UM will take place across central Lisbon - Bairro Alto, Chiado and Santos - in new spaces, artist lead independent venues, cultural meeting places and outside in public squares and on the street. Um includes one exhibition, concerts and performances, workshops, seminars.

Exhibition: June 19 - July 3, 2008 :: Conscious Space, Sonia Cillari, NL - Tape Loop, Andre Goncalves, PT; Crackle Canvas, Tom Verbruggen, NL; Patchery, Laetitia Morais, PT; Come and See the View, Kathy Hinde, UK; Delicate Boundaries, Chris Sugrue, US.

Concerts and Performances - June 20 - 21 :: Andy Moor, NL; A Cable Plays, Chris Surgue, US and Damian Stewart, NZ/PT; N.I.P. collective, UK/NL/PT; BOP, UK; Goodiepal, FO/UK; Rudolfo Quintas, PT
Turntable Reconstructions, DJ Sniff, US/NL; TokTek, NL.

Seminars - June 20 - 21

Panel 1: Gesture and Movement Based Interfaces - Speakers: Ivan Franco, Creative Director of Y-Dreams and artist, PT; Frank Balde, STEIM, designer, NL; Adriana Sa, artist and musician, PT; Chair: Takuro Lippit, musician and Artistic Advisor/STEIM, NL.

Panel 2: Landscape, Environment and Movement - Speakers: Pedro Appleton, PT - architect, Promontorio Architecture; Goncalo Velho, PT - researcher and anthropologist, Instituto Politecnico de Tomar & The Oporto Faculty of Arts; John Klima, US/PT - artist and game designer (tbc); Chair: Rui Trindade, CADA, PT.

Panel 3: People, Place and Distributed Communities - Speakers: Teresa Dillon, IRE/UK - artist - researcher-director, Polar Produce/N.I.P./UM; Luis Silva, PT - curator, Upgrade! Lisboa and Rhizome; Takuro Lippit, NL - musician and Artistic Advisor, STEIM; Paulo Raposo, PT - musician and director of Sirr records; Chair: Luisa Ribas, FBAUL, PT.

Panel 4: Extended Bodies within Mixed Reality Spaces and Places: Speakers - Paul Sermon, UK and Sonia Cillari, NL.

Workshops

- Wearin’ it - DIY wearable workshop, Andre Goncalves, PT
- Wii Undressed, Frank Balde/STEIM, NL
- Build your own electronic noise machine, Tom Bugs, UK
- Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra, Goodiepal, (FO/UK)

Initiation/Direction: Polar Produce :: Co-Production: CADA + NIP :: Funders: DGARtes, MInisterio Cultura, PRS Foundation.

Glow is an illuminating choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss. Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states.

Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.

In Glow, light and moving graphics are not pre-rendered video playback but rather images constantly generated by various algorithms responding to movement. In most conventional works employing projection lighting, the dancer’s position and timing have to be completely fixed to the space and timeline of the video playback. Their role is reduced to the difficult chore of making every performance an exact facsimile of the original. In Glow, the machine sees the performer and responds to their actions, unlocking them from a relationship of restriction and tedium.

Ideally located in the very center of Brussels along the Canal in a district currently involved in an intense urban renewal process, the new Center will host the office, workplace and workshop rooms of iMAL, and will propose a public space of 400m2 entirely dedicated to the contemporary artistic and cultural practices emerging from the fusion of computer, telecommunication, network and media.

EXHIBITION: The exhibition explores the hybrid world merging the Internet and the physical world. About a dozen works from artists coming from Belgian, Europe and USA are proposed. With Yannick Antoine (BE), Yves Bernard (BE), Jonah Brucker-Cohen (USA), HC Gilje (NO), Linda Hifling (DK), Thomas Israïël (BE), Walter Langelaar (NL), Sascha Pohflepp (DE), Domenico Quaranta (IT), Antoine Schmitt (FR), SecondFront & Odyssey (Second Life), Walter Verdin (BE).

CONCERTS AND PERFORMANCES

THURSDAY 4.10, 18:00

OPENING: Performance Second Life <-> Brussels, with the collaboration of Second Front and Odyssey

FRIDAY 5.10, 20:30

Espaces Croisés, Mathieu Chamagne (fr), Pyrogenesis, Pascal Baltazar (fr), 2006 - These two artists supported by GMEA, the musical research group of Albi will play personal compositions where they expore new types of gestural interfaces for controlling multi-channel computer-based sound processes.

Mikro, HC Gilje (no), Justin Bennett (uk), 2006 -”Mikro” is a series of improvised performances using the immediate surroundings as raw material. A microscope captures everyday objects and surfaces like wallpaper, coins, clothing, furniture, newspapers and transforms it into an explosive universe of textures. Contact microphones and electromagnetic sniffers pick up unhearable sounds to create the live soundtrack.

SATURDAY 6.10, 20:30

EAVK, Visual Kitchen (be) & Eavesdropper (be) - Visual Kitchen explores the semantics of live AV performance and video art from a background of VJ’ing and music video production. Eavesdropper started as a drum’n bass breakbeats producer that soon found his way to theatre, performance soundtracks and sounddesign.

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, Sven König (de), 2006-07 -Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine. s?H! is a conceptual software which makes it possible to work with samples in a completely new way by making them available in a manner that does justice to their nature as concrete musical memories. s?H! is performed live by Sven singing to travel through an improvised remix of symphonic orchestra audiovisual archives.

From his blog: “Some of the questions at the center of my work are: Fundamentally, what is interactivity? How can we build environments that are interactive as apposed to reactive? What does an interactive architecture offer us over a reactive architecture? What does interactive architecture offer us over the lifetime of the buildings and wider landscape we inhabit?..”

The EyesWeb open platform (free download) has been originally conceived for supporting research on multimodal expressive interfaces and multimedia interactive systems. EyesWeb has also been widely employed for designing and developing real-time dance, music, and multimedia applications. It supports the user in experimenting computational models of non-verbal expressive communication and in mapping gestures from different modalities (e.g., human full-body movement, music) onto multimedia output (e.g., sound, music, visual media). It allows fast development and experiment cycles of interactive performance set-ups by including a visual programming language allowing mapping, at different levels, of movement and audio into integrated music, visual, and mobile scenery.

EyesWeb has been designed with a special focus on the analysis and processing of expressive gesture in movement, midi, audio, and music signals. It was the basic platform of the EU-IST Project MEGA and it has been employed in many artistic performances and interactive installations. More.