live performers meeting 2011

Art is Open Source will be at the 2011 edition of LPM, the Live Performers Meeting, an international event focused on visual cultures and live performance.

LPM started as a VJ meeting , but it soon evolved into something more. The fast evolution of the technologies and tools that can be used by artists and creatives widely expanded the scenarios of live visual performances, and now we are getting used to (and expect to) seeing electronics, devices, generative visuals, networked performances, projection mapping, architectural visuals, software art and body performance mixed with electronics.

LPM 2004

LPM’s own history reflects this kind of evolution. Starting out from a community brought up by Flyer Communication around the FLxER VJ software, LPM was nor an ordinary festival, really assuming instead the characteristics of a true meeting, in which people met, discussed, experimented things together and in which the performative part of the event was halfway between a showcase of the things presented through workshops and face-to-face discussions, and a very happy party :)

The meeting mutated through time expanding the range of activities that were featured during the event, including live cinema acts, intensive workshops, software presentations, urban performances, and the ever present intense dance floor experience.

FLxER, the software created by Flyer Communication, evolved together with the meeting. Already innovative since the beginning (a VJ tool that you could use directly from the web, if you wanted to, accessing not only your own content, but also all the content of the community, organized through convenient interfaces and facilities), it is now including outstanding features dedicated to projection mapping, 3D graphics, integration with controllers and other devices.

And, most of all, preserving and developing a really live community of artists, software developers, hackers and more.

LPM 2007

Each year LPM hosted the Digital Freedoms Week, an event started at the Linux Club in Rome in which open cultures and technologies, networked cultures, hacking and hacktivism built a discourse about the perspectives in which we all can use networks and technologies to promote our freedoms and to foster a more democratic, interactive, accessible world.

Each year the Digital Freedoms Week confronted a different perspective on the themes of open source, knowledge sharing, open access, privacy, intellectual property, and more, and we at Art is Open Source have always been really happy to participate to it with projects such as Degradarte and REFF RomaEuropa FakeFactory.

This year we will curate, together with our friend Arturo di Corinto, the section of LPM that is called

SENSIBLE DATA

sensibledata

directly from the concept page of the LPM website:

“This year the Digital Freedom Week @ LPM focuses on the domains of information.

Our lives, our forms of expression, the things we buy, our relationships and the things we learn, communicate and share are progressively (if not totally) changing into digital data that is transmitted over digital networks. Open access to data and information, and the possibility to determine how our information is shared and used are key factors to defend our freedoms and rights. Contemporary Visual cultures transform the fundamental role of data in our lives into new paradigms for aesthetics and interactivity, often poetically merging activism and beauty: database aesthetics, visuals produced using enormous sets of public/private data found on digital networks are only two of the forms of artistic expression that over time have produced wonderful sensorial experiences that have been able to both inform and activate the consciences of people worldwide.

This year DFW@LPM wishes to explore the themes of free access to data, information and knowledge: workshops, conferences and live performances will investigate on innovative and creative paths to promote freedoms-through-data.”

So, to make a long story short, we will be at

LPM 2011 in Rome (May 19th – 22nd 2011) at Nuovo Cinema L’Aquila

and at

LPM 2011 in Minsk (September 2011)

promoting and coordinating workshops, performances, discussions and presentations that deal with the ways in which arts, design, creativity and other practices can use open, accessible data sources to enact critical practices and, in a version that is a bit more “extreme”, how we can use currently available technologies to harvest informations from social networks, websites, networks and other possible sources of data (mobile phones, sensors, devices, tagging…) to both critically question the ideas of privacy, freedom of expression, accessibility, public/private space, identity, sexuality, and to understand how we can use these same “dangers” to create practices of reaction, of tactical forms of expression and to promote freedoms and self determination.

We believe that art and creativity have a very major role in this: making information “beautiful”, narrative, poetic, interesting, interactive, engaging (or even shocking and outrageous) and accessible have enormous effects on cultural, cognitive, political and emotional levels.

We are communicating an open call for participation and are also accepting suggestions for workshops and performances.

In this perspective, the best thing you can do is to register at the LPM website and then, after you added at least the basic info about what you’d like to do at LPM 2011, contact me or anyone from the LPM staff. In this way you will help us to share all the info we need to support you and your workshop/performance/exhibit/showcase.

Also feel free to ask for any information here or on the contacts.

Here below are some info material you all might like to view to know more about LPM and its 2011 edition. (in italian for now: expect more info in the next few days here on Art is Open Source, and directly on the LPM website)

LPM 2011 ROME – Press Release, Italian