Talk to me

• Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Daina Silina, Davis Bojars (LV)
• RIXC / Riga, Latvia
• We wish to be talked to. Nowadays scientists have conducted various experiments to verify the old assumption that plants grow better if you talk to them. Talk to the plant at least some minutes or read aloud to it.
• http://renewable.rixc.lv

Renewable Network Map

• Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits, Martins Ratniks, Janis Garancs, Daina Silina, Davis Bojars (LV)
• RIXC / Riga, Latvia
• In a quest for a sustainable future artists are amongst those who instead of global constructs offer resilient alternatives. They are living micro-organisms that arise in the gaps of concrete macro-structures. For a number of years now, the artists collective RIXC has worked in cross-fields of art and energy by addressing sustainability issues and initiating a series of events and co-projects, in a result of which new Baltic Nordic cooperation platform – the Network for Art and Renewable Energy Technologies (Renewable Network) was launched. The Renewable Network Map is visualization of these artistic investigations – it maps projects, people and fields, as well as their interrelations, connections and overlapping.
• http://renewable.rixc.lv
• The growing community of [Renewable] mailing-list is open, welcome to join! To subscribe: http://renewable.rixc.lv/subscribe
• More information: RIXC Renewable Network Map

groWorld Bazaar: Draw a plant spirit

• A game character design/permaculture workshop.
• Computer games allow us to take on other lives, and see the world from new perspectives. FoAM has been working for a number of years on using games to strengthen the connection between plants and people. Our latest approach takes popular games such as FarmVille as inspiration, but explores what would happen if they were infused with aspects of permaculture, and where characters called “Plant Spirits” help or hinder you as you discover a world organised by companion planting.
• The game is in active development, and we invite you to join us by designing your own characters on paper that will rebuilt in the running game for you to play with
• http://fo.am/groworld
• More information

Fungifiction #02: Mushroom Research Center Suomenlinna Island

• Tine Tillmann & Laura Popplow (DE)
• A post-industrial ecotopia for Helsinki region. Contaminated soil will be purified by wondrous vital mushrooms which, when cultivated on a large-scale, not only cure diseases and the polluted soil but also the farming society itself.
• http://www.tinetillmann.net/fungifiction/ff1.html

Power Flower

• Andy Best (FI/UK)
• Power Flower is a proposal for a robotic sculpture which reacts to the level of energy consumption in Helsinki area. The sculpture will be presented in Pixelache Helsinki 2011 as a prototype that has been created in collaboration with a group of students from Metropolia.
• Power Flower proposal was selected for further development from an open call for artworks by Helsingin Energia & Pixelache Helsinki.
• http:///www.powerflower.fi - http://www.pixelache.ac/helsinki/art-and-energy

Valo-loinen

• Maria Duncker & Koelse (FI)
• Valo-loinen (‘light parasite’) is a robot orchestra which steals its energy from artificial light sources outdoors.
• Valo-loinen proposal was selected for further development from an open call for artworks by Helsingin Energia & Pixelache Helsinki.
• http://www.pixelache.ac/helsinki/art-and-energy

Mag/Lab

• Mag/Lab offers a selection of locally and numerically produced objects. Created by Ars Longa and Studio Lo, the Mag Lab is developing scenarios on micro-industrial production conducted by digitally assisted fabrication. The Mag/Lab is a collaboration between designers, artists and amateurs towards all audiences.
• http://www.maglab.fr
• More information: Maglab

TIMELAB: The Mini-CNC kit


• Lieven Standaert (BELGIUM), Kurt Van Houtte (BELGIUM)
• Timelab.org - We're a workspace for art and technology in Ghent, Belgium and run a fablab.
• Over the past 9 months we have been developing a lasercut kit for a small, sturdy,desktop-sized, 
computer-controlled milling machine. So far we have used it to mill wood, plexi, PCB's and one table suface. We bring parts for 6 machines with us to Pixelache and would love to build them together with you.
• We're doing a workshop on Thursday to assemble and build your own CNC-machine.
• The other days we will be doing demonstrations with the machines. You can try them out yourself and we would love to discuss them with you.
• http://www.repairablemachines.com for info on the machine
• http://www.timelab.org for info on our organisation
• More information: Timelab Mini CNC

ZOE

• Niki Passath (AT)
• “ZOE” is an attempt to represent human and interpersonal relationships through machinery, describing social phenomena through principles of movement, although the causes of these principles are (still) unknown. For this art project I use active and reactive objects whose formalized behavior trigger emotion and life.
• Website(s): http://niki.xarch.at/wordpress/?cat=17
• More information: Zoe

PikselSavers

• Mark Beasley (US), Andy Deck (US), Jim Bizzocchi (CA), Claude Heiland-Allen (UK), Osvaldo Cibils (UR), Ralph Kistler (DE), Yves Degoyon (FR), Wayne Clements (UK), Thomas Thiery (FR). Curated by Gisle Frøysland (NO)
• PikselSavers is a screening programme of short movies and software art specially curated by the Piksel festival in Bergen, Norway. The programme was selected based on an open call for participation and includes 10 contributions from artists working in a wide range of digital media and techniques. All works are made using Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).
• http://www.piksel.no/pulse/pikselsavers
• More information: PikselSavers

Encoded Views

• Projects realised by participants of Experimental Project in Computational Photography course in Aalto University.
• http://computationalphoto.mlog.taik.fi/
• More information: Encoded Views

SubMap

• Attila Bujdosó, Dániel Feles, Gáspár Hajdú, Krisztián Gergely (HU)
• Kitchen Budapest (HU)
• Visualizing locative data on distorted maps.
• http://submap.kibu.hu
• More information: SubMap

Deptford TV workshop

• Lead by Adnan Hadzi, Lisa Haskel, Larisa Blazic
• This workshop will attempt to identify and document secret (covert) places, strategies and messages in our everyday surroundings. We will use overt, co-operative tactics and practice openness and transparency to push the covert into clearer view.
• Our main tool for this workshop will be easily to obtained, simple to use and perfectly legal video receivers that can intercept the data collected by small CCTV video cameras often placed covertly in shops, offices and other public/private spaces. But we will also use ordinary media-gathering devices, our own eyes and ears and our social skills to identify and record evidence of covert operations in our midst, whether this is capturing gossip and rumour about the Suomenlinna’s Island fortress or observing city planners’ attempts to ‘design out’ specific social behaviours.
• http://edit.deptford.tv
• More information

Improvised illustrations

• Filipe Cruz (ES)
• A series of sketched drawings in an abstract biologic cybernetic spirit (drawn during festival time)
• http://www.tpolm.org/~ps

iYou

• Niels Schrader (DE/NL), Waag Society (NL), Jan van Bruggen (NL/PT), Bert Kommerij (NL) and Michał Ejdys (PL/NL)
• Mind Design (NL) and Waag Society (NL). Financial support: Mediafonds, Amsterdam (NL)
• iYou is a personal, mobile data guide, which makes private communication patterns transparent and encourages understanding of the stories behind their data. The application aggregates, clusters and visualizes data the user never knew was stored. It examines your communication traffic and draws an overall profile that is based on questions like “How do I communicate throughout the day / week / month?”, “What are the links stored on my iPhone?” or “What am I talking about?”. iYou as a research project addresses relevant issues of contemporary media: 1. mobile communication behavior as part of your identity; 2. insight into the data stored on a mobile phone; 3. awareness how 'personal' data can be exploited by third parties; 4. mastering the problem of daily data overload.
• http://www.waag.org/project/iyou
• http://www.iyou.nu

SIXTY-NINE DAYS OF CLOSE ENCOUNTERS AT THE SCIENCE GALLERY

• Wouter Van den Broeck [BE] and Marco Quaggiotto [IT], in collaboration with Lorenzo Isella [IT], Ciro Cattuto [IT] and Alain Barrat [FR] for the SocioPatterns project (www.sociopatterns.org), with support from the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy (www.isi.it), and from the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland (www.sciencegallery.com).
• In the spring of 2009, the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, held the artscience exhibition INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY, which explored mechanisms of contagion and strategies of containment. The visitors of this exhibition were invited to participate in INFECTIOUS SOCIOPATTERNS, a simulated epidemic of an electronic infectious agent that spreads through close-range proximity of individuals. The simulation system was built on top of the SocioPatterns sensing platform. This platform uses wearable electronic badges to sense sustained face-to-face proximity (a proxy observable for social contact) among the participants. More than 30,000 visitors participated over the three-month course of the exhibition. All sensory data collected during this period was used to generate SIXTY-NINE DAYS OF CLOSE ENCOUNTERS AT THE SCIENCE GALLERY, a visualization that represents the daily contact activity during the exhibition. For each day, a cumulative contact graph is shown in which nodes represent visitors and edges connect individuals who spent time in face-to-face proximity. Nodes are color-coded according to their time of arrival at the venue. The contact graph is wrapped by a circular bar chart that displays the recorded number of social encounters over two-minute intervals. The position and angle of the bars are those of the hour hand of a 12-hour clock at the corresponding time. The colors of the bars match those used for the arrival time of nodes in the graph, so that the bar chart also serves as the legend for the color-coding of time.
• http://www.sociopatterns.org
• http://www.sociopatterns.org/gallery/infectious-sociopatterns-poster/
• More details on the data collection process and the properties of the shown contact graphs can be found in the Journal of Theoretical Biology [ “What’s in a crowd? Analysis of face-to-face behavioral networks”, by Lorenzo Isella, Juliette Stehlé, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Jean-François Pinton, and Wouter Van den Broeck, Journal of Theoretical Biology 271, 166-180 (2011) ]