from quad to zero.
The project is an extensive investigation of the body and the city, of an organism, a doubly mutated system in which deformed territories, structural glitches, and uncontrolled code cohabit with each other. They create new dynamic maps of places in continuous transformation. Through the creation of a work Platform, several researchers work to apply a method of analysis and composition to choreography focused on the specific urban context of the city and the theatre stage in which the performance takes place. Proceeding analytically from space in its different typologies, from the territory of the body, the flows, dynamics, agents, and movements that constitute it are quantified and codified. The process of exploration and generation of the flows is assigned to the dancers who, through data collection systems such as GPS, motion capture, and sensors, interact in real time with diverse spatial levels: the town, the stage, the body, the machine. The aim is to elaborate a single system of choreographic composition, capable of interpolating all the collected data into a set of choreographic instructions. WBNR is an immeasurable choreography between body and territory, an exploration of the city and the body, reimagining new modalities of analysis and new paths of investigation in order to reflect on the anthropological and socio-cultural transformations of the individual, and on how technology, infrastructure, places, and people are organized in the contemporary urban space.

If you can make sense of all that, you’re brighter than I.

I almost feel bad being so critical, because I’d talked to the Italian guy a couple times during the festival and he seemed like a cool guy. But if he (or others from his group) are giving a similar presentation again they really need to pare it down and simplify: pick one or two ideas and focus on communicating those clearly.

A Cable Plays:

This was probably my favorite of the performances. The two performers were seated in front a pegboard with bundles of yarn. They were instructed to behave as if they were playing a game, but given no actual directions or rules. They took turns laying out threads of yarn across the pegboard to enclose various spaces. Meanwhile, a webcam captured an overhead view of the board and fed it through a computer that would add dynamic elements to it before projecting it on a screen. Early in the game, little rotating ouroborus-things would appear and then expand to fill the areas hemmed in by the performers strings. Later, little balls would bounce around in the enclosed spaces. The collision detection was pretty well implemented, and it was often hard to tell just by looking at the screen which elements were “really” there and which were completely computer-generated.

Club night:

Thursday night, there was a “club night” dance party at a place down the street from Kiberpipa. (IMPORTANT TRAVEL VOCABULARY NOTE: In Central/Eastern Europe, “nightclubs” are strip clubs, and “discos” are dance clubs. As a rule, they do not, however, play disco music. This information may save you embarrassment/confusion.)

The club night was actually really cool. Some of the artists DJ’d or VJ’d (the Rosa Menkman, the Dutch glitch-artist was one of the VJs, and her stuff was really good.). I found that I actually like techno music when it contains samples from 8-bit video games. You can hear a lot of the music that was played on the website of the label 8-bit Peoples.

This was also where I first really noticed one of the odder little details of life in Slovenia. Apparently, there’s a law in Slovenia that if you don’t get a reciept for something, it’s free. This applies to everything. So even very small purchases that you wouldn’t necessarily want a receipt for, one is printed anyway. You aren’t allowed to decline it. Because virtually nobody wants a €2 reciept for a single beer, or whatever, the bar rapidly becomes cluttered with tons of abandoned reciepts. The bartenders spend a lot of their time printing off reciepts, then sweeping those same receipts up off the bar and placing them in little baskets off to the side (I’m assuming they aren’t allowed to just throw them out? In case somebody comes back and demands their reciept?).