Here we go.
Beam festival was a great event, no doubts.
It’s a pity I couldn’t give you a glimpse of the festival sooner, I’ve been travelling all summer; today I woke up and thought “hey, I’ve got time now, I could finally publish a report of BEAM!”.

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BEAM was organized by Sarah Nicolls and her team at Brunel University. BEAM (consistently) stands for Brunel electronic and analog music, and the event was pretty much about it. Curiously enough the main venue was a building named after Antonin Artaud.
Whereas the hospitality of the organization was very good and informal (and I do appreciate that, specially for “academic” events), the strongest aspect though was an incredibly heterogeneous, yet top-notch line up.
BEAM managed to bring together some of the most advanced – both aesthetically and technically – live acts around Europe. Me and Christos Michalakos were awarded a bursary for “outstanding work”, respectively for the pieces Music for Flesh II and Frrriction, and got to perform in the main, awesome concert hall along with old and new friends. Among the others, the line up included Stelarc, Atau Tanaka and Adam Parkinson (CultureLab, Newcastle), Ryan Jordan (Noise=Noise, London), Dj Sniff and Alex Nowitz (STEIM, Amsterdam), Ben Knapp and his team (SARC, Ireland), Chikashi Miyama (ZKM, Germany), your writer and my colleague Christos (SLE, Edinburgh).

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The performances program was complemented by an equally interesting array of audio installations, workshops and hands-on DIY sessions. Some good and original ideas were materialized in the labyrinth-like corridors of the Artaud building – such as the Stroviols project – and I gladly realized that the workshop were actually a pretty important aspect of the event, offering several hours a day of open sessions hosted by the practitioners present at the event.

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I’m sorry the pictures are not the best, I struggled a bit with the lighting at the main venue, but I hope you can imagine the lovely mood.
I highly recommend to keep an eye on this event, Sarah seems to be already working on the next edition and also accepting proposals… I’m personally very much looking forward to it!

We really had great times in Dublin.
This Irish Pd mini con was a small event, but an excellent review of some works(in-progress) made in Pd. Above all it was a good chance to meet face to face other Pd developers, which sadly does not happen so often as it should.

Many thanks to Rich Duckworth for the efforts in putting the event together.

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My presentation concentrated on the research project Xth Sense, a bio-sensing hardware/software framework for the application of muscle sounds to biophysical generation and control of music, video and responsive milieux. I also performed a related solo sonic piece titled “Music for Flesh II”, see more info here.

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My highlights of the event were the presentation by Ricky Graham “Performance system in Pd” and the Data Structure Workshop by Joao Pais, an active Pd’r based in Berlin and author of the jmmmp library for Pd extended.

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Richard presentation focused on a study of musical gesture; specifically Richard is working on a complex system for live electric guitar which is well described in the video below:

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Joao is also author of Click Tracker, “a program designed for composers, conductors and instrumentalists working with modern music. The main goal of the software is to prepare a click track of any score, no matter how complex it is”. Find further info here.

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And finally, my impressions of the event. Hope next year will bring another Pd Con in UK!
See bottom page for links to the webpages of the artists involved.

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Rich Duckworth: http://bluespetroleum.blogspot.com/
Richard Graham: http://rickygraham.com/
Joao Pais: http://code.google.com/p/clicktracker/
Mikael Fernstrom: http://www.idc.ul.ie/mikael/
Softday: http://www.softday.ie/

In November I had the great pleasure to take part in the Piksel Festival 2010. I presented the work Golden Shield Music, a sonification of IT censorship technologies during a talk focused on the current state of IT censorship techs.

Piksel “is an international event for artists and developers working with Free/Libre and Open Source technologies in artistic practice. Part workshop, part festival, it is organized in Bergen, Norway,and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of free technologies & art.”
I would also outline that Piksel is above all a living community, both on-line and off-line, as in the “real world”; this is probably what most made me feel close to the spirit of the festival because it recalls the same approach we foster at the Live Performers Meeting annual event.

So here you go with a brief and picture-ful report.

At first sight Bergen looks like the perfect Christmas postcard: snow, mountains, frozen lakes and small lovely houses. However once you get in the “pikseler” state of mind, the city start changing too. The reception and communal venue was located at the Knipsu; this was the first meeting point for all artists, the place where you want to go if you wish to get in touch with people, see old friends, buy some very interesting FLOSS gems or have lunch!
Knipsu was also the home of some of the guerrilla, low cost, sound/radio art installation by Julien Ottavi and Jenny Pickett, which nicely dispersed sounds around the city.

Sadly I arrived in Bergen only on Friday, so you’ll miss here pictures and words from the first day of the event.
On Saturday at about 11.00 the Exquisite Code team met up at Knipsu to plan their day out, writing, feeling, perceiving space and share their experiences and words.
“For the performance at Piksel 2010″ they executed “a new distributed parallel algorithm where the writers are dispersed around Bergen within and without the festival space. Analog lookup tables dictate the physical routing or dead-drop of text-chunks.” At night, at the end of their exploration “writing is made visible via periodic reading machine interrupt processes which rupture the pedestrian life-program flow” and a bottle of wine (?) helped us celebrating.

In the same morning Alexandre Torres Porres hosted a workshop dedicated to Spectral Analysis and Processing in Pure Data.
The workshop was very interesting and stimulating; Alexandre prepared some beautiful patches and examples which nicely led participants through such quite complex topic.
Interesting, well planned and very useful in order to shed some light on a topic which is often not that easy to grasp.

Following Alexandre workshop I presented a research about the actual state of IT censorship technologies and a related work of mine Golden Shield Music. Piksel team published a full video of the talk on their blip.tv channel. You might want to check it out here or you might find interesting to dedicate few minutes to the reading of the accurate report of my presentation by Regine Debatty for WE MAKE MONEY NOT ART.
Aymeric Mansoux, Dave Griffiths, Marloes de Valk then talked about Naked on Pluto, a brand new multi-player text adventure game they developed for Facebook, and which is spreading right now among our FB profiles. Really worth giving it a try and read more about it.
The first evening performance FRUIT+EMOTION=NOISE, is an audiovisual show by Oscar de Carmen and Victor Mazon which deploys a 3rd generation hardware “capable of processing into sound the energy contained in fruits and vegetables discarded by supermarkets, through an electrochemical reaction.”

At 21.00 Eleonora Oreggia aka Xname opened the formal night event at USF, the venue dedicated to live audiovisual concerts and presentations.
Eleonora performed Phantasmata, concisely described by the author as “Empiric noise-at-a-distance, electronic circuits, pulsating lights.”  A truly scary experience in noise and lights. Inspiring.

Last performance hosted by Cristiano Rosa can be described as an orgy of DIY tools, hacked toys and whatever can produce sounds. A nice set supported by Servando Barreiro’s live videos. The night ended with a party, some dancy music, some nice glitchy sounds and lods of people having good times. Live stop-motion animation by Alexandre Quessy’s ToonLoop constitued an interesting highlight of the night party.

Sunday, the last day. The schedule was pretty busy, so after a couple of workshop in the morning three different presentations took place. First off one of my favourite artist Alejandra Perez aka El Pueblo de China talked about Cartografia Sonora Antartica, an audiovisual project about a travel to Antartica, underwater field recording and a critical observation about the role of water and its commercialization worldwide.
Next was Claudius Maximus a Pure Data guru among his other manifold skills, as many of you might already know. He presented the amazing RDEX project “an installation and performance piece that explores in an autonomous hyperspace mathematical model, searching for interesting emergent behaviour (life-alike, alife).”

The following talk demonstrated the potential of “CHEAP, FAT + OPEN: an open source platform for musical exploration, composition and performance” by Jacob Sikker Remin and Jakob Bak. “A combination of the old and new: the raw 8bit / chip tune approach combined with wireless connectivity, state of the art open source hardware, and expandability – gives us that FAT sound.”
Night performances were great. First was HYLICS by Ryan Jordan and Geraldine McEwan: a blast of noise, distorted violin and strobo light, which I believe deserve to be indicated as the best live act at Piksel along with Slub, a breathtaking live coding performance by Alex McLean and Dave Griffith. Then we had the RDEX performance, the strong and disrespectful poetry/noise concert Degenerative Illetrism by Joachim Montessieus, Dystophonia, a stop-motion audiovisual performance by Quessy and Matthews and finally UKI, a viral performance by Shu Lea Cheang with Martin Howse and live improvised soniscape by various artists participating to Piksel, including your reporter here; personally the UKI experience has had a strong impact. We performed in a group of 7/8 artists, we didn’t have any rehearsal before the gig and, although we knew each other, not all of us knew perfectly what to expect. Eventually the audience seemed to have really appreciate the piece, which is very satisfying if you think that the whole performance last 70 minutes. More than one hour of noise, drone, cuts, screams and viral videos. Thanks to Shu Lea for organizing such amazing event.

I think there couldn’t possibly be any better closing for the Piksel Festival. After being submerged by 70′ noise sound wall, we all gathered at the hotel and spent the night over some drinks, saying goodbye to who had to leave and exchanging last ideas and some Brazilian music (Thanks Alexandre!!).
Overall, I have to say I was positively impressed by the quality of contents and projects presented at Piksel. It’s surely one of the place to be if you are one of us geek interested in technological freedom and constructive criticism. Besides Piksel gives a great overview about the current state of the art of the audiovisual and new media field, with a special highlight on all those kind of works which you will never happen to see in any other major festival around.
Thanks so much to Elisabeth and Gisle and all the other people involved in the event.
Next year, get your flight ticket ready for Norway!

Piksel team just released a full video of my recent presentation in Norway for Piksel 2010.
The talk focused on the current state of IT censorship technologies and a related sonification work titled Golden Shield Music.

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Piksel team published other videos related to the exhibition, performances and presentations hosted at Piksel 2010.
You’ll find many interesting projects on the Piksel blip.tv channel.

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Among the other projects you will also find the full video of UKI – a viral performance by Shu Lea Cheang with Martin Howse.

Sonicscape with participation of Piksel10 artists Oscar Martin Correa, Marco Donnarumma, Joachim Montessuis, Alejandra Perez, Eleonora Oreggia, Julien Ottavi.

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Piksel Festival: http://piksel.no

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I’m forwarding here a message from Netaudio Berlin Festival Staff. They have been putting together a series of publication about the last edition of the festival, including reports, ideas and articles from all participants.
Looks an interesting reading, I also contributed with a report of the event (previously published here) and some personal observations about net-labels’ music and such.
More info below.

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Dear friend, musician, netlabelhead, netaudio enthusiast, creative mastermind, visual aesthete and free thinker…

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We would like to inform you about a new publication on the website of Netaudio Berlin which is finally ready. (At least the texts… the layout is not perfect yet

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This publication has developed from the idea to keep hold of some personal perspectives, interesting anecdotes and developed ideas – alongside with some theoretical thoughts – as an outcome of the festival. And analogue to the colorful mixture of participants in the festival, we were able to tie a turbulent bundle of texts in style, types and perspectives. Most of them are very friendly and full of (personal) enthusiasm, others are meant to increase and develop the content, framework and general setup of the festival.

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Read more:

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http://www.netaudioberlin.de/publications/introduction_antina/

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Find the table of contents here:

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http://www.netaudioberlin.de/publications/

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You might leave comments on the texts if you like – and we would really love to read your remarks, footnotes and opinions. We are curious about any of your comments.
I will answer your Emails – but it can take a while – because of my final episodes in pregnancy… For urgent requirements please contact Raimund ( raimund@netaudioberlin.de ).

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We kindly ask you to spread the word on your websites, social networks and where ever you think it’s relevant.

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Best greetings,

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Antina Michels and the netaudio team

P.S.: If you are still interested to purchase a Netaudio Book (“Netlabels -  Soziale Netze On- & Offline”), please let me know. More info:
http://antinamichels.de/wordpress/?page_id=2

Check the article about the research and outcome in English in this publication:
http://www.netaudioberlin.de/publications/netaudio-scene-article_antina/

–

Netaudio Festival Berlin 2009
Antina Michels
Festival Management

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I just uploaded an excerpt from 6 channels open air participatory soundscape concert “High Spheres” hosted at Re-new Festival, Copenhagen in May 2010.
The concert – performed by the audience and managed by an autonomous responsive system developed in Pd – took place for the opening of the festival and last around 40mins, with a late night reprise.

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High-Spheres – Participatory Soundscape Concert 2010 by Marco Donnarumma

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Further info about the project:
http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/high-spheres/

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You might want to check the report with festival highlights here.

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In May I’ve been invited to Pikslaverk Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, to present my work Golden Shield Music, a multi-channel generative sonification of IT censorship.
Pikslaverk is the Icelandic branch of the Pixelache Network which operates worldwide thanks to several organizations such as the almighty Piksel and its community.
Yes, I know, it’s probably very late for a report, but come on… better later than never.
Although I was really looking forward to my Icelandic journey, the arrival in Reykjavik was slightly weird. I was stopped and checked at the border by the local police for about 30′, with no explicit reason. I did not have anything illegal with me, fortunately. However after this warm welcome I suddenly faced an awful and hostile weather which did not help me rescuing the excitement.

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Later on all my worries disappeared: I reached our lovely accommodation and eventually met long time friend Servando Barreiro along with the other international artists hosted for the event.
Once relaxed, chilled and excited again, I joined the group at the Reykjavik Art Museum for the first session of lectures.
The bad weather were still hiding the beauty of the city, but the modern, formal and cozy mood of the museum positively surprised me.

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While Servando was setting up his performance for the opening of the festival, I got my chance to meet the organizers of the event and have a chat in the shiny library of the museum.
Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir is an exquisite person and an excellent host, she’s also a curator working with digital and critical media. Aki Asgeirsson is a talented experimental composer and organizer for the Raflost festival. Curiously enough, we had already met a week before in Copenhagen as he have performed a concert at the Re-new Festival.

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Eventually Margrét formally opened the event and lectures started. Pall Thayer presented his Microcodes, “very small code-based artworks. Each one is a fully contained work of art. The conceptual meaning of each piece is revealed through a combination of the title, the code and the results of running them on a computer”. I had already viewed the work on-line, but the talk revealed some specific and interesting aspects of the research along with many practical examples. Make sure you check his website.
Then Servando performed an audiovisual self-destructive concert and the night ended with the hyper-fast and tense meta-talk by Goodiepal. I think I can’t really explain his presentation, probably any explanation won’t even make justice to the performance he made, but just think about 20mins of the fastest and most chaotic talk you can imagine, fill it with some real pragmatical and cynical considerations about modern electronic music as we know it and mix it with the exhibition of self-promoting hand-crafted gadgets such as toy-shaped vinyls, fake (?) theoretical handbooks and other lovely, weird objects.

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The day after we all met again at the Museum Hall for another session of lectures. Presentations were mostly focused on software “art” and a critical approach to the digital media in its widest conception. Martin Howse talked about his research projects amongst which I’d like to mention the brilliant Island2 “a free software application which creates a semi-permanent, isolated island in the computer’s memory”. I presented the Golden Shield Music project and I have to thank the audience and the other artists who outlined few criticism which I didn’t faced before, questioning the “liveness” of the generative system and proposing a theoretically endless accumulation of data instead of a static analysis of pre-recorded figures.
Next was Linda Hilfling who introduced a “TV-program in its literary meaning – a software executing local-tv-transmissions, where the code of the programme critically reflects on the premises of participatory media itself.” (I stole this quote from http://www.observatori.com/pages/ob.php?anim=0&lang=en&tid=3). Finally Rafael Hidalgo closed the session presenting his Personal Weather Sensation, a multimedia project researching the interaction between the weather and human feelings, aiming at the creation of a sonic reactive environment controlled by the variations of weather conditions in specific place around the world.

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Eventually we headed at the Reykjavik Academy of Fine Arts to attend the presentation by Juan Parra and the exhibition of student’s final projects included in the Raflost program.
The walk was amazing: 20/30 mins wandering along the open sea surrounded by most likely the widest sky I’ve ever seen.

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The night after PIkslaverk was officially closed with few hours of live performances including myself and I C::ntr::l Nature audiovisual improvisational concert, Juan Parra quadriphonic concert, Martinka Bobrikova and Oscar de Carmen and some other interesting performances.
The following party ended in the morning and I exploited the industrial set of the location to make some improvised strictly geeky and conceptual mapping projections over the whole building structure using the latest mapping module for FLxER, free vjing and multimedia mixing software.

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We all couldn’t leave Iceland without seeing the legendary landscape around the island, so we rented a van and spent the whole final day driving around incredible views and alien scapes. Well, this would deserve another whole post, but… hey, I won’t describe my holiday!
I want to thank the organization of the event, Margrét and Aki, the other artists that shared with me such a great times in Reykjavik. I wish to come back soon on this awesome island.

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About three weeks ago me and Ioann Maria held a two days, free Pure Data workshop at Electron Club.
I gave an introduction of the graphical programming framework of Pd, audio and video real-time processing libraries and their possible applications, Ioann showed her DIY HRM – heart rate monitor – and eventually explained how to use Arduino in combination with Pd.
We had great times with folks in Glasgow and we are going to gather again this week for our second Pure Data Scots Users MeetUp. Come and join us if you’re around, the meeting is open to beginners, practitioners, passionates whoever might be interested in spending few hours chatting, patching and making some noise.

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I’d like to thank Simon Yull for his support in the organization of the workshop, the CCA staff for their help and all the people who showed up.
Here you are some photos.

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