DEAF07
 
 

Exhibition

Exhibition & Screenings 10-29 April 2007
Closed on Mondays and Wednesday 18 April
Location: Las Palmas/LPII and Pakhuismeesteren, Kop van Zuid, Rotterdam
Tickets available at the Las Palmas cash register
Admission: € 8,- / € 6,- reduction for students and VPRO Backstagepas holders
Opening hours: 11:00-18:00 hrs

Installation Pneumatic Soundfield in the courtyard of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen: free admission during opening hours
Installation Soft(n) closed after 15 April.

A large international exhibition shows an intriguing overview of contemporary interactive arts. From cutting edge and experimental technological art to almost classical video art. With works from Europe, the United States, Canada, China and Japan, and also some specially commissioned works. The exhibition opens with a performance of Code31 on the 10th of April and runs on till 29th of April.

Unless stated otherwise, all works are exhibited in Las Palmas/LPII

Projects in the Exhibition

The Amazon Noir crew (Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, Ubermorgen.com) stole copyrighted books from Amazon by using sophisticated technology coded by 'supervillain' Paolo Cirio. A subliminal media fight and a covert legal dispute escalated into an online showdown with the heist of over 3000 books at the center of the story.

Chinese Portraiture (Zhou Hongxiang) is a conceptual image work, presented like a dictionary, in the way of Chinese tradition scrolls. Various Chinese people: workmen, policemen, the emperor of Qing Dynasty, intellectuals, monks, old people, children, beggars, farmers, judges are presented with their most remarkable characters, morals and habits. The film works like a photograph, because of the stare between viewer and portrayed people. You’ll wait for a certain thing to happen in a quiescent time and space.

(Donna Conlon) Leaf cutter ants live in the habit of transporting leaves to their nest, to feed their colony and assure its survival. In this video work we get a close-up look at an ant colony carrying political and institutional symbols like those seen in flag parades. The friction between the selforganised ant colony, based on evolutional strategies rather than on law and order, and the political symbols they carry through the woods, brings up ambivalent questions on the issue of power and survival principles.

Location: Pakhuismeesteren 10-29 April

COMMON GROUNDS (Workspace Unlimited) brings the realities of the physical and virtual space closer to each other by creating an intermediate third space that opens new perspectives. The installation raises questions about presence, representation and identity as a reflection on mediaculture where the relation between real and virtual take more and more complex forms. A virtual simulation of the exhibition space of DEAF07 is connected to the Common Grounds network of virtual worlds (IMPLANT, DEVMAP, EXTENSION), they will all be simultaneously accessible from the terminals in DEAF07, Montreal, and Gent.

Death Before Disko 3.1 (Herwig Weiser) brings us back to the raw components, it exposes the innards of our technology in all their complexity and beauty. The work plays on associations with popular media culture by sculpting with plastics, metals and magnetic liquids, instead of showing the fetishized end results of informational transport technology. The sculpture visualizes live input from outer space noises which have been sampled from various internet sources.

In the installation drawn (Zachary Lieberman), figures drawn with pen and ink take on a life of their own and interact with their creators. They seem to arise from the sheet of drawing paper and start to move in synch with the hand motions of the person who drew them. Drawn figures can be animated in diverse ways simply by touching the figures on the paper.

Location: Pakhuismeesteren 10-29 April

First public user test

Exercise in Immersion 4 (Marnix de Nijs) is an art-game played in an existing physical space. The players wear a specially designed headset-display and a crash-suit. The headset has a sensorsystem that connects the position of the player with previously modeled visuals. Objects in the virtual world correspond with objects in the existing world, on the display of the headset both are mixed visually. A player who does not move sees an existing reality that he confides in, the more he moves the more that existing space is visually taken over by an unknown virtual world.

(Garnet Hertz) A miniature webserver is implanted in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container. Through an ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani's original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal.

Go Up! Go Up! (Hu Jie Ming) consists of 24 TV screens are stacked up as a vertical column resembling a ladder. The TV screens show a number of people climbing fanatically. The audience intervenes the climbing scene by either shouting at them or making noises, the climbers fall down hopelessly, and start to climb once again. 

 

Harddisko (Valentina Vuksic) is an installation piece dealing with raw computer sounds. Rhythmic noises evolve from sixteen harddrives, which are orchestrated through simple power circuits. By cutting the harddisk's power in varying sequences and amplifying the peculiar sound characteristics of each drive, an unpredictable acoustic and visual interplay takes place.

knife.hand.chop.bot (5VOLTCORE) is a cybernetic system that plays with the senses and perceptions of the user. A robot is equipped with a knife, to simulate the test of courage known as "Mumbledy Peg". A user puts a hand in the machine and starts the knife game at the push of a button. The knife starts to hit the space between the fingers, first slowly, then faster and faster. In case the user can’t keep his or her cool and start to sweat, contacts are activated, and the computer is disrupted.

(Zhang Peili) A small LCD screen plays a video, hardly recognizable from distance. The viewer approaches, the video signal becomes fuzzy. The closer the viewer, the blurrier the video image until the image totally vanishes. One can never see the images clearly, whether from distance, or from close-up.

MOBI (Mobile Operating Bi-directional Interface) (Graham Smith) is a human sized telepresence robot that users remotely control to move through distant environments, see through its camera eye, talk through its speakers and hear via its microphone ear. Simultaneously a life sized image of themselves is projected onto the robots LCD face, creating a robotic avatar. MOBI allows people to "explore far away art shows, attend distant presentations and make public appearences from anywhere on earth, thus helping to reduce air travel and reduce global warming".

Morphing Machinery (Graham Smith) explores the world of nanotechnology, and takes as it thematic foundation a new urban landscape filled with transforming machines and architectural forms in motion. Just as plants grow and alter their structures over time our machines, buildings and environments may in the future reconfigure themselves based on environmental and programming influences. Our cities will then become alive in a real sense as they will change and evolve in ways that more resemble the growth in a forest.

Object B presents a modified first-person 3-D shooting game with real objects connected to a virtual-reality setting. Robotic objects made of computer parts, electric tools, and a control terminal for players trigger automatic commands, according to which the game develops. By controlling the game characters with vibration and shocks from the power tools, the system enables a myth of connecting the global abstract theme to the sense of local materiality to be repeated between reality and fiction.

Ondulation (Thomas McIntosh with Mikko Hynninen and Emmanuel Madan) is a composition for water, sound and light. A two ton pool of water is set into motion using sound, beams of light are projected onto the surface of the water and reflect onto a projection screen. The pool becomes a liquid mirror that is slowly sculpted into perfect three-dimensional expressions of a musical composition.
 

Location: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen 10-29 April

Opening hours 11:00-17:00
In the sound installation Pneumatic Sound Field (Edwin van der Heide), wind, pressure and sound create a 'breathing' architecture from sound structures. Sound and wind cross a field of 36 + 4 valves mounted over the heads of the audience, with differing speeds, directions, and intensities. The audience is challenged to find its own perspective on the spatial interaction of the air vibrations and the sound-generating valves, and the resulting composition.

Roots (Roman Kirschner) is inspired by an old persian image: a bush growing heads. In an aquarium filled with a brownish fluid, iron crystals grow steadily. Bubbles ascend like jellyfish. Branches break off and sink to the dark ground. They start to dissolve and become thick clouds hovering over the scene. Electricity is pulsed through the sculpture. Growth changes the flow of the current. The modified flow changes the growth. The voltages at each wire are put through a resonance filter and transform into sound.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
14.00 / 18.00

Camouflage. LOOK like them - TALK like them

Jun Yang

A 2002/04, 16:33 min

As an object of "suspicious appearance and behaviour", Migrant X feels forced to develop a range of camouflage tactics to ride out his everyday life.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
15.00 / 19.00 (total 30mins)
Faceless - The Spectral Children
Manu Luksch

A/UK 2006, 13:00 min

In a future society where people´s faces have decreased to an anonymous plain, a woman runs scared when looking into the mirror one day.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
15.00 / 19.00 (total 30mins)
In the Event of Amnesia the City Will Recall

Denis Beaubois

AU 1996, 07:31 min

The video questions the role of surveillance in public space by trying to reach beyond the anonymous CCTV system and to get in contact with what's behind it.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
11.30 / 15.30
Marching Plague - Critical Art Ensemble

The Arts Catalyst

GB 2006, 17.00 mins

A powerful critique on UK-US bio-weapons research and the bio-terrorism paranoia.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
12.00 / 16.00

Safe Distance

Kuda.org

RS 2003, 31:00 min

A testimonial from the world´s first "clean war"; the NATO intervention against former FR Yugoslavia, won exclusively with air strikes, keeping a "Safe Distance" between the pilot´s navigation screen and the reality of the outside world.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
15.00 / 19.00 (total 30mins)
The Catalogue

Chris Oakley

GB 2004, 05:30 min

From a remote position, we observe humanity being reduced to spending capacity and consumer categories.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
13.00 / 17.00

The Red Flag Flies
Zhou Hongxiang

CN 2002, 25:00 min

A video essay offering new perspectives on a contemporary China between communist slogans and market-driven society.

During DEAF07 a series of screenings will be shown in the film theater on the groundfloor of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Las Palmas.

Location: Nederlands Fotomuseum, Las Palmas, film theater on groundfloor, 10-29 April
14.00 / 18.00

What Noah Knew: Old Models for New Conditions
The Yes Men

USA 2006, 05:00 min

The "disaster and conflict industry innovator" company Halliburton presents its latest product: The Survivaball.

SE/30 (Code31) is an installation of 20, almost 20 year old Macintosh SE-computers. The installation is based on the principle of cellular automata, every SE/30 is a cel that adapts to its environment and forms collaborative patterns. The sound is modulated and the images are plotted by the status of each computer that generates the sound and images. In the realm of General Midi and Quicktime Musical Instruments the aesthetics of failure are a necesity. Digital artefacts distort mobile phone-like timbres to abstract structures...

Location: V2_Lounge 10-15 April

Soft(n), survival strategies for interaction (Thecla Schiphorst) is an interactive public art-installation based on exploring emerging network behaviour, through interaction between a group of soft networked objects. It is a survival strategy for interaction that allows misplaced action, mistake, forgiveness, a bad attitude, weakness, and stillness, giving in, throwing away. The Soft(n) objects create an ecosystem, where the audience interferes and where new behavior comes into existence through audience interaction.

 

Surrounded (Yang Zhenzhong) is a circular installation of 8 synchronized videos. It explores the contemporary preoccupation with questions of identity and perception, and the ability of images to turn apathy into anticipation, and ordinariness into desirability.

In World Wide Ensemble (Antoine Schmitt), an endless landscape of frenetic audio and visual automatas, all entangled in one another, slowly scrolls before the eyes of the viewer, through a window cut in the wall. The trackball, situated on the side of the window, allows the visitor to change the direction of the movement, to explore other parts of this "planet seen from a satellite's window".

Admission: € 8.00 / 6.00

Program information

Location: Las Palmas/LPII

Times: Wed11 Apr12:00–21:00
Thu12 Apr12:00–21:00
Fri13 Apr12:00–21:00
Sat14 Apr12:00–21:00
Sun15 Apr12:00–21:00
Mon16 Aprclosed
Tue17 Apr12:00–19:00
Wed18 Aprclosed
Thu19 Apr12:00–19:00
Fri20 Apr12:00–19:00
Sat21 Apr12:00–19:00
Sun22 Apr12:00–19:00
Mon23 Aprclosed
Tue24 Apr12:00–19:00
Wed25 Apr12:00–19:00
Thu26 Apr12:00–19:00
Fri27 Apr12:00–19:00
Sat28 Apr12:00–19:00
Sun29 Apr12:00–19:00

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