Uhh. Don‘t believe the Internet!

I was clever enough to bring my own AirPort Base Station to READ_ME and to hook it up to one of the network ports on stage allowing me to liveblog from row four.

Sitting in the audience blogging about what is going on I was suddenly surprised to hear my name being announced although I was expecting to be the last speaker. What happened? Well, the organizers changed the order of the speakers and of course this change was reflected in the printed program that was given out to everybody.

But it wasn‘t changed in the online version which I was reading because I refuse diving into dead trees when I have Internet. Social glitches in a modern world.

Frankie the Robot

Slub seems to be strange word. I can‘t find any convincing translation to german in my favorite translation machine. Seems to be one of these untranslatable slang words.

However, Slub is Alex McLean and Adrian Ward that produce sequencer software for the Mac and Unix. Quite cool realtime manipulation of loops and tracks. One of these tools that look too complicated when you encounter them but might transform itself in a powerful tool once in a hand of somebody who knows what he is doing. Their music is pretty gabba-rish, loud and fast. Machinery. You can feel it. Perfectly matched by synchronized ASCII art.

Tony Scott is a programmer and developed the hobby of collecting glitches. His web site describes this as „GLITCH ART. The aesthetics of digital corruption“. But Tony insists he is „a programmer by trade“ and not an artist.

Glitches are to be seen in the context of The Aesthetics of Failure.

Very interesting talk, very nicely presented. He shows some pictures of various types of glitches including background noise, lightning and distorted TV signals but focusing mainly on screen shots of software and hardware crashes, RAM maps and other interesting stuff.

He explains: „a glitch is any outcome, generated by a complicated process but which is deterministic“. So the computer, being complicated but deterministic, is the ideal birthplace for glitches.

Dubbed „Low Tech Music For High Tech People“ the micromusic project uses flash to set up an interface for collaborative music making. it is a pretty noisy site but that is part of the concept. People contribute jingles and customize the site that includes a communication tool („microtalk“).

Carl Wanga – who is doing the presentation – says „it is all about reduction“ and it shows. All the music reminds me of the good old times of C64 and Atari Games as does the overall design of the site.

Finnish is a tough language. It is part of the Mystic Three (the other two being Hungarian and Bask). But I was pointed to a funny tutorial containing the most important stuff: Speak Finnish like a restless native!.

Käyhän että tuon kannettavani saunaan?

Alessandro Ludovico is talking about Neural.it, an italian hacker magazine. Behind neural, there is a group of italian hackers that are also organizing Hackmeeting, the annual italian hacker meeting. They are also regular guest of the Chaos Communication Congress and – hopefully – the Chaos Communcation Camp this year.

Neural.it covers lots of topics on hacktivism, e-music, new media art and other cultural activities. It attacts aroung 1400 viewers per day. Neural.it was one of the magazines reporting on Blinkenlights.

The talk is also mostly read from paper with accompanying web pages on the beamer. Makes difficult to follow but he is speaking quite clear and in good english.

I asked him about Hacktivism in general and what he thinks about his view on this. He explains that his view of hacktivism is more the virtual fight and not the actual active technological approach as done by the Electronic Disturbance Theatre for instance.

He is also elaborating a bit about Hackmeeting and stresses that these meetings are completely self-organized and never have an official sponsor. This is very similar to the CCC events while we have a bit more open approach (which is to be expected as our situation in Germany is not as problematic as in other countries) as long as we don‘t feel „incorporated“ by anyone. This is important for hacker meetings but makes them difficult to organize.

First talk is by Amy Alexander. She demonstrates the Discordia Weblog system. The insists the domain discordia.us should be pronounced „Discordia‘R‘Us“. That‘s fine with me.

Amy speaks very fast and very american. Difficult to follow when you are not too much into this style. But explains the „new approach“ of Discordia, which is more an experiment. I don‘t really get the „new“ thing here but doing experiments in blogging and trying to combine various technology to research new communication is certainly a good thing.

So here I am. Sitting in row four of the audience of the READ_ME Software Art Festival and they just started the keynote. I am supposed to give a talk on Blinkenlights later and have just finished setting up my stuff.

My computer is bogging me with failure and incapabilities. I can‘t use DVD playback in dual monitor mode and the program is either too simple or too complicated depending on how you see it.

The Keynote is read from paper. Not very intriguing. But the festival‘s organizers Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin are very nice and highly motivated.

This is really the week of new tools for me. Just threw out 10 Euros to buy the it-is-so-super-cool tool Salling Clicker.

What it does? It binds your Sony-Ericsson phone to your Mac in a very cool way. Small scripts (actually AppleScripts) get activated on the press of a button on your phone controlling basically everything: your presentation software, your music player, you name it.

But that‘s not all: it also loads new menus into the phone making this a very interactive experience. The phone can request the currently playing track, control the volume with the slider button and and and. It is endless. I agree with many others that this is really a killer application. And it is great fun. Can‘t wait to do my next presentation using this new and super cheap tool. Congratulations! This is how Macintosh software should have all along.