Coded Cultures Media Arts Festival: Program for the 2nd Week

Coded Cultures is an multinational initiative of the group 5uper.net to discuss and reflect the intersections of media, art, society and technology in experimental settings of exihibitions, workshops, symposia, presentations and artistic interventions. For the fourth time, Coded Cultures presents a forum to discuss and present (new) media arts, digital communities and positions itself in the current international (media arts) discurse. Coded Cultures 2011: The City as Interface takes place from september 21st to october 2nd and is located around the second district (Leopoldstadt) in Vienna, Austria. 
Open Seats at Workshops
Martin Howse: Viennese Symptoms
This.Play Space / 28.09, 12:00 - 18:00
Activities will include the dowsing, scrying and divining of buboes on the skin of the city, the rubbing, tracing and excavation of these sites (inscription and playback of the stone tape using self-built apparatus) towards the collective production of a strange hybrid of archaeologists/ forensics report, an essay in self-observation and social questionnaire.
http://codedcultures.com/post/viennese-symptoms
Gordan Savicic/ Danja Vasiliev
The 120days of *buntu / This.Play Space / 30.09, 12:00 - 18:00
The 120days of *buntu is a mash-up of 120 different Ubuntu operating systems (OS). It works from the source code of popular Linux/GNU and redistributes modified software through the Internet and through a new distribution model, the so called Street-Sneaker-Net inspired by the illegal CD/DVD sellers in the streets of São Paolo, Brazil. Computer operating systems are imposing many rules and dogmas onto the ordinary user; thus an OS becomes an inescapable device of our control-driven social environment. By breaking and modifying the rules, we can liberate ourselves and discover new facets of pre-determined paths, similar to strategies practiced in situationism within urban environments. We envision the operating system as a contemporary replacement of urban space. The systems we are creating are reflections of life situations and desktop-user experiences within the genre of software art. They comprise a collection of idiosyncratic but useless distributions. While default systems impose ever more rules and dogmas, making them similar to increased control over public space, the project emphasizes that they are open to modification, reuse and public action. The 120days of *buntu incorporates the production and distribution of a user-determined OS. Each OS is a self-contained Live CD/USB stick; a PC/Mac can be instantly booted off it. These OS interventions are being brought back into the physical space, given away for free and distributed in the city.
http://codedcultures.com/post/120daysof
TALKS IN THE 2nd WEEK
Armin Medosch: Technpolitics
Urania / 27.09.2011 19:00
Technopolitics is a praxis oriented research project initiated by Brian Holmes and Armin Medosch. It is a self-educational project which works out a theoretic framework and vocabulary that makes complex and difficult concepts accessible to cultural producers and activists such as themselves. technopolitics@thenextlayer: http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1199http://codedcultures.com/post/technopolitics
dérive: INCUBATE! / Urania / 28.09.2011, 19:00 - 23:00Large parts of the industrials areas, ports or railway sites lost their functions and orphaned. During the last years many of them disappeared and became residential areas, business parks and the like. But there are still numerous sites that await a new function. The need for cheap, extraordinary space for people nowadays called „creative class“ and the rising importance of the „creative industries“ increased the attention for those old industrial sites.
http://codedcultures.com/post/incubate!
Findeisen/ Zimmermann: Future Fluxus
Urania / 29.09.2011, 19:00 - 23:00
The project Future Fluxus is an experiment on many layers of cultural memory. Like it should be, one should add, if it is true that, in many European countries, and since at least 1995, we have been fed back by diverse forms of online cultures that, so it is said and believed, actually, are developing 4-8 times faster than analogue cultures. Are we to be scared now?
http://codedcultures.com/post/futurefluxus
A.Maze: Games Culture Circle
Urania / 30.09.2011, 19:00 - 23:00
Since 2009, “A MAZE.” presents the talk show “Games Culture Circle” (GCC) in cooperation with the Computer Games Museum in Berlin. Moderated by Uke Bosse, it offers a forum and meeting place for artists, game designers, musicians, directors and players from the media and cultural landscape and discusses interdisciplinary topics of digital game culture in front of an open-minded audience. It is not our aim to produce academic jibber-jabber, but to create an authentic exchange of experiences, opinions and visions. The interplay between computer games and society is more important than previously assumed: games influence works of contemporary fine arts, cinema and music, and more over the behaviour of many people in everyday life.http://codedcultures.com/post/gamesculturecircle
Program:
http://codedcultures.com/page/program
http://codedcultures.com/presscoded_cultures_2011_program.pdf
http://codedcultures.com/press/codedcultures2011.ics