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

Angel_F participated to multiple events supporting digital rights, knowledge sharing and the noew forms of identities and sexualities available trough dgital technologies.
A book has been recently published titled “Angel_F, il diario di una intelligenza artificiale”, telling the story of the young artificial intelligence’s first year of life.
Angel_F and its book have been presented at Generative Arts Congress 2009, to a delighted audience. This is the presentation that was used in that occasion.

Other presentations have been made at the Piemonte Share Festival 2009.

more info on:

http://www.angel-f.it/
http://www.artisopensource.net
http://www.generativeart.com/
http://www.toshare.it

Angel and Derrick

In Italy, a new law imposes strict conditions for bloggers, such as defining incredibly high fines for people not correcting stuff on their online publications, and enormous amounts of bureaucracy. Thus practically making free speech on the web too risky, to costly, too hard, cumbersome… a bureaucrat’s dream come true: censorship through fines and forms

A big event has been organized today in Rome’s Piazza Navona where hudreds of bloggers, journalists, politicians, intellectuals and other people of any shape and sizes gathered to protest.

Among these was Derrick de Kerckhove, who met his little digital child, Angel_F, to discuss problems, scenarios and possibilities for the future of the network and for people’s rights and freedom.

As you might know, Angel_F is an ongoing art performance in which a young Artificial Intelligence, son of prof. de Kerchove, takes action, first online and, then, in the physical world, on issues ranging from digital rights, to new economy business models, new sexualities, contemporary approaches to identity.

Angel_F has been the first digital being to officially speak at the Internet Governance Forum, the United Nations’ organization for the definition of a bill of rights and to promote global network freedom and accessibility.

RomaEuropaFAKEFactory

angel_f

SuperAvatar

here is a report on ArtsBlog

here is the story on NeRVi

NoemaLabs published some info

here are the pictures:

Angel_F and SuperAvatar

Angel_F and SuperAvatar are scared.

The lives of the young artificial intelligence and of the  avatar who escaped from virtual worlds have been endangered  more than once by the control, that is constantly perpetrated on people’s information, habits and identities.

Forms of surveillance that are progressively and obsessively  expanding through continuous control of our lives (and not  only of the ones of our beloved digital beings). Along the streets, in supermarkets, in public spaces, and even in our homes, through telephones and internet connectivity.  An enormous amount of resources are wasted to control people’s  lives in multiple ways: from cameras to armed forces, passing  through data retention systems spying on people’s personal  information.

Angel_F e SuperAvatar are feeling annoyed, alarmed and outraged by all of that and, therefore, decided to publicly show their dissent, together with their human friends.

The two digital beings will join the “Freedom not Fear“  event, and they will attend the conference that will take  place at the “Provincia di Roma” building on saturday,  starting at 9:30am.

Who: Angel_F and SuperAvatar
When: Saturday, October 11th 2008, from 9:30am to 13:30am
Where: “Freedom not Fear”, palazzo Valentini (Palazzo della  Provincia di Roma, via IV Novembre n. 119/a, Roma

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“Freedom not Fear“: International action day for democracy, free speech, human rights, civil liberties; against censorship, mass-surveillance, mass-data retention.

http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Fnf08

Angel_F is the young artificial intelligence son of Derrick  de Kerckhove and the Biodoll.
It was born on February 2007. Since it started interacting with humans’ physical world it has been deeply interested about the international dialogue on digital rights. After a peculiar case of censorship, little Angel_F managed to attend the UN’s Internet  Governance Forum held in Rio de Janeiro all by itself.

Angel_F is a project by xDxD.vs.xDxD and penelope.di.pixel
http://www.artisopensource.net/2007/12/10/angel_f/

Fatherboard - the SuperAvatar - is an avatar that escaped  from virtual worlds when its owner’s computer exploded in  a short circuit.  It looks like a cyborg, but it isn’t, as its body is built from the hardware parts of the computer from where it materialized.
Its relations with human beings are contradictory and intermittent: the SuperAvatar is a fugitive living a constant conflict with institutional control, either the virtual and the real ones!

Fatherboard is a project by Luigi Pagliarini
http://www.artificialia.com/Fatherboard/

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