After the Net explores the paradoxical development of the Internet. As the current Web 2.0 hype begins to wane, the exhibition reflects upon the promises of technological progress, global networking and instantaneous communication. Presented artworks draw attention to key developments: from cybernetics to free and open source software, and
social networking platforms.

Reflected in the title, the exhibition makes explicit reference to the documentary film The Net by Lutz Dammbeck (2003), and has three iterations: for Valencia (2008), Plymouth (2009) and Toluca (2010). The selection of artists is updated for each venue as a new version.

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Exhibition
12 September – 23 October 2009, Peninsula Arts Gallery, University of
Plymouth, UK

Roy Ascott, Blackboard Notes (1967), special poster edition of 1000 produced for After the Net (2.0) by KURATOR / Wayne Clements, logo_wiki (2007), The Best and Worst of Possible Worlds (2009) / Geoff Cox, antisocial notworking for Arnolfini (2008), Hello World! (2008) / Lutz Dammbeck, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet (2003) / Jeff Gompertz & Caen Botto (Universomente), Second Public Life (2009) / Rui Guerra, www_hack (2008) / Linda Hilfling, Participation 0.0 ­- Part I (2007) / Aymeric Mansoux & Marloes de Valk (GOTO10), Hello process! (2008) / Graham Harwood, Richard Wright & Matsuko Yokokoji, Tantalum Memorial (2008)

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Performance
25 September 2009, Peninsula Arts Gallery, 7.00pm
4NX performance by Aymeric Mansoux

4NX is an audiovisual noise sculpture, starting with the panic of a flat signal, turning it into image then back into sound, the bootstrapping of a stochastic noise generator, the search for structure and frozen moments of accidental beauty. A cornucopia of clicks, pops and glitches. 4NX is violent but draws you into this world of chaos through its black and white aesthetics, melancholic atmosphere and unexpected shaping of raw noise into hypnotic patterns. 4NX is on ongoing research on noise aesthetics.

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Lecture
22 October 2009, Theatre 2 Roland Levinsky Building, 6.30pm
Transiting the Net by Professor Roy Ascott

Cybernetics and behaviour, mind and technology, connectivity and syncretism, chance and change, constitute the parameters of practice of Roy Ascott, whose talk will chart his passage through the Net, from analogue to digital and beyond. Ascott has exhibited widely, from Venice Biennale to Ars Electronica, is published in at least twelve languages, and recognised internationally as an innovator and visionary. He is president of the Planetary Collegium at University of Plymouth.

Galleri 3,14 in Bergen (norway) fron the 12/12/08 until the 25/1/09.
Greetings to Monique et Malin for the very nice help and support on site:)
For more information about the piksel festival check http://piksel.no !

From the 5th till the 29th of July, hello process will be exhibited at Observatori festival in Valencia, Spain. Observatori is an international festival of contemporary art, running since 2000, programming diverse artists and projects across different art forms. Hello process will be part of the exhibition ‘After the net’. Like the film ‘The Net’ by Lutz Dammbeck (2003), the exhibition explores systems of technological control and presents works that draw attention to historical shifts of network power: from cybernetics to free and open source software, and in turn to social networking platforms. The works in the exhibition explore some of the historical roots of technological open systems in relation to ethics and artistic practice and reactivate some of the founding paradoxes. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on the social promises of global networking and instantaneous communication, and on the other, an emphasis on intrusive systems of technological control. The artists in the exhibition respond through critique, invention and panache.

Final presentation of ‘Hello Process!’ with on show the installation developed during the 5 week residency at Sign, and a short report on the events that have been taking place at Sign the past month. And of course, drinks :)

See you Thursday!
:*

In this case, each of the eight bits in a byte of data sent to the printer corresponds to one pin on the printhead. A bit’s value can be either 1 or 0. When the printer receives the data, it interprets a bit with a value of 1 as a command to fire the corresponding pin. Bits that are set to 0 don’t cause pins to fire.

Each block code will end up with its own “byte ID” so it can be visualized and identified on paper in the graphics line. But before getting there, a few tests have been done to try different bit combos and select the generators the most aesthetically pleasing for us :)

Below, one of the small quick and dirty shell scripts used to quickly test different patterns:

#!/bin/sh
# OKI 320 ML tests
# this test is to generate (crap) random 8 pin mode patterns
#PRNG
function rand {
echo "obase=8;`expr $RANDOM % 256`" | bc
}
function randpat {
n=1
while [ $n -le 256 ]; do
RND=`rand`
echo -ne '\'$RND
n=$((n+1))
done
}
PATTERN=`randpat`
# noise
# PATTERN2=`head /dev/urandom -c 1024`
echo -e '^[@^[5^[9^[*1\4'$PATTERN'^[@' | lp -o raw

During this evening we will be questioning the nature and purpose of generative art. With 4 lectures and an open talk, we investigate whether or not generative art is indeed an art form or just a technique. Is it possible to make a distinction between generative processes, applications of generative processes and generative processes as a conceptual ground for software art? Does the term generative art apply to screen savers, alife, fractal art,, conceptual software/code art and poetry alike? Is it even important to make this distinction? The term generative art has been around for a while now, and is applied to extremely diverse works and opposite artistic approaches. No more! It’s time to fork! (again!)

The tactics of generative art – Florian Cramer
Despite frequent claims to the contrary, artistic employment of generative system is never simply a reflection of structures or issues formally inherent in them – such as self-organization or emergence -, but linked to artistic politics. In other words, even systems supposedly removed from intention are intentional depending on their programming and, most importantly, the context they get put in. The lecture will reconstruct this along a classical and more contemporary example, John Cage’s chance operations and Cornelia Sollfrank’s net.art generators, reading the latter as a critique of the former, and question concepts like indeterminacy, chance, and unintentionality.

Florian Cramer, born 1969, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Course Director of the Media Design M.A. programme of the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, writer on (among others) experimental and computational arts.

Accidents, generative art and livecoding – Dave Griffiths
Livecoding is the practice of programming in front of an audience. This lectureformace will demo three livecoding systems which are designed to encourage a more playful interaction for live performances than traditional text based livecoding. Using a gamepad, these systems use metaphors borrowed from computer games to encourage playful accidents by the building up of emergent behaviours.

The first instrugame is called betablocker, and is programmed with a form of colourful assembler to make acid techno music. The second is called Al Jazari, and is a robot programming music game named after a 13th century inventor of musical robots. The third is a work in progress gamepad language called daisy chain, where the performer-coder builds network structures of flowers which give birth to new executable visual structures.

Dave has been writing programs to make noises, pictures and animations using a variety of languages for many years. He is the author of lots of free software projects exploring these areas, and uses much of it in performances and workshops around europe. He is part of the Openlab free software artists collective, the TOPLAP live coding community and slub, the live coding band. He lives in London where he makes film effects software and computer games.

Dave has performed at various events using his own software, including the Piksel festival in Bergen, Barcelona’s Sonar festival, the Linux Audio Conference in Karlsruhe, and at the READ_ME Software Art Festival/Dorkbot City Camp in Arhus, Denmark.

Generative Art, a subjective overview – Arie Altena
In my presentation I will give a subjective overview of generative art, including examples from music, literature, media art and the visual arts. If there is a subtext to this overview, it might be the attempt to discern the differences and similarities between the use (and status) of ‘the generative’ in these fields. Examples may include work from: John Cage, John Zorn, Frieder Nake, OULIPO, Karl Sims, Tom Ray, Casey Reas, Driessens & Verstappen, and Telcosystems.

Arie Altena (1966), studied Literary Theory, and writes about art and new media. Currently he is editor/researcher for the V2_Archive in Rotterdam and theory tutor at the department of Interactive Media and Environments of the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. He also curates the Sonic Acts Festival in Amsterdam. In the past he worked for Mediamatic and Metropolis M. He co-edited the POD-book Pervasive Personal Participatory, Ubiscribe 0.9.0 (2006) and the Sonic Acts publications Unsorted, Thoughts on the Information Arts (2004), The Anthology of Computer Art (2006) and The Cinematic Experience (2008).

Algorithmic Art – Adger Stokvisch
A lecture on the different aspects of algorithmic art and the artists’ own art practice. A short overview on computational methods and techniques, investigating the possibilities and meaning of these techniques for art production, the integration of algorithmic art in location based work such as art in public space, collaborations with the high-tech sector and a view on the future of algorithmic art and interactive media.

Generative art is firmly rooted in the philosophy of process-based science, which lays the foundation for many artistic possibilities to create autonomously functioning, dynamic (interactive) artworks that can for instance learn, show infinite variations or show emergent behaviour.

Adger Stokvisch focusses on the use of computer technology and computer coding as a medium and works on the artistic research and development of interactive location based computer driven installations. Keywords that describe his practice: interactive computervisualisations, algorithmic art, mathematical modelling, location based computer driven installations, interaction devices and interaction design.

Hosts of the evening – Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk
Aymeric Mansoux has taken part in many artistic experiments based on the internet and the emergence of networks, and considers any form of data to be a new clay that can be used to develop software art. His most recent projects include the 0xA band, the digital artlife Metabiosis project, the pure:dyne GNU/Linux live distribution for media artists and ongoing theoretical research into tools, online communities and digital autonomous processes. Aymeric is editor of the FLOSS+Art book, scheduled for release mid 2008, as well as www.digitalartistshandook.org which was launched early 2008.

Marloes de Valk is a dutch digital artist, currently based in the UK. She is part of GOTO10, a collective of artists and programmers working in the field of digital art and Free/Libre Open Source Software. She studied Sound and Image at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, specializing in abstract compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. Her work consists of audiovisual performances and installations, investigating machine theater and narratives of digital processes. She is currently collaborating with French artist Aymeric Mansoux on Metabiosis, a project investigating the ups and downs of data packets living in a world of connected ecosystems. From August 2007 until January 2008 she was editor of www.digitalartistshandook.org and is currently working on the GOTO10 publication FLOSS+Art, to be published mid 2008.