Planet Piksel

As part of Kultivator’s preparations for The Wedding Between Art and Agriculture in July 2010, Tapio Mäkelä and Andrew Paterson were invited from Finland to contribute to their ‘Land-reform and open-source?’ seminar. Kultivator’s related ‘Lysning’ exhibition and event programme

is hosted by Kalmar Konstmuseum on the mainland next to Öland.

Kultivator will be presenting their work and plans for the ceremony during the ‘Herbologies/Foraging Networks’ Seminar on Saturday 27th March, 13-17, in Kiasma Seminar Room during Pixelache Festival.

HOWTO: using LiVES with pd (pure data)

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Renowned bioartist Adam Zaretsky (US) leads a hands-on lab in Pixelache Festival entitled: ‘How to Extract DNA from Anything Living in the Laboratory or in your Kitchen: A Compare and Contrast Vegetarian Laboratory and Hobbyist Workshop’. It will include a bio-political discussion on the difference between whole plant preparations and purified, ‘isolated’ extracts, with a risk assessment of intentional release ‘utilisation’ of Hybrid DNA.

The workshop will take place in Kiasma Seminar room on Saturday 27th March, from 1730-1900, and is free of charge. Held in English language, it has a limited number of spaces for involved persons (Maximum 25 participants), although another 15 are welcome to watch the proceedings.

Please register before 25.3. Look here for more information.

On Sunday 28th March, the Pixelache Festival weekend, from 13-17, there will be two interactive workshops at Kaisaniemi Botanic Gardens, Helsinki:

‘Herbal Tinctures’ Workshop by Interdisciplinary Arts Group SERDE (LV), and ‘Fermentation Sermon’ by Finnish wild plant expert Ossi Kakko, which teach artistic and ‘hands-on’/practical skills, and give DIY -tools to prepare and enjoy wild vegetables and local herbs following traditional and contemporary procedures.

These workshops are free of charge, but have a limited number of spaces (Max. 20 participants in each). Please register before 25.3. Look here for more information.

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var ot,c, b, m;

ot = #[60, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71];

c = Pbind(\dur, 0.1,
\amp, Pseq([ Pgeom(0.2,0.95,50)],2),
\midinote, Prand( ot-12, inf),
\legato, 0.2,
\pan, Pfunc({1.0.rand2})
);

b = Pbind( \dur, Prand([5,Pseq([1,1,1,1,1]), Pseq([3,2]) ], 2),
\amp, Pfunc( {XLine.kr(0.001,0.1, 0.5)} ),
\midinote, Pshuf( ot-24)
);

Paddp(\ctranspose,
Pseq([0,2,4,6,7], inf), Ppar([b,c])).play

)

I’m finally on facebook. Go to my page and become a fan!

The LEDs for the ‘Windowfarms Finland’ installation are now glowing. Also, Helsinki days are sunnier, longer, and many of the plants are growing in the huge Kiasma takaikkuna window.

‘What plants are there?’ you ask.. The latest update can be found in the ‘plant chart’ recording the current content of the installation in an online spreadsheet. Hopefully the majority will make it until the end of the month, where there will be workshops on 27th and 28th March, using some of the plants.

Documentation of the participatory building workshop, LED module-making, and finishing of the installation, have now been gathered onto one page.

I’ve been getting lots of requests for a VL-tone page with schematics. Here it is.

Electric Sheep and I won 2nd prize (€1000) in the Lúmen_Ex digital art competition held by the Universidad de Extremadura. The piece is called "Transformation" and is a 3 minute long high definition edge between two sheep. That's 3x "slower"...

The Michael Berger Gallery on the Southside of Pittsburgh has us in a two-person show with Cheonae Kim until April 3rd. They wrote the following: SCOTT DRAVES has turned his PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie...

Yesterday the exhibition chmod +x opened in Sign gallery, Groningen. The works exhibited are “love2″ by Wayne Clements, “island2″ by Martin Howse, “Microcodes” by Pall Thayer and “Class Library” by Graham Harwood. The exhibition presents works that use the computer as a space for social revolution, as location, an ungraspable island that slowly transmits itself to other computers, as actor, mimicking other machines. Executable language, thoughts, ideas and actions translated into code that can be interpreted and executed by a machine. Each of the works show aspects of our relation and history with computers. Even though for non-programmers it might at first be hard to approach the code and the processes it describes, there are fascinating stories to be found.

You can visit chmod +x art at sign in Groningen until the 7th of March.

Images top to bottom: Class Library by Graham Harwood, island2 by Martin Howse, Microcodes by Pall Thayer and Love2 by Wayne Clements.

Prepared-Gameboy: Leach.

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Not to miss next week, the opening of the Anisotropics exhibition (12-28.3), with Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran (India)!

The featured projects are based on temporary public works, media interventions and other artistic probes into technologies, communities and spaces in cities like Bangalore, Bombay, Dakar, Delhi, Jerusalem and Mexico. Anisotropics is part of Pixelache’s annual Signals from the South programme, which also includes a seminar to be held during the festival on 28.3.

Artist Ashok Sukumaran will be present at the opening.

Opening Time: Thursday, March 11th, 5-7 pm
Location: MUU Gallery, Lönnrotinkatu 33, 00180 Helsinki, Finland

More information

When? 2, 3 and 4 March 2010, 10:00 – 17:00
Where? het Paleis, Erlenmeyer zaal
Entrance: free

At this very moment, the workshop Hello wor(l)d! is taking place, part of the chmod+x event. Hello wor(l)d! is an introduction to 3 different artistic approaches to programming, using three different programming styles: graphical, textual (code poetry) and life coding. The workshop gives a taste of all three flavours and is meant as inspiration and exploration for those artists curious about these forms of art but a bit afraid to try them. You cannot learn how to program in 3 days, especially not in 3 different ways, but it is well worth giving different languages and styles a try before starting to learn something new.

Day 1: Pure Data by IOhannes Zmölnig and Agoston Nagy
Day 2: Microcodes by Pall Thayer
Day 3: Fluxus by Dave Griffiths and Gabor Papp

No previous programming experience required, as long as you’re not afraid to work in a terminal. Basic experience with any scripting or markup language (even if it is HTML/CSS) will make it easier to follow.

For more chmod +x events, please visit http://makeart.goto10.org/chmod+x

The Golan Levin exhibition opened in Kiasma this week, here are a couple of photos:

Some remixed faces in Reface by TMEMA (Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman)

Captured blinks of eyes in Eyecode by Golan Levin

Also the WindowFarms installation can now be found in Kiasma Lobby:

Window Farm installation in Kiasma Lobby / Photo by Antti Ahonen

* * *

I would also recommend for you to check out the Adel Abidin’s solo exhibition in Kiasma (which is *not* organised by Pixelache, but is definitely worth visiting and fortunately still open when Pixelache festival takes place).

Prepared-Gameboy: Bot.

LiVES 1.2.1 has been released.

Prepared-Gameboy: Envelope.

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Directions and parking info

I recently came across these nice two eHows explaining how to run the Electric SHeep: How to Get the COOLEST Animated FREE Screensaver Ever and How to Get Electric Sheep on a Computer. A comment on one of them reads:...

Here’s a video from my new installation.There’s lots more info on this piece here.