Piksel 2008

Piksel 2008 has ended. I went to see the live performances on thursday and sunday, some presentations on friday, and had a quick look at the real.code thing on saturday.

Despite having a lot of workshops, presentations and performances, the event did not really feel like it was intended for an outside audience. Most of the people there seemed to be involved in this scene of audiovisual software/hardware hackers, in that sense it seems similar to a demoscene event.

From the performers I've seen, a lot seem to indulge in some sort of noise-wankery. I like to have at least some sort of melody or recognizable beat when listening to music, but for some reason these people think they don't need that. It's as if live-coding in Pure Data already makes it Art, so why bother actually making it enjoyable for your audience?

I did enjoy the _rrr performance on sunday, though I wasn't properly awake when seeing that because some drunken students had kept me awake most of the night before. And I really enjoyed the performances by IOhannes zmölnig and Gabor Papp & Agoston Nagy.

"Do sinusoids dream of electric sweeps?" by IOhannes is another live-coding performance with Pure Data. It is interesting conceptually because he added some interesting bits to his patches. He could make the patches move around on their own in his Pure Data work area, and not just move around, also automatically making connections to other patches (based on proximity in the work area). The end result (the audio) wasn't terribly interesting, but as a performance I enjoyed it.

"No Copy Paste" by Gabor Papp & Agoston Nagy was the best performance IMO. The first six minutes of the performance are silent, the performers start from scratch and it takes them a while to set up sound and visuals. Music is made in Pure Data by one of the performers, which was projected to one of the screens (sadly you do not see that in the video of the performance). In he mean time, the other performer is creating the visuals on the main screen using Fluxus, and he is able to interface with pure-data to use some aspects of the music as input to the visuals.

Videos of the event are here: giss.tv/dmmdb/piksel08 (you may need VLC to view the downloadable .oggs). The piksel homepage is at piksel.no.

Conclusion: I did enjoy visiting Piksel, also, Bergen is pretty (for pictures see flickr :).