Festival: NODE08 / Jannis Urle Kilian Kreft: EnBW Lichtspiel

VVVV has slowly but steadily been gaining fame as a tool for realtime video synthesis. Artists like David Dessens, Jannis Urle Kilian Kreft (see image above) and Thomas Hitthaler (aka Ampop) have amply proven its maturity as a platform for live visuals, interactive installations and generative graphics. For more proof, take a look at MESO’s media design projects. Their work for Salzzeitreise Berchtesgaden looks spectacular.

Now a group of VVVV users have decided to celebrate their community by setting up a festival called NODE08. Set to take place in Frankfurt next April, the event will be part of the Luminale light art festival. In addition to an exhibition it will feature workshops and lectures on VVVV-related subjects, as well as a club night for the VVVV Fan Club to strut their stuff.

The NODEo8 organizers are currently looking for submissions, so if you’re working with VVVV and light you should head over to their submission page. The participants will have their work shown as part of the Luminale programme, which should give extra attention beyond the usual media art crowd.

Other VVVV posts: Seelenlose Automaten, *#07 video, Reality Foam, Sanch TV, Dein Lieblingsgestalter.

Berlin-based sister festivals Transmediale and Club Transmediale 2008 have just posted their call for entries:

Transmediale will be back at its old venue, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with a new director replacing Andreas Broeckmann. It will be interesting to see what new direction (if any) the festival takes as a result of the change.

Meanwhile, we are hoping to do a new Generator.x symposium in collaboration with Club Transmediale 2008, but it’s a little too early to confirm. If it happens details will be posted here. Cross your fingers…

Elements of Chance is a YouTube-based conference, organized by Greg Niemeyer and Meredith Hoy at the Center for New Media, Berkeley:

Call for proposals in Florence, Italy, from our friends at Italian media design agency TODO:

BIP 2007 – BUILDING INTERACTIVE PLAYGROUNDS BIP is an international competition for interaction design projects for public events. Through an international call for works, opened to interaction designers, artists, researchers, architets and students, it aims to select, invite and show interactive installations, specifically conceived for events and public spaces.

Simple and straight-forward projects, involving exploration, irony, play and social relationships, that can intrigue a curious and young audience. Projects that are able to transform festival locations into programmed spaces, active processes, playing with time, space and people.

Deadline: 10 May 2007
URL: BIP info @ TODO.IT

Some new calls for projects in the Nordic region, the first being the brain child of several people involved in the Generator.x conference in Oslo. Please note that these calls are also for international artists.

The Electrohype call is exciting, since they had long ago announced the likely death of the Electrohype organization and thus also the biennial. With Electrohype resurrected, there are currently three major exhibitions of media art underways in Norway and Sweden (the third being Article). With Pixelache in Finland and various projects in Denmark completing the picture, that means the Nordic scene is still going strong.

This call for works is very exciting, as there are very few bigger exhibitions of electronic art in the Nordic region. Electrohype in Malmö did an excellent biennial for many years, but had to close down due to short-sightedness of the local funding bodies.

i/o/lab in Stavanger has long been aiming to become a full-fledged node in the Norwegian electronic art network. With the Article project they will contribute significantly to the scene.

The i/o/lab initiative was set up by Kevin Foust, Jens Laland and Hege Tapio. The programme committee for Article consists of Jon Brunberg, Kevin Foust, Juha Huuskonen, Mogens Jacobsen and Hege Tapio.

Call for proposals in Paris and São Paulo:

Due to the current concert tour (which is going very well, expect an update very soon) blogging has been a low priority. Here are a few interesting things we’ve noticed recently:

• Atelier Nord has a call for participation for a workshop called The Empire’s New Clothes - Art, Fashion and Technology. The deadline is today – Monday 24 April, so if fashion is your thing hurry up and send them a CV and statement of intent. Apologies for the late post of this call
• Switchboard is a new Processing library written by Jeffrey Crouse. It implements a general application layer for using web services with Processing. Services already implemented to varying degrees are “google, yahoo, msn, allmusic, shoutcast, foaf, and rss/atom feeds”.
• Linkology by Ben Fry is a project for New York Magazine showing link connections between the top 50 blogs. I’ve been meaning to blog it forever, but never got around to it so I’m simply linking it here.
• Visualcomplexity keeps adding new projects. Some new favorites are Essence of Rabbit (by our Berlin friends at Pictoplasma) and Font 004 - Community by Marian Bantjes. Interesting to see that Visualcomplexity is including projects that don’t fit a strict infoviz focus. If you haven’t checked in for a while then take a look and consider subscribing to their RSS feed. It’s well worth it.

Photos and video of the Generator.x tour should go online in the next few days.

OFFF Festival, EXTEND : Advanced Processing Workshop

Barcelona is always a nice place to be, but the upcoming second week in May may hold particular interest to creatives working with digital media. The reason is the OFFF festival for "Post-Digital Creation Culture". Now in its fifth year, OFFF has moved away from its Flash-oriented roots and embraced the full spectrum of experimental digital work. According to the festival site, OFFF is exploring “software aesthetics and new languages for interactive and visual expression.”

The festival’s biggest pull is probably the presentations by a core of well-known creatives, with names like Kyle Cooper, Weworkforthem, Nando Costa and many more. This year the list is also conspicuously full of names from the computational design and generative art fields: Ben Fry, Golan Levin, Casey Reas, Marcos Weskamp, Zach Lieberman etc. It’s an interesting mix, and while the actual program of events hasn’t been announced yet there are sure to be some good presentations.

A special partner event of OFFF is the EXTEND: Advanced Processing Workshop. Co-produced by OFFF and Hangar (an art centre for the audiovisual arts), the one-week EXTEND workshop will be led by Ben Fry, Casey Reaz, Zachary Lieberman and Marius Watz. The workshop is intended for artists and designers who already know how to code, but who would like to experiment with new topics, learn how to extend the Processing tool itself or just play around in a constructive environment.

The workshop fee is set at a low EUR 50, so it should be accessible to freelancers without design agencies who can bankroll them. The number of places are limited, however. To be accepted, applicants must submit a personal biography and a description of previous experience with Processing.

Application deadline is 21 April. See the following call for more information.

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