project site: 8bit.amberplatform.org
8 Bit Music project is designed to enrich the means of musical expressions of a hip hop group from Sulukule, a Roma neighborhood of Istanbul. We will organize four workshops during the first two months of the project. These workshops will be about converting old and broken electronic toys to musical instruments and using them during the band’s performances. Today 8 Bit Music is a widespread form among young musicians and sound artists. Circuit bending and toy hacking has been a common practice especially since the 1980s to produce 8 bit music, also known as chip music. Workshops will focus on these practices to allow participants to create their custom and unique instruments. The participants of the workshop will be the main band members as well as junior trainees; in total, there will be 5 participants. The main project action will consist of workshops and a concert presentation. The workshops will take place in September and in October and the concert presentation in November. October will be the preparation period for the concert with the support and guidance of the workshop teachers. This project aims at introducing do-it-yourself, making-things, circuit bending, hacking, repairing and recycling practices to the musical as well as the daily life of a disadvantaged young music group and their circle.
visit project site postdigital.amberplatform.org
The Exhibition and related events
“Histories of Post Digital: 1960s and 1970s Media Art Snapshots”
will be take place at the Akbank Sanat Beyoğlu, Istanbul,
between 17 December 2014 – 21 February 2015
Curator: Ekmel Ertan
Co-curator: Darko Fritz
This exhibition aims to explore the histories of media art after the real and seemingly permanent entry of the digital into our lives. It does so beginning from the beginning and looking at the first attempts, first digital artistic products of the 1960s and 1970s. It attempts to read from the present perspective the histories that were written with each event, each research and artwork and that are part of the paradigm we live in now.
The exhibition has two main axes. The first one “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” focuses on a legendary series of performances that took place at the Regiment Armory building in New York in 1966. With performances by 10 artists, 9 Evenings is a milestone in the field of art and technology, an event where many of this field’s firsts originated. The second is about the 4th and 5th exhibitions of the (New) Tendencies movement, organized in Zagreb in 1968-69 and 1973. These two vanguard exhibitions that took place in the relative periphery of Europe at an early date and the discussion they inspired meant that the computer has come of age as an artistic medium. In collaboration with the MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and an international network of collectors and private archives, this exhibition offers the overview of the original early digital artworks including Waldemar Cordeiro, Gustav Metzger, Vladimir Bonačić, Frieder Nake among others.
There will be first time presented computer installation with anti Vietnam war slogan Nixon Murderer conceived back in 1969 by Remko Scha. First time after 35 years will be publicly presented Mobilodrom – “a vehicle producing sounds in reaction to its environment” from 1979 by Michael Fahres, now in the form of multimedia documentation.
The Off-Line Media Space, which takes up a large section of the exhibition, will offer a wide array of resources in field of media. A large collection of books, Transmediale and Art Electronica catalogs from the last 30 years as well as entire collections of the magazines Neural and Mediamatic will be on hand here. In addition, there will be three computer stations in this space dedicated solely to the voluntary endeavour of translating the rapidly growing media archive artelectronicmedia.com, The Art and Electronic Media Online Companion by Edward A. Shanken in Turkish. This is certainly not a one-way translation, it will also allow the works and events realized in Turkey to be archived in a universal manner.
The Saturday Seminars will take place during the exhibition and aim to give the audience an opportunity to hear about media histories from a group of artists and researchers who actively contributed to these histories though artistic creation and writing.
The Wednesday conversations aim to deepen and broaden the conversation around specific topics and works. They will also provide an open and live resource as well as a space to work and converse.
“9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering”
10 films, 10 artists and avant-garde performers in collaboration with 30 engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York, by Barbro Schultz Lundestam, series director and E.A.T. Julie Martin, executive producer.
John Cage Variations VII
Lucinda Childs Vehicle
Öyvind Fahlström Kisses Sweeter Than Wine
Alex Hay Grass Field
Deborah Hay Solo
Steve Paxton Physical Things
Yvonne Rainer Carriage Discreteness
Robert Rauschenberg Open Score
David Tudor Bandoneon! (a combine)
Robert Whitman Two Holes of Water-3
Documentary film: New Tendencies, 2008, directed by Vladislav Knežević, HRT, Croatian National TV.
Digital artists, exhibited:
Marc Adrian, Jan Baptists Bedaux, Vladimir Bonačić, Frank Böttger, Jeroen Clausman, Compos 68, Waldemar Cordeiro, Charles Csury, D. E. Evans, Michael Fahres, David R. Garrison, Hans Köhler, Auro Lecci, Robert Mallary, Jean Claude Marquette, Gustav Metzger, Tomislav Mikulić, Petar Milojević, Jorge Moscati, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, A.Michael Noll, Ivan Picelj, Ludwig Rase, Sylvia Roubaud, Beverly Rowe, Remko Scha, Manfred Robert Schroeder, Arthur Veen, Aron Warszawski, Gerold Weiss, Rolf Wölk, Edward Zajec, Vilko Žiljak, Anton Zöttl
Saturday Seminars:
20 December 2014
“Agents of Social Change in 1960s and 1970s Digital Art”
Darko Fritz
10 January 2015
“9 Evenings of Engineering and Theatre””
Sylvie Lacerte
17 January 2015
“Histories of Post Digital: Media Art in Turkey”
Ekmel Ertan
24 January 2015
“The Complex Expression of Digital Art: MediaArtHistories and its Impact on Archives and Humanities”
Oliver Grau
7 February 2015
“An Archaeological Rewiring of the Contemporary in Arts”
Jussi Parikka
14 February 2015
“The Technological Unconscious and Digital Art”
Armin Medosch
21 February 2015
“Genealogies of the Digital: A ‘Post’-Critique”
Christiane Paul
31ST OCT - 1ST NOV
TAŞKIŞLA
In the frame of Connecting Cities Network (CCN) Project, partners believe that the city screens and architectural media facades are public spaces. With this consideration they wanted to get city-screens had social content more then the commercials; they also researched means of converting the city screens and architectural media facades into a medium for arts.
amberPlatform as a partner of CCN project and as an NGO working in the field of technology and art with a focus on cities as commons, artistic interventions in the cities, empowering citizens by the new technologies since 2010. Considering the city screens and architectural media facades, we believe citizens should have the chance to get their message powerful and impressing with its size, since the size matters in this capitalistic society of spectacle surrounded by media with no content. Hence we wanted to provide a medium impressive with its size, add a bit of creative touch and wisdom to the sensitive content provided by people.
We are organizing a one-week research workshop to develop an open-source, cheap and simple, easily producible and ready-programmed media screen system / architectural media façade.
We invite researchers, makers, artists, engineers, thinkers and all kind of creators to the research workshop in the frame of pre events of amber’15 Art and Technology Festival and part of Connecting Cities Network Project activities. The workshop will take place in 7th and 13th of EYLÜL at Taşkışla İTÜ. The workshop program will be announced later on sensitivetouch.amberplatform.org.
As a follow-up to the workshop, a hackathon will be held on 31st of October and 1st of NOVEMBER on data/info visualization and sensitive content creation on “CITY and LABOUR” for the media façade created in the workshop that will be exhibited during amber’15(*).
Please send a short mail about your motivation and background to info@amberplatform.org with the subject “creative touch” for application till 29th of August.
http://creativetouch.amberplatform.org
Starting Our Mesh Network!
amberPlatform presents Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud with their project “qaul.net”
qaul.net implements a redundant, open communication principle, in which wireless-enabled computers and mobile devices can directly form a spontaneous network. Text messaging, file sharing and voice calls are possible independent of internet and cellular networks. Qaul.net can spread like a virus, and an Open Source Community can modify it freely.
In a time of communication blackouts in places like Egypt, Burma, and Tibet, and given the large power outages often caused by natural disasters, qaul.net has taken on the challenge of critically examining existing communication pathways while simultaneously exploring new horizons.
qaul.net workshop at StudioX İstanbul on Saturday, March 29th, at 2pm-6pm
