This is a historical archive of information about Future Places 2008. Please start at the top of Futureplaces.org for current information.
The FUTURE PLACES exhibition is the result of an international call to artists and digital media creatives to reflect on the Festival subject of Digital Media and Local Cultures. A list of participants is being finalized, and an online catalogue of the show will be available, containing information on the authors and documenting the pieces and the associated events: set-up, opening reception, and awards ceremony.
The Jury:
Some of the people who have entered their work at FUTURE PLACES:
Ivan Franco (electronic music performance, “Airstick – A Gestural Controller for Performative Electronic Music”)
email: ivan.franco@ydreams.com
Ivan Franco created The AirStick, an instrument played “in the air”, in a Theremin style. It is composed of an array of infrared proximity sensors, which allow the mapping of the position of any interfering obstacle inside a bi-dimensional zone. This controller sends both x and y control data to various real-time audiovisual synthesis algorithms. The Airstick was first presented in the NIME Conference (New Interfaces for Musical Expression).
Since then the Airstick has been included in Franco’s music performances and it has represented his own continuous work-in-progress. More recently a full redesign was made, with the support of YDreams, which has also used this interface for other interactive applications.
António Aleixo (video, “No Oitavo”)
Born and raised in Setúbal, António is a long time storyteller and image creator.
After studying Cinema at Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, still unprepared to take on the responsibility of assuming himself as a director, he started to work as a Sound Operator and Production Assistant. Soon he became part of Tobis` team, where he spent 3 years as a Post Production Technician. Meanwhile his eagerness to embrace some projects of his own kept on growing and growing. Still as a sound operator, he started to attend every workshop and part time course on directing and scriptwriting he could get his hands on.
In April 2008 an opportunity came up and António took it. He left Tobis and ventured into a Writer/ Producer/ Director/ Editor career, starting his own label called Low Cost Filmes.
Since early 2007, year when he first directed something of his own, António shot five films of his own and was commissioned for four more, having been selected for various festivals and having won Best Digital Short at Festroia Int. Film Fest/ Sapo Videos 2007.
phone: 91 411 04 38
e-mail: antaleixo@hotmail.com or lowcostfilms@gmail.com
Marta Luísa Macedo Calejo (Installation, “Time Anchorage”)
Nasci em Braga a 2 de Dezembro de 1984.
Licenciei-me em Design Gráfico na Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto em 2007 e estou actualmente a Frequentar o Mestrado em Design da imagem na mesma instituição.
Anabela Costa (video, “LIQST”)
1958 Lisbon, Portugal. Works and lives in Lisbon.
Visual Artist, studies Fine Arts at Lisbon Art School (1980)
Independent filmmaker working with moving image in experimental animation, developing projects that problematise concepts, relations, between art and science.
e-mail : anabelacosta@msn.com
www.anabelacosta.com
Margot Herster (Installation, “After You’ve Been Burned by Hot Soup You Blow in Your Yogurt”)
Based in Austin, TX, Margot Herster is an artist whose practice combines photography, video, sound, installation, and curation. Her ongoing project, After You’ve Been Burned by Hot Soup You Blow in Your Yogurt, comprises a series of visual, textual, and audio installations using documents she gathered from American attorneys who represent suspected terrorists from the Middle East and Afghanistan. Through a constellation of private lives interrupted by captivity, the project provides anecdote to the credence of photographic imagery.
Herster’s one-person exhibitions include the M.W. Offit Gallery at Columbia University (New York, NY), Sesnon Gallery at the University of California-Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, Calfornia), FotoFest (Houston, Texas), and SCALO Gallery (New York, NY). Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at Arthouse (Austin, TX), Exit Art (New York, New York), Open Society Institute (New York, NY), and SPAZIOTEMPO (Florence, Italy), among others. Herster holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and undergraduate degrees in psychology, art history, and studio art from the University of Kansas.
e-mail: m_herster@hotmail.com
Kimberlee Koym-Murteira (Installations, “Locket Machine” and “Inside”)
Incorporating video and household electronics Kimberlee Koym-Murteira creates kinetic sculptures, explorations in energy driven by the fluidity and beauty of water. Her works reference the interior landscape of the domestic and the psychological. Originally trained as a Set Designer, her works range in size from miniature to installation. Kimberlee earned her MFA from Mills College in the spring of 2007. She currently lives and works in Berkeley, CA. She has shown her work in the bay area at The Lab, Mission 17, Sonoma State University, the Invisible Venue, and Thoreau Gallery. In 2004 she was awarded a grant by Lugar Comum to create a video installation in Lisbon, Portugal. In Europe, her work has been shown at the Biennial of Mediterranean Young Artist in Saravejo, Bosnia, Porto 2000 Capital of Culture, Cultural Center Malaposta, Gallery ZDB, and ‘Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin’ in 2001. She holds a MA in Scenography from Central St. Martins College of Art & Design, London.
www.kimberleekoym-murteira.com
Shlomit Lehavi (Installation, “Time Sifter”)
Shlomit Lehavi is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with new-media, interactive installations, and site-specific installations.
Tension between elements is key to her work. She constantly challenges the balance and conflict between the collective and personal. Her work is subliminal political and critical
She has exhibited and curated shows internationally, and is the recipient of the America-Israel cultural foundation fellowship and the TSOA fellowship.
She has a Master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program
Born in Tel-Aviv, she lives in Brooklyn since 1998.
José Carlos Neves (Installation, “Limiar”)
José Carlos Neves (Lisbon 69) has a degree in Communication Design and works in that field since 93. He also teaches disciplines related with design in ULHT and ETIC. He’s about to finish a master in “Multimedia Systems of Communication” where he developed his interest on the interaction between art, technology and human body/mind. “Limiar”, the interactive audiovisual installation presented at “Future Places Festival”, is his thesis core. Painting and photography experiences throughout the years, constant necessity of theoretic and technological skills improvement, and daily observation of people social behaviour, are all paths crossing in “Limiar”.
email: josecsn@netvisao.pt
Filipe Pais Ferreira (Installation, “Living Room Plankton”)
Filipe Pais Ferreira (1983) has been interested on synesthesia phenomena and routine subjects since 2004 when he got he’s first prize at Atmosferas Digital Art Center. Since there he has been researching methods to explore routine as a source for aesthetic experience and augmented reality. Using analog, digital or biological materials his works look for an organic and autonomous behavior and they are normally based on simple rules that reach complex and ever changing outputs.
Living Room Plankton is an interactive visual installation which allows the user to interfere with an artificial organism growing process and daily routine. This interaction leads to plastic contemplation and often to identity reflections.
Pygar (performance)
Pygar is Hugo Olim (visuals) and João Ricardo (audio).
Our work investigates the nuances of modulations through the use of experimental audio/visual compositions, emphasizing the artificial nature of digital media. As a side note, analogue tools are often used to achieve certain textures. We like to explore abstract sceneries as motifs to describe the idea of an imaginary reality…
Pygar started making electronic music video clips in 2001 and have broadened their activities to live performances. Since then, our videos have been screened in festivals like Transmediale and Art-Ort (DE), lovevideo, videolisboa, ovarvideo, MadeiraDIG, EME, STFU (PT), Macfest and Störung (ES), PI Video Festival Szczecin (PL), Chroma (MX), Rosario Digital Art Festival (AR), CeC & CaC at India International Centre New Dehli (IN), Victory Plaza in Dallas, Texas (USA), Enter Caravasarai (TR), etc. We’ve also performed alongside names like Tim Hecker, Kangding Ray, Fennesz, Mikael Stavostrand, among others.
pygar.pt.vu/
Christopher Robbins (performance)
Christopher Robbins grew up in New York City, and has since lived and worked in London, Tokyo, West Africa, Fiji, and Serbia. He built his own hut out of mud and sticks and lived in it while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin, West Africa, spoke at a United Nations conference about his cross-cultural digital arts and education work in the South Pacific, and has exhibited in the United States, Europe, Fiji and Africa.
Awards include the RISD Award of Excellence, SITINGS Installation Commission, the Stein Experiential Art Prize, SXSW Web Award, and residencies/ fellowships at MacDowell Colony, Haystack, Penland, Anderson Ranch, the Kala Art Institute, and the Nebraska Art Farm. He has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and currently splits his time between New York and Serbia.
CVCM – 3T1 (Installation, “PhotoMatic”)
CVCM – 3T1 is a multidisciplinary group, formed by the finalist students of the Multimedia Communication course at Universidade Lusófona de Lisboa (ULHT), coming from distinct disciplines such as, design, Web programming and 3D animation. In the last six months the group has been working and researched the thematic of interactivity, allied to entertainment as a mean to communicate. As final result, the CVCM – 3T1, present at the Future Places Festival, PhotoMatic – interactive multimedia application – that uses text messages from the cell phone as a way to interact.
pedrosuspiro@hotmail.com
e-mail: pedrosuspiro@hotmail.com
André Neto (Installation, “Welcome to Yellow Bop Records”)
André Neto makes music, plays the violin and has two cats. With a strong education, focused on music and technology (as two separate things), he spent his life, so far, working for the superior art in some way. Though he didn’t find it yet, he knows it requires experience with tools, with skills, with life and an incredible ability to communicate. He’s from Portugal, his work’s from the future.
e-mail: a.neto@essaycollective.org
James Daher ( Installation, “Crystal Futures”)
James Charles is a Brooklyn based new media artist and professor of design at St. Johns University. His work has been featured on CNET, Make Magazine and free103.9. James is a recent graduate from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and received a BFA with honors in Graphic Design from the School of Visual Arts, where he concentrated on visual communication design. He has presented interactive works in New York at Eyebeam, Sony Wonder Lab, Dumbo Art Under the Bridge Festival, Figment Art Festival, Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television, The Grassroots Media Conference, and Hunters Electronic Social Club.
For information on current work visit jamesdaher.com or contact: james@jamesdaher.com
loev – live online events (Installation)
Mónica Mendes, Paulo Nuno Vicente, Joana Beleza, Moisés Coelho, Ricardo Cardoso, Arthur Liégeois, Miguel Crespo, Eduardo Taborda, Luis Ferreira, Ana Jorge, and Sílvia Silva.
Ricardo Reis (Installation, ” Soa-te a ISTo”)
Born in ’78. Professional occupation: aerospace engineer specializing in computational simulation of fluid dynamics. Woke up for different ways of making radio around 2003. Since then has produced/acted in BzapCatrap with André Martins, a radio drama for the old incarnation of Rádio Zero, and made Ponto de Escuta, a sound collage regular program also for Rádio Zero. Also guest starred in Harmon e. Phraysier from ResonanceFM and delivers a biweekly cinema show called Matiné with Mário Lino at Rádio Zero. On a non-regular basis has produced several art radio pieces for Zero, art radio festivals or other radios.
He organized and curated, RadiaLx2006, and shared the function with Paulo Raposo for the 2008 edition. RadiaLx is a radio art festival happening once every two years in Lisboa.
He also has been a scout and scavenger for the Radia Network since its inception, instigating Portuguese artists to produce radio art.
Contact: rreis(a)radiozero.pt
Webtraces: http://www.radiozero.pt, http://www.flickr.com/photos/rreis
Rui Avelans Coelho (Video, “Footmobile”; “Bzzzzzz bzz”; “The Champion”; “15 Frames”)
My name is Rui Avelans Coelho, and I have been working with films made with mobile phones. I earned a degree in electronics and I currently work in audio for cinema, TV and interactive installations.
I am doing a post graduation course in New Media in Universidade Nova de Lisboa where I been researching new ways of making films. My goal is to create new recording techniques using small devices like surveillance cameras or mobile phones. These devices, being so small and accessible, can be used in ways that bigger cameras cannot.
I believe that the mobile phone camera is a new creative tool that will enable everybody to make their own films and with the help of the net, make them available to the world.
With these mobile phone films, I have won 6 awards this year—3 of them firsts–in international film festivals (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Brazil, Portugal), all without leaving my room.
Rita Coelho (Performance, “Hybrid Articulations”)
Porto, 1981
Communication Designer freelancer (having worked on projects such as video, instalation, interface design and graphic design).
Master in Multimedia Art (FBAUP 2008).
Graduate in Communication Design (FBAUP 2005).
As an Erasmus exchange student, attended the Willem de Kooning Academy, in Rotterdam, in 2004.
Cristobal Mendoza (Installation, “Every Word I Saved (Uttered)” )
Cristobal Mendoza is a Venezuelan born new media artist whose interests lie in data collection, databases and “non-informational” visualizations, and how these practices intersect with the sphere of personal experience. He currently teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he is also based. He obtained an M.F.A. in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, and his B.A. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 2003.
Mário Roda and Narciso Melo (installation, “:Psy:”)
Mário Roda has a degree in Communication Design, works as freelancer and as a teacher of Graphic Design and Multimedia.
Narciso Melo has a degree in Computer Engineering, was a researcher at the Center of Computer Graphics at the University of Minho, and is currently a consultant of Prológica S.A.
Rudolfo Quintas (Performance, “Burning The Sound”)
Burning the sound is a visually amplified sound art performance about the nature of rituals and the relation they establish with the state of power and control.
Since later 2007, Quintas, has been creating and developing the performance, which aims to push the ritualistic primitivism, gesture and body to technological mediated computer sound performances.
Burning the sound was performed at STEIM, NL (work-in-progress); La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Festival PixelAche at KIASMA- Contemporary Art Museum Helsinky; LUCY Festival, Istambul; Festival UM, Lisbon and BODIG08, Istambul.
Developed at ISR – Institute for Systems and Robotics Lisbon; Sponsored by DGArtes and Ciência Viva; Residence in STEIM (NL) supported by NIP – www.newinterfaces.net
Jorge Cardoso and Pedro Santos (Installation, “Stories in Place”)
Jorge Cardoso is a teacher at the School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University
where he teaches Information Technologies, Multimedia Programming, and Interactive
Video Art. He is also a researcher at the Research Center for Science and Techonology of Art and author of a Java Mobile programming book.
He is currently a PhD student at the University of Minho and his main interests lie in mobile computing and situated interaction.
Pedro Santos finished a Masters Degree in Informatic Engineering from the Engineering Faculty of the Oporto University (FEUP) in 2008. The Master final project was developed at the Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR), where he currently works as a researcher.
Caroline St.Romain & Wei Yeh (Installation, “Hello Lamp”)
Designer Caroline St.Romain has always had an innate sense of curiosity, stemming from a desire to understand the world around her. The more of life she experiences, the more she realizes there is much yet to discover. Her work explores the tangible interrelationship between aesthetics and
functionality. Recently, this sense of exploration has led her to blend the fundamental principals of design with the challenges of other disciplines, such as engineering and film making. These experiences help her more fully understand the symbiotic relationships that design has throughout the world. Her project, the hello lamp, explores the seamless integration of technology into everyday objects through the use of organic movements and fluctuations of light as a means of communication.
A native of Houston, Texas, Wei graduated in 1999 from the University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Radio Television Film with a concentration in New Media. In 2000, he joined Yacov Sharir in the pursuit of artist centric tools that enhance live performance. 2001 marked the completion of his
Masters degree with his thesis on the Automated Body Project. Currently, Wei is pursuing an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. on ambient technologies with Project Aurora. In order to apply the ideas from his research, Wei founded Applied Bozonics, LLC, a pervasive technologies company in 1998. Wei manages and oversees the Project Aurora team while continuing to lead hardware development and research component miniaturization, wireless communication and wearable technologies. Since 2000, Wei and his teammates have built several iterations of a wearable performance augmentation system. He has
demonstrated this system at conferences, symposiums and workshops world wide, gaining the project international recognition. In 2004, Wei and the Project Aurora team were accepted to the Monaco Dance Forum for their works Led and Shadowpuppets. In the spring of 2005, Project Aurora premiered Incandescence as part of the New Works Festival at the University of Texas at Austin.
Renato Roque (Video, “We Are Sam”)
Renato Roque nasceu no Porto há muitos anos. Não se lembra. Dizem-lhe que era uma segunda-feira e fazia sol. Apesar de céptico por natureza, acredita É engenheiro da FEUP: Electrotecnia, opção Telecomunicações. Por vezes esquece. Nos anos 80 descobriu que era possível contar histórias com a fotografia:
‘Entre dois espelhos a dez graus’ (1986) porque, como diziam os inventores da fotografia, a fotografia é um espelho com memória
‘Dez graus para a meia-noite’ (1988) porque os espelhos a dez graus resolveram fechar
‘Espelhos’ (1990) + ‘Novos Espelhos’ (1992) porque precisava de continuar a escrever o livro de memórias
‘Os sonhos são a preto e branco’ (1994) porque os sonhos são a preto e branco, excepto os de tom azul
‘O que resta da Arte’ / Cada pessoa é um artista’ (1997) porque acredita nisso!
‘Pinturas do Outro Lado’, de Manuel Manchinha – objectos fotográficos bi, tri e ene-dimensionais (1998), porque o Manuel Manchinha é fantástico!
‘A hora sua’ (1999) porque a morte o perturba
“Corpos de Cidade” (2001) + ‘Descobertus/descoberti'(2001), com música de João Lóio, porque as cidades nascem, crescem, adoecem e morrem
‘D’ouro d’Alendouro’ (2003) + ‘Paisagens do silêncio’ (2003) porque naquelas ervas só o silêncio se pode deitar
‘Catedrais do silêncio’ (2004) porque o infinito faz cócegas na espinha
‘Luz de papel’ (2005) porque o a livraria Académica fazia 95 anos
’12 pm’ (2008) porque a luz misteriosa da meia-noite me obrigou
Alguns dos projectos de que é autor ou co-autor e que estão editados em livro:
Espelhos (1992); Arcas de Sonhos (1994); Renato no País das Manchinhas (1998); A Terra dos Quadrados, de Manuel Manchinha (1998); A hora sua (1999); A teoria da relatividade restrita dos sonhos e o 25 de Abril (2000); Corpos de Cidade (2001); Projecções da Memória (2002); D’ouro d’Alendouro (2003); Catedrais do silêncio (2004); Balada Solitária (2004); Copo de tempo (2005); Luz de papel (2007); 12pm (2008)
Jody Zellen
Jody Zellen is an artist living in Los Angeles, California. She works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists’ books that explore the subject of the urban environment. She employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations. Her most recent online work uses the New York Times as a point of departure and can be viewed at (http://allthenewsthatsfittoprint.net/frame.html). She is currently making tracings from news imagery and transforming those drawings into digital photographs and animations.
For more information and to see other projects visit www.jodyzellen.com
Muge Belek & Frederico Fialho
Muge Belek and Frederico Fialho are co-founders of [f]Flat Architectures research group an environment to research and develop architectural and media art projects. A number of their works have been awarded, exhibited and published in multiple programs and stages. This course of events provided the ground to develop works with the emphasis in avant-garde methodologies techniques in media art and architecture.
Currently their studies fall into the area of Spatial Arts using techniques, such as Trans-acoustics, based in biological and evolutionary stratums. In this field of research, [f]Flat explores systems with emergent/evergent spatial characteristics able to embody multi-dimensional properties. This processes establish through elemental modularity which carry multiple algorithmic stratums. These machines develop within ubiquitous ecologies instigating multiple behaviours – both physical and virtual – and functioning immanently towards the evolution of a multi-dimensional space.
Born in 1978, Istanbul, Muge Belek is an architect and a research assistant at Istanbul Technical University (ITU). She holds a BSc. in architecture, a MSc. on “Collaborative Design Studio Environments” from ITU, and MArch from Architectural Association School of Architecture Design Research Laboratory. She has worked in several architectural firms, including Zaha Hadid Architects Ltd., in London, Istanbul and Brazil. She is currently continuing her PhD research on Trans-Architectural Acoustics, during which she worked for two years with Marcos Novak in University of California Santa Barbara, Translab.
Frederico Fialho Teixeira is an architect, media artist, currently researching at University of California Santa Barbara, where he is an Awarded Fellow. He is working towards his PhD degree in Media Arts and Technology based at the California Nano Systems Institute and supervised by Prof. Marcos Novak. He graduated in Architecture and Urbanism, holds an MA in History of Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture University of Porto, and a MArch from the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He worked in firms which include Zaha Hadid Architects.
AYO
AYO (aka Ayoka Chenzira) is a filmmaker and interactive digital media artist. Her current creative work is in tangible storytelling where she is working with sensing and cutting edge interactive technologies to create interactive films. In 2007 she presented her work at the FAMU International Film Program in Prague. In 2008 her paper on the work was published for the journals of the TEI conference in Germany and the ISEA conference in Singapore. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology and teaches digital media at Spelman College in Atlanta.
Digitópia (installation, presented by Rui Penha)
Digital music making is evolving dramatically with today’s increasing availability of free music software and musical content. Digitópia, a platform for collaborative music creation recently started at Casa da Música, Porto’s main concert venue, addresses how these trends can affect generalized music creation and music software design, promote social inclusion, and lead to the emergence of multicultural communities of music makers/lovers. While certainly not an example of digital media, Digitópia is quickly becoming a “Future Place”, fostering a new generation of digital media creators and providing them with means for the informal development of skills.
Rui José (Installation, “Instant Places”)
Rui José is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minho in Portugal, where he is a member of the Ubicomp@UMinho research group. Rui José received his PhD degree in Computer Science (Distributed Systems) from Lancaster University, UK, and since then he has been actively involved in the field of ubiquitous computing, having lead several projects in the area. His current research interests include systems software for smart spaces, interaction design for ubiquitous computing applications, and particularly situated displays. He is the coordinator of the Research Program on Situated Displays for Smart Places, a multi-disciplinary long-term initiative that aims to develop and evaluate new concepts of situated displays as shared, networked, pro-active and strongly situated information artefacts. Instant places is part of that program and is an ongoing research work exploring new mechanisms for social interaction around displays.
