Mentors: Blaž Vrečko (producer, mastering engineer) and ALPHAWAVE

Blaž Vrečko is a producer and audio engineer, trained especially in the field of mixing and mastering. He produces trance and techno and collaborates with numerous record labels and successful performers. As a sound technician he worked on some of the albums by the melancholic trip-hop producer JUNEsHELEN and the ethno duo Kalliope, and produced the cover song for the film project Kresnik, The Lore of Fire, which was also presented at the competition part of the Cannes festival, where it was performed by Maja Keuc.

Program:

14:00 – 15:00 Intro

15:00 – 16:00 DAW

16:00 – 16:15 break

16:15 – 18:00 Beat, seqencer, bass

18:00 – 19:00 Melody, harmony …

www.alphawave.si

In the beginning of the Millennium Bio Art has become one of the central genres of contemporary art. It is signified by thematizing the advent of the age of biotechnology with all its prospects in manipulating the living of the world: the body, animals and plants for various objectives, such as the food industry, medicine, pharmacy, aesthetics, etc. For the art that won the title Bio Art it is significant to include biotechnology in its procedures and displays this inclusion in its performances, production of the living “sculptures”, performative installations, and workshops. With this imperative the Bio Art projects become very demanding in their realization and sometimes rather hermetic in their discourse.

Bio Art could be recognized as a Western or capitalist phenomenon in the sense of its ensign or promotion, but there exist also very critical and innovative, even avant-garde encounters with biotechnology in the truly transdisciplinary art-biotechnology-humanities projects, by default produced in the ex-communist countries.

Polona Tratnik, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate and Associate Professor for philosophy of culture, is president of the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics and holds courses at the Faculty for Education, University of Maribor and the Faculty for Design, University of Primorska. She is Associate Professor for theory of art and media at Singidunum University, Faculty for Media and Communication. She was Head of the Department for Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska. In 2012 she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and a Guest Professor at University of California Santa Cruz. She was a Guest Professor also in Bejing, Helsinki and Mexico. She is an author of five monographs, among others of the Hacer-vivir más allá del cuerpo y del medio (Mexico City: Herder, 2013). Since 2010 she is a member of the research group Arte+Ciencia at the Faculdad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

– lecture: Thursday, October 15, 2015, KIBLA PORTAL at 11.00

The project is a 3D construction of the 15th century city walls. Out of the five towers, only one was preserved (from the northern part of the wall) and used as a study case. The Čeligi Tower, originally named Black Tower or Smodniški (eng. gunpowder) Tower, was a vital part of the city’s defense system at the time. The 3D model is a copy of the existing tower with some added elements, mainly made of timber, which have not been preserved but were a distinctive feature of the defense mechanisms of that time.

Jan Sterniša (SI), born in 1986 in Maribor, graduated from the technical college Academia as an engineer of media production. He is engaged in 3D and spatial design and animation. He participated in the exhibition Robot Shop in the Cultural Incubator as a 3D animator, and led a workshop Modding Half-Life 2, where the participants were taught to modify computer games. As a 3D designer he was involved in the project implementation of Jože Slaček’s cybernetic theater, the project Concerto for 3D printers (2013) and in the production of the project Corpus Indeterminata 3D by sculptor Zoran Srdić Janežič (2013).

Gregor Rojko (SI), born in 1980, is actively engaged in the field of culture and graphic design for several years. He deals with graphic design (all types of printed materials) and print preparation (magazines, books, posters, leaflets, ads, corporate visual images and identities). He performs workshops and presentations of 3D printing in collaboration with the Youth Cultural Centre Maribor, the Cultural Incubator and Jože Slaček. For the International Festival of Computer Arts MFRU 2014 he produced a web platform in collaboration with Kristijan Robič. In the field of computer arts he works in editing, photo processing, and producing and manipulating digital images.

Jože Slaček (SI), born 1965, lives and works in Maribor as a program coordinator, animator and mentor. He is an author in the field of video, animation and multimedia. His first video art project was created in 1989, when he carried out a series of screenings by Slovenian and foreign video artists at the Media Nox Gallery. In the early nineties Slaček began to focus on computer art and is known as one of the initiators of the International Festivals of Computer Arts – IFCA (MFRU) in Maribor, which debuted in 1995. He participated in the production of the mfru hyperfilm and supervised the building of the archive for the Computer Arts Festival. He participates in the implementation of VR projects as an author and organizer.

Saturday, October 10 (9.30–14.00)

The Robopioneer is a creative program by Mali ustvarjalci, and is intended for children aged 6 to 11. This kind of informal education offers the children a chance to confront and get to know construction-related and logical problems, as well as programming, by playing with, assembling and disassembling Lego blocks. In this way the child sees and follows the functioning of things, learning why certain elements spin and why others swing, and why sometimes some of them don’t work the way they are supposed to. There isn’t a child in the world that can’t assemble Lego blocks or can’t learn to do it in a very short period of time. The ideas already reside in the children; they are of crucial importance, which is why the child’s innovativeness and independence are stimulated during the process of assembling and programming. The simplicity and appeal of this workshop lie in teaching the children about programming in such a way that they are not even aware of it, because the program commands are executed manually, all the while making logical conclusions and establishing links between actions and reactions, between cause and consequence. Every child goes through the entire process of robotization, i. e. from the idea and the problem of construction, to programming and a final functioning product.

Key words and subject links: ROBOTICS, MATHEMATICS, LOGIC, PHYSICS, PROGRAMMING, NATURAL SCIENCES, TECHNICAL SCIENCES, ART, CREATIVE THINKING

The creative workshop mentor is Jure Pikl, a professor of physics and technical education at the Primož Trubar Elementary School in Laško. Apart from his formal employment, he is also actively engaged in informal education, working as a part-time children’s teacher/instructor of robotics who believes, as he puts it, in bringing the technical world as close to children as possible in a fun and relaxed way. He also emphasizes that technical education in schools is becoming less and less interesting for children, who “fail to resolve problems in the sense of assembling and disassembling constructions, logical reasoning, step-by-step problem solving etc.”

Boki Batina (youreup crew), USELESS D.I. (diablo loco REC.), Theejay (Bass Fighters)

DJ set

Jernej Marušič aka Octex is one of most profiled and internationally established Slovenian electronic artists, operating somewhere in between club and avant-garde, exploring the boundaries of dub aesthetics and sub bass frequencies, placed in variable rhythmical time frames.

His releases have appeared under numerous labels (Mute, EFA, STHLM, Public Records), and his list of remixes includes artists such as Laibach, Marko Furstenberg, Gabriel Le Mar, Ultra Red … Under the new alias Pavemental he recently released the debut Streeteepy, which focuses on his unique take on urban hip hop beats. He is performing his audio-visual live set at festivals and clubs across Europe, such as ARS Electronica (Linz), Club Transmediale (Berlin), ISEA (Helsinki), Dis-patch (Belgrade) Exit (Novi Sad), White Night (Riga), Flussi (Avellino), 7epta/8ogdoa (Chalkidiki) …  In recent years, he developed a new interest in improvised music, performing solo impro-sessions centered around a modular synthesizer, or performing with other musicians.

http://www.octex.si/

– Friday, October 9 at 21.15

AV performance

Peoplemeter is a new expanded cinema performance created by Incredible Bob, video artist and WoO, experimental guitarist and sound artist, both from Belgrade, Serbia.

The performance is comprised of a synchronized video projection, blue lasers, neon wires, and lights with live electronic music. The video consists of imagery shot with microscopes, endoscopes and other techniques, and the protagonists are robots living in a post digital world of media signals, frequencies, oscillations and other media junk. Live music is performed by WoO playing guitar with effects and Bob playing live electronic music. Peoplemeter premiered on MUTEK Festival 2013 in Mexico City in IMAX cinema, and was performed in Kassel, Timisoara, Athens, Zagreb, Belgrade.

WoO (RS) is an experimental guitarist and sound artist from Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, born in 1978. Taking clues from electronic music pioneers, he experiments with mobile devices such as mobile phones, remote controls, media devices, computer equipment and similar, to capture their frequency interferences through his guitar magnets. “Amplifying the air” through his guitar, WoO creates a magical sound-world that is rich in frequency, oscillating and meditative. Soundscape ambience, distortion drones, high pitch harmonics and analog electronic sounds all find their place inside of his compositions.

Incredible Bob (RS) is present for over a decade on international media scene and his works have been shown in more than 300 festivals around the world including MUTEK, Transmediale, TodaysArts, European Media Art Festival, and others. Bob performed live with Actress, Deadbeat, Morphosis, Murcof, Mika Vainio, Dan Deacon, Mats Gustafsson, DJ Rupture, Laurent Garnier, The ORB, Tiga, Dasha Rush, and many others.

AV performance

Always evolving hybrid performance exploring the interplay between analog and digital, audio and video in which fragments of prerecorded material intertwine with live modular improvisation resulting in an immersive synesthetic soundscape of shifting time and space.

Jernej Marušič aka Octex is one of most profiled and internationally established Slovenian electronic artists, operating somewhere in between club and avant-garde, exploring the boundaries of dub aesthetics and sub bass frequencies, placed in variable rhythmical time frames.

His releases have appeared under numerous labels (Mute, EFA, STHLM, Public Records), and his list of remixes includes artists such as Laibach, Marko Furstenberg, Gabriel Le Mar, Ultra Red … Under the new alias Pavemental he recently released the debut Streeteepy, which focuses on his unique take on urban hip hop beats. He is performing his audio-visual live set at festivals and clubs across Europe, such as ARS Electronica (Linz), Club Transmediale (Berlin), ISEA (Helsinki), Dis-patch (Belgrade) Exit (Novi Sad), White Night (Riga), Flussi (Avellino), 7epta/8ogdoa (Chalkidiki) …  In recent years, he developed a new interest in improvised music, performing solo impro-sessions centered around a modular synthesizer, or performing with other musicians.

http://www.octex.si/