Projects 2003
RAM4: Survival Kit
3-8 November 2003
Suomenlinna Island
Helsinki
www.olento.fi/ram4
A survival kit must contain the essential tools appropriate to your own environment: an arctic kit is unlikely to help you in the jungle.
RAM4:Survival Kit is part of the "Re-Approaching New Media" series of workshops and events being held across 6 Nordic and Baltic countries. Olento and NIFCA invites applications from artists, media practitioners and researchers who would like to propose the contents of a communications technology "survival kit". We ask the question: what do we need to survive in today's media and technology environment?
At the workshop we will learn and discuss about each others environment, skills, communities and strategies, and share our knowledge and insights. Our goal is to enable participants to create, develop and reflect new concepts, partnerships and projects that address the needs of their communities.
Participants are invited to Helsinki for 1 week (3-8 November), or for a shorter period (5-8 November). Accommodation for living and working will be on the historic fortress island, Suomenlinna, 15 minutes ferry ride from Helsinki. The weeks activities will be a mixture of timetabled, structured workshops on particular themes, discussions toward developing "survival kits", and workshops involving local practitioners and communities in Helsinki.
RAM 4 | Survival Kit event
Survival Kit publication launch + Kim Cascone concert
Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art
Thursday 6 Nov, 6-8 pm
Short presentations by Survival Kit workshop participants at the launch of the Survival Kit publication! Also a concert by Kim Cascone.
The event takes place at the panorama window on the 5th floor of Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary art. Arrive early (between 5:30-6 pm) to get in for free!!
Kim Cascone
www.anechoicmedia.com
Formally trained in electronic music at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New School in New York City. Founded Silent Records in 1986. Worked on David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" and "Wild at Heart" as Assistant Music Editor. Sound Designer & Composer for Thomas Dolby's company Headspace. Worked/performed with Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Oval, Scanner, Ikue Mori, and David Toop among others.
Since 1980, Kim has released numerous albums of electronic music for Silent, Mille Plateaux/Ritornell, Sub Rosa, C74, anechoic and 12k to name a few. Cascone has performed/lectured at the Lovebytes Festival (UK), Micro 2 Mutek (Montreal), Tate Modern (London), Observatori Festival (Spain), Stanford University (US), U.C. Santa Barbara and Sonic Circuits Festival (Washington DC). Cascone is one of the co-founders of the Microsound list (http://www.microsound.org) and has written for Computer Music Journal (MIT Press), Artbyte Magazine and Parachute Journal. He currently resides in San Francisco, California with his wife Kathleen and son Cage.
RAM 4 | Survival Kit event
RAM 4 workshop wrap-up event
Nifca, Suomenlinna
Saturday 8 Nov, 3-6 pm
Join us for an informal final event of the RAM 4 workshop! In addition to some of the workshop results there are presentations dealing with architecture / public space / locative media / performance: Usman Haque (UK/Pakistan), Adam Somlai-Fischer (Hungary/Sweden), Margot Jacobs (Sweden), Andrew Paterson (UK/Finland), Ophra Wolf (UK).
+ Michael Connor (FACT, UK) will present the dive publication + dyne:bolic cd
dyne:bolic GNU/Linux is a live bootable distribution which works directly from a CD without the need to install or change anything on hard disk. It recognizes most common hardware devices and offers a vast range of softwares for sound and video production, streaming, 3D modeling, peer-to-peer/filesharing, deejaying and veejaying, and much more. The main feature of the dyne:bolic CD is its full pre-configuration for live-streaming over the internet. To run your own radio station, just reboot your computer and start your show.
Born as a grassroots effort to spread free software and the spirit of sharing information, dyne:bolic was developed to suit the needs of media activists in order to stimulate the production - and fruition - of digital and analog information.
Usman Haque
'architecture as operating system'
Traditionally, architecture has been thought of as hardware: the static walls, roofs and floors that enclose us. An alternative approach is to think of architecture as software: the ephemeral sounds, smells, temperatures even radio waves that surround us. Pushing this analogy even further, we can think of architecture as a whole as an "operating system", within which people write their own programmes for spatial interaction. One model of operating system that is particularly relevant to architecture (since the design of space is always a collaborative process) is an open source system.
We know that architecture is political. And we know that people themselves make architecture by using it. Now, how do we balance the differences in technical skill, technology access and self-sufficiency desire that different people have, in order to produce a viably democratic space (in all senses)? Is an architecture operating system just another meta-system of control? Does open source architecture suggest a possible way forward, or is it just an empty metaphor? These are crucial questions, and I hope that a collaborative team like that assembled for RAM4 might be able to begin to look for answers.
Adam Somlai-Fischer
'Architecture as Media'
Qualities of virtual spaces are building up social conditions that architecture should respond to, the actual gets blurred with the virtual, local with the global, and our perception of space and architecture is going through major transformations. Therefore it is important to develop a more refined relation between the two realities, something beyond the visually pleasing representational VR, something that also affects back to our world.
Designing communication between different information structures includes the development of synthetic senses that take over our interpretation and create their own. A computer mouse interprets our gestures, a keyboard our language just as the technology of a camera changes the space in a photograph. This synthetic interpretation is suggestive; definitely not objective so perhaps it could even be considered creative?
Margot Jacobs
Margot is an interaction design researcher exploring the playful, emotional and appropriate incorporation of technology in everyday life, developing innovative design methods and experimental prototypes for social interventions in public space.
Public Play Spaces, a platform at PLAY Studio {Interactive Institute}: Inside Public Play Spaces, we reflect on, question and re-examine places, relationships and qualities for the design of technology in the public sphere. This requires that we ask different questions, apply new methods and try alternative means of prototyping possibilities. Operating on the fringes, our goal is to create projects that are provocative and personal, challenging people to reflect, participate, and evolve.
Andrew Paterson
'Human Orienteering and the Remaining Traces of Locative Media'
The media environment that i feel needs a survival kit (for myself and others) is the emerging category of 'locative media'. This label may be understood to mean media which pertains to location, but also - by inference - to a certain time, and so experienced in a certain context. Beyond the contextual signifier, it also has been associated with mobility, collaborative mapping, social networks, and relativity.
It is worth mentioning that although the initial objectives of using this term were to banish (sic.) technological jargon from media art practice and discourse, it is defining the use of spatial and mobile technolgies to augment everyday lived environments with media content.
Ophra Wolf
I have been working as a performer, both with dance and theatre companies, for many years now. But in the past two years, as artistic director of Pursue the Pulse, I have increasingly come into contact with new media and technology for art and performance. Pursue the Pulse is an international collective of artists from different fields – performance, music, video, multimedia – that specializes in the creative use of new technology. Our current project, Four Seasons, uses sensors to create an interactive environment in which a performer, the music, video, lights, and the audience all affect one another.
RAM 4 | Survival Kit event
Software for Survival workshop
Nifca, Suomenlinna
Tuesday 4 Nov, 10 am-4 pm
Schedule
10:00-12:00 Introduction lectures
12:00 Lunch
13:00-16:00 Discussion and a possibility to try out the software
There is no fee for participation but you need to sign up in advance! Send an e-mail to ram4@olento.fi to sign in! (Please include your full name, name of organisation (school, company, etc), e-mail and phone number)
Presented projects:
TamTam
Presented by Zeljko Blace and Aleksander Erkalovic (Croatia)
TamTam is an easy-to-use publishing platform for collaborative and dynamic projects that don't have a fixed structure from very beginning, but grow it as they develop. Based on a small number of easy-to-remember rules TamTam lets almost everyone manage and organize their web site.
It was developed with the idea of a dynamic web, but having in mind beginners and designers (who don't have programmers on disposal). Content inside of TamTam is not static, but it is neither hidden in a hard-to-manage database. TamTam invites users to change it if they find something missing or incorrect, and viewers to comment on it (or also to change if security level allows them). TamTam sites are ment to be open to all who feel like contributing to other peoples work. That is one of the main differences between TamTam and common publishing systems.
Unlike other wiki implementations, TamTam includes a strong security model that lets you organise your site into private, public or semi public sections (security level is set for page, section or web respectively, and depends on permissions granted to individuals or groups). Security model and user management is powerful enough to let you organise users in different groups such as administrator, editor, designer etc.
TamTam's templating system separates content from visual representation of our site. It is very easy to have different look-and-feel models within a single site or section of site.
Webdynamo (www.webdynamo.org)
A template-based content management system for dynamic development in the web, presented by Ville Aho (Finland).
Webdynamo is a PHP-based web development environment which has been specially designed to be easily managed and customized for different needs. All functionality and content is controlled by templates. This provides a totally customizable way to develop dynamic solutions. The system features abstracted, high-level functions for adding/modifying/checking and formatting data and has a modular structure to minimize development overhead and keep solutions maintainable.
STATUS: The basic functionality is more or less ready but there's still quite a bit work to get things standardized and totally modular. Designing a highly usable and practical interface for the environment has a high priority. Also a lot of documentation needs to be done. The focus has been a lot on using the environment to get different solutions in production. Primary targets are different non-profit communities.
Ville Aho runs an ethical media co-operative and does himself mainly hosting and web development for ethically sound projects.
discussion about self-made software
In the afternoon there will also be a discussion about the context of these tools - the role and future of self-made software, self-organised communities etc. The discussion will include several other RAM 4 participants working with open source software etc.
RAM 4 | Survival Kit event
DIY Electronic art & toys workshop
Nifca, Suomenlinna
Wednesday 5 Nov, 10 am-4 pm
Schedule
10:00-12:00 Introduction lectures
12:00 Lunch
13:00-16:00 Hands-on sessions with electronics and software
There is no fee for participation but you need to sign up in advance! Send an e-mail to ram4@olento.fi to sign in! (Please include your full name, name of organisation (school, company, etc), e-mail and phone number)
Presented projects:
Solar sound modules
Presented by Ralf Schreiber and Pascal Glissmann (Cologne Academy of Media Arts, Germany)
I am working with oscillations, interferences, feedbacks, chaotic processes, auto active systems and silence. I understand myself as scientists, my motivation is driven by curiosity, a desire for knowledge and for playing so I develop minimal autonomous robots and pseudo robots. These small bots move and generate soft ever-changing sounds. All my creatures get their energy completely from small solar cells.
I would like to demonstrate my work with the solar bots and I would like to offer a practical workshop for maybe twenty (or more) people. The participants can build their own solar sound module or their own solarbot. The bots and the sound modules are based on simple electronic circuits (the same I use in my installations), which are supplied by solar cells and imitate biological systems. The bots move under the influence of light and the sound modules generate quiet and variable sounds. Electronic know-how isn¹t necessary. The participants can make their own experiments with these special electronic structures.
Pure Data, AID, GridFlow + more
Presented by Marc Lavallée (Montreal, Canada)
- - General knowledge about Free Software and social issues.
- - Problem solving, doing more with less.
- - Audio/video compression and streaming with free software
- - Video motion capture in Linux.
- - Pure Data:
1) programming patches
2) programming externals in C
3) interfacing PD to other softwares and the external world
4) my parapin external, that turns the parallel port of a PC into a digital I/O interface.
- - The AID interface building and using the AID with Pure Data and DIY softwares
- - Basic demo of GridFlow
How have I survived so far?
At the age of 5 (1968), I plugged two pieces of aluminium foil into an AC wall plate and touch them; for a very short time, I was connected to the northern hydro-electric dams. At 15 (1978), I wrote a BASIC program on a Burroughs computer to calculate the first hundred prime numbers. At 25 (1988) I stopped studying electrical engineering and dedicated myself to digital survival. At 35 (1998) I started to use Linux for my desktop computer . At 45 (2008) I hope to use an open source microprocessor.
Kokeellisen elektroniikan seura / Association of experimental electronics
Presented by Antti Ahonen & co (Finland)
We are a group from Helsinki concentrated on audio electronics. With experimental we don’t mean scientific repeatibility. We experiment things with electronics and mechanics. Our instruments are mainly made of electronic waste or modified from old consumer electronics.
We use the lowest technology possible: Motors, relays, anything that can produce sounds. From these simple sounds we mix a complex soundscape. We search for the balance between chaos and order.
Our work is combination of installation, soundwork, performance and workshop. We work with lots of people from different backgrounds from architects to performance artists.
RAM - Re-approaching new media is a project with the support of the Culture 2000 Programme of the European Union and financial assistance of the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology.
RAM4 workshop is organised by Olento in collaboration with NIFCA www.nifca.org, Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art with the support of Nordiska Kulturfondet.
For more information contact:
juhuu@olento.fi
project@nifca.org