iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technologies is proud to announce Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition focused on the artistic reinvention of obsolete digital media. Produced and hosted by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón, Asturias) in the frame of the Mediateca Expandida, Playlist now moves to Brussels enriched with twelve new participants and a broader range of artworks.

Playing Games, Music, Art

What happens when the emotional investment you made in your old computers brings you back to the garret where you sent them years ago? When you can’t no longer suffer to work with sophisticated machines that, while promising you more freedom, actually force you to wear the straitjacket kindly designed for you by some corporate guy? When you decide that’s time to put your hands on the machine?

Reinventing the medium: from music to visual arts

What happens is an act of reinventing the medium. Along the Nineties, many artists started working on the reinvention of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies such as vinyl’s, vintage computers, game platforms and alike. Hacking software, circuit-bending hardware, they turned “dead media” into powerful tools of artistic creation. Playlist is an exhibition that explores this kind of research, focusing on the relationship between musical research and visual research, in the belief that the first, rather than the latter, has often been the driving force in this process.

Chiptune, 8-bit punk and media arts

The core of Playlist is the exploration of the “chiptune scene”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music. The show demonstrates that the retro-gaming phenomenon in visual arts can be considered an outfit of a pretty musical phenomenon, that in a bunch of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs, occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-fi sounds and low-res aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes.
Playlist proposes artists from the chiptune scene and the media arts world sharing attitudes such as DIY, recycling, subversive refusal of programmed obsolescence, aesthetics of the glitches from electronic materials. On display, artworks (objects, installations, videos, computer-based and printed works), but also instruments, tools, software’s, hardware’s, records, 8-bit music, movie documentary, platforms and communities.

Presented artists

2 Player Productions (US), Alex Bond / Enso (US), Boogerlab (NZ), The C-Men (NL), Paul B. Davis (UK), James Dingle (US), Jeff Donaldson / noteNdo (US), Julien Ducourthial (FR), Entter (SP), Dragan Espenschied (DE), Gino Esposto / Micromusic.net (CH), Gijs Gieskes (NL), André Gonçalves (PT), Chantal Goret (BE), Goto80 (SE), Jodi (BE / NL), Mike Johnston / Mike in Mono (UK), Joey Mariano / Animal Style (US), Rosa Menkman (NL), Raquel Meyers (SP), Mikro Orchestra (PL), Don Miller / NO CARRIER (US), Erik Nilsson (SE), Nullsleep (US), Tristan Perich (US), Rabato (SP), Gebhard Sengmuller (AT), Alexei Shulgin (RU), Paul Slocum (US), Tonylight (IT), VjVISUALOOP (IT)

Production

Playlist is an exhibition produced by and firstly exhibited at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon (Spain) from 18.12.2009 till 17.05.2010. The Brussels adaptation is produced by iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology.

Curator: Domenico Quaranta (IT)

Practical Info

Playlist, playing Games, Music, Art
June 4 – August 21, 2010
Opening the 3rd of June, 18:00 – 23:00
Open Tuesday > Saterday: 11:00 – 19:00
iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology
Koolmijnenkaai 30 Quai des Charbonnages, 1080 Brussels
(metro Comte de Flandres/Graaf van Vlaanderen)

Press Folder

Press Release (pdf)
Press Images (zipped folder)
Flyer (pdf)
Poster (pdf)

More info on www.imal.org/playlist

About iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology

iMAL (interactive Media Art Laboratory) is a non-profit association created in Brussels in 1999. In 2007, iMAL opened a new venue, a Center for Digital Cultures and Technology for the meeting of artistic, scientific and industrial innovations, a place dedicated to the contemporary artistic and cultural practices emerging from the fusion of computer, network and media.
iMAL is: (1) a laboratory and a research, experimentation & production workplace for artists in residence (2) an education center which organises workshops targeted to creative people (artists, designers, developers) under the direction of leading international artists (3) an art&culture center producing exhibitions (e.g. “Infiltrations Digitales”/2004, “Art+Game”/2006, “Holy Fire, art of the digital age”/2008), concerts, performances, conferences in order to create critical, interdisciplinary encounters between the public, artists, technology, and society.

Pixel. A Pixel Art Documentary (2010) by Simon Cottee. Via Gamescenes

Yesterday Rhizome.org started publishing a series of beautiful posts on the demoscene, a widespread and long-time phenomenon still little known out of the underground niche that contributed to it. I wrote shortly about it in my text for the catalogue of Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art, the show I curated for LABoral (Gijon) some months ago and that closed on May 15. Now I’m happy to announce that the show will travel  to the iMAL Center for digital cultures and technology in Bruxelles, where it will open on June 3 with some fresh new works. More will come soon. By now, here you can find the website iMAL designed for Playlist, featuring texts, short explanations of the works and links to most of them.

Above you can see one of the new works on show: the video Come Together, coded by Erik Nilsson on a C64 BBS, with music by Goto80. Enjoy!

… as part of the concerts series conceived for the exhibition Mediateca Expandida: Playlist.

Domenico Quaranta (ed), Mediateca Expandida – Playlist, exhibition catalogue, Gijon (Asturias, Spain), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creaciòn Industrial, December 2009.

The second issue of “Mediateca Expandida”, the magazine published in conjunction with the exhibitions in LABoral’s mediateque, is out. It features texts by Matteo Bittanti, Ed Halter, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz and myself, plus about 30 artists and a music CD. You can download the full pdf from here.

Back from Gijon, I just uploaded my (bad as usual) photos on Flickr. Regine Debatty and Valentina Tanni posted something better on their own account. Soon the official pictures will be available as well!

PLAYLIST.  PLAYING GAMES, MUSIC, ART

CURATOR: Domenico Quaranta
DATES: 18.12.2009 – 17.05.2010
VENUE: Mediateca Expandida de LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación
Industrial (Los Prados, 121, 33394 Gijón – Asturias)
MORE INFOS: www.laboralcentrodearte.org

ARTISTS:

Paul B. Davis (UK), Jeff Donaldson / NoteNdo (DE), Dragan Espenschied (DE), Gino Esposto / Micromusic.net (CH), Gijs Gieskes (NL), André Gonçalves (PT), Mike Johnston / Mike in Mono (UK), Joey Mariano / Animal Style (US), Raquel Meyers (SP), Mikro Orchestra (PL), Don Miller / No-carrier (US), Jeremiah Johnson / Nullsleep (US), Tristan Perich (US), Rabato (SP), Gebhard Sengmüller (AT), Alexei Shulgin (RU), Paul Slocum (USA), Tonylight (IT), VjVISUALOOP (IT).

CATALOGUE:

Texts by Matteo Bittanti, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz, Ed Halter, Domenico Quaranta. Music CD included.

Along the Twentieth Century, music has often been the driving force behind crucial innovations in visual arts, and the starting point for many artists. Without forgetting the role played by music in the development of abstract art, it was mainly during the Sixties that music provided a fertile ground for new approaches, new theories, new art forms, new aesthetics. John Cage was a musician working with artists and engineers. The very first performance (the Untitled Event at Black Mountain College in 1952) was a musical event, such as many Fluxus events during the Sixties. Furthermore, Fluxus adopted music notation for its peculiar “scores”. It was thinking to music that Umberto Eco first introduced the concept of “opera aperta”. And at the very beginning of Video Art lies the manipulation of the electronic signal, first experimented by Nam June Paik in music.
PLAYLIST is an exhibition that wants to explore the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation, since the mid Nineties, of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms and alikes. It’s our feeling, on the one hand, that electronic music culture has been of great importance for the development of low-tech, home-based media art; and, on the other hand, that – such as for the early Video Art – the manipulation of the digital stream is mainly grounded in musical research.
The core of PLAYLIST will be the exploration of the “8bit movement”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music. The show will demonstrate that the retrogaming phenomenon in visual arts can be considered an outfit of a pretty musical phenomenon, that in a bunch of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs, occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-res sounds and aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes. For the first time, retro-gaming will be explored through the lens of musical production and distribution, displaying not only tracks, but instruments, tools, softwares and hardwares, skins and graphics, but also discographies, platforms and communities. Thus, PLAYLIST will serve as a starting point for an archive / collection of materials produced by artists and musicians, and as a relational context where visitors can practice with tools produced by artists, and take part in workshops, lectures, improvised performances.
Furthermore, PLAYLIST will try to provide a context for this kind of research, not necessarily game related, selecting seminal projects and artists that helped forging the conceptual frame in which retro-gaming took place.

Gijs Gieskes, Eye, 2003 – 2005. On Vimeo.

Nullsleep, New York Romscapes

GameScenes / Videoludic Scenaries

curated by Domenico Quaranta
as a section of Piemonte Share Festival 2005, Turin (Italy), Palazzo Cavour, February 24 febbraio – March 1, 2005.

Featured artists: Mauro Ceolin (ITA), Jeremiah Johnson aka nullsleep (USA), John Klima (USA), Martin Le Chevallier (FRA), Gonzalo Frasca – Newsgaming (URY), Selectparks (AU), Antonio Riello (ITA), Josh On (USA), Carlo Zanni (ITA), Brody Condon (USA), JODI (NLD), Kinematic Collective (USA), RETROYOU (ESP), Eddo Stern (USA), Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski (AUS), TWCDC (USA), 8bitpeople (nullsleep’s selection); Micropupazzo (ITA – DE); Role Model (Johan Kotlinski, SWE); Tonylight (ITA); Oliver Wittchow (DE); Gameboyzz Orchestra (POL).

Piemonte Share Festival

Exhibition images (Picasa)

Gamescenes (2005)

Press Release:

During the last twenty years, videogame imposed itself as a new cultural form, becoming object of papers and academic research; and as the product of a true cultural industry, which has overcome the cinema industry. It was almost inevitable, therefore, that others artistic and cultural forms would try to start an affair with videogame, in a way that still remains to be studied. Videogames showed literature new narrative techniques, electronic music a new sound; they filled our imagination with new spaces, new landscapes and new icons. But, most of all, the videoludic industry invented and experimented,beforehand on scientists and artists, the forms and languages of the interactive media. It is spreading its own ideology, an ideology that not all gamers are accepting undiscerningly. It is creating new life spaces, new communities, new identities, even a new economy that has nothing to do with virtuality. GameScenes wants to offer to the PIEMONTE_SHARE_2005 public a selection of works capable of showing the different forms of artistic experimentation that are in someway connected to the videoludic horizon, gathering artists, musicians and writers that look at videogames as an important reference for their activity. The event will feature a conference and an exhibition. The conference will gather Alessandra C (writer), Jamie D’Alessandro (journalist), Matteo Bittanti (expert in game studies), Alessandro Ludovico (writer and founder of Neural magazine) and Molleindustria, independent game designer.

The exhibition will open with a performance by Tonylight, Italian artist and gameboy performer, who wants to bring game boy to public spaces using his SolarAudioBag, a portable loudspeaker which functions thanks to a solar panel. The Gameboy, converted into a music synthesizer and used to play music by a keen experimental scene called “gameboy music” or “8 bit music”, will be the first character of the exhibition’s soundtrack, featuring tracks by nullsleep (USA), other members of the 8bitpeople community and major artists on the international scene.

The exhibition will feature the different ways artists relate to the world of videogames, representing a broad spectrum of almost historical works and recent experiments: paintings and prints that adopt a videoludic aesthetic, such as the Solid_Landscapes by the Milan artist Mauro Ceolin and the New York Romscapes by J eremiah Johnson a.k.a nullsleep; artist’s videogames, as Jon Klima’s The Great Game, on the Afghan War, or Fur’s Painstation consolle and Vigilance 1.0, a game on videosurveillance by the French artist Martin Le Chevallier; modified games, from Jodi’s Wolfenstein version of Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came back from the War to the works by the spanish artist retroyou, to the great 9/11 survivor, on the Twin Towers’ disaster, by Kinematic Collective; politically engaged videogames, from Newsgaming’s September 12th to TWCDC (Together We Can Defeat Capitalism) collective STOP BUSH! All works that show, time and time again, that videogame is changing our way of looking at the real world, and introducing to our collective imagination new narratives and new landscapes; but also that it could become, from an instrument of the cultural standardization and idelogical conditioning, a device for information, report and fight.

GameScenes.Conf
Alessandra C – Jamie D’Alessandro – Matteo Bittanti – Alessandro Ludovico – Molleindustria – Oliver Wittchow.

GameScenes.Performance
Tonylight (ITA); Oliver Wittchow (DE)

GameScenes.Soundtrack
8bitpeople (nullsleep’s selection); Tonylight (ITA); Oliver Wittchow (DE); Gameboyzz Orchestra (POL).

GameScenes.Scapes
Mauro Ceolin (ITA), Solid_Landscapes, 2004; Jeremiah Johnson aka nullsleep (USA), New York Romscapes, 2004.

GameScenes.Games
John Klima (USA), The Great Game, 2002; Martin Le Chevallier (FRA), Vigilance 1.0, 2001; Gonzalo Frasca – Newsgaming (URY), September 12th, 2004; Selectparks (AU), Acmipark, 2004; Antonio Riello (ITA), Italiani brava gente, 1997; Josh On (USA), Antiwargame, 2001; Carlo Zanni (ITA), Average Shoveler, 2004.

GameScenes.Mods
Brody Condon (USA), Suicide Solution, 2004; JODI (NLD), My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, 2000; Kinematic Collective (USA), 9/11 survivor, 2003; RETROYOU (ESP), retroyou_nostalG, 2002; Eddo Stern (USA), Deathstar, 2004; Vietnam Romance, 2003; Sheik Attack, 1999/2000; Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski (AUS), Bio-tek Kitchen, 1999; TWCDC (USA), STOP BUSH!, 2004.