Multiplace in multi places

The following is the review of 15^th episode of Multiplace Festival which took place in Bratislava. Multiplace is a celebration of network culture and create the opportunity to think about our future in the post-digital area.

The first night offered us the soundtrack of this new area.

Sound Sleep is a vibration. It gets you in a various range of electric vibes, caught you into lines of distortion – and suddenly wakes you up with a broken rhythm. Vibration, distortion, eruption – the holy trinity of Sound Sleep – what you may not expect with such a name. Wild superposition, a jolting in the intensity. Pulsation, distortion, eruption. And a new disruption. Black, white, grey. Black pulsation, white explosion, grey dilution. Acceleration. Collapse. You’re on a plane on its way to take off – but you’re stucked on the landing track. In a permanent state of tension. That distorts you and combine with something else. Assemble and disassemble. You’re connecting the dots. You’re awakening to the sound.

Gazelle Twin is the allegory of violence. Hurting in cadence. Female and male, faces covered with transparent tights. Blurred silhouettes. As they’re running on their treadmills, you’re going into empty shopping centres, dark underground parking lots. They put light on the shadow areas – the ones you usually dodge when you’re alone. And you’re alone. Perfect place for an assault. An alarm is resonating – but it’s in your head. You don’t know if this is a human voice reading words or if the words are directly speaking to your mind. Or just the dance of dead pixels. You’re the ghost of a Pac Man game that already ended. White swirl of smoke. Grumble of a horse galloping in slow motion. Slow death. Painful delivery. Exorcism. Compulsive. Backlash.

M.E.S.H. is the opera of the progressive dilatation of the sound. And the space. Establishing new connections. Tunnel. Exploration. Bombing. The space is wide and it’s spreading with you inside.

The weekend workshops gave us the opportunity to get involved and to pitch in, to experience at first hand the true nature of Multiplace, in a friendly and creative atmosphere and enthusiasm about the discoveries.

John Hegre workshop was experimenting new ways of making (old) guitars sound. By creating new outputs and cable them to paddles, you are able to create distortions, to make the instrument sound in a way that is not usually meant to be. What he basically put into practice during his very own performance – connecting extra outputs, plugging wires somewhere they don’t usually belong, and finally playing confusion between acoustic and electr(oni)c sounds, mixing them, abolishing the barriers. Improvising, enjoying the sound creation and distortion. All of those wires poking out his guitar, like a music lover MacGyver.

And then, playing with Gisle Frøysland, mixing the distortion with his white noise of encrypted channel projection, harmonizing rain and thunder. All of a sudden hammered the guitar in a big lighting strike – unexpected, and then smashing it repeatedly, with slivers flying away. The one guitar he fixed during the workshop, hammered with no chance of further representation – or why not?

While admiring computer art exhibition and Piksel Remote lab, you could also take part into your own DNA extraction. In a replicate lab process with everyday substances – sweet combination of soap, salt, ananas juice, alcohol, and your own saliva of course – reconstruction of the DNA double helix with a stirrer – what comes next is if you dare drink it or not.

Finally Egil Paulsen workshop allowed you to build your own kinetic solar sculpture. But what is a kinetic solar sculpture? It’s a delicate construction – recycled plastic which suddenly come alive when light touch them. The changing light of the heating lamps that give the feeling they’re about to melt. Their tiny solar panel gets some solar energy and they start humming like insect wings. They stop when the light goes away and resume with new intensity when light again. They’re poetic and fragile – bunch of flowers fighting not to wilt, wild animals galloping, small fellows throwing away their lasso, scaffolding of dystopian cities. And that’s what you created as well.

Thanks to Adam Harvey, we learn how revealing we are through computer vision, while we are truly unique trough our relationships with other people, does post-digital mean we will appear to each other as Eigen Faces?

Gazelle Twin picture from Branislav Grebečí, others from Carlos Gutiérrez