Artist Harm van den Berg investigates the boundaries between image and language via different forms of representation like film, musical performances, installations and CD’s. A sense of “place” plays a central role in his work. By using different media (painting, sculpture, sound, video) and crossing the boundaries between them, Van den Berg creates immersive landscapes in which spectators can lose themselves. For the installation Lullaby Land the artist asked people from all over the world to sing a lullaby they remember from their childhood. He recorded these songs and merged them together into a sound collage. The sound piece is presented through a customized radio, and it appears as if the songs - invisibly floating in the air like radio waves - are made audible by a world receiver. Between each lullaby you hear noises like a radio searching. Most of the songs will be incomprehensible, but their universal message surpasses language. The installation also consists of a painting of a night sky stars and a full moon: an image everyone remembers from their childhood. In reality, everybody looks at the same sky with the same stars, but all from different points of view – topographical and cultural - so the same sky looks different to everyone. To stress this, Van den Berg broke the painting into several parts and aligned them. The cracks and tears between the parts remind the artist of noise waves, analogue to the sounds a radio makes when in between two radio stations. People who walk along the painting scan the pieces just like a radio searcher.

Born 1970, NL. Lives and works in Amsterdam, NL

http://www.harmvandenberg.nl/

Roel Wouters & Jonathan Puckey’s crowdsourced animation project flitser.org is inspired by the ultimate amateur photo: those pictures of people who have taken photos of themselves in a mirror and who have seemingly been ‘decapitated’ by the flash. By remembering the positions of all the flashes and by placing the photos in a specific sequence, the artists managed to create a coherent stop-motion type film that merges all the self-portraits made by different people in different places at different times. The flash starts a life of its own and seems to fly through the screen in a fluent line With the iPhone app -developed specifically for this project- you can add your own flash photo to the project and play with the flash animation. The artists comment on the current social networking trend in which everybody continuously tries to make him/herself as visible as possible. By merging the results of all these ‘narcissistic’ individual gestures into a collective film, the artists have created a social film project which needs as many people as possible to participate in it in order for it to be successful. During the 5DaysOff festival, these generative flash films will be screened at the entrance of Paradiso and Melkweg turning visitors into celebrities chased by the paparazzi.

Check out http://flitser.org, download the iPhone app (only available on iPhone 4), and use this arts-project as an excuse for some shameless self-promotion!

flitser.org was developed specifically for Cloud Sounds and has been sponsored by the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk).

Roel Wouters was born in 1976 in NL & Jonathan Puckey born 1981, NL. Both artists live and work in Amsterdam, NL.

http://flitser.org/

Since 2001, Hinkis and Lapidus have been working collaboratively under the synonym of LoVid, combining their interests in visual art, technology, music, and science. LoVid’s interdisciplinary work explores social, personal, and physical experiences in the networked era. Their work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. They combine opposing elements in their work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analogue with digital, or handmade with machine-produced objects. In their recent work, LoVid focuses on tactile interactions between technology and the human body and engage the audience as active participants. Their methods become particularly apparent in the installation NetWork, in which the ancient craft of weaving is combined with contemporary video engineering. The installation includes participatory weaving elements using electrical wires. Similar wires also conduct live video from LoVid’s handmade synthesizer. The combination of weaving and the live electrical signal represents human touch and attention throughout the passage of time. During the exhibition, the woven elements grow through visitors’ participation and will be preserved as a collectively produced object of recorded time and gesture.

Tali Hinkis (born 1974, IS)
Kyle Lapidus (born 1975, US)
(Both artists currently live and work in New York, US)

www.lovid.org

Aaron Koblin is an artist specialized in data and digital technologies. His work takes real world and community-generated data and uses it to reflect on cultural trends and the changing relationship between humans and technology. Chris Milk is a commercials- and music video
director. In 2004 he started producing music videos for artists like Gnarls Barkley, Green Day, Kanye West and Audioslave. Together Koblin and Milk developed the interactive, internet based artworks The Johnny Cash Project and The Wilderness Downtown. The Johnny Cash Project is a global collective art project which invites everyone to participate. People can share their vision of Johnny Cash via a website: working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, it is possible to create a unique portrait of Cash. That work is then combined with the artworks by other participants around the world, and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for the song Ain’t No Grave, Cash’s final studio recording. As new people discover and contribute to the project, the living portrait will continue to transform and grow. And so it becomes an homage to the immortality of ‘the man in black’ and how he lives on, not just through his vast musical legacy, but also in the hearts and minds of all of his fans around the world.

Aaron Koblin (Born 1982, US. Lives and works in San Francisco, US) & Chris Milk (Born in New York. Lives and works in LA, US)

http://www.aaronkoblin.com/
http://www.chrismilk.com
http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/

In his works Jonas Bohatsch deals with the constitution, reception and development of digital media. The video DVD Containing Video of Itself is about the making, storing and reproduction of digital video, while the installation Movie Really Far Away reduces a motion picture to the size of one pixel. It is only visible as a flickering dot, but the colours and rhythm of the original film are left in tact. vinyl is an interactive installation, experimenting with the expansion of time code vinyl. Virtual objects are projected onto the surface of a white record and come to life when the record is played. Their behaviour changes depending on the rotational speed of the record as well as the position of the turntable‘s needle. Users are encouraged to spin the record for- and backwards and to reposition the needle in order to influence the visual output of the installation. The vinyl acts as the screen, interface and apparent carrier for generative audiovisual software pieces. The combination of turntable, computer and projector results in a new device, oscillating between analogue and digital and hard- a software.

With friendly support of Wien Kultur.
Supported by the City of Vienna/Department of Culture.

Jonas Bohatsch was born 1981 in AT. He currently lives and works in Vienna, AT

http://www.jonasbohatsch.net/

Thomson and Craighead have been working together in the field of video and sound since 1991. More recently they have been exploring the possibilities of the Internet and screen based multimedia to create navigable or user led environments. In much of these works, they research how trends of globalisation and global communications networks are re-shaping the way we all perceive and understand the world around us. Their internet-based works seek to manipulate existing data in critical and humorous ways, which often engender a feeling of estrangement in the visitor.
For Unprepared Piano, a self-playing grand piano is connected to a database of electronic musical scores appropriated and compiled from the worldwide web. This library of electronic scores is then “performed” automatically according to a simple set of rules. The musical scores found on-line contain a wide variety of instrumentations and are not generally intended simply for piano, so the Unprepared Piano is told to perform each piece from beginning to end by randomly picking and choosing from its different parts. This means it might play parts intended for other instruments. The result is a transformation, where traces of the original remain, but form part of a new generative piece of music that could be thought of as an automatic random improvisation. The piano performs and reinterprets each score every time it is played, and although there is no person playing the piano itself, it retains a kind of innate authority because it is recognised as a complex and traditional instrument built and perfected over hundreds of years for the virtuoso.

Jon Thomson (born 1969, UK)
Alison Craighead (born 1971, UK)
(Both artists currently live and work in London, UK)

http://www.thomson-craighead.net

Ssst....

sit down
close your eyes
think of a sound
a sound that was important for you, that
has stuck with you
that has touched you
try to hear that sound again
recreate it in your head
and describe it for me
please

Stijn Demeulenaere is a sociologist, radio producer, sound artist and musician. His installation Soundtracks is about remembering sounds and how sound fixes itself in our memory. Everywhere we go, we are constantly confronted with sounds, and at a subconscious level they set the tone of our daily lives. However, when we are asked to recall something, we are inclined to describe what something looked like, or what we felt or thought at that moment. Our memory is mostly visually oriented.
Remembering sounds seems to be much more complicated. According to Demeulenaere, sounds are connected with emotions and memories via the sub conscience, and therefore form a blind spot in reconstructions. He believes that when we are asked to reconstruct a sound in our mind, we have to rely more on our imagination. This allows us to discover why a specific sound is so special that it has stuck with us. And thus, the process of collecting sound memories becomes a way to explore personal histories.
The Soundtracks archive contains personal memories stored in glass jars. Please open the jars to read the handwritten notes of memories by others and also to take part by contributing your own recollections and adding them to the expanding archive.

Born in 1978, BE. He lives and works in Brussels

http://www.stijndemeulenaere.be/
http://versonatura.org/audio/stijn/stijnWsoundtracks.html