MEDIA PERFORMANCE

Info

Performance as a new field of creativity has shaped itself since the beginning of the 1960s along with development of media art, as well as new composing strategies, broadening the field of contemporary music, such as happening and actionism, live activities employing audio tape, and prepared musical instruments. Photography, film and video have first been used by artists to objectively document their performative actions, which were often accompanied by sound. Later on these very media became crucial elements of the technological configuration, what has opened the way for the development of media performance. This vast field encompasses today various genres and techniques, starting from multumedia and audiovisual spectacles, interventions within broadcast media, to programming strategies of genenerating events in real time.

The program features 43 chosen and edited materials, recorded, among others, during the subsequent editions of the WRO Festival and the WRO Media Art Biennale in the years 1994–2014. These are actions by the outstanding Polish and international artists, using electronic media to explore relations between sound and image; performances experimenting with broadcast and communication space, including the low-tech and microsound aesthetics; testing interactivity along with generative and algorhytmic composition, and the applicability of the technological instruments to create new strategies of creation and perception.

Works

Władysław Kaźmierczak / Crash / 1994 / PL / 8’56”

„This transmission from a TV studio took place in the spring of 1994 under the auspices of the WRO Polish Monitor Festival in collaboration with Polish national television. Władysław Kaźmierczak’s action was the first perfomance broadcast live on public television in Poland. Direct transmission is essential to the nature of the work, which was broadcast while other channels were showing the evening news. This was a period when more and more TV stations were appearing in Poland, and, along with them, the practice of channel—surfing. Kaźmierczak’s action is a striking blend of artistic expression with the realm of news broadcasting. The personal predicament of the artist, who’s trying to get down from a rickety structure and out of the public space of the TV studio, is interspliced with reporters’ footage of the absurdity of police intervention in a spontaneous demonstration by kids celebrating the first day of spring. Television has a new language now; the propagandistic newspeak of the previous era has long since been replaced by the explosion of violent images that typifies contemporary news programs. The mentality of the police, though, is still blurry: Several years into the general social and political transformation, the police don’t know whether to react in the old style or the new.” source: Piotr Krajewski, From Monument to Market. Video Art and Public Space, ed.: Piotr Krajewski, Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska, WRO Art Center, 2005. Place and date of documentation: WRO 94 Polish Monitor Festival, television studio, Wrocław, May 1994

Piotr Wyrzykowski / Embodiment / 1994 / PL / 8’39”

A performance during which the artist gives physical value to a immaterial phenomenon of a drop—out, which — defined by the video tape technology — is lack of small fragment in the picture, a hole visible as a torn part of the film frame or slightly defective picture. A defect, caused by an accidental magnetic glitch on video tape, in the performance is effected by using a needle, with which the artist, wrapped with the tape, makes holes in the tape and his own body. Before the artist wraps himself with the tape taken out of a cassette, he uses a camcorder to film a close—up of his torso and head in a self—portrait recording, with the camera held in his own spinning hand. The pierced tape with the traces of the artist’s blood is returned to the cassette. The defective tape as an original object becomes not merely a material medium for an electronic recording of a picture, but a contemporary relic with a vague status of the original, impossible to reproduce even in the age of seemingly universal and infinite mechanical reproduction. Place and date of recording: WRO the Polish Monitor, television studio, Wrocław, May 1994

Józef Robakowski / I Am Electric / 1996 / PL / 13’12”

I Am Electric has been a hazardous action performed during WRO 96 Monitor Polski Festival. The artist presented a tool utilising his body as a connector for the flowing electricity whose voltage has been gradually increased with the participation of the audience and on the artist’s demand. The interest over the phenomenon of energy and the reflexion upon the artist work has appeared in Robakowski’s earlier works such as About Fingers (1982) or My Videomasochism (1989). During his performance, the artist commented on the course of action humorously. The artist’s commentary consisted mostly of comparing eletrical energy to work, emotions or the relations in the world of art. The other layer of action was the atmosphere created in the studio, the strong interest and unprecedented reaction of the audience of the live broadcast in the public television. Place and date of documentation: Festival WRO 96 Polish Monitor, television studio, Wrocław, May 1996

Stelarc / The Third Hand / 1997 / AU / 10’42”

Stelarc describes his Third Hand project (1979—1998) as an appearance, in which a mechanical human—like hand is attached to the artist`s right arm as an additional hand. The movements of the hand are controlled by the electrical signals of the muscles contractions that are picked up, pre—amplified, rectified, and sent to the switching system. The hand, made from aluminium, stainless steel, acrylic and latex has ability to pinch, grasp and rotate in wrist, as well as is provided with a tactile feedback system for a sense of touch. Place and date of recording: 5th Sound Basis Visual Art Festival WRO 97, Apocalypse Hall, Grotowski Institute, Wrocław, May 4th, 1997

Piotr Wyrzykowski / Technopera 4.1 (TV reportage) / 1998 / PL / 13’57”

Technopera is a complex project by CUKT (an abrreviation of Central Office for Technical Culture), a group that shaped the Tricity’s techno scene, in which collective activities Peter Style was closely involved. The stage realization of Technopera, in the front of stage design created by huge projections of film fragments, close-ups of performers and text stripes, authentic performers appear: a very physical performer in a role of the Cyborg, a singer and performer of contemporary music pieces Haleh Abghari and the CUKT member Robert Jurkowski as a Man. A libretto created with Dre Kudlatz also includes characters of Bit and Aliens. Actors use texts of approximately hundred short quotes taken from films that appear successively on the screen. In an interview during Ekspresja Mediow Peter Style introduces a vision of Technopera which involves the audience, virtually participating in scenic performance through the internet using texts from a compilation prepared by the artists. Place an date of documentation: WRO Ekspresja Mediów, 1998

Phill Niblock / Music and image / 2000 / US / 14’02”

Born in Indiana in 1933, Niblock has become known not only for his music but for the experimental documentary films that usually also form part of Niblock’s live performance. The films show people, working in non-Western cultures, on simple agricultural or craftwork tasks. The shots are lenghty, and as straightforward as it’s possible to get; no commentary, no editing, just pictures of people doing what they do. What is common in Niblock’s films ist that although the misuc changes constantly, both at the microscopic level produced by interference between different microtones, and at the overall structural level embodied in the sequence of frequencies, it gives the impression of being a timeless continuum. Tha way the music chcanges is of secondary improtance to its mere existence, since this music which (Niblock always recommends high volume) has an incredible sense of presence. As with his films, change is very gradual, and the music becomes more of an environment than what music generally is, a narrative. Like other minimalist music, listening to Niblock’s compositions requires a definite change in perceptual approach; you need to immerse yourself in it, exerience it at a direct intutivie level, allow your attention to drift and follow subtle patterns in the overall density. WRO2000@kultura catalogue Place and date of documentation: WRO2000@kultura, Leopoldin Aula, Wroclaw, November, 2000

Alexei Shulgin / 386 DX Cyberpunk Rockbank / 2001 / RU / 1’59”

386DX is an on-going performance (since late 90s), in which the artist manipulates an antiquated computer with Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the legendary Intel 80386 DX processor to perform digital renditions of popular music hits, while a text-to-speech voice „sings” the lyrics. „Although on the surface the music of 386 DX is undeniably humorous, the project uncovers a series of deeper questions about the complexities of authorship in the digital age. 386 DX was invented and developed by Alexei Shulgin in 1998. The „band” has „performed” over 40 concerts in various locations throughout Europe and the United States, and also „plays” in public spaces as a street musician. Who, exactly, is 386 DX? 386 DX is a computer built by a hardware manufacturer who plays songs written by famous groups using software created by a third party company. So to what extent can Shulgin claim ownership of 386 DX? Does this project make him a musician or merely a technician? Is there a difference? Based on the evidence, it seems that Shulgin prefers to keep things ambiguous. He lists himself in the liner notes as „Operator” and includes software on the CD which allows the user to create more 386 DX songs on his/her own. Anarchy in the UK and Smells Like Teen Spirit come from The Best of 386 DX, a collection of timeless covers of everyone from Bob Marley and the Wailers to The Who, The Kinks or John Lennon. The songs are just so plain absurd that they are sure to bring a smile to even the surliest of faces.”  (http://easylife.org) Place and date of documentation: 9th Media Art Biennale WRO 01, Wrocław, May 2001

Anna Płotnicka, Paweł Janicki / Performance on Demand / 2001 / PL / 4’59”

In Performance on Demand (2001), the audience Internet collectively steers the artist’s activities via Internet. The work was created in collaboration with Paweł Janicki who designed the communication strategy and software enabling to shift the perforer’s activities into the space of the net. The performer in an isolated space had at her disposal a set of simple objects of everyday use, such as matches, a jug, a book, a pen, etc. Place and date of documentation: 9th Media Art Biennale WRO 01, Contemporary Theater in Wrocław, May 4th, 2001

Bertrand Merlier, Jean-Marc Kuchenne / 4Hands / 2003 / FR / 10’11”

4 Hands is a multimedia instrumental duet, an interactive performance investigating the sensitive world and stimulating relations between technology, gesture, sound and image. No instruments are visible, only four magnified hands of the performers, lighted intentionally, are seen on three screens in the background. The artist’s bodies, not of interest, only act as two marionettes telling allegorical stories thus vivifying sound and images. Four hands spin, caress, knock, scratch, stretch, describe complex arabesques, and intriguing figures in a camera field. Its gestures of the performers obviously control images and sounds: one of the artists produces electro-acoustic music which is transferred to two speakers. The other artist operates the video projection on the big screens in the background. 4 Hands plays different media for sound, images, the hands shown on the monitors and their shadows on the ceiling. Both artists use the same means: a camera and the EyeCon software for motion tracking, which turns their gestures into visible sound and readable image. The electro-musical duet and the video projection completely change the habit and relation between sound and image. Place and date of recording: 10th Media Art Biennale WRO 2003, Wrocław, May 2003

Paweł Janicki / Ping Melody / 2003 / PL / 17’38”

Ping Melody is an Internet-based musical performance, using the mechanism of the programming command ping, which consists in that a series of data packages sent to the specified network location is returned to the sender. On the basis of the delay, number of lost or damaged packages, and other similar information, one can effectively diagnose the state of the tested network connections. In his performance, Janicki uses a reconstructed version of the ping command and sound samples digitized in real time as the data packages. The music played live unplugged is sent to the selected location on the Internet. Janicki often uses military or pornographic servers. The audio excerpts return partially damaged by errors and stream delay, and after playing become a sonic image of the temporary connection in the global communications network, and the musician begins to improvise with himself. The performance is accompanied by the visualization of the data packages sent and returned to different network location. The artist emphasizes that he does not use the Internet as a tool, but a forum for follow-up. In 2004, the performance, performed each time with the accompaniment of another instrumentalist, was awarded netarts.org main prize by the Machida City Museum of Graphic Art in Tokyo. Place and date of recording: 11th Media Art Biennale WRO 05, National Museum in Wroclaw, May, 2005

Jarosław Kapuściński / The Point Is… / 2003 / PL/US / 12’32”

The intermedia lecture-performance The Point Is… was inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s Point and line to plane, a book in which the artist attempts to objectively and methodically classify the expresion of basic graphical elements. In reality the presented views were subjective and their tone expressive in itself. The Point Is… playfully parallels this quasi-scientific attempt within an intermedia performative context. Visual points are collided with musical gestures and word expressions to “methodically” reveal the multiple dimensions of “intermedia point”. Place and date of documentation: 10th Media Art Biennale WRO 03 Globalica, Wrocław, May 2003

Julien Maire / Demi-Pas / 2005 / FR / 11’25”

Demi-Pas is a projection performance, resulting with a short film projected using a ”reversed camera” technique. A projector has been converted to house micro-mechanisms that produce animated images using a principle similar to that of cinematography. Demi-Pas thus finds its own narrative methods, its own action and images, like a kind of projected theater. Real objects and photographic material are transposed within the projector. Based on this experimental form of projection, the film narrates a tale that has an extremely simple storyline: one man’s daily routine. Demi-Pas is a short film that constructs an everyday reality, thus highlighting simultaneously both its simplicity and the complexity. Place and time of recording: 11th Media Art Biennale WRO 2005, Wrocław, May 2005

Sara Kolster, Derek Holzer / ResonanCity / 2005 / NL/US / 5’32”

ResonanCITY is a performance in which the artists employ and re-use myriads of sounds and images disappearing unheard and unseen in everyday life, simply because they are too small or because we lack the means to pick them up. ResonanCITY collects such microscopic sounds from various cities, and subsequently enlarges and transforms them. A new city of image and sound is being built during the performance within the existing space. Video artist Sarah Kolster utilizes macro lenses and a light box. Without using any effects, she captures the images and manipulates the found footage. The sound is composed of found objects, folk music, spoken word or field recordings. These are mixed live on computer to bring hidden details and nuances to the surface. Place and date of documentaiton: 11th Media Art Biennale WRO 05, Wrocław, May, 2005

incite/: Kera Nagel + André Aspelmeier / Bez tytułu (WRO 07) / 2007 / DE / 5’36”

incite/: (Kera Nagel, André Aspelmeier) is a Hamburg-based audiovisual electronic duo creating electronic audiovisual compositions.Their original minimalist sound is combined with a greyscale visual layer. The monochromatic, highly processed video imagery is always projected onto a screen, a white podium and the performers’ bodies, who become in such way a part of dynamics and narrative of an audiovisual artwork. Starting from 2007, the duo regularly preforms at the Media Art Biennale WRO, where it was awarded two times (2007 and 2011). They were also awarded such prizes as the Visual Music Award (2012) and among others at such festivals as VAD Girona (2007) or International Videofestival Bochum (2008). Place and date of recording: 12th Media Art Biennale WRO 2007, Wrocław, May 2007

Scanner. D-Fuse / Lights Turned Down / 2007 / UK / 16’30”

Performance focuses on the rhythmic relationship between light and sound. Distorted and reprocessed traffic changes into a tunnel of light. Lights Turned Down is a live interchange between artists charting a conversational movement of colour, music, texture and image, propelled at 128 beats per minute.

Brian Mackern / (((.living.stereo.))) / 2007 / UY / 8’25”

(((.living stereo.))) is a live presentation of the artist’s CD-ROM that showcases two ways of using, seeing and hearing things in which digital processes are involved. Its main interface reflects fragments of 1958 film Introducing Stereophonic Phonograph Records. Each of the two main sections: SoundCode.Sketches and cinema.tik links to different sets of soundtoys (simple soundvisual interfaces and remixers) reflecting two ways of interacting/reacting with the code and digital processes. The SoundCode.Sketches chapter shows soundtoys in which the codes are tightly linked to visuals. As the artist navigates the soundtoys, the visuals reflects the nakedness of the code. The cinema.tik chapter shows the same processes but “skinned” by iconographic loops and fragments of films connected with the artist’s “history” as a culture consumer. The codes he used are re-adaptations of codes found in the internet and designed for other tasks (physics spatialization, formulae representations etc). Thus three approaches to or levels of remixing are involved: the soundvisual/interface, code and culture. Place and date of recording: 12th Media Art Biennale WRO 2007, Wrocław, May 2007

Brin Mackern / Chamanic Interferences / 2007 / UY / 8’44”

Chamanic Interferences is a series of image-sound works, which resulted from the collaboration between various artists and musicians. Leitmotif of the project is the concept of “double consciousness” and its role in art. Through the notion of “double consciousness” the artist indicates a state of being which opens two or more different fields of experience at the same time. In classical anthropological terms this state is described as the shamanic “trance”, in which the shaman navigates through the outermost limits of the reality and psychic spaces. In the contemporary technological reality the notion of “double consciousness” is reflected by the possibility of moving without efforts through the infinite Cyberspace remaining at the same time within the structures of the material world. Place and date of recording: 12th Media Art Biennale WRO 2007, Wrocław, May 2007

Suguru Goto / Augmented Body / 2007 / JP / 2’11”

Burstscratch / Le Point Aveugle / 2007 / FR / 11’30”

Intuitive cinema, with or without white screen, with or without focus, without pop corn neither carbonated drinks, structured by a confused screenplay. Autistic proposition of pictures in movement running one after the other and thrown by means of ancestral instruments substituted for few years by the high digital acrobatics. With Le Point Aveugle we propose a session of live cinema, visual and sound performance using several projectors 16mm. The original images are manipulated and modified by various means: variations of focal, superimposing, rehearsals of sequences, partial maskings, additions of colored filters or transparent objects… Conceived as a dialogue between several film-makers, this performance considers the film image as material and light, as a spouting out visual stream of the darkness, destroyed and reconstructed permanently. By abandoning the story to redefine us on the nature of the film medium, we try to create something of the order of a contemplative journey, leaving to every spectator the care of leading its own investigation… Place and date of recording: 12th Media Art Biennale WRO 2007, Wrocław, May 2007

Johannes Kreidler / RAM Microsystems / 2007 / DE / 4’37”

Random access memory (RAM) is the working storage of a computer, so to say its short-term memory, where data can be edited in high speed. There, operations always develop systematic coherences, for instance when working out separated domains in successive blocks. That is not very different from the human brain. In this performance, a computer reads out permanently from about 350 samples. As improvised material, they are staggered and transformed with the self-designed instrument haptles, a reprogrammed flight simulator joystick to have a haptic control over the samples.

Paweł Janicki / MtnCtrld / 2008 / PL / 5’18”

Reconstruction and deconstruction of the classical self-portrait treated as a form based on contemporary media is the main idea of the performance MtnCtrld. The work uses both visual and audio forms and is based on a motion-detection system in which a camera documents the artist’s face and its expressions. The video stream is analyzed by the system and the abstract information created in such way can be treated as an equivalent of the traditional image reproduction technique. These data are being then transformed to sound structures and are applied to realtime image processing software. Video documentation, courtesy of Ania Ejsmont. Place and date of recording: Underwater Wrocław Festival, Wrocław, July 2008

Yoshihito Mizuuchi / A / 2009 / JP / 51”

A is a short “low-fi” sound performance in which the artists uses, among other, a self-built kinetic object, plastic bottles attached to each other with strings, a small table and colur markers as well as simple custom-made electronic devices.  Place and date of documentation: 13th Media Art Biennale WRO 09 EXPANDED CITY, Wrocław, May, 2009

Eric Siu / eeyee / 2009 / JP / 1’16”

Optical handlers—eeyee is an optical device with moving cameras and LCDs built in a googles-like object. By using it during performances in public spaces, the artist, encourages people to interaction in a handy way – by toying with oneself and playing with others. At the same time he subverts their body experience. This double mobile real-time stereoscopic viewing device has a redundant reality that questions, “Aren’t we living in a 3D world already? Or are we?”, eeyee facilitates a hyper entanglement exclusively for the users. eeyee has a set of identical LCDs that face outward, enabling the bystanders to see what the user is looking at through the cameras placed on his or her hands. Place and time of recording: 13th Media Art Biennale WRO 2009 EXPANDED CITY, Wrocław, May 2009

Dmitry Starkovsky / …as if forest / 2009 / RU/US / 11’39”

Elie Blanchard / Eile / 2009 / FR / 17’30”

Andrea Lange / Self-resolution / 2009 / NO / 4’50”

An analog sound composition is created live by four radio sets. Every radio has a digital clock which is showing a transformed picture – caused by short circuits. The pulsation of the sound is directely connected with the pulsation of the clocks. The generated minimal sequences depend on the passing time and the electricity which is running through the little machines and my own body. This builds the basis for the audible sequences. The LEDs of the radio clocks are projected at the walls to get an even more physical feeling for the beating sound. The repetitions of the main rhythm of sound and visualisation symbolise a movement in between without origin and ending – connected with the most elementary motion within ourselfes. The built radio-sound-machines can not be really controlled. Place and date of documentation: 13th Media Art Biennale WRO 09 EXPANDED CITY, Wrocław, May, 2009

Stelarc / Phantom Flesh Circulating Organs / 2011 / AU / 14’07”

Cécile Babiole / Stitch’n’Glitch / 2011 / FR / 2’16”

Stitch’n’Glitch is a performance for sewing machine and computer: A revamped sewing machine is used as a musical instrument. The performance is a kind of tribute to an everyday appliance that’s entering the final stages of usefulness just before becoming obsolete. The artist describes it as a woman’s view of the merging of technology and creativity. By “sewing sounds” on the machine Babiole redefines a commonplace activity often regarded as typical “women’s work”, as artistic creativity. Babiole combines concrete and synthetic music, using sound synthesizing software to modulate, in real time, the sounds made by the sewing machine as her co-performer sews the musical score of the piece being created onto a piece of fabric. Place and time of recording: 14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 ALTERNATIVE NOW, Wrocław, May 2011

Megan Daalder / Tribute to Karl Sims / 2011 / US / 3’44”

Karl Sims’ Virtual Evolved Creatures was an early experiment in artificial life that used genetic algorithms to generate creatures that would walk, swim or jump in simulated virtual environments. This project is a human’s tribute to some of the most charming and enduring artificial life forms ever created. The piece is performed by Megan Daalder with a simultaneous projection of Karl Sims’ original creatures from 1994. Place and time of recording: 14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 ALTERNATIVE NOW, Wrocław, May 2011

Francesca Fini / Western Meat Market / 2011 / IT / 7’04”

Francesca Fini is a video artist, live media and body art performer. Trained in digital arts, she has worked as a filmmaker for TV and independent and experimental productions. Her performance works, always addressing social and political issues, are mixed with lo-fi technology, homemade interaction design devices, live audio and video. She is primarily interested in video and performance art, but creates also tangible artworks assembling performance art ‘relics’ and fine art prints of digitally processed video stills. Her work is being presented itnernationally, at such events as, among other: Venice Performance Art Week, FILE, Sao Paulo, Athens Videoart iFestival, Magmart Videoart Festival (Naples), Directors Lounge (Berlin), Media Art Biennale WRO (Wrocław). She lives and works in Rome.

Andrzej Dudek-Dürer / Living Sculpture / 2011 / PL / 1’48”

Noriko Yamaguchi / Pillow Talk#2 / 2011 / JP / 4’41”

Noriko Yamaguchi’s Pillow Talk events are a platform for presenting documentations of young Kyoto performance artists. The premiere of Pillow Talk#1 was held in December 2010. The Pillow Talk event at WRO 2011 included new performances. During two evening presentations. the kimono-clad Noriko Yamaguchi guided the audience, reclining on cushions, through the documentation of performances by Mara Ota, the group Weast, Sawako Tanizawa, Tomoiko Kyogoku and Yamaguchi herself. Place and time of recording: 14th Media Art Biennale WRO 2011 ALTERNATIVE NOW, Wrocław, May 2011

Karl Heinz Jeron / Hermes / 2013 / DE / 5’09”

Hermes, a mobile phone opera in four acts. Hermes is a unique opera performed by singing robots. Its libretto is based/was written upon mobile phones conversations heard unintentionally by the artist on the public transport means. These interrupted passages of anonymous fellow travelers constitute a classical story of love and sex, betrayal and guilt, mystery and suffering. Tiny robots – two soloists and a choir – made out of common, everyday, ready—made objects and materials, move around the stage covered with pictures and images appearing on the screen according to keywords included in the libretto of the opera. Place and time of recording: 15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values, Wrocław, May 2013

Quentin Aurat, Émilie Pouzet / Jack Duo / 2013 / FR / 5’29”

Jack Duo is a sound performance using body as a musical interface. The device consists of three jack cables connected to a mixing console that create feedback loops. By touching the jacks, the body contact between the two performers create a variety of singular noises. The body, „plugged” like an electric guitar, becomes a complex and unstable moving instrument. Place and time of recording: 15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values, Wrocław, May 2013

Lucas Abela / Justice Yeldham / 2013 / AU / 11’05”

Justice Yeldham, the alter-ego of Australian performer, sound and installation artist Lucas Abela, was initially classed as an experimental turntablist. In his radical performance, he turns disguarded household windows into crude musical instruments by pressing his face and lips against the glass whist employing various vocal techniques ranging from throat singing to raspberries. Place and time of recording: 15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013, Wrocław, May 2013

Cod.Act: André et Michel Décosterd / Pendulum Choir / 2013 / CH / 26’06”

Pendulum Choir, a concert-performance for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks, was awarded the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival (2012) and the Golden Nica (2013) at the Ars Electronica Festival – is simultanously an installationan, performance and an original choral piece. The choir stands on tilting platforms, constituting a living, sonorous body. That body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies at the mercy of its sonority. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds, and lyrical or narrative sounds. The bodies of the singers and their voices play with and against gravity, undulate harmoniously or brush against each other with delicacy, at the same time being enslaved with mechanical harnesses and attached to a heavy hydraulic framing. Place and time of recording: 15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 PIONEERING VALUES, Wrocław, May 2013

Eric Siu / Touchy / 2013 / HK

In the performance, Touchy, carried out mostly in public spaces, Eric Siu uses a mobile interactive device that explores the core of human relation. The artist wears a helmet, which has a pair of shutters in front of his eyes that cover his vision. During the performance, he passes a lightbulb—like interface, called Touchy Bulb, to the bystander, and once someone grabs the bulb and touches his skin, the shutters get opened instantly and Touchy – the human camera – sees the world and the person touching him. When someone touches the artist continuously for 10 seconds, he takes a photo of him/her that is displayed at the back LCD of the helmet. The interaction is done by a very simple technology – completing a circuit by touch. Place and date of documentation:15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values, Wrocław, May 2013

Cécile Babiole / Bzzz! – The Sound of Electricity / 2013 / FR / 5’59”

Bzzz! – The Sound of Electricity is a sound sculpture designed to render the sound of electricity audible and spread it over the ambient space, a the same time it is a performance realized with its help. The sculpture has a radial form, arranged around a sound wave generator at the centre of a room surrounded by a set of wall-mounted loudspeakers. The generator is connected to the loudspeakers by a bundle of audio wires running vertically and then branching out to form a sort of tree that shows the pathways of the electrical current. The frequency generator is of a deliberately crude design, comprising just a few basic electronic components that allow the electrical current to be modulated so as to generate slightly amplified sound vibrations. Six simultaneous sounds are thereby produced and spread over the ambient space. This arrangement invites the viewer to move from one sound to another and experience how these sounds interact, how they scrape and buzz against one another. By reinventing an obsolete low-tech sound wave generator in this all-digital age, Bzzz! serves as a commentary on the history of technology and a tribute to unprocessed, unsampled analog sound: in a word, the raw sound of electricity. Place and time of recording: 15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 PIONEERING VALUES, Wrocław, May 2013

Aki Onda / Cassette Memories / 2013 / JP/US / 2’34”

Cassette Memories project is an ongoing site-specific performance that Onda has been doing for more than two decades, in which he uses a cassette Walkman for field-recordings, kept by him as diaries containing sounds and his personal memories. During the performance the artist physically manipulates multiple Walkmans, plays with electronics, recollects and reconstructs concrete sounds. What emerges from these sound memories is a sonic collage of ritualistic tape music. By documenting fragments of sound from one’s personal life, something is revealed in the accumulation. The meanings of the original events are stripped of their significance, exposing the essence of memory. The result is perhaps invisible, but one can feel live memories awaking sleeping memories. Place and time of recording: 15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 Pioneering Values, Wrocław, May 2013

IP Group: Jakub Lech + Bogumił Misala / dIP (deconstructing Identity Paradigm) / 2013 / PL / 5’08”

Audiovisual performance exploring borders of senses. Three random streams: word, music, and image that provoke into a perceptive play. Habit-confused both the author and the receiver of the message, start the process of de-coding it anew. Flowchart: 1. random word generator 2. speach synthesis 3. audio samples’ processing / video samples’ set-up 4. confrontation: files’ exchange (image vs. sound) 5. randomization of the set-up structures 6. setting up of the synchronized structures 7. live performance Place and time of recording: 15th Media Art Biennale WRO 2013 PIONEERING VALUES, Wrocław, May 11th, 2013

Tina Tonagel / Himalaya Variations / 2013 / DE / 5’10”

Improvisation with two overhead projectors and a range of custom—built electronic sound generators. In her solo project Himalaya Variations Tina Tonagel uses two overhead projectors as an analogue VJ tool. She plays an experimental instrument system arranged on the illuminated surface made up of electric guitar elements, rotating disks, steel ball tracks, the sound making parts of an alarm clock, perforated sheet metal and motors, combining manual and automatic mechanisms for sound production. The sound spectrum combines subtle sounds with intricate rhythms while the projection through two superimposed images and the direct visual translation of sound production creates a brilliant colour and light display that blurs the boundaries between image and music.

Istvan Kantor / Media Revolt / 2014 / CA / 26’14”

Istvan Kantor made the Media Revolt performance during the opening of his retrospective exhibition under the same title that was presented within the RenomaWRO exhibition series in June 2014. Open pop star Monty Cantsin – also known as the steadily eccentric and radical Hungarian-born Canadian artist Istvan Kantor (b. 1949) uses varied forms of expression in his provocative and highly characteristic works dealing with the institutionalization of art and art authorities. In his ongoing battle for the independence of artists in a society that is increasingly unified technologically but increasingly disparate economically, Kantor creates videos, performances, multimedia installations and electronic music, and launches social movements like the multiple-use name movement exemplified by the open pop star Monty Cantsin and the worldwide underground Neoist movement. Since the early 1980s, Kantor has released over a dozen albums, and has been very influential on alternative music scenes such as noise and electropop. His music draws on a wide range of styles and genres, from classical to 1980’s synthpop, punk, industrial music, march music and French chansons de geste.