Chatroom is a collaboration between Jeff Gompertz and Caen Botto (Universomente). It is an augmented chat environment in which the audience is prompted to interface with an assortment of what appears to be standard chat elements. Through a layer of copied desktop and a faked chat interface, captured ‘chatters’ looped into the system appear from the past and what is currently happening in real-time, stuck in some kind of chat echo-chamber. It is an exercise in fascination with the ephemera of chat, extracting a vocabulary of simple human interactions and redundancy. The manipulation of image signal through analog and digital means creates a loop effect – a hall of mirrors. The audience simultaneously can input a text layer that outputs into the room like an old school text-to-speech soundtrack. The piece utilizes video chat software, CCTV surveillance cameras, max programming and analog video technology, with output displayed on a mix of flat screen monitors and video projection.

Caen Botto (Universomente) (ARG/ES), born in Buenos Aires (1970), lives and works in Spain, is an intermedia artist - composer, developer of interactive software, installations, immersive environments and audiovisual performances. In 2000, he created Universomente – an independent laboratory dedicated to the research and production of experimental audiovisual techniques for interactive communication (http://universomente.xicnet.com). He is also a founder and producer of Optiq Syndicate, an online distribution platform for new media art (2002 – 2003) (http://optiq.xicnet.com); co-founder and manager of Gipsy Films, multimedia lab specialising in audiovisual performance in real time, Barcelona (2002 – 2003) (http://gipsy.xicnet.com); a member of the IIESMUMD (Institute for Experimental Research of Digital Media Sound and Music), New Technologies and Communication Research Center; School of Computer and Communication Sciences; Universidad de Morón, Buenos Aires (1998 – 2000). His recent projects include: CODE: The Mechanics of the Spell, an interactive installation commissioned by FACT and LJMU (Liverpool John Moores University) (2006) (http://hci-fun.org.uk); Il Pikolo cirko di pulga virtualis, multimodal performance presented as part of GA (Generative Art Symposium), Milano (2002); Butterflystorm, telematic interactive installation exhibited in at III Muestra de arte Sonoro y Visual, Barcelona and El Atajo, Buenos Aires (2002) (http://universomente.xicnet.com/butterflystorm.html.

Jeff Gompertz (USA) combines new technologies with traditional tools of production to create theatrical installations with a minimalist bent. An attention to situational architectures and architectural situations, a fascination with hyper-reality theoretics, these play an ongoing role in his work, reflected in the group name Fakeshop, which he formed as a collective in 1997. The pieces often address contemporary themes and social issues in response to the site of installation, incorporating live video, hidden cameras, web broadcasting, and performance elements. A core member of Hell.com, he participated in numerous experimental internet broadcasts and webcast performances in the early days of the net art movement including Radioqualia, Public Netbase, Xchange network, Candyfactory, etc. His work has been exhibited internationally, including: The Whitney Biennial - USA, Ars Electronica - Austria, ARCO - Spain, and Japan Foundation – Japan. Recent exhibitions include: The requested URL is not available in your country, Contemporary Art Center, Beijing (2008); Artbase, Beijing (2007); Floor Sample, 798 Arts festival Beijing (2007). Other exhibitions include those presented at ARCO International Art Fair, Madrid (2005), Cooper Hewitt Museum, NYC (2003), Franklin Furnace, NYC (2002), Whitney Museum, NYC (2000), Eyebeam, NYC (2000), and Ars Electronica, Austria (1999).

logo_wiki identifies military, corporate, and governmental editors of Wikipedia (‘the Free Encyclopedia'). It does this by tracing back the editor's IP address. logo_wiki shows recently edited ‘diffs' pages (with changes highlighted) and shows who the shadowy editor is. logo_wiki does this by replacing the Wikipedia logo with the editor's logo. Military, corporate and governmental users are responsible for many thousands of unacknowledged alterations to Wikipedia pages. logo_wiki reveals this process occurring in real time.

Wayne Clements is a visual artist and a writer living in London. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Chelsea College of Art and Design. He completed a practice-based Ph.D. degree in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design (2005). He researched the use of rules and instructions when applied to text. His poetry, prose and visual work are published in a number of magazines and books, and his sound work (sound poetry) is included in the book and CD Homo Sonorus, An International Anthology of Sound Poetry, Moscow (2001). His artworks are included on the http://www.rhizome.org/ and http://www.runme.org/, repositories of online art, and are also shown in many festivals and exhibitions of electronic art. un_wiki (2006) received the Award of Distinction, Net Vision, Prix Ars Electronica (2006), and was shown in Connecting Worlds, ICC Gallery Tokyo (2006), in a specially commissioned Japanese language version. Wayne has lectured, made presentations, and published articles on aspects of visual art and the history of new media.

antisocial notworking is an online repository of projects that explore the pseudo-agency of online social platforms. It takes a number of recent software projects as its inspiration to reflect upon the fashion for 'participation' within the arts sector and culture in general. The concern is how the Internet is increasingly characterised as a 'platform' (or collective machine) for 'social' uses, but to question what is meant by the term social in such descriptions. Although social networking platforms rely on user-generated content, what is the nature of this participation? What alternatives (or antitheses) can be identified? Emergent forms are undoubtedly dissimilar to the ways in which social relations have been traditionally organised but in general, appear to reinforce existing power structures. The suggestion of the project is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged. The project is launched online with a selection of exemplary projects, including: Hans Bernhard & Alessandro Ludovico, Google Will Eat Itself (2005), a hack of Google's growing monopoly of information; Hans Bernhard & Alessandro Ludovico (with Paolo Cirio and Lizvlx), Amazon Noir (2006), that exploited the Amazon Search Inside function to distribute/steal over 3000 books. Other projects addressing these themes in uncompromising ways can be submitted to the repository. For Observatori 2008, antisocial notworking features a selection of installations: logo_wiki byWayne Clements (2007), Participation 0.0 - Part I by Linda Hilfling (2007), and www_hack by Rui Guerra (2008).

Geoff Cox (UK) is Associate Curator of Online Projects at Arnolfini, Bristol (UK). He is Lecturer in Art and Technology at the University of Plymouth (UK) where he is part of the AZTEC (Art, Science, Technology) research consortium, and a member of the research faculty of Transart Institute (A/USA). His research interest concerns software culture and is expressed in various projects such as the co-curated touring exhibition Generator (2002/03), his PhD thesis Antithesis: The Dialectics of Software Art (2006) and the co-curated public art project Social Hacking (2007). He is co-editor of the DATA Browser book series published by Autonomedia (New York), and co-edited Economising Culture (2004) and Engineering Culture (2005).

The Net is a documentary that provides a subversive history of the Internet. The film takes the story of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, as a starting point to trace the contrasting cultural responses to the cybernetic revolution and technological progress. On the one hand, it emphasises the intrusive systems of technological control, and on the other, the utopian promises of global networking and instantaneous communication. It includes archive footage of Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Henry A. Murray and Norbert Wiener and interviews with John Brockman, Stewart Brand, Paul Garrin, David Hillel Gelernter, and Heinz von Foerster.

Lutz Dammbeck (DE) is an artist and filmmaker living in Hamburg. He became a freelance graphic artist and painter in 1974 and began making animation films, documentaries and experimental films from 1976. In 1990, he founded 'Lutz-Dammbeck-Filmproduktion' and in 2000 set up and directed Project Class New Media at the College of Fine Arts Dresden. From 1992, he has been a visiting professor and subsequently teaching at the Fachhochschule für Gestaltung, Hamburg. Most recent solo exhibitions include: 'Herakles-Konzept' (1997/98), presented in such venues as Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Lindenau Museum, Altenburg, Städtische Galerie Rähnitzgasse, Dresden, and Kunstverein Heidelberg; 'Krieg der Viren II' (2000) presented in Brecht - Zentrum Berlin; and 'All Systems Go' (2005) in Akademie der Künste, Berlin Berlin and"Re-Reeducation" at Galerie COMA, Berlin. A selection of his films includes: 'Herakles Hoehle' (1990), 'Time Of The Gods' ('Zeit der Goetter', 1992), 'Herzog Ernst' (1993), 'Duerer's Heirs' ('Duerers Erben', 1996) and 'Master Game' ('Das Meisterspiel', 1998), 'The Net' ('Das Netz', 2003), and 'Besuch bei Rudolf Arnheim' (2004). For his film 'The Net', he received the EMAF Award European Media Art Festival Osnabrück in 2004. Other prizes include the Kathe-Kollwitz Prize from the Berlin Academy of the Arts and the prize for the 'Promotion of German Film Art' from the DEFA-Foundation (both in 2005).   (http://okno.be/index.php?id=811; http://www.othercinemadvd.com/net.html)

www_hack by Rui Guerra is a creative intervention onto Arnolfini's web site. A script installed on the host site allows all visitors to a single page to observe each others' mouse movements at any one time. On a technical level, the work is based on a javascript that contacts a server where all individual mouse positions are stored, displaying all the cursors in 'real-time'. Users experience the virtual presence of others, as controlled by a server. Web platforms are being promoted as a privileged arena for emerging communities and open collaborations. www_hack, on the other hand, aims at exposing the internal architecture of the web as well as the protocols that reflect a server client hegemony in which users are separated from information and from each other. The project demonstrates that the server-client relationship is not open as such, nor free from power structures. Indeed, all clients are subject to the 'dictatorship' of a server that is intrinsic to web architecture.

Rui Guerra has been writing software with a critical view on communities for several years. Holding an MSc in Computer Science, he is currently working on his MFA in New Media. Besides working and collaborating with several institutes in the Netherlands such as V2_, Virtueel Platform and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, he is involved in open culture by initiating and organizing open events. In 2007, he initiated a self-organized, uncurated and open festival - unDEAF - as a satellite event of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival.

Participation 0.0 - part I documents an intervention in Second Life carried out spring 2007 where the Terms of the Service were being brought back into the virtual world. Second Life's Terms of Service was broken down to quotes and published on billboards placed on different sites, private as well as public, within the world. It took 112 billboards in order to post the entire Terms of Service document. When clicking on a billboard the user would be taken to SL's official 'Terms of Service'-web site. The billboards could be seen as a kind of temporary juridical graffiti, since after a while they were in most cases deleted by the Second Life land ‘owners'. The video documentation is a journey through the Terms of Service, through Second Life. It reveals a ghostlike space: empty streets, empty playgrounds, empty shopping malls and empty houses for rent - a virtual suburbia enforced by a strict regulative framework. The project was initiated as collaboration with Kristoffer Gansing in connection with the exhibition Societe Anonyme at Le Plateau, Paris 2007 as part of tv-tv, an artist run local tv-channel from Copenhagen.

Linda Hilfling has a background in filmmaking, architecture, urbanism and media design. Her interest in those fields is based on an attention to the structures they are part of and how practice is inscribed in but also reforming these structures. This has led her to interventions within existing media-structures. Works range from concepts for using ATM-machines or surveillance cameras as local-media platforms, or the Misspelling Generator - a Firefox extension that circumvents Google's self-censorship and rigid information structure. Linda is currently based in Rotterdam finishing her masters' project at the Piet Zwart Institute. The project is 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.

0xA is a live electronic music performance by Chun Lee (TW) and Aymeric Mansoux (FR). Their collaboration (since 2005) has grown into both musical research and the development of new musical interfaces for live performance. Using virtual instruments and their own algorithmic processes, they sculpt sound in real-time, looking for new electronic spectra and waveforms. Lee and Mansoux are using a diverse toolkit for their performance, including Pure Data, an open source artistic software originally dedicated to real-time audio synthesis. In this environment, they work on algorithmic processes to produce different sound modules, effects and sequencers that are connected to each other via a network reflecting their remote collaboration. The performance draws upon many genres from surreal electronics and abstract ambient to early electro and kitsch synth-pop, chiptune, recalling Stockhausen, Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk and Nobukazu Takemura, as well as the broken beats and lo-fi glitches of modern dance music.

Chun Le is a sound artist currently based in London (UK). With a background in classical music, he became increasingly drawn into contemporary music and electronic arts. His discovery of Free Software led him to base his work on Pure Data - a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. Chun is now actively involved in the use and development of Pd. He is also an active member of GOTO10 and Openlab - two international collaborations of digital artists. Chun has appeared in a number of places - from academic conferences, to festivals, local meetings/presentations, gigs and squat parties. GOTO10 is a collective of international artists and programmers, dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and digital arts. The collective aims to support and grow digital art projects and tools for artistic creation, located on the blurry line between software programming and art. GOTO10 lives on servers, IRC channels, lists and streams; without any static physical meeting place. GOTO10 organize events throughout Europe, independently and in collaboration with like-minded organizations. The aim is to live within this network of machines, people and places, to develop and teach new and existing tools, to produce, experiment and play. All of GOTO10’s projects are based on 100% Free/Libre Open Source Software.

Hello process! is part of the Metabiosis project by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. The idea behind Hello process! is to show a machine doing what it is best at - that is, deleting/copying/moving blocks of data. The bits of code used are not meant to generate beautiful videos or sounds, they are simply placed in a file and each block inside the file gets loaded and executed one after the other, for a predetermined number of iterations. Each block and program has a byte to represent itself. Each byte is sent to the printer that interprets it as a graphic character. For every iteration of the process a line of graphic is printed representing the software activity in the file. After a couple of iterations, patterns start to become visible. In addition to this, a small electro-magnetic microphone is placed on the CPU, RAM or the Hard disk to amplify the signal directly to speakers, to give another level of reading of the internal computer activity. The project demonstrates the open system paradox, as even though the machine runs free software (a white box...) the complexity of the process turns it at run-time back into a system that cannot be penetrated (... a black box again). Metabiosis projects have been made possible with support from: the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Kunsthochshule fur Medien Koln, the Digital Research Unit, Waag Society, the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst and Sign. All the Metabiosis material is licensed using GPL, GFDL or simply belongs to the public domain.

Aymeric Mansoux is an artist and musician, member of the GOTO10 collective. His main artistic and research interests revolve around online communities, software as a medium and the influence of FLOSS in the development and understanding of digital art. His most recent projects and collaborations include the 0xA band with Chun Lee, the digital artlife Metabiosis project with Marloes de Valk and the pure:dyne GNU/Linux live distribution for media artists. Aymeric is editor of the FLOSS+Art book, scheduled for release mid 2008, as well as Folly's Digital Artists' Handbook that was launched early 2008.

Marloes de Valk (NL) is a Dutch digital artist, currently based in the UK. She is part of GOTO10, a collective of artists and programmers working in the field of digital art and Free/Libre Open Source Software. She studied Sound and Image at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, specializing in abstract compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. Her work consists of audiovisual performances and installations, investigating machine theatre and narratives of digital processes. She is currently collaborating with French artist Aymeric Mansoux on Metabiosis, a project investigating the ups and downs of data packets living in a world of connected ecosystems. From August 2007 until January 2008 she was editor of the Digital Artists' Handbook and is currently working on the GOTO10 publication FLOSS+Art, to be published mid 2008.

GOTO10 is a collective of international artists and programmers, dedicated to Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and digital arts. The collective aims to support and grow digital art projects and tools for artistic creation, located on the blurry line between software programming and art. GOTO10 lives on servers, IRC channels, lists and streams; without any static physical meeting place. GOTO10 organize events throughout Europe, independently and in collaboration with like-minded organizations. The aim is to live within this network of machines, people and places, to develop and teach new and existing tools, to produce, experiment and play. All of GOTO10’s projects are based on 100% Free/Libre Open Source Software.

Cybernetics Revisited is a retrospective survey of the work of the artist José Antonio Orts including antecedents (1970-1994), first light-sensitive sound installations and luminous sculptures (1995-2000). It presents multidisciplinary work produced from 1970 to 2000 where technology is used to establish a relation between the visual and the sonic fields as well as between the spectator and the work itself. The show includes the first light-sensitive sound circuit produced by Orts when he was 15 years old (1970), and the inspiration for his later work. Presented for the first time in this exhibition, the circuit is shown together with the later work including his 1980's prized toys. The exhibition also presents four video projections of interactive installations; two electro-acoustic sound works Territorios de sonidos Coloreados (1995) and Cromosfera (1999) produced from photosensitve installations and sound sculpures ‘played' by the artist by the means of luminous devices. The retrospective survey of Orts's work also includes his first light-sensitive installation created for the Centre National des Arts Plastiques Villa d'Arson, Nice (Territoires de sons blancs, 1995) along with other interactive light and sound sculptures such as Dúo rojo verde (1999), serie Ritmos Luminosos, S/T (1999).

José Antonio Orts (ES), born in Valencia (1955), is a multidisciplinary artist working with sound, technology and objects. Orts studied at the Conservatory of Valencia (1985) and the School of Paris (1988). He studied music composition with Assemble Blanquer (1974-1985), Luciano Berio in Aix en Provence (1983), Iannis Xenakis in Salzburg and Delphi (1985), and Yoshihisa Taïra in Paris (1986-88). He expanded his practice in electro acoustic music while studying at the School Phonos of Barcelona (1984), the Center of Mathematique et Automatique Musical of Paris (1987) and in the Groupe of Recherche Musicale of Radio France (1988-1992). Orts was a visiting professor of composition and leader of a seminar on harmony, musical forms and composition in the Conservatory of Zaragoza (1985-1986) and in Valencia (1996-1997). His paintings were first shown in the University of Valencia (1991) and the Official School of Architects of Badajoz (1993). His light-sensitive sound installations were exhibited at the Foundation Maeght of Saint Paul de Vence and in the Ville Arson of Nice (1995), the Center of the Carmen of the IVAM, Valencia (1997), the Berliner Festival Neuer Musik (2000 and 2002), the Institute Cervantes in Brussels (2002), Kryptonale 9 in Berlin (2003), the Center of Culture Ltd Nostra in Ibiza, Formentera and Palma (2004) as well as in Buenos Aires, Mexico DF, Guadalajarra and Montevideo. He received the Scholarship Endesa (1999) and the Scholarship of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm in Berlin (2000) where he was an artist in residence (2002 – 2003). His work is in major international collections in Germany, Holland, France (Central Pompidou in Paris) and Spain (the Foundation ARCH, IVAM of Valencia). He has received a number of prestigious international prizes including the Deutsche Klangkunst Preis (2004) and the first prize of the Biennial of Sculpture Riofisa (2005).

openKURATOR is an online curatorial system (in progress) developed by KURATOR for Observatori. The idea behind openKURATOR reflects an open systems approach to curating and the possibilities for further development towards self-organising, generative and dynamic curatorial systems. In this way processes associated with software are extended to the process of curating a physical exhibition. In its first iteration, openKURATOR provides a semi-moderated online platform for open submission, selection and presentation of works from an open call, presenting six online works selected to address the complexity of socio-technological networks and the issues of un/openness, in/security, un/stability and systems of control. The works were selected by Joasia Krysa (KURATOR), Manuela Moscoso (LaAgencia), Marta Rupérez (TheArtOrganisation), Luís Silva (Rhizome / Lisboa 2.0 Arte Contemporanea). openKURATOR site is developed by Gianni Corino using the Open Source web platform Drupal. For Observatori openKURATOR 2008 presents: Infomania by Cyril de Vroom & Jos Wabeke (2008), Hipercontrol^3 by Bestiario (2007), Mypocket by Burak Arikan (2008), Netart for poor people by Carlos Katastrofsky (2006), Triptych.tv by Abe Linkoln, Jimpunk, Mrtamale (2008), and Viral symphony by Joseph Nechvatal (2007).

Mypocket by Burak Arikan (2008) discloses the artist's personal financial records to the world by exploring and revealing essential patterns in the daily transactions of his bank account. These are the records that we usually keep secret, whereas financial institutions intensively analyze them to score our credibility. Archived on the site, the artist's two years of spending history is analyzed by the custom software to predict future spending; these predictions sometimes determine his future choices, creating a system in which both the software and the artist adapt to one another. Influenced by today's techno-cultural milieu, Mypocket presents a hybrid interface to a living physical/digital process.

Burak Arikan (US/T) is an artist and researcher based in New York and Istanbul. He focuses on creating networked systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. His work confronts issues ranging from cultural sustainability to finance to politics and labor in networked environments. Arikan shows the instances of his systems online and onsite through diverse media including prints, animation, software, electronics, and physical materials. He has a master's degree in the Physical Language Workshop (PLW) from the MIT Media Laboratory and in Visual Communication Design from Istanbul Bilgi University (2004). His work was presented internationally at institutions including Ars Electronica (Linz), Venice Biennale, Amber Festival (Istanbul), Club Phazon (Tokyo) and independent venues such as Art Interactive (Cambridge), Turbulence (online), Upgrade! International (online) and Hafriyat (Istanbul).

Hipercontrol^3 by Bestiario (2007) is a data navigation machine. The data that confines the space contains more than 4000 links originated from 3 del.icio.us webpages: http://del.icio.us/pedrojimenez, http://del.icio.us/mokoyote, http://del.icio.us/nerudl. These web-pages constitute an investigation based on 3 axes: disorientation, subjectivity/control, video-surveillance, created by the team of Zemos98 (http://www.zemos98.org).

Bestiario (ESP) is a small company based on Barcelona and Lisbon. Majority of the work is research developing information interactive spaces. Projects include: 6pli (http://6pli.com), Spectrum Atlas (http://spectrumatlas.org), Informational City Distances (http://bestiario.org/research/citydistances), Archivo JAE (http://archivojae.edaddeplata.org/jae_app/jaeMain.html).

Netart for poor people by Carlos Katastrofsky (2006) is a simple statement on the iconic '404-File not Found' message to illustrate a misunderstanding in most of the common clichés about the net. Netart - just like everything else online - relies on a technological infrastructure, an access to hard - and soft - ware, and at least a basic education in using computers and other preconditions. These premises are normally overlooked when people are talking about the freedom of the Net, its overall accessibility and the assumed democratic structures.

Carlos Katastrofsky (AU) is Vienna-based artist working primarily in the field of new media art. His work examines the politics of Internet-based art production, distribution and consumption, and considers how dominant practices of the artistic modus vivendi - curating, dealing, showing, and reviewing - function in the virtual realm, where the immaterial has replaced the object. His works explore characteristic features of the Internet such as software, interfaces, language, and discussion forums- to question the current development of the Web. His latest work Lastwishes (2007) was commissioned by Lisbon's LX.20. He is co-founder of CONT3XT.NET (2006) - a collaborative platform for the discussion and presentation of issues related to Media Art. (http://cont3xt.net)

Viral symphony by Joseph Nechvatal (2007) (28:09 mins) is an experimental investigations into the blending of computational virtual spaces and the corporeal world into the sonic register. Real-time 'field recordings' of the audio manifestations of his custom created computer viruses are reworked and reprocessed by Andrew Deutsch and Matthew Underwood, resulting in the sonic landscape of the 'viral symph0ny'. With resonances of Yasunao Tone, Fluxus, Oval, and Merzbow, this 28-minute composition is supplemented by a further 50 minutes of audio, comprising the original raw data field recordings. Further contributions to the project include Stephane Sikora (C++ programming) and Steven Mygind (IEA technical support). Project produced at The Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University.

Joseph Nechvatal (US) has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics since 1986. He was an artist-in-residence at the Louis Pasteur Atelier and the Saline Royale / Ledoux Foundation's lab in Arbois, France (1991-1993) working on the Computer Virus Project. In 2002 he extended his experimentation into viral artificial life through a collaboration with the programmer Stephane Sikora of music2eye in a work Computer Virus Project II, exhibited in a solo show cOntaminatiOns (2005) at Le Chateau de Linardie in Senouillac, France. In 2006 Nechvatal received a retrospective exhibition entitled Contaminations at the Butler Institute of American Art's Beecher Center. He currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (SVA) and at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Infomania by Cyril de Vroom & Jos Wabeke (2008) is a project about RFID and ubiquitous computing. The website features a documentary, and contextual information about the subject including clips, links and records of headlines from various newspapers and the Internet sites.

Cyril de Vroom and Jos Wabeke (NL) have recently graduated in Communication and Multimedia Design from the Art Academy in the Netherlands.

 

Alex Amoon (Nonostar) and Fabian Fenk (Pantasz) form the all new Berlin-based band Bodi Bill. No More Wars, their album debut, moves elegantly between club and folk aesthetics, though not denying one another's advantages. The outcome is a beautiful electronic music longplayer, full of catchy dance tracks and melancholic songwriting. Rhythm sequences are taken over by love confessions, which then turn into forward Berlin club music - and vice versa. Bodi Bill's No More Wars is a refined pop album, full of electronics, straight beats, passionate songs, and genuine programming, never falling into the trap of becoming impersonal computer music, but rather evolving organically. Bodi Bill drags twigs and leaves through their laptops, processing them into complex beats. They play classical instruments, and sing because of a most inborn desire to tell the full that they should still be hungry. Still dreaming of the last Sunday morning walk, synthetic sounds are combined with field recordings and wooden beats to fall out of context. Rooms open and close, fizzle and bang. In here, the sampler writes a song, you can dance to tree noises, and the city reaches out for its green surroundings. Using their books, Alex Amoon and Fabian Fenk to transform reality -fractioned into shreds of sound- into music, no matter if working close to silence or midst the roar. Sometimes their methods yield a morphing dance anthem; sometimes they create a ballad about the deadlock and the cramped confines of techno clubs. A hole in the soul, crowded clouds, and passing moments - for them, the world is too big to not be told and lived through in its absolute entirety. Relating the sampling philosophy of Murcof and Matthew Herbert, the intensity of Will Oldham and Thom Yorke and the stirring arrangements of Max Bruch and Alfred Schnittke, Bodi Bill create one thing after all: Digital heart music.

Transit is a 45 minute environment created to immerse the viewer in a space just out of recognition and suspending them in this state to better experience and think about the places in-between. In-between sleep and wakefulness. In-between memory and emotion. In-between the inhale and exhale, where snatches of something almost recognizable appear and dissolve, distorted through our altered consciousness. A multi channel audio / visual installation/live performance that in its ideal showing will see the audience surrounded by large projection screen and speakers.

Paul Bradley is a musician based in UK who creates tapestries of textural drones to redescribe the sonic landscape. Sounds are abstracted from life, reinterpreted and given a new context. Instruments, most notably guitar are disembodied, twisted into new soundworlds and together these are transformed into rich, drifting, sonorous music. These ‘sensual strung-out vibrations' effectively marry digital with analogue and phonography with instrumental disciplines creating an organic abstraction of sound. The final result often gives the impression of time being fluid, whose boundaries are simply there to transcend. Collaborations have been plentiful, working with contemporaries such as Colin Potter, Jonathan Coleclough, Andrew Liles and also as a member of Monos. Paul also runs the ‘Twenty Hertz' and ‘edition sonoro' labels issuing recordings from the likes of Ubeboet, Keith Berry, J. Grzinich, Maile Colbert and Monos.

Maile Colbert is a filmmaker, video, and sound artist currently working in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BFA in The Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, and a MFA in Integrated Media/Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. She has had multiple screenings, exhibits, and shows, including The New York Film Festival, LACE Gallery, MOMA New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, The Portland International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, and has performed and screened widely in Japan, Europe, Mexico, and the United States.

The piece is an interactive installation which alludes to its own process of construction. It consists of a bed covered with a hand made quilt. A chamber situated over the bed creates recognition of the space in real time. Each unit of the quilt has been related to a sound. The sounds are bits of a conversation which a group of women are having while they are creating the quilt. When the spectator sits or lies on the bed, it activates sounds hidden in the chamber corresponding to the patches. The title of the piece refers to the idea of creating by uniting or connecting small bits or objects. It's called ‘patchwork'; the kind of blanket (patchwork quilt) created using units. ‘Patch' is also the word applied to applications which through the organized uniting of objects creates the function of the piece.

Chop Shop is the moniker of New York based sound artist Scott Konzelmann, whose activities have comprised recordings and installations featuring his speaker construction assemblages and sonic compositions since 1987. There have been plenty of micro-edition CD-R releases, 2 noted 3"CDs for the prestigious V2 label, several old school cassettes, a handful of singles, and two legendary 10" vinyl productions. One of which was a double 10" bound in roofing tar strapped to a plate of steel. The other was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party, which was literally chopped in half and assembled on the listener's turntable at their needle's peril. Konzelmann's sound and noise are intrinsically connected to his sculptural objects. Forged from re-purposed junkyard fragments fitted with functional loudspeakers, these objects compress and articulate particular frequencies into hissing static, jet-engine drones, and noxious rumbles, all of which retain a metallurgist residue.

It is not possible to indicate in a concrete manner ‘where' the piece in digital form exists: it is a data base, a series of codes and mechanical algorisms which can be stored in hardware but cannot be touched... for that reason we question their duration, their time and aging in so far as image and support. Time, is well, a rather relative component: It is what makes ‘aging', it deteriorates the supports, being a constant of reality that frames thoughts about the ephemeral, the transitory and the becoming of the piece. The question would be: What remains of a work of digital art when its exhibit time expires? This is a question to which it is not pertinent to respond now, but it is expressed and left suspended as an incognito. This is an ephemeral digital piece, which carries the countdown of its own existence.

I often use raw material from my trips, sounds from different spaces like caves or frozen lakes, sounds from strange animals like some aquatic organisms, sounds from old instruments, strings of grand pianos or wires of cable railways. (I like almost unhearable sounds). These materials are processed and transformed; some of them are treated to be almost unidentifiable. It is important to me that the sounds keep their original archaic energy and characteristic.

Taconexiones is an interactive installation which crosses two forms of expression that the spectator will have to intertwine. It consists of playing with the sound created by the dancing heels of a flamenco dancer, accenting and in some way transforming, through the use of technology.

The project aspires to question the abuse of technology, proposing to the user the metaphor of the human-cyborg transformation through the symbolism of a wheelchair and a projection screen. Man uses technology every day to solve his necessities, but in certain moments the same technology provokes an effect of alienation depriving man of direct contact and relation with the world that surrounds him, creating the necessity of living in virtual worlds, imaginary, technological, and fleeing personal contact. In this way an emotional invalidity is created which manifests in the impossibility of relating without the help of machines. The project deals with warning, through the use of this very same technology, about this situation. It proposes an interactive game which invites the user to renounce their physical mobility by sitting in a wheelchair to be able to interact with an application that proposes navigating through various virtual worlds. In this way, the wheels of technology advance, reaching a point in which we cease to question its use and accept as normal and everyday automaton behaviour. The piece invites us to reflect on the use of technology, not trying to criticize its use, but rather, trying to induce the user to question the social changes which have been produced in recent years in relation to the behaviour of mankind, not only with everyday machines and technological objects, but also concerning the changes produced in the way in which we relate with the people around us and the space we inhabit.

Having exceeded the threshold of the basic common necessities of all animals, humans generate their own necessities from their singular characteristic: rationality. Despite having made use of this capacity to develop the skill to succeed in modifying the environment to their taste, despite having tamed, vegetation, animals and matter, despite having investigated the micro and the macro cosmos, the human species has not been able to find its place. The prouder it becomes of itself the further it distances itself from natural equilibrium. The path of this separation began precisely with the appearance of its capacities to reason. This was the point of dilemma between man and the rest of the universe. Conscious, and as such incapable of accepting it, man initiated the path of absurdity, believed in the concept of sense, formalize its logic, embarked on an investigation to shrink the universe to the scale of its new capacity to reason, began devouring knowledge that does not exist, which it invented in its mind to try to related everything its senses capture. Man is the motor of absurdity. The installation makes the user the motor of the projection of their own image captured with a camera, distorted and projected on the ceiling.

Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his ears inwards: His new work LABYRINTHITIS is a three-part interactive sound piece that consists entirely of sounds generated in the artist's auditory organs - and will cause audible responses in those of the audience. LABYRINTHITIS relies on a principle employed both in medical science and musical practice: When two frequencies at a certain ratio are played into the ear, vibrations of the hair cells in the cochlea will produce a third frequency. This tone is generated by the ear itself: a so-called ‘distortion product otoacoustic emission' (DPOAE), referred to in musicology as ‘Tartini tone'. By arranging these recordings in a composition and playing them to an audience, the artist evokes further distortion effects in the ears of his listeners. At first, each new Tartini tone can only be perceived individually, inside the head of each member of the audience. Kirkegaard picks it up, reproduces it and combines it with another distorting frequency. Thus another Tartini tone is created. Step by step, a pattern of descending tones emerges - ‘intersubjectively' in the audience's ears, ‘objectively' in the auditorium space. The spiral form of this tonal structure mirrors the composition of resonant spectra in the human cochlea. Paradoxical as it may sound: we can listen to our own ears. The human hearing organ - still often perceived as a passive unidirectional medium - does not only receive sounds from the outside, it also generates its own sound from within itself. As a matter of fact, it can even be ‘played on', just like an acoustic instrument.

Jacob Kirkegaard (born 1975, Denmark) is a sound artist with an interest in the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time and hearing. His performances, audio/visual installations and compositions deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain inaccessible to sense perception. With the help of unorthodox recording tools such as accelerometers, hydrophones or home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard manages to capture and explore ‘secret sounds' - distortions, interferences, vibrations, ambiences - from within a variety of environments: volcanic earth, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, crystals, ice... and the human inner ear itself. A graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, Kirkegaard has given workshops and lectures in academic institutions such as the Royal Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen and the Art Institute of Chicago. During the last ten years, he has been presenting exhibitions and touring festivals and conferences throughout the world. He has released five albums (mostly on the British label Touch). Among his numerous collaborators are J.G. Thirlwell, C.M. von Hausswolff, Ann Lislegaard and Philip Jeck.

Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the underground experimental music scene. Over the last twenty five years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, and sound installations in 50 countries of the five continents. His extended catalogue of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 100 international artists) has been released by more than 140 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded twice with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival.

Languages without words have other grammar. As with stimulants that, through the senses, reach the subconscious provoking emotions and feelings. An essence that carries us to another place, a person or a moment of our life. Intangible, elusive and without apparent reference. Particles in the air that invade us against which we can do nothing. The desire satisfied, or not, which becomes necessity. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words... and a smell?

 

Silence is an interactive modular sculpture, multi-user touchable: physical interface and at the same time three dimensional surface projections. The piece has a truncated tetrahedron form centre module, and 32 normal tetrahedrons of sufficiently small size to be easily manipulated; all of the pieces are equipped with circular magnets which allows the connecting and disconnecting of the smaller tetrahedrons to the centre module, following a system of predefined positions where, attaching the smaller pieces consequently modifies the physical structure of the entirety. Interacting with it creates a play of combinations which modifies individual letters, generated and projected onto the piece, creating the illusion of physical letters floating and joining in a liquid medium; the combinations of letters can in some cases create words that make sense and in other cases not. The name of the game for the user is to modify the combination of tetrahedrons attached to the centre module trying to find the word or the combination of nonsensical letters that they want; each user, in modifying the physical structure of the piece, proceeds to modify the former message as well.

L'Oubli du Monde (forgetting the world) is an installation, a concert, a performance; it rather is an environment, or a situation. It is an immersion, to the hearth of a soundscape, recomposed from phonographies of the Amazonian forest. Also, it is a space unfolding, a time stretching. The audience is invited to stay in it, to experience it, to live and sleep in it... Toying with several limits: between the documentary realism and the musical abstraction, between the educated - and awaken - listening and the progressive abandon of the perceptive benchmarks, throughout a nocturnal crossing. Wishing for the musical listening to come apart, to loose and wear away... That another landscape, an abstract, imaginary space would unfold within the first one, within the sound matter and the acoustic phenomenon. It would be necessary not to project any end, or to fall asleep for good. Since 1998, Pali Meursault develops an electroacoustic composition and phonography work. Throughout the use of soundscape recording tools, that work aims to replace the question of listening at the center of the musical issue. A research that is phenomenological as well as electroacoustic and which got confronted to various environments, industrial (Promenade, Universinternational, 2004), urban (notably through a collaboration with the Ici-Même art group] or natural (Without the wolves, And/Oar, 2008).

In Observatori, Novi_sad will present a set previously commissioned and performed at the Dutch National Radio VPRO, which will be out from Staalplaat [NL] in the ‘Mort Aux Vaches' series. Novi_sad (Thanasis Kaproulias, b. 1980) lives and works in Athens, Greece. Influenced by the pioneers of audio assault, he began generating sounds in 2005. Amplified environmental recordings, drone manipulations, structured ambient soundscapes, microtones vs overtones, all come together in a hyper structure of iconoclastic form. Novi_sad's sonic power operates on a level in which the audience participates as transcendental listeners. The sounds explode from sonic movement and lead to the appearance of instantaneous images as experienced and created by each member of the audience. All of his works display a high level of technical ability, as well as sensitivity to the nuances of location. The strength of his soundscapes works in the same elaborateness for the whole creation process, starting from a basis of very strong conceptualism, the intense examination of field recordings over the actual composition work, to the point of performing back the result onto location. His critically acclaimed debut Misguided heart pulses, a hammer, she and the clock, has been followed by Dramazon, an audio track which is now available on TouchRadio from the publishing house Touch [U.K].

Michael Prime's art is mostly focused on letting the listener hear sounds that surround him but of which he remains unaware. This goes from the choice of environments in which he performs (caves, railroad tunnels, forests) to the type of sound sources he uses. On his 1998 CD Domestic Science he manipulated sounds from household appliances like a refrigerator and a washing machine. But his most influential album is the 2000 release L-Fields on which he ingeniously uses bioelectric recordings of hallucinogenic plants to create haunting electro-acoustic works. He developed a technique allowing him to interact with plants, translating variations in their bioelectrical field into sound produced by an oscillator. He performed live with plants on numerous occasions and that´s will be presented in Observatori.

Michael Prime presents himself as a sound ecologist, a title that describes his two passions: music and life. Active on the avant-garde music scene since 1985, he gained a solid reputation playing in electronic ensembles like Morphogenesis and Organum. Prime studied ecology and worked in that field for many years, conserving wildlife habitats in South London. This work led to the development of techniques used to translate environmental and organic sound sources into music. He co-founded the live electronic improvisation group Morphogenesis in 1985 with Roger Sutherland, Adam Bohman, Ron Briefel, Clive Hall, and Fred Sansom and released a string of records with them on Streamline, Paradigm, Vintage Electronic Records, and his own label Mycophile. In 1988, he started performing with the group Organum and released with them a 7" for Les Disques du Soleil et de l'Acier in 1989 and a string of CDs in the 1990s. He has collaborated with such avant-garde luminaries as Jim O'Rourke and Eddie Prevost and formed the group Negative Entropy in 1997 with Geert Feytons of Noise-Makers Fifes.

It is an interactive space, where a situation that occurs in a public space, is reflected in a private one, projecting the images of the street artists in a pool of water, a reflection which is distorted by throwing in a coin, which will activate the audio aspect for a short time, and in that way putting an everyday situation in abstract.

Stray Bullet is a 3D game where the player has to move a ball through a labyrinth filled with holes in the floor without falling into one of the gaps. But instead of using a mouse or a keyboard the player is using a board balance trainer to move the ball. The aim of this Installation is to augment the man-machine interaction by increasing the user awareness of his body and forcing him to react to the will of the machine.

The installation tries to create a dialogue between different mediums of interacting sound, photography, illustration, and video. The projection compliments the installation of fans which project the breeze in the space creating a reaction with the spectator and the image.

Joke Lanz aka Sudden Infant creates a unique blend of physical sound-poetry and dadaistic vocal expression, using contact microphones, prerecorded soundloops and noises. The result is abrupt Musique Concrète juxtapositions of spasmodic gibbering and a battery of disorienting electronics. It's a fragmented field of sound that comes to its own autonomy.

Born in Switzerland, now based in Berlin, Joke Lanz is presenting his work since more than 20 years all over the world. He composed music for contemporary dance, theatre, sound-installations and short-films. Innumerable releases on international labels e.g. Schimpfluch, Entr'acte, RRR, Tochnit Aleph, Blossoming Noise, SSSM, Artware, Klanggalerie, MSBR. Led workshops about Turntablism & Noise Music at the Music Academy Lucerne, he had artist residencies in Berlin (1999) and London (2004). Composition assignment by Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland (2006). Also he´s member of the legendary actionist-group Schimpfluch-Gruppe (with Rudolf Eb.er, Dave Phillips, Daniel Löwenbrück, Marc Zeier...).

Various, or Various Production, is an English dubstep/electronic music duo formed in 2003. The group blends samples, acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and singing from a revolving cast of vocalists. Its members, Adam and Ian, purposefully give very little information about the group or themselves, and tend to do little in the way of self-promotion. Nevertheless, the group began winning critical acclaim with its single releases in 2005 and 2006. Their full-length for XL, The World is Gone, arrived in July of 2006. They have released a large number of vinyl EP's and 7" records, as well as digital exclusives for Rough Trade, iTunes, and Boomkat.The duo signed a publishing deal with the newly formed Fire Songs in November 2007. A division of eclectic London-based record label Fire Records.

A theoretical synopsis about power, the kinds of power and political systems and general theoretical concepts of positive and negative incentives, the example of the ‘turbo' donkey. Donkeys are controlled with blinders and reins, complemented with a stick across the hindquarters or a carrot in front of the muzzle. But if, as well, the stick and the carrot are simultaneously combined, the donkey becomes ‘turbo', as the intensity of motivation is augmented. But even in the case of ‘turbo' donkeys one can further encourage the animal by increasing and/or reducing the distance of the carrot from the muzzle and by the intensity and frequency of the stick across the hindquarters.

Inspired by the current immigration flow. The disappearance of borders makes it easier and easier to embark on a venture, be it by sea or by land, in search of a dream, a better life or of a promising land, converting immigration into a future of prosperity. This piece is concerned with those borders, physical or psychological, which in principle are closed and which obviously hide or deform the reality hidden behind them. The video installation takes place in a series of phases, in which photographs and sound are projected, the space falls silent and darkens. One begins to hear in the distance explosions, helicopter rotors and gunshots. It is the representation of a military conflict which pushes the immigrants to move, to leave their country, it is the fleeing.

We live in a world where everything that surrounds us changes. Think of the change that cities undergo, their evolutions and involutions. Construction without previous studies, buildings which by general norm are very similar to each other, creating monstrous neighbourhoods and towns of clone buildings where repetition is the rule, created without the slightest aesthetic intention and without giving any importance to urban development. For that reason I propose the creation of urbanism and construction with no kind of previous study, in this way the user is the one who creates the virtual neighbourhood or city, criticizing the current situation of development of cities at present.

Theremin of colour is an interactive multimedia piece in which the user takes part through a device with sensors which capture the movements of their hands. This data which is collected by means of a software program is converted into variations in the colours of the light which illuminates the space and in variations of sound. The objective of this piece is to show and in a way bring about an alteration in the perception which the user has of a series of fixed images which are displayed on one of the walls and which are perceived in different ways depending on the colour of the light cast on them.

This piece is based on a game invented by Mozart to compose music by chance. This musical and mathematical genius composed the meter of music through the resulting sum obtained by dice and two matrices. This piece consists in succeeding in also composing music while playing within an environment of reality set up with dice.

Twart.tv is a "web-television" from which is assumed the challenge that television, as a device, will be absorbed and substituted by the internet. Assuming the need to analyze this new situation to which we find ourselves exposed, twart.tv was created with the objective of participating in daily generated reality. Twart.tv is a space of intermediation, diffusion and artistic experimentation at the reach of anyone willing to interact with it. Twart.tv is an interactive television; trying to be a tool for the user. Twart.tv is more than anything a public space. Twart.tv takes advantage of technological circumstances, more and more affordable and accessible, to be able to enjoy an autonomy within the field of art with limited budget. TV-Mató, forms a part of the programming grid of twart.tv; this section will emit all the material which is captured in our TV-mató, in different exposition spaces. TV-mató allows the spectator to record videos of one minute duration in which they can freely express themselves.

 

Submerge yourself in the history of lights, tackle our viewpoint and virtualize the context. A book as non pictorial interface, but rather luminesce, is the tangible support for this piece. Breaking the immobility of the support, providing another view of more dynamic reading, Paper Lights brings the user closer to my more imaginary stories, and submerges them as virtual protagonist of a piece which does not exist, but rather is systematic bits and coloured lights.

That things happen in this way and not in another is without a doubt that which makes the everyday in equal parts a comforting and tedious continuum. That object A goes and bumps into object B due to a slight but sufficient inclination of the surface on which both are found, is something not even worthy of mention. That in observing this or any other thing we will see without seeing is due to that, in fact, it is as though we had already seen it (what does it matter when, whether yesterday, now, tomorrow before lunch...). That this bland tranquility makes one sign, is not a sign of happiness, but rather of resignation. These events, causes and effects, reactions, consequences, norms, laws... that exist because they are thought of and that, of course, are thought of because they exist.