[spectre] Piksel @ PixelACHE 2005

[juha huuskonen]

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BEK is happy to announce Piksel @ PixelACHE and the
launch of the Piksel LiveCD.

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Piksel[1] is an annual event for artists and developers working with open
source audiovisual software tools. Part workshop, part festival, it is
organised in Bergen, Norway, by the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts
 (BEK)[2] and involves participants from more than a dozen countries
exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing
workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics
of open source. Since 2004 Piksel has collaborated with the Pixelache
festival of electronic art and subcultures in Helsinki, Finland[3].

The development, and therefore use, of digital technology today is mainly
controlled by multinational corporations. Despite the prospects of
technology expanding the means of artistic expression, the commercial
demands of the software industries severely limit them instead. The open
source movement is a strategy for regaining artistic control of the
technology, but also a means of focussing on the close connections between
art, politics, technology and economy. Trying to achieve all this, Piksel
is perhaps hard to pin down, with aspects of both convention and circus,
so an explanation will be offered at this year's Pixelache.

Gisle Frøysland[4], director of visual arts at BEK and main organiser of
Piksel, will present the ideas behind the project and the results deriving
from it. Gisle Frøysland is a Norwegian multimedia artist, vj and musician
working with various themes connected to modern technology and
communications. He is founding member of BEK and initiator/maintainer of
BEK's video software MøB[5].

Pixelache 2005 coincides with the release of the Piksel LiveCD, a Linux
distribution containing the software[6] used and developed at Piksel. The
package contains a suite of innovative audiovisual and artistic software,
free video plugins[7], and documentation from the past Piksel
events.Version 1.0 of the liveCD will be launched at Pixelache,
and also be presented by Gisle Frøysland.

Among the other Piksel-related projects at Pixelache 2005, we find
Streamtime, Dyne:bolic, TEMPEST and PiDiP.

Dyne:bolic[8] is a GNU/Linux distribution very easy to employ, shaped
on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives, being a practical
tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both
sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, all using
only free and open source software. Dyne:bolic has been made freely
available on the net, while it has also been published by major Linux
magazines in India, North Europe, Italy, Spain, Greece, China and more.

Dyne:bolic is in use in Streamtime[9], a project of Radio Reedflute
developed with artists and activists from Iraq and elsewhere. Streamtime
uses old and new media for the production of content and networks
in the fields of media, arts, culture and activism in crisis areas, like
Iraq. Streamtime takes the Tigris as a metaphor for liberation -
a source of civilisation and a site of pollution, repression and resistance.
The stream will be transformed into a stream of sounds and images
on the internet, through local radio stations and web based networked
projects it will promote civil activities in media, architecture, poetry,
music and popular expression. Architects, artists and reconstruction
workers will be challenged to look at Baghdad from the river and
reshape the public sphere.

TEMPEST[10] is Erich Berger's (AT/NO) performance employing the
surveillance technology Van Eck Phreaking, where the content of a computer
monitor is reconstructed by picking up the electromagnetic field of the
monitor. The U.S. government has been involved withem-field interpretation
for many years under a top-secret program code-named "TEMPEST."

PiDiP[11] is an extension to the popular open source environment Pure Data
(actually an extension to Tom Schoutens PD extension PDP.), containing
image processing objects, streaming objects and a collection of other
additions, developed by Yves Degoyon, musician, video artist and
developer, member of BULT (with Tom Schouten) and d.R.e.G.S.

More info:

[1] http://www.piksel.no
[2] http://www.bek.no
[3] http://www.pixelache.ac
[4] http://www.220hex.org
[5] http://mob.bek.no
[6] http://www.piksel.no/piksel04/software.html
[7] http://www.piksel.org
[8] http://www.dynebolic.org
[9] http://www.streamtime.org
[10] http://randomseed.org/tempest/
[11] http://ydegoyon.free.fr/pidip.html