Lecture Series Behind Pythagoras’ Curtain
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008, 5pm-9pm

LOCATION:
Mejan Gallery
Excersisplan 3, Skeppsholmen
Stockholm
(Across from the main entrance of Moderna Museet)
Map

Behind Pythagoras’ Curtain
LECTURE SERIES
Curated by Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen and in collaboration with FRINGE (the Interactive Institute)
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008, 5pm-9pm

Behind Pythagoras’ Curtain proposes to understand "behind the scenes" and reveal contemporary strategies in sound and interactive art practices. The lecture series Behind Pythagoras’ Curtain will be offered as a compound strategy, and is about identifying the relationships between the spatialization of sound, interactivity, and storytelling in today’s artistic practice.

The notion of Pythagoras’ curtain is used here as a conceptual framework, since it is thought to be the origin of the term acousmatic in concrete music. It is said that Pythagoras’ pupils were required to listen to their master lecturing while standing behind a curtain or a veil, so that they would concentrate better and knowledge would be better assimilated. In other words, acousmatic sound is the sound one hears without seeing the originating cause.

Participating Lecturers:
Robin McGinley (UK) is a sound artist/composer, performer, and co-director of Interactive Agents, the independent production company and R&D think tank.

Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen (CA) is an artist, curator and editor. Her artistic endeavors are often developed into sound and video installations, these seemingly newfangled artistic practices primarily stem from her interest in the notion of dynamic installations. Nguyen has participated in European and Canadian exhibitions.

Håkan Nilsson (SE) teaches art history and art theory at Södertörn University College and at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, both situated in Stockholm. Nilsson is also an art critic at Dagens Nyheter and founding editor of cultural magazine Merge.

Malin Zimm (SE) holds a PhD in architecture which she obtained in 2005 with her thesis "Losing the Plot - Architecture and Narrativity in Fin-de-Siècle Media Cultures". She is currently chief editor of the Swedish architecture magazine Rum.

PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact person: Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen | jacqueline.hoang.nguyen@gmail.com

The artist would like to thank the Royal University College of Fine Arts, the Institute for Electro-acoustic Music in Sweden (EMS), and the Canadian Embassy in Stockholm for their generous support. This project has been made possible with funding from the Swedish Research and Development in the Arts Foundation.

]]> http://fringe.nu/fringe-event-oct1st-2008-lecture-series-behind-pythagoras-curtain-at-galleri-mejan/feed/ http://fringe.nu/workshop0003-interactive-institute/ http://fringe.nu/workshop0003-interactive-institute/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:21:41 +0000 admin http://fringe.nu/?p=55 Max/MSP Workshop with Sten-Olof Hellström. 2008.05.22

Max/Msp is an software environment for producing and manipulating sound, image and data in real time. This hands-on workshop started off with a quick jog through the theory behind digital signal processing focusing on fold-over effects and aliasing. We glanced at some examples before we took a short stroll through the park of band-limited oscillators. We listened to different band-limited oscillators before deciding to slow down and actually hands-on go through basic Max/MSP which turned out to be a very successful move.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon ID:I (artist driven gallery in Södermalm) hosted the 5^th Fringe gathering. The same gallery had already been hosting for the week Mental Radio a work by Ulrika Sparre on telepathy among the participants.

During her presentation Ulrika demonstrated her work by having one person in the audience to redraw an image hidden behind a purple screen.

Following it was Alex Berman whom under the name of Nim presented his nimations a novel technology for generating music-synced visuals. Prior presenting this work Alex also mentioned about Dånk! a collective for media artists and designers in Göteborg.

Lastly Kanta Horio a very special guest from Japan (special thanks to Alex ;) has performed an electromagnetic dance with tiny metal components interacting with each other.

]]> http://fringe.nu/gathering-0005/feed/ http://fringe.nu/workshop-0002/ http://fringe.nu/workshop-0002/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 11:58:56 +0000 bridell http://fringe.nu/blog/?p=13 DIY synthesizers with Nils Edvardsson and Yoshi Akay. 2008.04.22-23

The workshop was aimed for those that have an interest in practical electronics, sound and music. The original concept of the workshop was to build a simple modular synthesiser on the basis of a printed circuit board. Due to some lacks in the delivery of special components

the workshop took another turn. Instead of building synthesizers we build simpler pulse oscillators and filters on breadboards, thereafter we build a sequencer that controlled the circuits. We also worked with light sensors. The participants will after the workshop build the original idea themselves at home with equipment and instructions that will be provided to them by the workshop leaders.

More images and list of participants below…

The participants of the workshop were:

Sten-Olof Hellström
Bengt Sjölén
David Eriksson
Jens Rudberg
Peter Wastholm
David Hesselbom
Deniz Duvarci
Björn Aneer
Johan Nordstedt
Jonas Gazell

Text by Nils Edvardsson
Photo by Tina Finnäs

Entering the place visitors were already confronted with the bizarre results from Reverse Design, a course held by Alberto Frigo at Konstfack College of Art and Design which saw 12 students re-engineering different ready made objects throughout three weeks.

The first presentation was given by Bete Rum a Brazilian VJ visiting Stockholm. She shared are very skilful and hand crafted VJ works with colourful loops animating quite socio-political songs commenting on modernization.

As part as the exhibition vjbr#1 was screened (the latter being a compilations initiated by Bete of the good v-joking around Brazil. See more: www.coletivovirtual.com.br, http://www.youtube.com/beterum).

The second presentation was given by the Artistic Director of the Institute Ingvar Sjöberg who surprised the audience by introducing his own work apart from talking about his decadal engagement with the Institute. His lecture presented a variety of installation of various mediums yet maintaining the focus on the subtle ambiguities between transaction and interaction.

The third and last presentation was given by the artist Tomas Nygren who arose a vivid discussion presenting his philosophically based participatory installations involving the production of fragile elements such as child and nature in combination with a violent technical medium. See more at: http://www.tomasnygren.com/

Lastly embedded with bar and music some of the Reverse Design works were demonstrated such has an old toy guitar turned into a portable device (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NJMBEGE_rM).

The workshop Mental Radio took place the 2nd of April and was led by the artist Ulrika Sparre and hosted by the Interactive Institute. The workshop was the first in a series of workshops organized within the framework of Fringe. During the workshop a group of 9 people performed different experiments to investigate their telepathic abilities.

One of the experiments was a “telephone” experiment where the participants trough throwing dice decided who would call to another pre-selected person from the group located in a different room. The aim of this experiment was that the person who was alone would try to feel which person from the group was calling. The participants also worked with transferring images of personal objects that were hidden in a box.

In one of the tests an object brought by one of the participants was put inside a box. The rest of the persons in the group had to concentrate and try to feel and draw the content of the box. This test gave compelling results and many of the persons in the group could sense both the right colour and the shape of the object.

One test was performed with “Zenner cards” and drawings were used as a medium for transmitting mental images between the participants. These tests gave positive results. The machine “Mental Radio” that was developed by Ulrika Sparre during her artist in residence period at the Interactive Institute was also used during the experiments at the workshop.

Some photos from the event are available at http://tii.se/node/2823

With Nils Claesson, Johan Mattsson, Bertrand Gondouin 2008.02.14

As the Nanotechnology Konstfack students had their exhibition fringe invited their people to three brilliant presentations and their works.

Nils Claesson talked about his art (including Tala med Ingmar, the International Dog Sound Interface, Se människan) and experiences about working with new media art in public (and sometimes outdoor) spaces.

Johan Mattsson talked about his research on using physical items (phicons) in collaborative workspaces.

Bertrand Gondouin talked briefly about using sensors and wiimotes to control visuals and showed us some of his visuals. [www.bertrandgondouin.net] [www.laeterna.net]

This time the Fringe coincided with an exhibition, where the students at the Konstfack master course in physical computing presented the work they’ve been doing the past weeks.

Below are some images from Fringe Gathering #0003, at Konstfack. Photos by Erik Sjödin and Fredrik Bridell.

With Chandana Paul, Cameron MacLeod, Petra Vergova, Sönderbyggd 2007.12.20

The second fringe or better the xmas_fringe took place in the very centre of the city at Lava, Kulturhuset.Chandana Paul talked about her research in tensegrity robotics. [www.mae.cornell.edu/paul]Cameron MacLeod showed some of his paintings and ongoing works. [www.cameronmacleod.net]

Petra Vargová started out with showing her video work dead or alive 2, and talked about other works including victims, tears and sound flowers. She also showed her ongoing experiments with a robotic tail. [www.petravargova.org]

Sönderbyggd (music and sound artist Michael Idehall and visual artist Olle Huge) did an audiovisual performance where they made corn starch do fascinating things on speaker membranes. [www.myspace.com/soenderbyggd]

sonderbyggd_01

sonderbyggd_02

Below are some images from the event.

With Daniel Peltz, Koji Wakayama, Sue Huang, Yoshi Akai, Instructions 2007.11.15

The first fringe ever has been launched at the Weld a dance theatre in the hearth of Stockholm. For the occasion several speakers currently living in the city has been invited.
Daniel Peltz talked about his projects Beepez-le in Cameroon and the online video sharing Call and Response project [www.risd.tv].

Koji Wakayama showed his robotic War Garden live [hfg-karlsruhe.de/~kwakayama/roboter.zip].

Sue Huang talked about her wires videos and the photographic Domestic Series and Spinach Series [sue.knifeandfork.org/].

Yoshi Akai let people play with his musical Lego [homepage3.nifty.com/yoshi_akai/].

Mikael Wehner and Henrik Berggren from Instructions ended the night with a DJ/VJ set [www.instructions.se/].

Below are a lot of images from the event.