[spectre] ISEA2004 FERRY PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS

[Amanda McDonald Crowley]

ISEA2004
14 - 22 August 2004
http://www.isea2004.net

DON'T MISS THE EARLY BIRD CAMPAIGN!
-SAVE 30% ON TICKETS AND BOOK BEFORE 23 APRIL.

Secure your access to the ISEA2004 symposium, including the all-inclusive
ferry cruise (meals, travel, programme all in one), and register for the
event at http://www.isea2004.net/tickets. By doing this by April 23 you
will get tickets for the reduced price.

CLUBBING AND NETWORKING BY THE POOL: THE FERRY PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS

We are delighted to announce some highlights from the ISEA2004 cruise
programme that interface live music, performances, funky club acts by the
most prominent members of contemporary dj and vj culture, sound
installations in unexpected places from lifts to swimming pools,
interactive mobile games, networking sessions and panels.

The entire ferry is turned into a multi-venue experience on the Main Stage
at the Metropolitan Club, the Karaoke and Disco Lounge, the Sonic Pool, the
Chill out deck as well as multiple workshop and network meeting modules.
Even the Silja Opera ferry itself becomes source material for several
projects. American artists Steve Bradley and Tim Nohe for example electrify
the elevators with "ferrite" sounds.

Each stage offers 24 hours of electronic music and live events spread out
over the two cruises. The Interfacing Sound Cruise has a stronger focus on
dance music while the Networked Experience cruise explores more
experimental edges of electronic music. Participants can also navigate
between live performances and interventions by ŒOpen source sailors¹ and
various project presentations.

Indeed, it is difficult to escape from interesting content on the ferry.
When you take a swim in the pool, an underwater sound by Tuomas Toivonen
will take you over - or rather in this case, under. The food menu on the
ship is "co-curated" by Silja Opera main chef and the gastronomic ISEA2004
production team. It will be tough for the shy ones, as the ship is a true
social mixer. However, in the quiet of the cabins TV-channels are
programmed with special ISEA2004 screenings.

*Interfacing Sound Cruise (Helsinki-Stockholm), August 15, 2004*

The cruise kicks off in Helsinki, Finland, on August 15 with some 1400
participants boarding a cruiser ferry, the luxurious Silja Opera. This
newest member of the Silja fleet is often described as a floating tropical
island with pools, palms, jacuzzi and retractable glass roof. The first
part of the trip, the Interfacing Sound Cruise from Helsinki to Stockholm,
is organised in collaboration with Koneisto, the largest festival of
electronic music in Nordic countries. The Interfacing Sound Cruise creates
an electrified environment by mixing clubbing with video and sound art,
cruising with installations, actions and sonic experiments.


VIDEO NASTY EXPERIENCE
Musician and British DJ FreQ Nasty (Darin Mcfadyen) is known for nasty
breaks and classic releases, the latest of which ŒBring Me the Head of FreQ
Nasty¹ on Skint records. FreQ Nasty has collaborated with a range of
digital media artists and image makers to create The Video Nasty
Experience, a project extending the club environment by merging sound and
vision in an integrated, filmic style. The Video Nasty Experience uses
custom-designed graphics, text and seamlessly montaged 2D and 3D animated
characters. Currently FreQ Nasty is collaborating with Weta Digital (New
Zealand), known for the legendary Gollum character in the Lord of the Rings
trilogy.  Further video material is projected onto smaller screens by FreQ
Nasty and VJ Cindy Lee, who have joined forces to create a visual
representation and extension to the music as an invitation to an
audiovisual experience to watch, participate in and dance to at the ferry¹s
groovy Metropolitan Night Club.

SANKARI
Petri Kola and Minna Nurminen are the artists behind the Sankari Show
(Œsankari¹ means hero in Finnish), a live participatory impro show
combining stand-up comedy, drama and game. Sankari experiments with
bringing aspects of human relations to a game. For this purpose, travellers
participate in an interactive cinema-karaoke. In 2003, Sankari won the
MindTrek competition for acclaimed emerging Finnish multimedia talent. The
session at the ferry¹s multi-screen Stardust disco is hosted by Finnish
musician Zarkus Poussa.

FLOAT
Media artists Tamas Szakal (Hungary) and Tuomo Tammenpää (Finland) are the
creators of the locative sound installation Float.  In Float, the ship
turns into a play-head and the route into a track. The surrounding islands
build the score of the sound installation, the ship playing the track as it
moves from one city to another. This unique experiment using various
streams of data (GPS coordinates, depth, direction, speed etc.) results in
a slowly developing soundscape that invites the travellers to take a dose
of the moment, to listen.

*Networked Experience (Stockholm-Mariehamn-Tallinn), August 16, 2004*

After the Interfacing Sound Cruise, the journey continues the next day from
Stockholm to Åland Islands and on to Tallinn under the file name Networked
Experience.

ICOLS STRATEGY DEFENSE AND ARMS FAIR
Icols (International Corporation of Lost Structures), a collaboration of
artists from across the globe, have designed Œarms fair¹ to act as a
catalyst and provocation to covertly animate narratives and histories, such
as Leonardo Da Vinci¹s work as a designer of weapons, submarines, tanks,
flying machines, military complexes and bridges for the Duke of Milan and
Cesare Borgia. Complex shifts have occurred in the relationships between
the artist and the idea of warfare during different expressions of
modernism. Contemporary new media technology that artists use is often
connected with modern warfare, such as GPS, augmented reality systems and
VR-technologies. Icols presents a modified Œarms fair¹ in Mariehamn,
capital of the demilitarized zone of Åland, to explore these relations.

MONOTON
Musician, hypermedia developer and content designer Konrad Becker created
Monoton, the crucial Austrian electronic music act providing distinguished
soundscapes. The Wire magazine (#175) singled out Monoton¹s record
Monotonprodukt07 among the 100 most important ­ and ignored - records of
the 20th century. Konrad Becker will trigger the ferry audiences with
minimalist rigour in a live-gig at the Metropolitan Night Club. (For the
Interfacing Sound Cruise Becker will perform Super Mario and other Golden
Classics, featuring a medley of 25 years of electronic music and noise with
a reference to console 8bit gamesongs and a new flavour of garage.)

LIFEBOAT
Lifeboat is a project dealing with concepts of sustainability, survival and
notions of biological, cultural and ideological re-generation, and its
obverse, the degradation of life and all its manifestations. The project is
contained within a lifeboat brought onto the Silja Opera ferry especially
for this project. The lifeboat has become home to a Biotechnology lab
producing tissue culture. Behind the project are the Symbiotica members
Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Guy Ben-Ary and Nigel Helyer. Art and science
collaborations are a larger theme within the ISEA2004 programme. Lifeboat
will be part of a collaboration with Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre as
the artists will be doing preparatory works in the centre¹s Open Lab.

SYREN
Syren is a shipboard version of augmented audio reality developed by the
New South Wales University, Australia. This system is developed for a new
sea faring experience by artist Nigel Helyer to operate a sonic cartography
in and around each of the ports that the ISEA2004 ferry visits with some
additional points en-route. Syren is designed to operate with an array of
surround sound speakers on one of the ferry¹s outdoor decks. Geo-spatial
information will be automatically accessed as the ship navigates the
electronic charts associated with each of the ports of call via a
high-resolution GPS system coupled to a digital compass. This positional
information will in turn be used to render a surround-sound (3D)
sound-scape corresponding to proximate physical features.

NETWORKING SESSIONS
The Networked Experience cruise will also include meetings, panels and
roundtable lunches for regional networks of new media practitioners from
Africa and Asia; discussion groups from MIT press; a panel on international
listserv culture with representatives of a range of new media culture lists
that emerged and flourished through the 90s examining strategies in
networking and list management to encourage productive online communication
spaces and industry specific meetings.

After the groundbreaking cruise, ISEA2004 continues in Tallinn and
Helsinki. Themes in Tallinn comprise Wearable Experience, Geopolitics of
Media and Critical Interdisciplines: research, science, art and
collaboration. ISEA2004 culminates in Helsinki with conferences,
exhibitions, performances and works in city spaces exploring the themes
Wireless Experience, Histories of the New, Critical Interaction Design and
Open Source and Software as Culture.

DON¹T MISS THE EARLY BIRD! RESERVE YOUR TICKETS ON-LINE HERE:
http://www.isea2004.net/tickets

Welcome aboard!
ISEA2004 crew

+ terveiset ja hyvää viikonloppua! Mika.

Mika Minetti
marketing and communications manager, ISEA2004
mika at isea2004.net
+358 40 719 2280


-- 
Amanda McDonald Crowley
executive producer, ISEA2004
http://www.isea2004.net
mobile: +358 (0)440 344 441
amanda at isea2004.net