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Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel & Ilza Black

present DVD documentation from the following works:

Orchestra of Anxiety
Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel

The Orchestra of Anxiety is a collection of instruments that use materials and technologies from the security and surveillance industries. The central focus of the installation is a harp, traditionally regarded as a sacred or metaphysical instrument. However, unlike standard harps, this one is strung with razor wire, requiring the harpist to wear protective gloves while playing. Touching a string triggers multiple projections and sound sources in the gallery.

For this new work to be first shown at Watermans Gallery, artists Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel expand their ongoing explorations of the concept of security. While 'security' can be seen as desire, as ideology, as illusion but never as a garuanteed status quo, socio-political measures of control have been implemented in the name of security. The security industry is one of the fastest growing sectors this decade, and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The participative installation piece, Orchestra of Anxiety, deploys security and surveillance technologies in an unusual and playful context, prompting visitors to reflect on their personal sense of security and their relationship with public fears. 

BROADBANDIT HIGHWAY
Manu Luksch & Ilze Black

On the occasion of the 'Please Disturb Me' art show at the Great Eastern Hotel in London [www.ambienttv.net/disturb]., ambientTV.NET premiered the first production from the ongoing  cAmbientTV series; the live webcam road movie 'BROADBANDIT HIGHWAY.'

The broadbandits hijack (by means of java scripts) video streams from traffic surveillance cams  on websites  round the world and montage these live sequences to a 24/7 road movie, which, resized and stretched to full-screen, are diverted onto the hotel television channel. The sound track was created  and improvised during the performance at the hotel by SUPERMODEM (Kate Rich & Sneha Solanki). Broadbandit Highway as a self-generative road movie is still ongoing and online at www.ambienttv.net/broadbandit.

MYRIORAMA
a dance performance for a live location-aware media environment
by ambientTV.NET and kondition pluriel

Once upon a time,in the kingdom of Myriorama, there ruled a king who knew the art of reading and bending the thoughts of his people over great distances, which rendered him famously powerful. One day, a wanderer entered the kingdom ...

Taking a hint from Italo Calvino’s story A King Listens, Myriorama unfolds the world of one whose environment is all ears and all eyes; one for whom every whisper and rumour is heard distinctly, for whom every movement is watched and logged.Today, equipment designed for a paranoid king has become the plaything of the people, part of our everyday gadgetry and woven in the fabric of the city.

For this production, ambientTV.NET and kondition pluriel have repurposed location-aware mobile devices, motion sensors and audio-visual transmissions to fashion a responsive performance space that both extends beyond, and is concentrated in the venue itself.

TRyPTiCHON

live locative media and dance performance
by AmbientTV.net
Kiasma Theatre, Helsinki, 4 April 2004

The audience at the Kiasma Theatre was led all the way down the steps of the tiered seating area and invited to take their places inside a hexagonal veil-like tent raised on the stage. A performer equipped with a GPRS capable hand-held computer and GPS receiver left the building on a walk. As the lights dimmed, the semi-transparent walls of the tent became a myriad of projections, the stepped auditorium a stage for a dancer dressed in white and the bip-bip-bip sound of a pedestrian crossing signal was heard, introducing an evocative live sound-track.

The walk, framed between the steps of Helsinki's Parliament building and the steps of the Lutheran Cathedral, also formed the framework of the 45-minute show as text messages from the walker, along with the positions reported by the GPS system, were mapped in real time in a visual display. The live messages from the walker emerged from the context of layers of archived walks and the earlier walkers’ messages, and threaded their way through a forest of texts. Crossing the three-dimensional images generated this way, were live-mixed video footage and closed circuit relay of the dancer’s movements outside the tent. The sightlines of the dancer seen through the tent-screens, her shadow and her image crossed the many sightlines of the audience seated at will in the tent rather than in rows in a theatre. The movements of the walkers in the city, tagged with their messages, mediated by the technology, became the cues for the dancer, interpreting her own space with the movements of her body.

AmbientTV.net’s interest in so-called ‘locative media’ (mobile communications and positioning technology) stems from earlier ‘telejams’ which linked performers and situations in different cities with live messaging, music and video. The Ambients draw from the traditions of psychogeography the notion of a spatial encoding of narrative and its subsequent unveiling. The complex visual and sound environment created in Triptychon is the emergence of language from media: the reciprocity between ‘objective’ data and ‘subjective’ interpretation. It mirrors the urban experience as a myriad of crossings.

TRyPTiCHON also emerges from and tends towards another locative-performative piece, now developing under the working title Myriorama (formerly FlipFlop). In this respect, TRyPTiCHON has been a valuable research loop, allowing the Ambients to develop software and hardware solutions, but above all to develop the critical approaches to media and subjective focus that stop it becoming a gadget-piece