coded cultures: Symposium Tag 2 Event

Exhibition - open daily from 10 am - 08 pm

Craving - soundwalk
meeting point: freiraum/quartier21
time: 11.30 am - 1.30 pm

A Geo-Spatial Sound Composition for a Listener Moving Freely through Deserted Urban Landscapes
Craving is a site specific spatial sound composition set up by the two artists in the public space of Vienna’s Donaucity district. There they arranged musical and spoken sound fragments inspired by the late Sarah Kane’s play “Crave”. The selection of sounds and their spatial as well as temporal distribution follows a detailed study of the text and the emotional tectonics of the physical space itself. The latter one, which is reflected in features such as rhythms and flows of pedestrian movements and architectural layers.

The piece is experienced by the listener while he individually wanders though the outskirt high-rise area. He wears headphones and a GPS- and sensor equipped computing device, allowing the composition to unfold while he drifts through the area. A binaural sound simulation incorporates the sounds that have been affiliated by the artists to certain places into his acoustic environment, as if they were around him. While the listener explores the urban environment himself, he is also shaping his very own spatial sound narrative. The project is based on the artists’ self-developed software “Global Player”.
Bernhard Garnicnig, Gottfried Haider (Austria)
Bernhard Garnicnig studies Digital Arts at the University for Applied Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a founding member of c17, an artist-run space in Vienna. His current work focuses on establishing social, theoretical, sculptural and audiovisual constellations.
Gottfried Haider studies Digital Arts at the University for Applied Arts Vienna. He is interested in urban soundscape theory and researches the interdependencies of algorithmic acquisition of space, its coexistent manipulation and numerology.

* offspacecenter.com/infoblast - Homepage of Bernhard Garnicnig
* gottfriedhaider.com - Homepage of Gottfried Haider

: MUMOK Auditorium
Artist Presentations
time: 2.00 pm - 3.30 pm

Verina Gfader (FI)

Title: I prefer not to use predictable paths*

Verina Gfader is an artist and researcher with an interest in the criticality of emerging practices and economies of media art. Her work addresses themes of non-linearity, modes of resistance, and articulations of the democratic, active work. Gfader was born in Helsinki and currently lives in London. After completing a PhD in Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins London, she joined CRUMB web resource for new media art curators. Recent projects include: 2008 Close to the Surface: Digital Presence, ICA London. 2008 Condensation Revisited: A Lecture on Pigments:3 (with Colm Lally), ISEA 2008, Singapore; 2008 Nervous Light Planes (essay), Animation, Vol. 3, No. 2, SAGE Publications.

UBERMORGEN.COM (Hans Bernhard & lizvlx / AT)

“By implementing specific algorithms, software enables many processes to be automated: not only does it allow artists to delegate a significant portion of work to a machine, it also allows them to give up on the element of artistic “intentionality”, which is substituted with the random factor much sought after by the avant-garde movements. Instead of emulating a creative process, UBERMORGEN.COM’s generators actually appropriate an authoritative device and offer it to anyone who wants to use it. They appropriate this authority. They can do this thanks to the evolution that the formal device of the ”certificate” has had in the digital era, with the shift from ”original” to “[f]original”. The authenticity of such documents is claimed and acknowledged according to a hallucination which is shared by all, but which is nevertheless a hallucination. UBERMORGEN.COM programmed machines to generate injunctions, bank statements, interrogation protocols and prescriptions which are unexceptionable in terms of form and content, and which can be put into circulation in the given communication systems, with varying results.” Domenico Quaranta
UBERMORGEN.COM – lizvlx & Hans Bernhard (AT/CH/USA)
UBERMORGEN.COM is an artist duo created in Vienna, Austria, by lizvlx and Hans Bernhard (co-founder of etoy). Behind UBERMORGEN.COM we can find one of the most unmatchable identities – controversial and iconoclastic – of the contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde. Their open circuit of conceptual art, drawing, software art, pixel painting, installations, net.art, sculpture and media hacking transforms their brand into a hybrid Gesamtkunstwerk.

* ubermorgen.com - Homepage of UBERMORGEN.COM
* ipnic.org/superenhanced - Superenhanced Generator, 2009
* ipnic.org/psychos - Psych|os Generator, 2006
* ipnic.org/BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR - BANKSTATEMENTGENERATOR, 2005
* ipnic.org - Injunction Generator, 2001

BCL (Shiho Fukuhara & Georg Tremmel / JP - AT)

Reverting genetically modified blue carnations back to its natural white state using open-source DIY bio-bending methods and procedures.

“Common Flowers / White Out” reverses the effects of the modification of the petal colour in carnation (Dianthus caryophyllus L.) from white to blue through genetic manipulation. By using a DIY bio-bending approach, the genes which are responsible for the blue colour are exorcised from the plant and its orginal natural white colour is reinstated. “White Out” is the next logical step of the “Common Flowers” series, which laid the foundation by re-animating, multiplying and technically cloning the first commerically available and purely aesthetic GM product, Suntory’s blue “Moondust” carnations. The interest is less biotechno-centric, but more towards solidifying concepts of “bio-media” and “wetware”. “White Out” takes this process a step further by removing the previously introduced genetic material and creating a non-genetically modified plant from a previous GM plant. This double genetic manipulation negates the original intention and serves to question concepts of “change”, “nature”, and “manipulation” in the ongoing biosciences and in the wider social context.
Shiho Fukuhara (Japan)
Shiho Fukuhara received a BA(Hons) in Fine Art from Central St Martins and continued her studies with an MA in Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art. Shiho was invited to participate at the Le Pavillion at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2004 and was selected as Artist-in-Residence at IAMAS (Japan), ISEA 2008 in Singapore and most recently at Ambient TV in London. In her art projects she is investigating the relationships between art and science with a special interest in the social implications of emergent biotechnologies.

Georg Tremmel (Austria)
Georg Tremmel studied Visual Media Arts on the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art in London, where he started his ongoing collaboration with Shiho Fukuhara. Their works were shown internationally and awarded serveral distinctions and honours. Most recently, they formed the artistic collaborative research framework BCL with the mission to explore the relations, congruences and differences of biological and cultural codes through artistic interventions and social research.

MUMOK Auditorium
Theoretical Lectures
time: 4.30 pm - 6.00 pm

Fumihiko Sumitomo (JP)

MUMOK Auditorium
Keynote
time 7.00 pm - 8.00 pm

Marina Grzinic (SLO) & Hiroshi Yoshioka (JP)
Thomas Fürstner (AT)