n.blog

OFFF TICKETS

Un festival che celebra la cultura della creazione post-digitale non poteva non distinguersi anche per le modalità di acquisto dei "biglietti" (nonché di accesso), se così possono definirsi quelli acquisiti attraverso transazione telematica.

Offf sceglie la via della dematerializzazione (forse per una non dichiarata ispirazione ambientalista?).

I biglietti erano difatti acquistabili unicamente online, attraverso un servizio di transazione sicura (cui rimanda il sito ufficiale di Offf) offerto da un nota società che opera esclusivamente in rete: circostanza che ha suscitato non poche perplessità in chi, intenzionato ad assistere alla manifestazione, si vedeva obbligato a dover aprire un conto online, fornendo i propri dati personali, il proprio numero di carta di credito (o prepagata), al solo scopo di collezionare il titolo di accesso.

Ma, vista la celerità e il numero delle adesioni, si desume che una simile modalità di acquisto, per il target di pubblico cui si rivolge l'evento, non sembri rappresentare un problema.

Già due mesi prima della data di apertura del Festival, il sito ufficiale della manifestazione annunciava il sold out , (notizia che ha fatto il giro della rete, replicata su blog di creativi, potenziali visitatori e magazines) con (dichiarato e... come presumibile) grande entusiasmo degli organizzatori, ma disfatta psicologica per chi ritenesse di essersi azionato con discreto margine di anticipo per poter "collezionare i biglietti".

D'altronde... anche la cultura della creazione post-digitale, oltre ad attirare consensi e dettare i nuovi standard nel campo dei nuovi media, deve poter trarre (dal suo interno - ed ha saputo farlo in modo senz'altro conforme alle proprie aspettative ed influenze culturali) una qualche utilità (il vile danaro... digitale!).

Ma non si esaurisce qui la originalità degli "Offf tickets".

In primo luogo, chi avesse acquistato il full ticket (50 euro circa, valido per l'intero svolgersi dell'evento) entro il mese di marzo, veniva "omaggiato" di t-shirt e catalogo ufficiale¹ della manifestazione.

Quanto alla procedura, all'atto dell'avvenuta transazione online per l'acquisto dei biglietti per il Festival o i workshops, si riceveva una e-mail di conferma da stampare e portar con sé a Lisbona, onde esibirla (in uno con un documento di riconoscimento dell'acquirente) all'accesso nella LX Factory, momento in cui il visitatore riceveva il vero pass, un braccialetto che veniva fissato al polso con un sigillo metallico e che andava gelosamente custodito (assolutamente impossibile sfilarselo senza romperlo) per l'intera durata della manifestazione (portandolo anche sotto la doccia), pena l'impossibilità di accedervi.

 

 

 

Note

1. "A WI FI A WI FI my kingdom for A WI FI", Catalogo Ufficiale Offf Lisbon 2008

 

Riferimenti webliografici

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerializzazione

http://www.offf.ws/

http://www.offf.ws/#/tickets/

http://www.flickr.com/people/spritehat

 

Riferimenti Bibliografici

 "A WI FI A WI FI my kingdom for A WI FI", Catalogo Ufficiale Offf Lisbon 2008

Offf Formula

Più di 100 artisti, 2500 visitatori, conferenze, presentazioni, workshop, installazioni, proiezioni, concerti, spazi ricreativi... 

Offf 2008 riconferma la "formula" dimostratasi vincente nelle edizioni precedenti: la strutturazione degli spazi della LX Factory ha permesso di ricreare gli 8 caratteristici ambienti/punti d'incontro¹ del Festival, ognuno dei quali avente una specifica funzione:

 

ROOTS 

Il cuore del Festival, stage principale dove hanno luogo presentazioni, discorsi, performances live ed in cui si sono avvicendati gli artisti - tra i maggiori innovatori della cultura visiva contemporanea - con presentazioni delle proprie idee e sistematiche progettuali, tutte caratterizzate da originali modalità espositive e soprattutto - questo il gene comune agli artisti della cultura post-digitale - da una geniale e contagiosa ironia.

 

LOOPITA

Luogo di sperimentazione di sonorità elettroniche.

Attigua allo spazio principale, da cui è separata da uno spesso tendaggio insonorizzante, Loopita è un'area destinata ad un ascolto di tipo meditativo, disseminata di futuristici divani in cui i corpi dei visitatori sembrano scomparire.

In un ambiente quasi privo di illuminazione, i sensi, rapiti dai pochi riflessi bluastri provenienti dal palco e dal flusso sonoro, si lasciano andare in leggerezza, nutriti da performance live di musica elettronica eseguita dai più importanti ed innovativi musicisti della scena internazionale digitale.

 

OPENROOM

L'area dedicata alle nuove leve della scena digitale, a coloro che stanno sviluppando progetti indipendenti su web o attraverso altre tecnologie digitali. Un'opportunità unica per vivere Offf come trampolino di lancio per la propria attività creativa, per far crescere e promuovere il proprio lavoro.

 

CINEXIN

Ambiente dedicato alla proiezione di film selezionati per l'Offf Film Festival, di retrospettive dei grandi nomi dell'animazione, motion graphics e microfilm.

 

SHOWPLACE

E' il principale spazio espositivo del Festival, in cui l'audience ha la possibilità di esplorare ed interagire direttamente con gli ultimi lavori presentati dai partecipanti al "Roots" o da altri nomi della scena internazionale.

Sono presenti installazioni interattive, lavori di arte generativa, strumenti o installazioni ludiche, sound art, illustrazioni.

 

MERCADILLO

L'area dedicata ai collettivi indipendenti e agli artisti che necessitano di uno spazio per esporre e vendere i propri lavori, in cui è possibile acquistare t-shirts, stampe, libri, riviste, dvd, merchandising.

 

MACHINA

Stanza multimediale aperta al pubblico per permettergli di accedere al web e visionare i lavori selezionati per l'Offf Film Festival.

 

CHILLAX 

Il luogo ideale per rilassarsi ed incontrare gli altri visitatori: spazio bar e ristoro con divani, video... il tutto in puro stile post-digitale.

 

Note

^{1. Per una più approfondita e diretta osservazione delle immagini dei singoli ambienti, si consiglia la consultazione del link al materiale fotografico ufficiale della manifestazione.} 

Riferimenti Webliografici 

http://www.offf.ws/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/offf 

its use is rare if one excepts the slightly moving tiny image on credit cards. The objects displayed are sometimes dubious (lots of scary images, monsters). however, holography remains as fascinating as complex. Michael Page has been producing and studying holography at OCAD, U of T and in his studio "the Photon League" in the basement of 401 Richmond street  
A fairly disappointingly expensive and difficult technique, holography is still under development. teams of scholars and techniques have tried to solve problems related to rendering and parallax and a tool named "the rail" has been devised to prepare the images for printing and making camera ready.
Page says holography has lots of potentials and further developments: creating full parallax holograms, mass-producible images as well as real time holograms are only a few of the goals set.

 

 holography is increasingly used in a number of areas  for medical imaging and visualization and architects/architectural models.  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=holography&search_type=
a number of artists have experimented with holography with some success.
 Ron English, for instance,  who has created holograms out of videos documentations of his billboard displays.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zpXLKAyESM

Meats Meier  is the author of this image

 

 

 

here are a few pictures of the photon league studio, where a workshop on holography took place a few days before Subtle Technologies 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By providing rare examples of experimental films, Bruce Elder showed how light can be manipulated to create radically different results and how it can be interpreted and filtered through the personal experience  of the artist. Light is primal, experiential and outside of language, almost a sacred energy, something that takes  but also gives.

For every image there is a form of energy. To illustrate this, Elder chose to show Moholy Nagy's light space modulator ,  a great example of how light as energy can be "modulated" to become a sculptural element.
On a different level, the works by animator Oskar Fischinger
combine music and images, and render the trajectory of dialogics and harmonics within the film, as if he was re-writing the notations

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/

http://www.oskarfischinger.org/

of course, this example is in deep contrast, though it is intimately connected with the work of Jim Davis,
an almost unknown film-maker who spent a long time experimenting with light, and colors. his films try to reproduce the ephemeral immateriality of light and the formation of colors in crystals and glasses, capturing, he thought,  " the essence of movements and light."

Marko Ciciliani is a composer and performer working with the experimental group "Bakin Zup"  
Interested in the intersection of light (especially electricity) and sound, he was surprised to see how different audience would react to the same composition.
Although his work uses light as an extension of musical parameters in composition,  many people still choose to close their eyes to better listen to the music played, instead of enjoying the piece as a whole.
intrigued by this phenomenon, Ciciliani started to explore multisensorial perception and the phenomenon of synaesthesia, the "involuntary stimulation and response from various senses while only one sense is directly stimulated."
While modernism has  somehow discouraged synhaesthesia   (and the idea of singularity and pureness in art, Clement Greenberg's idea that a piece of art has to be autonomous and self-contained), cognitively speaking,  it is an element that can be more prominent in certain people but that everybody harbors to a certain extent.
 
Ciciliani's goal is  to connect, in his works, light works traditionally tagged as "pure," "ordered," and "noisy" or "impure" music.

My Ultradeep I for 6 performers and Alias are two examples of his compositions and his collaboration with Bakin Zup

here is a short interview that explains Ciciliani's work

 

 

These pieces are the result of an assignment on "light" for the "modern physics" course at the Ontario College of Art and Design. after having explained to art students some scientific basics Robin Kingsburgh asked them to conduct practical  experiments and to devise a conceptual elaboration that drew from the experiments findings. the result, as you can see here, are quite diverse.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The prospective shaman lives in the darkness for the first years of his life.
only then s/he is allowed to experience life. in this way, s/he is encouraged to direct the introspection inside.
For Philip Ross, practicing a metaphorical endoscopy (nothing to do with the medical procedure), in this context, becomes an invitation to look inside ourselves, to visualize and re-inagining what our "inside" has to tell.
his works render this notion fairly well: they always hide something which is enclosed or which is trying to emerge from a hall-open lid or a vase.

it sis interesting that light can be interpreted as both a tool of introspection (like with Ross) as well as a mirror. A filmmaker and photographer, Curtis Wehrfritz's latest fascination lies with Daguerrotypes.  he claims "in 170 years the use of optics and their records have become the modern backbone of our recorded perception" thus, these devices are equally mimicking and mirroring the methods of perception of the human brain as well as they constitute mirrors of our experiences and our memories.

the daguerrotypes, printed on a mirror,  are small and ephemeral. they combine  an image and a reflection at the same time. the mirror is inextricably linked to the image that reflects it. The myth of narcissus and echo "illuminates" their inner symbolic features.

 

 

A professor of Physics and Astronomy, Jayanne English works with images captured through the telescope. Pictures of the sky that can be admired in popular science magazines are a bridge between the astronomer and the audience, as they bring a general idea of what the sky looks like and encourage people to know more. these images  taken with radio telescopes are colored artificially to distinguish the variety of gases and to distinguish their motion. often very appealing and meaningful to the scientist, they mislead the audience with non-standard and discipline specific color-coding, and other symbols that sometimes end up contradicting common sense intuitions. Visual literacy, knowledge of techniques of composition and color harmony as well as team work are often necessary to construct those award winning images we find in popular science magazines.

If English deals with the super-big and super-far, Boustany has to wrestle with the small, complex and in motion.
cells have pathways. In order to be healthy they have to reach a certain equilibrium. they have to count a certain number of deaths. too much  death is bad. But dying too little is a bad sign too.
fro the sake of research, it is possible to tell why and how cells die (through nechrosis, autophagy, or apoptosis) from the  way mytochondria mutate during this process. While Optical microscopes can hardly catch these transformations, Electromicroscopy allows to view one stage of the process, but it fails to explore it in its entirety.In fact once a cell is isolated and stained for viewing, is already dead or can no longer be utilized.
Thus, Boustany and her team have developed  an alternative technique that enable the use of a light microscope to determine the transformation of the cell's morphology. this technique is based on optical scatter imaging.

 

 

maybe an odd association, Jason Baerg's northern lights,  Jayanne English outreach pictures of the sky and Nada Boustany visualization of cell death have a lot to share after all: they both try to interpret and reconstruct narratives originating from the sight and the impression of light. they meet under the name of translation and outreach: the one that tries to make things more appealing and palatable to a wider audience and that tries to get a mediated story across. the difference lies in the topics: traditional narratives versus scientific data.

With his project, now in development and about to be turned into a 9 episodes animation series, Baerg engages with First Nation legends that explain the existence of the northern lights. his ambitions are multiple: in fact, Northern lights aims to "educate the public to Canada's Aboriginals relations to this phenomenon" and tries to capture the interest of  First Nations youth. At the same time, Baerg seeks to reconstruct a comprehensive narrative that collects and combines the many and diverse stories narrated by the Elders. Finally, a outreach effort, he decided to transmit  this enterprise with virtual rendition, 3D games and animation, performing several layers of translations that bridge different generations (elders vs youth), different interpretations and different means of communications (form oral communication to visual).
some examples:
http://www.stormspirits.ca/English/plain_truth/
http://www.youtube.com/user/painteravantvangarde

"...In 2008, where each year parcels of the Antarctic Ozone hole move over the southern part of Australia, our relationship with the visible and the invisible electromagnetic soup in which we live becomes much more complex."

By invoking the notion of Synchresis, Melinda Rakham illustrates how, in Australia maybe more than anywhere else, artists might manifest special bonds with light and, despite the differences in their approaches, they might display common elements and cross-modal threads.

Five artists
Robin Fox , George Khut ,Tracey Cornish, Paula Dawson (with Graeme Murphy)
and Chris Henschke clearly display different ways to interpret light and use it as a medium or source of inspiration, by attempting to manipulate it through sound ,
 by turning it into a medium that represents bio-feedback signals, by invoking the materiality of light manifestations in the form of electricity, by capturing it through holography ,and, finally, by experiencing the speed of light  through a synchrotron.