Musings of a Digital Brain

I performed the first outcome of my new piece Catatonic State Society at Upgrade!International, Chain Reaction. I'm building simulations with software agents to perform with, primitive as they are, a bit like populating the city models I'm looking into and what I hope will soon also be part of the Shifting Metropolis Workshop. This little text describes it:

In the Catatonic State Society, all members live in a state of reduced consciousness. Saccading their heads on spastic pulses or just in plain inertia, they seem indifferent to perception. These rythmical units do interact however, they behave in surprising ways towards one another. They move in and out of sync, form complex superstructures to shift from texture to crystalline structures, rythmic pulses and back again.

But better yet, and slightly more down to earth, this is what it sounds like: CatatonicStateSociety.
A bit rough, especialy playing outside, but great fun too.

Also had a great impro-session with Skopje electronic musician Alexander Nikov and played on alternative Channel 103.
In short, it was great : )

I spent a lot of time with Marianne Kirch and Theodossia on this piece. What started out as an interesting but vague mix of an unhealthy japanese obsession, feedback and a lot of theory might actually turn into a nice piece one of these days.
Scary part is: we play it in Munich.
Anyway, it's turning out to be a rather multidisciplinary thing with costumes, music, dance, sound, and who knows what else.
So if you're around and into that sort of thing, do drop by.
The show is at Tube in Munich, 19 and 20 september.

The workshop was a great succes. All the participants were super motivated Skopjans who really threw themselves at it.
We sent them out to make trajectories through the city, picking places and gathering material there. Text, audio, photo's, video, everything digital.
The material is then put into a digital framework to make a digital representation of people's Skopje.
As an interface we used a large map of Skopje and barcodes on locations, which is nice and nifty.

I had the honourable but somewhat daunting task of making the framework, which I didn't prepare and I got sick. But we pulled it off anyway and I think it was a great experience for everyone.
This was one of my locations, I learned a thing or two about 3d in the process. And got the taste of it, so expect more of that in the future.



Big thanks to all those Macedonians, organisers and participants and of course my partners in crime Annemie Maes and Shelbatra Jashari.
More documentation will follow and hopefully more cities!

I'm taking part in this upgrade international event. I'm doing the workshop Shi fting Metropolis with Annemie Maes and Shalbatra Jashari and doing the first Ca tatonic State Society performance.

Together with the theatre piece Shift(unrelated besides the new media parlance) this causes me to have a pretty nasty schedule.
More info soon (or a bit later) and on the sites of line and upgrade.net