Syndicate: Wiretap 5.13 - Story-boards for Interactive Media

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

V2_Organisation and Exploding Cinema present:


Wiretap 5.13 - Story-boards for Interactive Media


Location: V2_Organisation, Eendrachtsstr.10, Rotterdam
Date: Sunday, 30 January 2000, 14.00-17.30 hrs
Entrance: Hfl. 7,50


With: Ron Kuivila (US), David Blair (US/F), Martin Berghammer (D)
Moderator: Tanja den Broeder (NL)



Wiretap 5.13 - Story-boards for Interactive Media, deals with the
construction of narrative and interactivity in media art projects.
Interactive films, electronic music or computer games no longer have a
fixed, linear narrative, but they offer the user the possibility to
constructing their own stories, their own works from the digital material.

Notation determines the outcome of a performance in the more traditional
art forms, like in classical music composition or the story-board in
film-making. Here, notation provides a rather strict rule for the
realisation of the art work. In non-linear media, notation has to strike
the right balance between the freedom of the user to choose a path through
the material, and the need, or the desire of the artist, to convey a
certain story, or to construct an exciting narrative.

The question arises, how much narrative should be scripted into an
interactive environment, and how much freedom the user of such environments
has to perform? How can a fruitful instability be introduced into such
programmes? The Wiretap programme looks at the role that direction, chance,
subjective decisions and social relations play in digital performance
spaces. It explores new forms of notation and interactional scores which
guide and motivate action and interaction in multi-medial environments.



Guests:

Ron Kuivila (US) is a sound artist and musician who studied with, amongst
others, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Alvin Lucier. Kuivila teaches at the
Music department of Wesleyan University. Ron Kuivila composes music and
designs sound installations that revolve around the unusual home-made and
home-modified hardware and software instruments he designs. He pioneered
the use of ultrasound and sound sampling in live performance. More recent
work has explored the possibilities of mutant speech forms, compositional
algorithms, and high voltage phenomena. In 1999-2000, Kuivila is a guest of
the Berlin artists programme of the DAAD.

Martin Berghammer (D) is a visual artist, web-designer and programmer who
lives in Berlin. He is the director an co-curator of Shift e.V., an art
organisation and gallery in Berlin. For Shift, Berghammer recently curated
the exhibition 'RELOAD' in which four artists teams designed special
levels for the online multi-user game Quake. Berghammer has done extensive
research about online games, focusing on the social and creative aspects of
online interaction.

David Blair (US/F) is a film maker and media artist who has recently
launched the first complete Web-version of 'Waxweb', a "hypermedia" version
of the theatrically-distributed electronic feature "WAX or the discovery
among the bees" (1991). Waxweb is available on CD-Rom and on the Web, in
English, French, or Japanese versions, and is based on 1600 film shots and
a 25-section matrix unique to each shot. It is one of the most extensive
and complex artistic attempts to date at reconciling film narrative with a
non-linear, hypermedia structure.

Tanja den Broeder (NL) works in the area of new media and design direction
after a career in theatre and television.
"The Greeks employed drama and theatre as tools for thoughts in much the
same way in which we hope to employ our computers today. Greek drama was the
way that Greek culture publicly thought and felt about the most important
issues of humanity, including ethics, morality, government, and religion.
The tragic universe placed in the digital domain can be a forum, a context,
for the postmodern soul to experience motions of heroic splendour within."


Bookmarks

Martin Berghammer / Shift - http://www.shift-ev.de
David Blair: Waxweb - http://www.waxweb.org
David Blair: The Telepathic Motion Picture of "THE LOST TRIBES" -
http://www.telepathic-movie.org
Calin Dan: Happy Doomsday! - http://www.n2.nl/projects/hd/
Exploding Cinema - http://www.iffrotterdam.nl


Wiretap 5.13 is a co-operation of V2_Oganisation and Exploding Cinema. The
Wiretap series is supported by the Rotterdam Art Foundation and the Dutch
Ministry of Culture. V2_Organisation is supported by the City of Rotterdam,
by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and Luna Internet.



Exhibition

Calin Dan: Happy Doomsday!

During the IFFR and as part of the Exploding Cinema programma, V2_ presents
the Dutch premier exhibition of the interactive multi-user installation
Happy Doomsday! by Calin Dan (RO/NL). Happy Doomsday! is a reflexion about
history and action, modelled on a computer game in which two users go into
battle. Two fitness machines function as interfaces and navigation tools in
the virtual battlegrounds and dungeons of European culture. A prototype
version of the installation was presented during the DEAF98 festival, and
the completed piece was recently shown at the ZKM in Karlsruhe/Germany.
Location: V2_, Eendrachtstr. 10, Rotterdam
Duration:  26 January - 6 February 2000



Context Wiretap 5.13

Notation is a way of representing, or: writing down, movements and
modulations in time. A well-known form of notation is the musical score of
classical Western music where the score provides the possibility for an
accurate, reproduction of a musical piece which the performer may never
have heard before. Graphic signs are used to represent modulations of sound
through the manipulation of musical instruments (pitch, rhythm,
coordination and dis/harmony of different players).

Notation is a specific code of description which can also be applied to
other systems and types of performances. Dance, for instance, can also be
notated, as can be the performance of audiovisual electronic material. In
film-making, the story-board is a form of notation which is playing an
increasingly important role when, in interactive movies and games, the
linearity of the traditional narrative is replaced by open, non-linear
narrative environments of sound, image and text.

This field for performative applications within electronic arts is rapidly
expanding. The role a notation plays need not be to specify a work so much
as create a set of conditions that enable creative action.  Such notations
are found in the work of John Cage, the 'prose scores' of Fluxus, and
ongoing practices in improvised music. Interactive systems, digitally
supported music and dance performances, databases  of audiovisual material,
etc., extend this, further confusing the social roles of  'maker', 'performer',
'user', and 'consumer'. The more indeterminate the notation, the greater
the freedom of the performer and the more blurred the distinction between
the composer and the performer, between programmer and user. In interactive
systems, every user becomes a performer and a co-composer. The challenge
for the designers of such tools and notations is to find the right balance
between constraint and openness, between fixing and destabilising narrative
and expressive elements.



---------------------------------------------
V2_Organisation
Eendrachtsstraat 10 - 3012 XL Rotterdam
tel: 31.(0)10.206.7272
fax: 31.(0)10.206.7271
mail: v2@v2.nl
URL: http://www.v2.nl/wiretap
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