WELCOME TO EF15 There is an inexhaustible race amongst tastemakers and pop culture commentators to be the first to say something isn’t “new” anymore. It signifies cultural awareness, fashionable cynicism and is an opportunity to assert oneself ahead of the curve. Drones are done, 3D printing is dull, the internet is dead, nobody even remembers Tumblr. I recently came across some Electrofringe posters from 1998, excitedly offering workshops on “Desktop Computing” and an “Introduction to the Internet”, with a CD ROM exhibition to boot. But whilst things might lose their newness, it doesn’t mean they lose their relevance. For example, at EF15 rather than introducing you to the internet, a large majority of the works on show intrinsically and unstatedly rely on it to function. It might no longer be novel to save a document to your desktop, but desktop computing is the primary interface through which artists now operate to make work. These mass produced systems and interfaces have very real impacts on the thought processes and creative outputs that transpire. Old and new are happening at the same time, and yes, it’s old to say that. But I want to get beyond discussions of the novelty of technology – beyond worrying about what is or isn’t new – so we can focus on understanding the real effects and impacts that technologies are having on our lives. At EF15 we see artists looking to intuition and transcendentalism when navigating the digital sphere, ancient Indian spiritual snakes as symbolic heroes for combatting e-waste, and cosmology as catalogued on the internet. Here together weaves a materiality of 21st Century existence: at once as industrial as it is personal; distributed globally and simultaneously grounded in the ego; and as old as it is new. It isn’t so much about building up a historical through-line as it is about continuously shattering and reforming our understanding through renewed experience. This year’s selected projects explore a range of concerns that are unabashedly current, from privacy and surveillance amidst the nation’s newly enacted data retention laws, to death and spiritualism in the digital age as transhumanist philosophies gain traction, to imagining possible futures through glitch, synaesthesia and virtual reality. Each in their own way, the artists that make up the EF15 program celebrate the many ways in which ubiquitous and novel technologies give us agency, and at the same time draw our attention to the electronic forces that frame, govern, manipulate and inhibit us. It is the critical, reflexive artistic processes on show here that are endlessly necessary. Roslyn Helper, Artistic Director
QUICK GUIDE PERFORMANCES 1:00 1:45 2:30 3:45 4:30 5:15 6:00 6:45 7:15
Jannah Quill D.A. Calf Paul Young Ensemble Metatone #BoMoHCycle Deprogram Ryan McGoldrick Electric Naga Emily Parsons-Lord
SHOWCASE
WORKSHOPS 2pm 3pm 4pm
iPad Improvisation Women’s Coding Online Privacy
Aurora Scott and Mahira Sobral Benjamin Drury Emily Parsons-Lord PARTY Glenn Remington Jannah Quill Del Lumanta Frolic and Gambol Manheim Rocket Josh Harle and Louise Zhang Kimchi Princi Matte Rochford Net Daddy B2B Spoonty Nathen Street Body Promise NODE with visuals by Hyper Reelist Szymon Dorabialski Warren Armstrong
SHOWCASE Aurora Scott and Mahira Sobral Open Source, internet-based performance **A 3:30PM ARTIST READING WILL TAKE PLACE IN THE GALLERY** Throughout the gallery six live-stream videos feed from seven disparate locations including Terminal One of Hamburg Airport, the Kabba in Mecca, London’s Abbey Road, Mount Rushmore, Tokyo’s busiest crossing and a fish tank in Baltimore City. This multi-screen intervention brings into view an overwhelming contemporaneous present — a global panorama that conflates the gallery space with the spectator’s gaze. Benjamin Drury Untitled, artist-made machine Attaching resonators made of different materials and sizes, and using sympathetic strings to alter the sound of fixed electronic music, this sonic installation highlights the physical nature of sound and speakers. Different speakers can change the transmission and reception of a piece of music, and this work calls attention to the way technologies and hardwares are not just conduits for creation, but also frameworks that delimit our experiences of aesthetics and politics.
Emily Parsons-Lord You Will Always Be Wanted By Me, performance and documentation **7:15PM SPECIAL PERFORMANCE ON THE ROOFTOP GARDEN** In the Cygnus constellation is a red dwarf star. It has a colour signature with a spike in yellow, orange, and purple, which tells us that the star is mostly hydrogen and helium, much like our sun. Its name is “You will always be wanted by me”. It was named in the International Star Registry. Unrecognised by science, and hidden in the depths of an archive, exists this grand message, accessed only via the internet. You Will Always Be Wanted By Me uses spectral analysis to recreate stars that have been named in the International Star Registry in coloured smoke; a fleeting shout to the imagined depths of space from the fathomless throws of internal yearning, loss, shame.
Frolic and Gambol – AKA Johannes Muljana and Pamela Lee Brenner Unlocked Melody, hand-crafted software Software generates visuals and sounds based on passwords that have been harvested from various online sources. A projection cycles through millions of passwords that have been compiled into a database. Passwords – once the domain of fairy-tales and children’s games, now play a ubiquitous part in our day-to-day lives – delineating our public from our private information, and constituting the limits of our multifaceted identities. This project celebrates the password-as-gatekeeper economy, but also highlights the fractious, fallible nature of passwords as they govern our access and others’ access to information.
Glenn Remington RoomTone 1.0, sound work RoomTone 1.0 uses contact mics to amplify the unheard sounds of a space and feed the sound back in on itself. In this age of mass surveillance, the work is monitoring itself by creating a feedback loop of observation.
Jannah Quill Motor Modulation, various lights, servo motors, solar panels, arduino controller, electronics Motor Modulation is the sonification of various commercial lighting goods using photovoltaic transfer. Different coloured lights create different sound harmonies. Different light emission frequencies create discordant patterns of sound. This motorised installation uncases the electrical energy within everyday lighting systems, framing the invisible processes of energy transfer as a shifting soundscape.
Josh Harle and Louise Zhang Blobs, interactive iPad application Blobs is an ongoing collaborative series creating interactive forms – visceral, overflowing, abject-beautiful. This iteration sees the artists work on a new series of blobs, making improvements to the head-tracking perspective – allowing the viewer to ‘look around’ the object on the iPad.
Matte Rochford Lesser Copying Machine, performance with VHS Lesser Copying Machine is a durational performance for bespoke VHS tape. Carefully prepared artist-made tapes are continuously copied over the course of a day, gradually warping and disintegrating as each dubbed copy undergoes generation-loss. This nostalgic, degenerative material process is redefined within a contemporary ‘prosumer’ economy as new forms emerge out of the process of consumption.
Nathen Street Field Lines, software, artist-made machine If you could hear the electrons passing around the circuit board of your mobile phone, what noise would it make? What would it look like? In Field Lines, you are invited to scan your electronic device and hear the electromagnetic noise it generates, manipulate the sound and interact with the projected image. Nathen works with technology that allows us to see, feel, hear, and experience the bits of the world we can’t sense with our eyes, ears and body.
NODE PAUL, artist-made machine Is it possible to communicate with an animatronic entity? Is it possible to portray emotion with only a few mechanical degrees of freedom? PAUL is an interactive animatronic eye, with moving fluid weave that depicts human emotion through kinetic expression.
SculptureCraft Computer game art show, organised by Warren Armstrong Every year during November, the village of Wollombi in the lower Hunter Valley – and the vineyards that surround it – become the site for an outdoor sculpture exhibition called Sculpture in The Vineyards. This year, that exhibition will be accompanied by a separate exhibition of sculptures in a virtual world – the world of the popular construction game, Minecraft. To bring this about, a 1-to-1 scale replica of Wollombi and some of its surrounding vineyards has been built on a specially commissioned Minecraft server and opened up to local kids and other interested young Minecraft enthusiasts who will spend the month of November crafting original sculptures in this virtual Wollombi. Witness the final presentation and judging of their creations and take guided in-game tours streamed live to the Web as part of EF15.
Szymon Dorabialski Ludek Prays, sculpture with spherical projection Afflicted by the cynicism and face values following the postmodern, it seems that intuition, transcendentalism, and the spirit have become aesthetic taboos. This work dances around the relationship between grounded physical reality and the spontaneous, chaotic, psychedelic, soul. Pray to the digital sphere.
PERFORMANCES
1:00pm Jannah Quill Jannah carves soundscapes through the amplification of everyday technologies. Discarded LCD screens, projectors and consumer product lighting are re-circuited, shifting the focus from function to materiality. She works with the light properties of these digitally produced (and then re-produced) systems and their ability to be linked with sound as either producers or reactors. Her performances are the loud discordance of amplified strobes and synthesiser. 1:45pm D.A. Calf Hurtz, generative sound performance Hurtz takes as its starting point a single 50Hz tone. Using Ableton purely as a tape machine, modulated variations of this initial tone (ranging in pitch from -12 semitones to +48 semitones) are spat out onto an old mixing console. Using creative on board EQ, panning, gain stages as well as more than a dozen outboard devices connected via the board’s auxiliaries, the relatively characterless tones are shaped into a narrative. 2:30pm Paul Young Askew, improvised noise and visual manipulation Askew uses a multi-speaker system to distribute processed electronics to improvising musicians. Acoustic instruments are manipulated live and combined with pre-composed electronics. Audio is spatialised throughout the performance space, drawing inspiration from drone, glitch, minimalist and free-improvisation. 3:45pm Ensemble Metatone DIY software, mobile phone performance Making music with computers usually means laptops – but is a phone based performance practice possible? What does it sound and look like? Find out with this smartphone duo: two phones, one stage. Ensemble Metatone explore Charles Martin’s custom iOS apps to improvise with field recordings, samples, and pure synthesis.
4:30pm #BoMoHCycle BoMoH, electronic sound, performance art, computer music, new media BoMoH is a short-form chamber opera using new media, face recognition software and hypermedia design to examine various connections between the performer, human interface and the computer, as well similar dualities between aspects of syncretic religious systems as manifest in the rite of exorcism and trance. 5:15pm Deprogram Cracea - Improvised performance with the Telechord, artist-made machine This performance features a polyphonic audio-visual Theremin (the Telechord) accompanied by augmented electric bass and percussion. The Telechord integrates real-time physical modelling synthesis with video generation derived from improvised body postures and movement patterns. The shifting relationships between selected joint positions produce harmonies that reflect the unique geometry of the human form. 6:00pm Ryan McGoldrick Echo Projects, artist-made machine, performance Collected over three years using motion-capture technology, a series of ‘data portraits’ of dancers is fed through a machine and live-coded to produce a soundscape. This sound performance uses live-coding and machine intelligence to explore non-anthropocentric readings of human motion and the politics of data sharing. 6:45pm Electric Nāga Performance, electronic DIY wearables Nāgas are snakes that may take human form. Nāgas are only malevolent to humans when they have been mistreated. They are susceptible to mankind’s disrespectful actions in relation to the environment. They are also associated with water – rivers, lakes, seas, and wells – and are generally regarded as guardians of treasure. This nāga is made of e-waste and post-consumer waste: disused computers, circuit boards, old keyboards, plastics, rope, toys and thrift shop finds. The costume is inspired by gaming avatars and a sense of human body dysphoria.
WORKSHOPS 2:00pm iPad Improvisation Workshop Charles Martin of Ensemble Metatone will talk you through the process of developing custom iOS apps, provide insight into his gigging set up, and orchestrate a group improvisation session. Come with your mobile phone, and download “PhaseRings” for free from the AppStore to get involved.
3:00pm Women’s Coding Workshop Only 25% of information technology professionals in Australia are women. This workshop is an access point for women of all ages who want to learn to code. Web trainer Kirsten Wolf leads this beginners’ workshop in HTML and CSS, so bring your laptop and take the first steps in learning the language of the internet.
4:00pm Privacy Workshop Australian data retention laws are now officially in place. Learn what it’s all about, what’s worth worrying about, and what to do about it. Held in partnership with Electronic Frontiers Australia, this workshop will provide practical skills on setting up a VPN, TOR browser and encryption on your communication devices.
PARTY
: Del Lumanta : Manheim Rocket : Kimchi Princi : Net Daddy B2B Spoonty : Body Promise with visuals by Hyper Reelist
WITH THANKS...
1 7 p r e s e n t s
ELECTROFRINGE TEAM Roslyn Helper Caitlin Gibson Andy Huang