[spectre] READ_ME 2.3 program

[olga goriunova]

READ_ME 2.3
Software Art Festival (2nd edition)
May, 30-31, Helsinki

http://www.m-cult.org/read_me
http://runme.org 

READ_ME 2.3 is a festival of software art that explores the territory between art and software cultures, and aims at creating an extended context, against which software art may be mapped. 
The two-days event will focus on the four major themes: community - software and people, tool is the message - artistic interfaces, software cultures, and guerilla engineering - uninvited interventions. 
Keywords: digital folk and artisanship, glitch and virus aesthetics, software without hardware, binary poetry, text manipulation, institutional critique, sound and visual tools, low tech, hardware transformations and many others.
Welcome!

PROGRAM
---> Friday, May 30
---> Saturday, May 31
---> Installations
---> Club

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FRIDAY, May 30  
Media Center Lume, Hameentie 135 C
Entrance: Free

> 12.00 Welcome  

> 12.20 Community: Software and People 
Weblogs and other software-based online communities have become ubiquitous on the web seemingly overnight - but do they really foster community? Should they? Do they really offer improvements over other online structures such as lists? Can peer moderation be trusted? How much influence over content should site administrators have - and how transparent should that influence be? Is community software at last the democratizing utopia we've been waiting for on the internet? Or merely more hype on its way to becoming corporatized? These questions and more will probably remain unanswered in the end - but we will wrestle with them anyway.
Moderator - Amy Alexander 

Amy Alexander (USA) 
Introducing Discordia a New Weblog Community 
Amy Alexander will introduce Discordia, a new weblog project working at the intersections and overflows of art, activism and tech cultures. Discordia is an experiment in social filtering, collaborative moderation and different styles of communication. It also aims to examine how software structures influence discussion.
http://plagiarist.org 

Carl, Wanga (Switzerland) 
Microbuilder - community construction kit  
Micromusic team presents their latest project: the microbuilder. Wanga and Carl will talk about the 3 years history of the micromusic_community and the community construction kit microbuilder.
http://micromusic.net
http://www.micromusic.net/microbuilder 

Alessandro Ludovico (Italy) 
Neural.it, editing new media culture's ideas
Neural it's an Italian new media culture printed magazine, born ten years ago (1993). From the end of 2000 its website companion it's daily updated, using a text editor and a popular photo retouching tool, with news, reviews and essays, in English and Italian. Being 
linked by more than 5000 other web sites on the net, Neural.it is an international source for new media culture's facts and ideas.
http://neural.it 

Panel discussion will follow.

> 14.00 Read_me Special
Tony Scott (UK)
Taxonomy of Glitches  
The genus of glitches contains a wide variety of species. In this lecture, an attempt at
definition and classification will be made, based on factors such as the appearance, natural
habitat and feeding patterns of glitches. The emotional appeal of glitches will also be explored.
http://www.beflix.com 

> 15.30 Tool is the Message. Artistic Interfaces 
Unlike traditional artistic tools such as a paintbrush or a violin that had been developing
through centures by generations of anonymous craftsmen, the new, software ones always have their authors named - individual or corporate. Such situation drastically changes the meaning of a tool: instead of being part of a tradition, it starts carrying out some new functions: making profit in case of proprietary commercial software or becoming an ultimate objective, an art piece in itself if developed by artists. Can software-produced sounds and images exist in a 'pure' form, without reference to the tools they were made with? To which extend software tool developers delegate their creativity to their products? Why many artists choose to develop software tools these days instead of just 'making music' or 'creating images'? 

Alex McLean and Adrian Ward (UK) 
Slub System 
Slub describe how they get their computers to make the sounds they like. Slub sound emerges from slub software; melodic and chordal studies, generative experiments and beat processes. In this short talk and demonstration, slub offer a rare glimpse at the inner workings of their entirely self-built realtime music system.
http://slub.org 

Ash Nehru and Christopher Fraser (UK) 
Frankie the Robot 
Frankie the Robot is an innovative audio-visual tool, a virtual DJing robot. He's generated in real time 3D by custom software, and projected onto a translucent elliptical screen placed in the DJ booth or on the stage. No more round-shouldered and pale-faced humans, robot does it better!
http://www.frankietherobot.com 

Adrian Ward (UK) 
Auto-Illustrator 
"Auto-Illustrator is an experimental, semi-autonomous, generative software artwork and a fully functional vector graphic design application to sit alongside your existing professional graphic design utilities." It allows to easily "produce complex designs in an exciting and challenging environment that questions how contemporary software should behave."
http://www.auto-illustrator.com 

Tim Pritlove, Chaos Computer Club (Germany) 
Blinkenlights project 
>From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights. The story of the project.
http://blinkenlights.de

Hans Bernhard (Austria)  
Hans "will talk about the long-term project "EXTREME.RU" [1999-2003] and it's successful features [creation, bulgaria, database, esof ltd.] and total disaster moments [esof ltd, money, communication, zurschaustellung] in opposition to this long-term project, he will present some simplicismus bbedit literature 2002-2003 in the form of genetic, binary and math codes, an easy-brain-machine-creation, snipplets of work, chapters, slogans, functions and sequences rather than huge systems."
http://www.ubermorgen.com/etxtreme_v1_0
http://www.ubermorgen.com/etxtreme/home.html
http://www.esof.net
http://www.runme.org/project/+geneticbinarymathpoetry
http://www.hansbernhard.com
http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/inde8.htm

> 18.00 Runme session  
Introduction of Runme.org, the online software art database by its developers.

Team Paperikori (Finland)
Paperikori - a collaborative story chain  
Paperikori (Paper basket) is a place where fragments of thoughts are collected together to form a new kind of entity by using SMS messages. The work is a modern way to create playful dadaist poems or stories. People collaborate on the story only knowing what the previous person has written.
http://peep.uiah.fi/paperikori
http://runme.org 
 
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SATURDAY, May 31  
Media Center Lume, Hameentie 135 С
Entrance: Free

> 12.00 Software Cultures 
Software art land lies among the countries of different software cultures and art practices, which have been existing since long ago. And it is not certain at all that software art land will be recognized officially and get a status of an independent state because the borders are in dispute. Leaving struggle for independence for the future, let's now discuss the zones of influence and histories, staying close to the ground. 

Tapio Makela (Finland) 
Conceptual games, software toys and software art 
Should all culturally experimental software be called software art? What implications does this branding have, in particular if it is positioned as a software avant garde? In this talk for
Read_me, I will outline some characteristics for cultures of creative software practices. By
talking about Conceptual games, software toys and media art gadgets one is able to point out how there may not exist an avantgarde, but various approaches that relate with earlier histories of representational, craft based and "experimental" design practices. And indeed, where does the demo seek to, or is framed as, contemporary art? 
http://www.isea2004.net 
http://www.m-cult.org 

Lev Manovich (USA) 
Cultural Software 
What is the relationship between computer's contemporary identity as a simulator for all previous media, and its "essence" as a programmable machine? Is software art is only real "avant-garde" of new media, or is the more "impure" practice of remixing older media with software techniques equally innovative? My talk will address these questions using the history of modern human-computer interface research in the 1960s and 1970s and in particular's Alan Kay's notion of computer as "metamedium." http://www.manovich.net 

Florian Cramer (Germany) 
Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts' (Nietzsche) 
Artistic Subjectivity and the Unix Commandline. 
A design principle of the Unix (and Linux/BSD) operating system is that all data should be ASCII text flowing through simple filters. Unix thus is a giant modular and programmable word processor. While the Unix hacker community itself has written papers like "Unix as literature" and strongly participated in creating such important digital arts genres as program code poetry and ASCII art, it was rather late that contemporary net artists and writers discovered the commandline as a symbolic universe and way of working and thinking. This presentation will attempt to outline the aesthetics and politics of the dialogue between commandline Unix and digital art, culling work from the "Nettime unstable digest" which the speaker is one editor of.
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin
http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/unstable_html 

Tim Pritlove, Chaos Computer Club (Germany) 
Chaos Computer Club 
Tim will talk about more than 20 year history of the famous Chaos Computer Club and will focus on its activity mutating from hacking into art and another way around.
http://ccc.de 

Panel discussion will follow. 

> 15.00 Performance 
Ubergeek, deprogramming.us (USA) 
Extreme whitespace - read between the lines.  World premiere.
Cast off your markov chains and start deprogramming...
Bonus: introduction of BeepMusic.

http://deprogramming.us 

> 16.00 Guerrilla Engineering. Uninvited Interventions 
Media activism is not at all a new phenomenon, but enhanced by digital technology and the power of the Internet it seems to have reached a new level, where an individual can be as strong and visible as a corporation or a virus, and a simple and elegant hack can generate a lot of media buzz. 

Sintron (USA) 
Touching without Touching 
Software is an ephemeral material for creation. There is nothing to touch and yet it touches all of our lives. There is something very magical about creating art based on software. In addition, when developing any model of reality, the word ILLUSION must immediately come to mind. Software and illusions are twins that go hand in hand and I will talk more about them along with their economic significance.
http://www.runme.org/person/+sintron 

UberMorgen (Austria) 
The Injunction Generator and [V]ote-auction 
[V]ote-auction 2000, bringing capitalism and democrazy closer together. during the presidential elections g.w. bush vs. al gore, ubermorgen and james baumgartner ran a business buying and auctioning votes via the internet. over 2500 news clippings global, 14 law suits, fbi, nsa, cia, janet reno and state attorneys investigated the case. listen to the exciting action-story and see a CNN 30 min. special about voteauction. you won't believe your eyes! as the contemporary legal art followup, we will give you in-depth background information on the notorious "INJUNCTION GENERATOR" and the soft-ware we use to automatically deliver such court orders [media hacking, shock marketing, fine art, ex-net.art]. our way of looking at software and thinking about it has mutated over the last 10 years. we would like to share this with you!
http://www.ipnic.org
http://www.vote-auction.net

The Yes Men (International) 
Value-Added in a Changing World   
The Yes Men are a genderless, loose-knit association of some three hundred impostors worldwide. Their feeling today can be summed up in one simple phrase: Value-Added in a Changing World. Although their name contains the word "Men," it doesn't describe who they are, it describes what they do: they use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. In other words, the Yes Men are team players... but they play for the opposing team.
The Yes Men are also considered to be the pioneers of Finnish media activism.
http://theyesmen.org
http://theyesmen.org/finland 
 
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INSTALLATIONS 
May 30-31 

Tempest for Eliza, Erik Thiele
aa-project / ttyquake, Jan Hubicka and others / Bob Zimbinski
Connector, ixi-software
n_Gen design machine, Move Design
Discomus, Anonymous
SPS, (Karl-)Robert Ek
DOS pseudoviruses, Various Artists

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READ_ME Festival Club  

SATURDAY, May 31, 21:00 - 4:00  
Alahuone bar, Mannerheimintie 13A 
Entrance: 5 ┬

Live:  
O Samuli A / FIN  http://osamulia.musicpage.com
Slub / UK  http://slub.org
Micromusic / SWISS  http://micromusic.net
Frankie the Robot / UK  http://frankietherobot.com 

DJ's:
TOTALLY! -dj team:
annie (telle rec.) 
kaukolampi (lefta rec.) 

VJ's:
c-men 
BEFLIX

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ORGANIZERS:

Curators: Alexei Shulgin and Olga Goriunova

Read_me 2.3 is a co-operation between NIFCA, The Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, Media Centre Lume and m-cult, The Centre for New Media Culture.

Supported by: Arts Council of Finland; City of Helsinki; Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of
Switzerland; British Council; the Center for Research in Computing & the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California San Diego.

Information: Lume Media Centre, Hameentie 135 C FIN 00560 Helsinki;
+358 9 756 30444; info at runme.org