Eric Kluitenberg on Tue, 2 May 2000 00:58:22 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> Announce: net.congestion - International Festival of StreamingMedia |
dear nettimers, Please find herewith the first general announcement of a new festival "net.congestion", entirely devoted to the artistic and tactical use of streaming media, which will be organised in Amsterdam in the beginning of October. We are interested in proposals both for on-site contributions in Amsterdam, as well as remote contributions via the net. kind regards, eric ------------------------------------- net.congestion International Festival of Streaming Media Amsterdam, October 6 - 8, 2000 * INTRODUCTION The Streaming Media Festival is the result of a collaboration of a broad coalition of Dutch and international cultural organisations, artists and media tacticians. The festival is devoted to new forms of broadcasting and live programming that have emerged around the Internet ("streaming media"). The festival presents and explores the use of streaming media as an artistic and tactical medium, i.e. the points where artistically challenging work and socially relevant content meet. The main venues will be Paradiso, De Balie and De Melkweg, creating a unique festival infrastructure around the Leidse Plein in the heart of Amsterdam. The festival will be a showcase of the most exciting and innovative artistic and tactical streaming media projects from around the globe. The program includes performances, concerts, club events, public presentations and debates, the media-bank a public hands-on walk-in media space, walk-in studio's that give the audience a chance to see the artists and technicians at work and interact with the live programs as they are being made, workshops and seminars. A large part of the festival will actually happen in the media; on the Internet, in local and national radio broadcasts, via cable television, satellite, and any other available trans- national medium. Besides a public event and meeting place, the festival will also provide a platform for a professional exchange of ideas and experiences. Various artistic and tactical communities who work with new media, but who do not regularly meet each other will be brought together. The aim of this meeting point is to give new incentives to these communities, and to create new lasting structures for co-operation and the development of fresh ideas and improved technology in this field. The festival will facilitate a cross-point where representatives of the cultural field and the main-stream industry can meet to learn about each others ideas and exchange mutual experiences. * HISTORY AND PRIOR EVENTS In the past few years there have been a number of interesting junctures for thought and discussion about streaming media in a cultural and artistic context. 'Horizontal radio' by Kunstradio Wien ('95) was probaly one of the earliest cross-overs between radio and net.radio in the arts. In 1998 Net.radio Days (Berlin) created the first major forum of this kind. From this landmark event a number of successful gatherings followed including 'Sync or Stream'in Banff (Canada), Art Servers Unlimited (London, 98), The Acoustic Space - 56 hours live net.radio at Open X (Ars Electronica, Linz, 98), and Xchange Unlimited (Riga, 98). Those present at these forums were largely from net.radio and net.art communities such as the Xchange community. They brought together ideas and experiences to share with other practitioners. However, it has always been apparent that at these events the necessary infrastructure to work in an ongoing collaborative way was missing. It has also been true that these groups have been unable to access resources that would raise the profile of their practice within the public sphere. * AIMS OF THE FESTIVAL The Streaming Media Festival is aimed both at a larger audience of people interested in the arts and media, experimental music, club culture and related fields, as well as a professional audience who are already engaged, or interested to become engaged, in this rapidly developing medium. The organisers have set the following aims for the festival: - The festival provides a platform primarily for the use of streaming media as an artistic and tactical medium. - The festival will focus strictly on streaming media, both audio and video. - The festival brings image (video / film) and sound (radio & sound art) communities together, who now operate largely in separate domains. - In the tradition of the famous Amsterdam Next 5 Minutes conferences this festival sets itself a particular aim at bringing together artistic form and socially relevant content and practices around streaming media. - An interlocked series of public events will structure the program, that will happen simultaneously in the physical locations in Amsterdam (Paradiso, Balie, Melkweg), on the Internet, in local and national media, as well as through a series of remote events that connect live & on-line to the festival in Amsterdam. - The field of documentary film making is an area where streaming media is already playing a (minor) role, which is expected to expand rapidly in the coming years. The media-arts and tactical media communities, and the documentary film makers do not usually meet. This festival attempts to create a lively exchange between these communities. - The boundary between media-culture and club culture and alternative music culture is of particular importance. They provide not only an area of vibrant activity around streaming media, but also introduce a notion of social space at the intersection of physical space (the clubs) and the media space (the net). - Aside from those already involved in net casting, the festival should also stimulate the awareness among traditional video and media artists of the implications of digital video and streaming media. - The festival should also act as a cross-point between the various artistic and tactical communities and initiatives and the main-stream developments in the new media industry and those groups and individuals who define their future development. * CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND: After the Internet survived the Y2K prophecies almost flawlessly, the stage now seems set for the transformation of the net into a main-stream medium. In less than 10 years after opening up to private users, the character of the Internet once again is changing dramatically. Part of this transformation are the continuously enhanced graphic capabilities of the World Wide Web, but even more so the new forms of micro-, narrow- and broad- casting via the Internet that have emerged in recent years. The generic name for these new types of live media programming via digital networks is called Streaming Media. Similar to discussion groups and mailing lists before, these new types of live programming via the net could be set up relatively easily by independent groups of net. enthusiasts, or even by individual experimenters. These new open distribution channels, typically spurred frantic activity in arts and music communities around the planet, leading to novel media formats as net.radio and net.audio, or web-tv. This early artistic activity was quickly followed by a tremendous interest of tactical media initiatives, who work in a more decidedly social and political context. Finally also the club culture scene, media-artists, and even documentary film makers began to experiment with the new streaming media. This early phase of experimentation now seems to come to a close, making way for a new stage in the development of the Internet; the fusion of old and new media, most notably of Television and the Internet. With television becoming digital from recording and production to distribution, and the Internet being enhanced with capabilities for delivering live programming, it became more or less inevitable that the two would come together.. The striking announcement of the mega-merger of Internet access provider America On-Line and media conglomerate Time Warner on January 10th of this year, no more than illustrates this process. This and other so called "deals of the century" represent the marriage of 20th century broadcast media brands to 21st century delivery systems. Behind these developments lie the technologies of streaming media. With this new transformation towards a main-stream medium, also main-stream interests enter the net. Dilemma's and opportunities On the one hand countless new opportunities emerge for distributing live content via digital networks. The main-stream breakthrough certifies continued technical development and interest for the new medium. The danger of marginalisation of the early innovators, however, is equally real. The Streaming Media Festival offers a platform where these artistic and tactical initiatives can reposition themselves, present and share their excellent work, and meet and exchange with the people who shape the future development of streaming media, both in the main-stream as well as at the edge. Right now, streaming media is at an interesting crossroads. The tools, which are being utilised by streaming media producers in the cultural and commercial fields are almost the same. The main differentiating factor between these two groups is the content, and the way the content is presented. This is a new phenomenon. This is the perfect moment for streaming activists to gather. The moment to confront the fact that although these developments represent great creative promise they also threaten to destroy everything that gave the net a natural bias towards principles of participation, collaboration and distributed authorship. The internet as a space for new forms of freedom, a zone in which radical cultural forms could emerge from new social processes could be overwhelmed by the production and consumption of spectacle. The emancipatory potential of the internet is in danger of being snuffed out by being transformed into a classical broadcast medium, neatly dividing producers and consumers. Only two years ago cultural and artistic groups such as Xchange experimented with the medium and were well in advance of industry (at this time there were not many commercial streaming media enterprises apart form those creating player and encoding tools). Developments such as the Radio Internationale Stadt's content database "Orang", Heath Buntings World Service, Interface Pirate Radio, and 'self.e x t r a c t i n g.radio' by r a d i o q u a l i a were exciting technical and conceptual innovations of the technology. Recently, however, we have experienced a very sudden change - mp3 is now the most widely searched term in search engines, replacing 'sex' for the first time in the modern public history of the Internet. This curious fact heralds a new era of public interest in streaming media. Additionally, there has been an increase in sophistication of streaming media technology, and bandwidth accessibility is growing fast. These circumstances have yielded an unprecedented growth of commercial streaming media enterprises and their propriety innovations. Unfortunately the cultural and artistic communities have not continued their initial rapid development, and we are quickly seeing these important initiators and innovators, who were once leaders in this field, being left behind by main-stream developments in the media-industry. As actors in this field and organisers of this festival we feel that this is not a necessary course of development. We rather see a an increased urgency, and a wider window of opportunity for artistic and critical exploration than ever before. The festival wishes to create an innovative platform for that. * STRUCTURE AND EVENTS: ONLINE Events For this festival the events happening in the media space are equally important as the events taking place in the real physical space in Amsterdam. The online aspect of the festival will be both a reflection of the activities in real space and an event in itself. The web site accompanying the festival will be an 'event', with a large collection of streaming tools for the public to experiment with, documentation of the content collected for the festival, the content itself, and information about streaming media. Streamed Events All the public discussions will be streamed live for free access over the internet. In addition we intend to have online participation by invited remote guests. These contributors will present their work or thoughts to the panel discussion by way of live streamed video and audio, direct to the presentation rooms. Hybrid Broadcast Events The festival would like to follow the model for hybrid broadcasting as established by DDS' Virtual Media Lab. Within a small but open environment we wish to melt different streaming and broadcasting media, to form hybrid outputs online, on air, and via satellite. The public is welcome to occupy this space while this occurs, and of course there will be plenty of opportunity for participation by the online public. The output of these hybrid broadcasts will also be displayed throughout the festival venues, both visually and audibly. Remote Participation The festival is organised in close co-operation with a large and very international community of artists, media producers and activists scattered across the planet. It is obvious that it will not be possible for all these people and groups to visit the festival in person. The very nature of the festival, however, turns this liability into an opportunity. T he net offers manifold possibilities for remote participation in live events, for re-mixing, co-creation, and mediated presentations. These remote contributions on-line will therefore add an important decentralised dimension to the festival. OFF-LINE Events A unique festival infrastructure in the heart of Amsterdam will create the backbone of the streaming media festival. The famous concert and club spaces Paradiso and Melkweg, and De Balie - centre for culture and politics, all located within two minutes walking distance from each other, will be the main venues for the festival. These venues will host a diverse series of public events and presentations. Concerts, performances and club-events The cross-over terrain between new music, dance and club culture, and media culture is investigated through a series of club events, live concerts and performances. Live programming via the Internet is becoming highly popular in club and concert-spaces. The performance and club events will bring together high profiled performers from the contemporary music and club scene, as well as young innovative musicians, sound and performance artists who produce challenging work in this new field. Walk in Studio A walk in studio for broadcast and streamed representation of the real space events will be created for the festival. The public is welcome to walk through this space and observe the artists and technicians at work. The aim of this studio is to reduce and demystify the live content production process and offer the public the opportunity to see and understand this process. This studio will be located in an open public space in one of the three festival venues. The Media Bank The media bank offers the visitors a chance at a first hand experience of streaming media in various formats. A centralised collection of PCs is connected to a central server, for the public to select and experience streamed audio and video material. The content collected will include artists works and also some demonstrative material comparing different streaming technologies and the quality they produce at high and low stream rates, ranging from the average home situation to professional broadband set-ups. * PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS & DEBATES: Besides the concerts, performances, walk-in spaces and club events the festival will contain a series of public debates and presentations intended to provide a wider culturally literate audience with an insight and background information about the recent developments in streaming media. Which new forms of broadcasting via the Internet are emerging? What kind of artistic work is being done? How can streaming media be used in a social and political context? What new forms of information dissemination emerge? These public presentations will include: Artist Presentations Leading individual artists and artist collectives around the globe will be invited to present and comment their work, but this program will also feature works of young artists and promising new initiatives. Panels and discussions Some of the preliminary topics that have been suggested for the public panel discussions include: - How we consume media? - Web Documentaries - Tactical Streams - The Narrative - Medium vs the message - Who needs an audience? - Mainstream Content - Free Speech - The Industry * WORKSHOPS AND SEMINARS: The workshops and seminars are primarily intended for practitioners and hence will require a base level of understanding of streaming media. As one of the important aims of the festival is to provide an opportunity for streaming media organisations and individuals to develop their practice, we wish to offer moderate and advanced courses. The workshops will be moderated by invited international experts, who will also have the opportunity to propose additional themes for these workshops themselves. Preliminary topics suggested for the workshops and seminars include: - Streaming Media: The basics - Legal Constraints - Video and Audio Codec Performance - Players - Customised Players - The Power of the database - Technical Workshops (software / hardware / standards) * PARTICIPATING ORGANISATIONS: De Balie Bellissima DDS DFM rtv Int. HKU - Faculty for Media & Technology, MFA/PHD Program Kunst En Televisie Stichting (K.E.T.S.) Melkweg Paradiso r a d i o q u a l i a Radio 100 De Waag XS4ALL * ORGANISERS / EDITORIAL TEAM: Initial Concept: Adam Hyde EDITORIAL TEAM: Adam Hyde <adam @xs4all.nl> Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl> Honor Harger David Garcia PRODUCTION: Lucas Evers (co-ordination) Justin Kniest (Paradiso) Kees Brienen (Paradiso) Boris van Vorstenbosch (Melkweg) CONTACT: De Balie c/o Lucas Evers / net.congestion Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10 1017 RR Amsterdam Tel. +31.20.553 51 51 Fax. +31.20.553 51 55 e-mail: congestion@balie.nl * INTERNATIONAL CONSULTANT EDITORS: Rachel Baker (.uk) Steven Bradly (.us) Andrew Bullen (.nl) Heath Bunting (.uk) Ted Byfield (.com) Martin Conrads (.de) Micz Flor (.de) Menno Grootveld (.nl) Heidi Grundmann (.at) Manse Jacobi (.com) Zina Kaye (.au) Susan Kennard (.ca) Tetsuo Kogawa (.jp) Geert Lovink (.nl) Manu Luksch (.at) MauzZ (.nl) Drazen Pantic (.net) Gordan Paunovic (.yu) Jesse Reynolds (.au) Mike Riemel (.de) Pit Shultz (.de) Rasa Smite (.lv) Marleen Stikker (.nl) Toek (.nl) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net