Tuesday 09/11:
Patterns and Projections: A workshop looking at the relative scale of things
1977 Charles and Ray Eames released Powers of Ten, a documentary visualizing a series of zoom-outs. Gradually moving from the smallest of detail to the immensity of the universe, the film reveals different sets of spatial relations and how they are interconnected with each other. Patterns and Projections is a workshop exploring these ideas. We will be looking at the relative nature of scale and how perspectives shift depending on where you are situated. Rather than employing a mathematical or universal approach, we will be intuitively thinking about the body in relation to larger cartographies and contexts. Using OpenStreetmap, image searches, WordNet and other on-line sources, we will plot connections and build layers of information. By searching for patterns, weaving together narratives and performing maps on a human scale, we hope to document subjective cartographies and the richness of identities they depict.
Tags:
mapping, performance, subjective cartographies, scale, projection, warp, patterns, points of view, objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are.
In Preparation:
--> IMPORTANT! Wear white clothing
--> Bring images that might reflect you or your surroundings
--> Come with a laptop if you have one, otherwise we will arrange for you to work on a desktop computer
De Geuzen is a foundation for multi-visual research and the collaborative identity of Riek Sijbring, Femke Snelting and Renée Turner. Since 1996 they have employed a variety of tactics to explore female identity, narratives of the archive and media image ecologies. Exhibitions, workshops and online projects operate as thematic framing devices where the group investigates and tests ideas collectively with different publics. Characterizing what they do as research, their work is open-ended and values processes of exchange and critical interrogation.
Tuesday 09/11:
Be Viz! ‘Disualizing’ Information (Disualizing = design + visualize)
Roberto Theron, (University of Salamanca, Spain) & Inbal Rief (Studio97, Israel)
Limited to 20 participants, with preference to design/psychology/Information Systems Engineering backgrounds.
‘Be Viz!’ calls for multi-discipline participants, who are keen to visually explore the scale and pace of a social activity, or phenomena. Data is all over… The swiftly mounting data being accessible nowadays forms great cultural and design challenges to society, and individuals alike. Much of this data ‘call’ us to take an active part in the discourse around varied issues.
In a one-day workshop, we will hop from visualization overture to an actual preliminary research of a specific topic. We will focus on visualization concept,
with expectancy to make an influence over data!
Wednesday 10/11:
Researching Visual Identity
Metahaven, Amsterdam: Vinca Kruk & Daniel Van Der Velden
Metahaven starts with a presentation of works we are interested in, some of the projects we have worked on and the questions they raise. For the afternoon session, we invite participants to bring samples of their works for review and discussion.
Wednesday 10/11 - Thursday 11/11:
Territorial Practice
OSP (Open Source Publishing), Brussels: Femke Snelting, Nicolas Maleve, Pierre Huyghebaert
A two days workshop on FLOSS cartographic tactics.
Even if cartography is generally produced from a bird’s eye perspective, details cannot be drawn from a remote location; they must be confirmed/corrected/added on the spot. The territory must be literally practiced by annotating and drawing.
Working on location with territories and the people living onto it, offers both beautiful and efficient ways of exchanging practices of space, and builds connections while mediating localized knowledge. Being able to consult, create, publish and exchange maps, to have access to cartographic data and know precisely where the openings are is both a poetic and a political necessity.
On Thursday 10 November, in the morning, OSP starts with a presentation of maps we are interested in, some of the projects we have worked on and the questions they raise. For the afternoon session, we invite participants to bring samples of maps they like/dislike, data they think that deserves geo-location, ideas for maps or edits to existing maps.
On Friday 11 November, we will group participants according to their interests and work together in response to needs, questions and ideas. Depending on the input of the participants, the work will concentrate more on practical issues or conceptual ones.
Tools and materials we could decide to work with on day 2: OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap, drawing, geonames, GPS-tracking, gpsbabel, web services and API’s...
Friday 12/11, Sunday 14/11:
Initimacy over Distance : networked broadcasting tools and scenarios
Nancy Mauro-Flude and Audrey Samson
This workshop is remotely facilitated by Nancy Mauro-Flude and locally by Audrey Samson. It explores networked communication and related technologies through the elaboration and enactment of a networked performance using PureData signal processing language (Pd) and the Internet as a performance platform.
The workshop takes place over 2 days during which participants first learn to implement and install the set-up on a computer. Then begin to develop, a script, a set (scenography), and consider timing - a dramaturgical system of ’tasks’ to be performed/executed by remote participants.
Depending on your hardware, the Pd patch (uploading tool) takes input for video cameras, webcams, RSS, text, and screen capture. The patch itself allows for filtering application to frames, contrast/brightness/grayscale adjustments, and varying upload speed. More experienced participants can also modify the patch to add features.
Working with carefully crafted instructions, it sensitizes participants, invites them to experience and reflect on different ways of being together in a machine-mediated world. This workshop asks how we deal with the tensions of collaboration and physical separation as we negotiate relationships through video imagery, computer software and digital networks. We ask the participants to consider the detail in a scene that might otherwise be consumed in a momentary glance; the light, the mood of the space, the position of the objects in the frame and the subject behind the view.
Participants may pick any topic: an online diary, an improvisation on a theme, a re-enactment of an existing tale, a fictional story they create, etc. with fictional and subjective elements such as live video, intimate gesture, and location changes spurred by the narrative reality of the performative event. Perhaps the watcher feels like they have discovered an unmarked package of photographs, with little inscriptions written on them, running off the steam of myth. The workshop is about how our collective memory is distributed across space and time and locale, mediating what it means to be human.
Originally conceived as a modular tool for performances, the tool can serve many different uses. Basic research, appropriation of electronic consumer goods and applied technological design constitutes a work of art that consequently questions the apparatus of production and opens a range of unknown possibilities for others to employ and extend upon. The performance tool can also serve as personal recording device to capture one’s daily life, to record conversations, log geographical data, and take images. Or it can even be used as a tactical medium in urban space, this is not symbolic, imagine the broadcasting tool for grassroot journalists operating under the conditions of repression, equipped with a tool for sharing them in real time. Random train spotters, information gatherers, and media activists alike can inconspicuously record events, and collect evidences. The project anticipates a media practice of perpetual recording and sending.
Skills/objectives:
-Working with internet protocols, understanding limitations and possibilities in this medium.
-Introduction to forms of co-authorship, collaborative storytelling, improvised performance, and multimedia installation (expanded cinema).
-Bridging time zones and distance in collaborative productions.
-Building scripts/scenarios/plots for non linear story telling.
-Familiarization with Pd and electronic performance tools - interfaces developed by Audrey Samson, Æther9 and Nancy Mauro-Flude.
Monday 15/11- Tuesday 16/11:
Free Radio: Liberating space through art and action - all.FM
Ronen Eidelman (Israel), Kasia Krakowiak (Poland)
A two days workshop on using a mobile FM transmitter for interventions in public space. With All.fm the participants in the workshop together with Kasia Krakowiak and Ronen Eidelman will be making radio interventions into existing radio transmissions in a public space that we will choose together. The participants will create content and execute creative uses for the all.fm mobile transmitter. At the end of workshop we will go out and operate the transmitter and will broadcast in close-range and test the interventions.
If radios start behaving strangely, you can assume we are in the area.
We will start the morning with a presentation of past projects where the all.fm transmitter was used. Discuss practical issues or conceptual ones, how it was used in different locations and countries and evaluate their use and the questions they raise. Discuss the possibilities of sound interventions in general and with the transmitter, live and pre recorded content, and the dilemmas and ideas in choosing the space to transmit.
For the second session, we invite participants to create, record and prepare files that they are interested in transmitting. The participants can work in groups or individually.
In the next morning, we will go out and transmit radio intervention into all radio transmissions in the proximity. The radio interventions should be documented via photo and video.
Participants should bring:
- Portable radio for listening.
- Sound recording device.
- Sound editing software on laptop
Wednesday 17/11- Thursday 18/11:
Pure Data
Frank Barknecht
Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for processing audio, video and 3D graphics and interfacing with input devices (joysticks, keyboards...) or microcontrollers like the Arduino. This introductory workshop is aimed at beginners and will introduce the core concepts of Pd starting.
If you are a sound or media artist interested in getting past the limits of Pre-fabricated and closed commercial software, Pd may be the ideal choice for you. This workshop will put you on track to create your own customized tools.
Among other things it will teach you how to play back and modify audio samples, how to generate new artificial sounds or analyse the microphone input. You will learn to create animated 3D graphics and synchronize them to sound events.
Participants should bring enthusiasm, creativity and an open mind. No prior knowledge of Pd is necessary.
Friday 19/11:
Data Carving / Hard Disque Trouve
Danja Vasiliev & Gordan Savicic, Moddr_ lab, Rotterdam
During the workshop we will explore the contents of found hard-disks (hard-disque trouvé). Using methods borrowed from computer digital forensics participants will peek into the lives of others - former owners of scavenged hardware. Hard-disks as the most intimate part of any computer system. In case of a personal computer - the most intimate part of person’s life. Deductively, we will try to discuss and recreate ‘psyche’ portraits of those strangers and restore the time-lines that otherwise would have faded away. In the times of paranoiac privacy awareness we forget that online is not the only place to loose your identity. Although more and more personal data is stored on the Internet servers it is still written to hard-disks. There were several reports about Internet server’s hard-disks ending up on flea-markets, being sold for little money.
By the end of the workshop all the hard-disks and/or the data will be destroyed!
Workshop prerequisites:
All participants are asked to go local flea-markets or second-hand shops to pick up few old hard-disks. You may try eBay as well. Older = better, those disks don’t need to be of large capacity, in fact 8-16 Gigabytes is the best size to be able to analyze it during one-day session. They also don’t need to have any operating system. Make sure the disks are 3.5” and have standard IDE interface.
Everybody is also expected to bring laptops (PC, Intel Macs).
Sunday 21/11:
Why Fi
Danja Vasiliev & Gordan Savicic, Moddr_ lab, Rotterdam
Encrypted Wi-Fi networks are private spaces carrying simple radio waves into the ether. Still, they can be received with normal equipment in public space, far beyond your apartment’s room. Who and what is claiming the ether? Are waves an emerging transmission carrier reshaping the definition of public and private space?
Sometimes we can still enjoy the luck of finding an open Wi-Fi network that some generous geek left free or occupied house-wife forgot to secure. Sadly, most recent wireless access points come off the shop shelves being pre-configured with rather strong encryption. We believe that regardless the settings the devices sold with, people still might not mind us using their wireless for the common good. All we need to do is to help them share it.
On another hand the concept of wireless security is a flaky topic to begin with. Anything what is in the air (like the radio waves) can be captured and decoded. There are no barriers for anyone to tap into anyone else’s radio network and with the power of modern computers cracking the encryption takes very symbolic time to complete.
The workshop will showcase the ease of cracking WEP/WPA wireless network encryptions as a way for understanding the risks of Wi-Fi networks and will provide participants with handy computer skill for the precarious offline times. Further on, easy ways of securing your own wireless environment will be taught.
The Digital Culture and Design Practices Workshops program is conceived by Tsila Hassine, organized by Tsila Hassine and The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon.
The organizers wish to thank Rotem Ruff.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
