Details

From Develop

[edit] The Condition of the Working Class in England / Igor Strojmaer [Paris] / Robotic Lecture / Open Graphics Studio

Working Men! To you I dedicate a work, a faithful picture of your condition, of your sufferings and struggles, of your hopes and prospects. I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors. Having, at the same time, ample opportunity to watch the middle-classes, your opponents, I soon came to the conclusion that you are perfectly right in expecting no support whatever from them. Their interest is diametrically opposed to yours. Their doings give them the lie. Have they ever paid any serious attention to your grievances? Not they indeed, those are things they do not like to speak of -- they have left it to a foreigner to inform the civilised world of the degrading situation you have to live in. Go on then, as you have done hitherto. Much remains to be undergone; be firm, be undaunted -- your success is certain, and no step you will have to take in your onward march will be lost to our common cause, the cause of Humanity! Intima Virtual Base, 2008 www.intima.org

[edit] Ignotus the Mage : El Mago Ignotus / Paul Hertz [Chicago] / Performance / Open Graphics Studio

Ignotus the Mage brings together various processes that have long informed Paul Hertz' work: induction of the audience into the creative process, pattern-making games, intermedia composition, remixing as a metaphor for memory, and collaborative interaction. Ignotus the Mage was originally a one-on-one performance with a deck of punch cards designed to generate geometric patterns that Paul Hertz used in paintings and drawings. In order to give something back to participants for helping to generate new patterns by acting as “random variables” in the algorithmic procedures run on the cards, he created the persona of Ignotus the Mage, dysfunctional fortuneteller. Ignotus can “read the present” (since he can’t tell the future or recall the past) in the patterns of the cards. Subsequently he used the card game to gather not just patterns, but the voices and faces of participants. Materials gathered in the performances have been used for interactive installations, digital prints, and audio compositions. Visual and audio design and software by Paul Hertz. http://ignotus.com/mage/index.html

[edit] The Story of Batya M. / sala – manca group [Tel Aviv/Jerusalem] / Live Performance / Open Graphics Studio

"The Story of Batya M." is the last (and unique) chapter of a fictional Argentinean "telenovela" (soap opera) projected on the screen and experienced as live performance in a drive-in-cinema (drive-in optional). In a live performance the two leading actors from the film dub the scenes (from Spanish into English). The language they use changes, the translation becomes dubious, the design of the subtitles and the conventions of the genre are also transformed and subverted. The outcome is a unique piece that exists on the border between mass television culture and avant-garde performance. The Story of Batya M. uses the classic story structure of the telenovela but subverts it through the subtitles which have a central role in this work or through the use of poetic elements from cinema language or the appearance of a melodrama researcher who comments about the work . The Story of Batya M. is a work full of humor, drama, poetics and blinks. The work addresses different audiences because allows different levels of reading: it dialogues with cinema, art and telenovela culture. The work deals with the concepts of migration, culture, social issues, and of course....love and revenge :)