PIKSEL 11
re:public
Piksel is an international event for artists and developers working with free/libre and open source technologies & art. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects.
The festival program is made up of presentations, hands-on workshops, audiovisual performances, exhibitions and specially curated events – all on the topic of free technology and art.
The main festival exhibition is held at Stiftelsen 3,14.

The 9th edition of the Piksel Festival takes place on November 17th-20th 2011. The festival subtitle re:public connects to various strategies for rethinking and redefining public space, both as a concrete physical space, and in a larger social and political context.
18.11.2011 – 08.01.2012

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Matchmaker 1.0 – Marleen Andela & Eva van der Velde
The Matchmaker 1.0 consists of a circle of seven panels equipped with infrared sensors. There is a visualization in the middle of the circle. The participants’ heart rate is measured when they place their finger on the sensor. The computer compares the heart rate rhythms. When the heart rates are in sync this is visualized using a line. If the system is fully utilized lines flash across. The longer one or more hearts are in the same cadence, the clearer the line between them becomes.

Collector—Afterlife – HsienYu Cheng
“Life is life, nothing about size. Even they are ants or small insects, life is still same as ours.”In this Project I try to reduce and magnify the scale of life, let this work can collect life by itself and transfer into a virtual environment to create a kind of afterlife. The virtual environment is a game called “life invader”. On the device, there is a display shows the amount of life collected by installation, and this amount will be the hero’s life of this game. So if audience plays the game and lose the life of hero, the number shows on the display will be decreased. When the number turns to “0”, that means the installation have to collect new life for continuing the game.
http://fukana.com/hsien-yu-c/work/lifecollector/

The Sound of Bureaucracy – Delia Cristina Gheorghiu & Eugen Minciu
If bureaucracy had a voice how would it sound? How does an invoice sound? What about a fragment from an emergency ordinance? The starting point of the work is the difficulty encountered by Romanians who wanted to implement various projects in various areas using money from Norway Grants. The difficulties they encountered were mainly due to the heavily bureaucratic system in Romania. The work reflects something deeper, continuous, seemingly impossible to change – heavy bureaucracy. Using the Ruby programming language an application was created. Through this application each word in the selected texts is randomly associated two sounds (one for vocals and one for consonants in the word). Once attached to a word the sound is repeated through a document every time that particular word appears. The texts are fragments from the codes used to identify a public purchase, a fragment from an emergency ordinance on public purchase, two forms, an invoice and a receipt. The words in these documents are attached only low-frequency sounds of 80 instruments which were selected from a media library. Played in loop these sounds are meant to render the quantity of ”bureaucratic noise” that each of us in Romania and possibly anywhere in the world are supposed to put up with every day.
(work presented in a group exhibition commissioned by the Embassy of Norway in MNAC Foto-anexa)
http://vimeo.com/27665343

Naked on Pluto – Dave Griffiths, Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux
Naked on Pluto is an open source, multiplayer online facebook game which serves as the focus for a wider examination of online privacy via a blog, interviews, public events and lectures. The project was developed during a shared residency at NIMk, BALTAN Laboraties and Piksel, between June and November 2010, by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.The game explores the limits and nature of social networks from within, slowly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerated by the companies that own them, carefully documenting this process as we go. We use the story of Elizabeth Magie’s Landlord’s game (the precursor to Monopoly made in 1903) as inspiration for games as explorations of political issues. Instead of tenant’s rights however, we combine story and play in an investigation on how exposed we are on social networks, and how our data is being used.

Proxy – Andy Gracie
The installation ‘Proxy’ features a pair of almost identical robotic devices (named ‘Essence’ and ‘Possibility’) which have been designed to carry out the basic tasks involved in hunting for tardigrades and nematodes in samples of moss, lichen and earth originally taken from the natural habitat. Essence and Possibility owe much of their aesthetic and their contextual purpose to the twin Mars rovers ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’ which have been roaming and experimenting upon the surface of the red planet since January 2004.In ‘Proxy’ we see a reversal in the normal relationships and assumed roles between humans and robots. Where normally we send robots to dangerous, inaccessible or inhospitable places, here it is the artist that has undertaken excursions to mountainous regions for the purpose of collecting samples which the robots, ‘safe’ and ‘sound’ in the gallery space, will investigate. On each occasion that ‘Proxy’ is exhibited a new sample collecting expedition is made in a geographical region related to the exhibition venue.
http://hostprods.net/projects/proxy/

Leaks – Paul Eugen Popescu
Installation with a type of liquid text display which would print news feeds from wikileaks. Working like a text scroll that you see on every news tv station. Just like the real news gets squeezed through lots of different media channels and gets retransmitted, in this installation the text message as it travels through the tubes gets out of sync and looses it shape, ending up looking like an unrecognizable, unreadable never ending line of morse code and the liquids are collected and reused in a loop.
http://www.lights.ro/2011/liquid-text-display-for-rokolectiv-2011/