Thursday, May 01, 2008

Network Culture Festival 7# 300408

All week across various cities in central Europe there have been a range of interesting cultural happenings taking place showing off the range of cutting edge artistic practice in this part of the continent.



Details of the cities involved this year are available on the Multiplace website. It's full of information on the venues and the artsts taking part. Here in Brno there have been educational workshops, and performances/gigs/concerts in several venues that range from cafes to nightclubs. It's a great feeling to be in a place that has so much to contribute. The number of world-class creative types is quite humbling to see, it is also more importantly very inspiring.

Conversation often drifts back to such things, critiques abound.

I spent a little time at Kavarna Trojka yesterday, lurking outside the PD (Pure Data) workshops and peeping through the windows before I had to go to work then returning to see and hear some people using the software to mess with audio and video information later that evening.

As you can see from the photo of the programme for the evening there were three acts scheduled. I saw all of them but only heard two, I spent some time in the drinking/smoking zone watching the video feed with friends - sadly there was no audio to accompany the images.

First up was Catophone a three piece laptop (Macbook) ensemble with three data projectors and three screens side-by-side. The images were stuttering cat videos the audio was glitched up from the same source. If you like glitch have a little watch of this clip:

Next up was Cabowitz and P.O.P Corp, I was a little bummed to miss the audio, but the video was superb, examples of the Corp's video work can be seen in my report of Heavy Mental 7#

Next up was Mytoken who looked as if they could be very interesting indeed. Electric guitar played with a slide, sitar, acoustic guitar and laptop audio with desktop video processing. It was good in parts but at other times it seemed a little like the kind of jamming that makes my toes curl. Aimless noodling or hot spiraling psychedelia. It was a rather hit-and-miss affair, but it got a bit more peppy when a piano player got up from th crowd and joined in. A clip can be seen here:

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