How does code dream? What are the dreams of code? Piksel08 examines the other side of code, an alternative side to a hard-coded reality of work and play. Open hardware and free software project a utopic vision, yet exist within economies of capital, the dream factory of mainstream technology. Within the chance meeting of sewing machine and umbrella on the dissecting table, hardware and software are flattened.

Piksel08: code dreams explores the dreams of this soft machine; bachelors coding for pleasure, reverse engineering paranoiac constructs of the real, automatic coding practice, soft hardware, and everyday magic.Open Call:

: Projects related to the code dreams theme including but not restricted to: reverse engineering, soft hardware, code poetry, novel instruction sets, invisible exploration, ghosted computation… programmed by and running on free and open source software and/or open/DIY hardware.

:Live art realised by the use of free and open source software. We specially encourage live coding and DIY hardware projects to apply.

: Innovative DIY hardware and audiovisual software tools or software art released under an open licence.

Deadline - August 15. 2008

Please use the online submit form at: http://piksel.no/piksel08/subform.html

or send documentation material - preferably as a URL to online documentation with images/video to piksel08@piksel.no

**subsections:

**real code :
real.co.[de][re] actively explores code which has strong effects on the real, constructing the world through prediction and description. The twelve hour real.co.[de][re] session will attempt the active construction of a working code model (of any form) which addresses a flattening of the distinction
between software and hardware, to resolve a new political reference for real core code.

**abstract code:

Abstract code is software whose results can be invisible, a software implementing different layers of action at the same time. Abstract code is a connection to parallel worlds, a poetic formula dealing
with outer forces. Code is art, its action is subtile, effective, magic.

procedural text :maledictions, oracles, iambi, hymn, formula, refrains, hypnotic sentences,
prayers, and other.

Piksel is supported by the Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway, Vestnorsk Filmsenter, Hordaland County Council and others.

More info: http://piksel.no

PulseCode is still under development and more information and examples will follow. In the meantime, if you are interested, you can download an alpha version here. PulseCode currently runs on Mac OS X 10.4 and later, but should be relatively easy to port to other platforms. It is released under the GPL. If you have any questions or suggestions, you can send mail to: fokke [at] pulsecode.org.

Watch a video.

In recent years the foregrounding of ‘collaboration’ in artistic practice has acquired an aura of inherent benevolence and emancipation, as though the very act of working with others in itself ensures some form of resistance or alternative to conventions of cultural production, and confers positive moral value. The recent valorisation of collaboration within the arts, however, merely elides the basic condition of collaboration that all forms of production ultimately rely on in various degrees and arrangements. This can be seen as one part of the larger growth in service and communications industries whose ‘labour’ and ‘produce’ are primarily invested in the structuring and intensification of various collaborative exchanges, often minute and ephemeral, yet, when harvested on a vast scale, capable of generating seemingly endless amounts of surplus value.[1] Collaboration in the production of this ’surplus’ now extends beyond the contracted employees into the consumers themselves, who help define and create the products they themselves consume. This is exemplified in the proliferation of highly ‘personalised’ products and services, reality entertainment, and the social networks of Web 2.0, with the virtual world of Second Life notably combining all three factors.[2] Those artforms which most consciously valorise collaboration, as described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, merely echo this situation.[3] The social relations constructed by the artist in gestures of collaboration with audiences and others become spectacularised and commodified in forms that often do not return to those who created them but rather become tokens within the circulation of the art market.[4] In a funding system that prioritises social inclusion within the arts, like that of the UK, collaborative projects can tick the box that unlocks the piggy-bank of state patronage. In such contexts collaboration quickly becomes little more than a revenue stream.[5] Similarly, the rise of Relational Aesthetics accompanied the embrace of artistic practice by the commercial sector, often drawing upon the strategies of such art to enhance collaboration and ‘creativity’ within the workplace.[6]…” Continue reading All Problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses by Simon Yuill, Mute Magazine.

xxxxx-workshops: [in]tolerance presents a series of constructivist workshops specially programmed for the ClubTransmediale 2008 festival, emphasising making and connection within the field of the existent. Workshops are led by international, field-expert practitioners, extending over realms of environmental code, noise, signal transmission, reception, and electromysticism. The workshops will utilise household materials and chemistry, readily-available electronics components, free software and the GNU toolbase.

Over the course of five days, participants will have the opportunity to construct a set of various electronic audiovisual artifacts (being either code or hardware) with which a final presentation/performance will be made. In learning how to create complex sound and image generators from the most basic elements, the participants will explore liminal electronic experiences and intriguing phenomena where carefully-engineered borders and parameters are twisted and transgressed, producing unexpected results in performance.

Workshops:

29.1. NOISE_PRODUCE by Martin Howse (UK) & Martin Kunetz (DE)
30.1. ONE BIT MUSIC by Frederik Olofsson (SE)
31.1. DIGITAL THEREMIN WORKSHOP by Andrei Smirnov (RU) & Derek Holzer (US/NL)
01.2. CHAOS IN NODES AND NETWORKS by Jessica Rylan (US)
02.2. BASTARD NATURES by Alejandra Nuñes Perez (CL)

The series takes inspiration from and continues the development of the (semi)weekly xxxxx workshops held at the Pickled Feet space in Berlin over the last year. It is supported by Arduino.

Theme: “…in the good old days of Shannon’s mathematical theory of information, the maximum of information coincided strangely with maximal unpredictability or noise…” [Friedrich Kittler: There is no software]

Engineers and scientists are concerned with prediction and thus predictability. Inside black-boxed apparatus the faint markings of tolerance, deviations from a predictable scenario towards the encryption of noise, can well be observed by the wily artist. Technology is thus exposed as a material expressing a certain chaos, pure noise of all voices. In return, materiality and an artistic concern with the matter of technology allows for the entry of the unpredictable, environmental noise within an otherwise closed circuit or economy.

Registration: xxxxx-workshops is open to anyone, from novice to experienced electronic artist. The workshops will be held in English. You can register for single workshops or for the whole series. In addition to the actual daily workshops, a free open work-area gives everyone opportunity to pursue projects begun in one of the workshops over the course of five
days. The registration fee for a single workshop is 10.- EUR, the fee for the series of all five workshops is 30.- EUR.

For descriptions of the workshops and workshop leaders go here. You can register till January 14, 2008, by sending an email to: xxxxx [at] clubtransmediale.de. Please don’t forget to indicate which of the workshops you wish to attend.

xxxxx-workshops: [in]tolerance is curated by Martin Howse and Derek Holzer, and produced by Jan Rolf and Anke Eckhardt for Club Transmediale.