[spectre] No streaming from Read_Me festival

[Alexei Shulgin]

Dear all (sorry for cross-posting!),

there will be no streaming from Read_Me 2.3 Software Art Festival.
Live experience will include (updated program):


 Friday, May 30
Media Centre Lume
Entrance:  free 
Ha"meentie 135 C, Helsinki, tel. +358 9 756 30444 

 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 is a digital media artist and performer as well as a recovering Unix administrator and filmmaker. She is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego.
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 
"basically "musical research" is the most accurate description of the micromusic.net activities. even though music produced on low_budget equipment and retro computer games sounds was the focus at the beginning of the micromusic project we always had far more in our minds than that. the internet is still in its first years and topics like how to build up 'special_interest_communities', advanced realtime communication tools and highly optimized interface design were also quite important to us."
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 
>From 1993 Alessandro is the editor in chief of Neural, the Italian new media culture magazine. He's one of the founding members of the Nettime list, and one of the founding members of the 'Mag.Net (European Cultural Publishers)' organization and of the 'European Peripheral Magazine' list. Now he writes for Springerin (A), Mute (UK), MyTech-Mondadori.com (I) and RTSI (Italian language Switzerland Radiotelevision). In 2001 he joined the n.a.m.e. (normal audio media environment) art group and developed 'Sonic Genoma', a computer/sound art installation. In the same year he organized the 'Liberation Technologies' conference in Bari (I). From 2002 he's a collaborator of the Digitalkraft (D) exhibitions. He also conducts 'Neural Station' a weekly radio show on electronic music and digital culture, and daily updates the Neural website.
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.

Break 10 min

 Read_Me Special 
 14.00 Tony Scott (UK) 
 Taxonomy of Glitches 
Tony Scott has been recording a wide variety of glitch-like phenomena for the past two years and uses minimal processing to produce aesthetically pleasing images.
This work has developed into a software project to bring the glitches to life, providing real-time visuals for Kim Cascone, Jan Jelinek and Warp Records.
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

Break 45 min

 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

 Hans Bernhard (Austria) 
 Extreme.ru, total desaster and simplicismus 
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

 Tim Pritlove, Chaos Computer Club (Germany) 
 Blinkenlights project 
For more than 20 years, Tim Pritlove works with computers and computer networks. He has been busy as programmer, system administrator, teacher and project manager in various projects.
Since ten years he is an active member of the Chaos Computer Club and is responsible organizing the club's events since five years.
Tim Pritlove is the initiator, project coordinator and one of the programmers of "Project Blinkenlights".
He is also an artistical-scientific assistant of the Digital Media Class at the University Of Arts Berlin.
Project Blinkenlights transforms buildings into huge computer screens and adds a significant amount of interactivity to allow people to participate in the project. It was originally installed at Haus des Lehrers in Berlin in 2001, and in has 2002 moved to Bibliothe`que Nationale de France in Paris to create the world's biggest light installation.
The talk explains history, motivation and technology of Project Blinkenlights and presents a wealth of animations, technological tidbits and background information on the installations and the project itself.
http://blinkenlights.de

break 10 min.

 18.00 Runme session 
Introduction of Runme.org, the online software art database by its developers
Overview of projects submitted to Runme.org software art online database.

 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
 

 Saturday, May 31 
May 30 and 31. Media Centre Lume.
Ha"meentie 135 C, Helsinki, tel. +358 9 756 30444

 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 Ma"kela" (Finland) 
 Conceptual games, software toys and software art 
Tapio Ma"kela" is the vice chair of m-cult, programme chair of the ISEA2004 symposium, researcher and a media artist.
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 
Lev Manovich was trained in art and programming in Moscow before he moved to New York in 1981. He has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include little movies , the first digital film project designed for the Web (1994), Anna and Andy (2000) , a Web adaptation of Anna Karenina, and a digital film project Soft Cinema commissioned for ZKM exhibition Future Cinema (2002-2003). He is the author of many articles on new media aesthetics publsihed in 28 countries and the book The Language of New Media (MIT Press).
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

Break 15 min

 Florian Cramer (Germany) 
 Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts' (Nietzsche) 
 Artistic Subjectivity and the Unix Commandline. 
Florian Cramer is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Freie Universitaet Berlin. He is the programmer of the web site 'Permutations'and Free Software activist. Florian is also an author of a number of texts on software art and an undercover artist.
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 
The Chaos Computer Club is world's oldest and one of the best known hacker groups. Since it founding in 1981 it has contributed to public opinion on many difficult topics where technology influences the society and tries to be a mediator between the state and economy on the one side and the sophisticated hacker scene on the other side.
Today the Chaos Computer Club is still a lively and interdisciplinary group organizing a groing list of conferences and other meetings for both the scene and the general public and continues to be a group that is open to all kinds of ages, interests, genders and ideas.
The talk focuses on the CCC as cultural phenomenon and describes hacking in its relationship to other cultural and creative activities.
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

Break 45 min

 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 where a simple and elegant hack can generate a lot of media buzz.

 Sintron (USA) 
 Touching without Touching 
Sintron is a conceptual artist creating playful public works that explore the development and integration of impossible realities. He received his MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is currently working on developing a memory implant technology corporation called Rekall Inc (rekallinc.com) and a fashion company called Shame On You Fashions (shameonyoufashions.com) that sells t-shirts with sex offender portraits aside their personal information.
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 
ubermorgen is thinking about a bio, word of mouth came from the streets <meta name="keywords" content="worms, european, hijack, ak-747, riefenstahl, 474, bulgarien, netuser, c17, ccc, silver server">. 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!
[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
 

 Installations 
Media Centre Lume.
Ha"meentie 135 C, Helsinki, tel. +358 9 756 30444

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

 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 / NL
 BEFLIX / UK

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Greetings,

Alexei