The Soft, the Hard and the Wet performance invites the public aboard MS Wissenschaft, walk through the Ars Electronica Center maindeck and step into the Stadtwerkstatt club to experience the wearable, the breakable and the imperishable. The three artists have each developed her project during the two weeks summer2014 residency on board Station Messschiff Eleonore. Their work examines current media art practices in a joint performance with Afroditi Psarra (soft circuit), Ce Quimera (open hardware) and Robertina Sebjanic (wet lab).

Feeling electromagnetic fields

Soft circuits utilize textiles with embedded electronic circuits, conductive materials and microcontrollers. Afroditi Psarra (Athens) develops a wearable dress that detects EMF (Electromagnetic Fields) and provides haptic and sonic feedback to the user.

Schedule

18:00 MS Wissenschaft, Heinrich Gleisner Promenade

19:00 Ars Electronica Center, Maindeck

20:00 Stadtwerkstatt, Kirchengasse 4

Weary of the media art scene’s many highly elaborate interactive installations, panGenerator, a crew from Poland, created Constellaction, a smart yet playful alternative to the stacks of hardware everyone else seems to require these days. Handy, three-dimensional tetrahedrons are the elements used to construct this array, one that’s so simple kids can master it immediately.

Communicating Light

The tiny, four-faceted figures react to sudden changes in lighting by glowing and making sounds. Plus, they’re quite communicative in that their illumination proves infectious to their neighbors. Thus, on a surface full of adjacent tetrahedrons, the illumination of a single unit triggers a light wave running across the whole field. In a dark space, all you need is a small flashlight to get the installation started.

Crew: Piotr Barszczewski, Krzysztof Cybulski, Krzysztof Goliński, Jakub Koźniewski (panGenerator / PL)

The project has been originally created for the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, Poland, for Przemiany Festival 2013.

Taking an artistically playful approach to the here & now is the passionate pursuit of Japanese performance art collective Grinder-Man. Their eight-minute-long experience entitled “Mirage” is dedicated to an age-old yearning: the blurring of the past and future and thus the dissolution of the reality to which we’re accustomed.

Into New Dimensions

The vehicle to achieve this is a substitutional reality system including data glasses, headphones and camera provided by the Riken Brain Science Institute. This equipment enables the user to enter undreamt-of dimensions of reality, as they behold two “real” dancers who, for their part, dance with the projection of their previously filmed performance.

Who’s Who?

Now, this alone wouldn’t be all that confusing, but the sophisticated system makes it impossible to distinguish the real protagonists from the virtual ones. “Mirage” invites its audience members to enjoy this loss of control over reality and to reinvent themselves in hyper-reality.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1De55Cl8sqc]

Crew

Artistic Director: Hitoshi Taguchi (Grinder-Man / JP)
Choreography & Dance: Makiko Izu, Taiju Matsumoto (Grinder-Man / JP)
Concept: Naotaka Fujii (Riken / JP)
SR System Design & Development: Sohei Wakisaka (Riken / JP)
SR System Program Support: Yu Okano, Takamitsu Hamajo (Riken / JP), Michihiko Ueno (Tokyo University (JP), Naoto Noguchi (TDU / JP), Seiya Takei (UEC / JP), Jun’ichi Nakano (buffer Renaiss / JP)
Music & Sound Design: evala (port, ATAK / JP)
Lighting Design: Yasuhiro Fujiwara (JP)
Production Crew Chief: Satoru Oyamada (Haletoke Inc. / JP)
Technical Director: Yutaka Endo (Luftzug / JP)

SOLD OUT!

With a view towards the future, Klaus Obermaier and the Ars Electronica Futurelab have recourse to a historical art movement that still packs a punch even as it nears 100: the anti-art movement Dada with its predilection for the anarchic and absurd. 98 years after the first Salon Dada in Zürich’s Cabaret Voltaire, a micro-performance entitled Take a Number, Leave Your Head takes the Dada mentality that once rained down abuse on the bourgeoisie and lets it loose on our high-tech present.

Club Absurd

In the basement beneath the Ars Electronica Futurelab, a temporary club will be set up featuring a bar and interactive zones in which visitors can get acquainted with Dada poetry. The space’s soundscape can be distorted by mere gestures. And suddenly the ludicrous dramatics begin—actors and dancers morphing into virtual copies of those present. In this dramaturgical setting, audience members together with professional performers and high-tech tools create a setting for digital and physical absurdities.

How do you get the public involved?

But keep in mind that this is more than an art history allusion. Take a Number, Leave Your Head is the interim result of a research project entitled (St)Age of Participation that, since 2011, has been investigating new possibilities of audience participation in stage-based media art. What dramaturgical factors have to be considered when spectators co-determine in real time what occurs in a performance? Which interfaces are suited to the collective design of a work’s sounds, visuals and other content? Can participation heighten an audience’s emotional involvement in an artistic experience? And can sustained involvement even be expected of spectators, or do they also need places for retreat and phases of passive reception?

Micro-performances

To wrestle with these issues, the staff of (St)Age of Participation developed several approximately half-hour-long micro-performances conceived as dramaturgical proving grounds. This series entitled Letterbox was staged in 2012 at Deep Space in the Ars Electronica Center.

Scientific Project Management: Christopher Lindinger (AT)

Artistic Director, choreography and sound: Klaus Obermaier (AT)

Technical Management: Roland Haring (AT)

Dramaturgy, text and research: Martina Mara (AT)

Software and Content Development: Roland Aigner (AT), Benjamin Mayr (AT), Michael Mayr (AT), Otto Naderer (AT)

Dance and acting: Michael Gross (DE), Katharina Pfiel (AT), Barbara Vuzem (SLO)

Stage set: Max Helbig (DE)

Stage and lighting technology: Patrick Müller (DE), Erwin Reitböck (AT)

Special thanks to Rose Breuss, Institute of Dance Arts, Anton Bruckner Private University Linz as well as Kyle McDonald.

A ticket is needed for this performance. Free tickets will be available at the cash desk of the Ars Electronica Center from 10 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. The number of audience members is limited to a maximum of 50. The performance takes place in the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s Studio. The entrance to the Studio is located in the Main Gallery of the Ars Electronica Center (you will find a door in the BrainLab area). Doors open at 4:50 p.m.

Read more about this on our Ars Electronica Blog!

This research was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR111