Experimental Day

Version bêta
31 October - 14 December 2008

Saturday 13 December from 10AM to 5 PM at the Center for Contemporary Images

To conclude this series of forums on a note of curiosity, on 13 December Version bêta has scheduled a day-long event under the banner of experimentation during which the public is invited to attend a presentation of current research projects.

10h
Welcome and presentation by Lysianne Léchot Hirt

10h15
Luis Blackaller

Luis Blackaller, a Mexican new media artist, designer, artistic director and mathematician,
has notably worked with the Media Lab of MIT in the US. His talk is entitled Social Creative Systems and he will explain his research into such systems on the net and their connection with the production and dissemination of art. In English.

11h
Ulrich Fischer

Ulrich Fischer is a Swiss filmmaker, technician and producer in new media and film, as well as a teacher. As part of the master's program organized by Réseau Cinéma CH, he is scheduled to present Walking the Edit, a project that proposes to combine the domain of film and the territories of the new technologies. The project's aim is to experience
the potentialities of narrative constructions between an audiovisual database and the path—recorded and analyzed—of a person walking through an urban space in order to automatically create a film-object.

11h45
Eléonore Hellio

Dividing her time between Paris, Strasbourg and Kinshasa, Eléonore Hellio is developing
projects that associate different levels of reality and are a part of cyber culture, such as Electronic Café International. Her reflection focuses on sensory and aesthetic experience of telepresence and virtual space through the visual arts, sound, performance,
poetry and cybernetics. She will be on hand to present Mowoso, a collective that is active in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The collective, dedicated to "off-format" arts, includes artists, thinkers and independent researchers—occasionally
self-taught individuals to whom the Ancients have transmitted their knowledge, in a radically unstable politico-economic context.

13h45
Caroline Bernard

The Swiss artist Caroline Bernard is a professor at Vevey's School of Photography and a contributing scientific associate of the Formes de l'interactivité laboratory of Geneva University of Art and Design — Geneva. She is especially active in new forms of cinema, so-called mobile images and interactive video, and is part of the collective Lili range le chat. The Migrateurs (Migrants) project fits into the logic of recording and hybridization through the use of lightweight, highly mobile means for filming such as cell phones. Exchanges are then organized around appointed meetings (blogs, sms, etc.), and the images, shot in different countries and combined or contrasted, take on a new meaning and new characteristics.

14h30
Jane Coakley

Jane Coakley, Manager of SymbioticA in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at The University of Western Australia has worked on exhibitions, symposiums and with residents and students since 2002.
SymbioticA – The Centre of Excellence in Biological Art is an art and science collaborative research laboratory. SymbioticA has hosted over fifty researchers since its establishment in 2000 and last year won the inaugural Golden Nica in Hybrid Arts at Prix Ars Electronica. Through opening the scientific laboratories to artists and humanities researchers, SymbioticA has engaged and enriched the interdisciplinary play and research of ideas crossing the arts, humanities and sciences. From the perspective of the informed observer this talk, entitled How to explain SymbioticA to a dead mouse, will engage with the wide and varied mix of activities and research projects where chance, collaborations, and the integrity of the art and science disciplines get interrogated ......and occasionally confused.

15h15
Mouna Andraos

Working for the label Electronic Crafts, the US-based designer Mouna Andraos deconstructs
electronic objects in order to rebuild them and make them more efficient and more poetic. Her objective is to demystify such technical knowledge and render it more accessible to enable consumers to use these technologies in a personalized way that is adapted to their needs. Electronic Crafts develops processes for creating handmade objects that integrate easily realizable technologies. Here objects that are close to our daily lives are reappropriated and improved through the addition of small electronic systems.

16h
Locus Sonus : Alejandro Duqué and Peter Sinclair

The audio-art research lab Locus Sonus is a joint undertaking of the Ecole Supérieure d'Art of Aix-en-Provence, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art of Nice and the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Marseille. The lab's objective is to experiment with innovative,
transdisciplinary aspects of artistic sound forms, carrying out its mission to create both a body of knowledge and a critical space vis-à-vis the activities and practices of sound art. Alejandro Duqué and Peter Sinclair will present Locus Sonus in Second Life: a dialog between physical and virtual spaces. In Second Life, Locus Sonus will install part of its lab and begin work on a piece dealing with virtual space as a potential acoustic space.

Following the events making up experimental day, there will be a performance by Abhishek Hazra, The Gaussian Blur of a Carnot Cycle, at 6 PM; and screenings of films by Kaori Kinoshita and Alain Della Negra, Newborns, 2007, 20 min, and The Den, 2008, 30 min, at 8:30 PM at the Center for Contemporary Images.