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Kiberpipa: All our code are belong to you.

November 16th, 2008 · No Comments · Hacker culture, Photos, Slovenia, Tech-art, Technology, Travel

After the exhibition at the art gallery, most people went over to Kiberpipa (“Cyberpipe”, in English), the hacklab/group organizing the festival. Kiberpipa is almost as cool as C-base, but in a very different way. Where C-base has a very gritty, cyberpunk aesthetic, Kiberpipa is much more upscale, receiving funding from the European Union and some Slovenian cultural foundations. It’s located in the basement of Caffé Metropol, a nice little coffee bar. Kiberpipa has wooden floors, comfortable couches and a really cool mini-museum on the history of computing. They have working examples, and dissected components, of some important early computers: the Commodore 64, the Amiga 1000, the Apple IIe, the NeXT cube of the type that ran the world’s first web server.

There were several art exhibits set up at Kiberpipa as well. HT Gold was a glitched-up version of an old C64 video game called Hat Trick. Anyone who wanted to could mess with the joystick, which would produce different interesting colors and sounds. Another piece called System Cassio:Pia reminded me of a Dalek; it had all sorts of blinking lights and TV screens displaying short clips from movies and music videos. A project I thought had the potential to be really awesome was a thing called “Culture Robot”. This involved a projected map of Ljubljana (with “free” or “open” cultural spaces highlighted), and these little insect-like robots built from a CD base with wire antennas attached to collision sensors. The whole thing was surrounded by a rectangular wood base with other movable obstacles, and the robots would roam around, bouncing off the walls and the obstacles. It was cool-looking, and I liked the robots, but it would have been about 200% cooler if the robots had actually interacted with the map in some way. As it was, the map was just a superfluous background.

Perhaps as a result of over-exposure to all the glitch art, my camera started going on the fritz, producing some rather interesting glitches(-art?) of its own. I’ve included a few of the (totally unedited!) cooler examples below, but it was actually really irritating to never be sure if a picture I took was going to come out or not. I guess in the days before digital photography, that’s how every shot was. Regardless, the photos of System Cassio:Pia and Hat Trick below were not taken by me but rather by the festival photographer, Tea. More actually-good photos can be found on the Kiberpipa photo archive.

The other big thing on the first night was the arrival of the Pirate Bay bus. For reasons of pure awesomeness, some of the people associated with the world’s largest bittorrent site (and its mother project Piratbyrån, the Bureau of Piracy) have decided to cruise around Europe in a modified Stockholm city bus as an “experience laboratory”. I really enjoyed the Pirate Bay/Piratbyrån people. For one thing, they took themselves about a third as seriously as anyone else at the festival (with the possible exception of Monochrom…I’ll get to them). It’s not that the other participants weren’t fun, it’s just that they mostly saw themselves as real artists with serious or semi-serious artistic endeavors. The Pirate Bay people seemed to be in it almost entirely for the lulz.

They were several hours late arriving at the festival, having just driven in from Bolzano, Italy. A slogan painted on the back of the bus cautioned “Slow on the road; fast on the net”. After arriving, one of the guys from the bus performed a “traditional folk dance of the Kopimi [read: copy-me] people,” which involved wearing a colorful knitted outfit and dancing randomly waving a “ceremonial sampling wand” to a repetitive, sample-looped piece of music. One person I talked to complained that this performance was just thrown together from some crap they already had on this bus, which I thought was sort of the point.

The Piratbyrån performance brought to a close the first day of the festival.

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