Minitek : The Magic Begins Tonight

Ready to shut down the office computer for the last time this week, the next destination is MINITEK. Join Vicki on her sail around the techno universe all the way from midtown Manhattan to Coney Island. In two words, this is going to be fucking. epic.

Here are some of the art installations that are happening, to entice those in the East Coast area to spend their last minute cash on this event. It's the first of what we all expect to be many more - a legend in the making, and a dream come true.

Festival: Minitek

Alright. This is sounding exaggerated. It's not, but goddamn, read on...

DAITO MANABE - Tokyo, JAPAN

wiimote DJ and RFID light sequencer
Redefining existing media and technologies from unique angles, Daito has been active in various fields, such as art, design, and even research and development. He produces the output of sounds, images, and light through analyzing and transforming the numerical values gained from various sensors and input devices. He will perform at the festival as an innovative musician with a Wiimote DJ performance and also as a groundbreaking RFID artist. The aisle to lead people to the hall are veiled with the lights and sounds and will look like an aurora— this is a fantastic view that technologies create. The color card placed on the table decides the color of the aisle. You can also combine more than one color card. For example, if you place a red card and a blue card on the table, the resulting color would be purple. When the cards are placed on the table the aisle color changes immediately. Also, the sounds change with the light changes. The use of RFID in the installation is groundbreaking and a sight to see. It will also illuminate the path to the night venue’s dancefloor.


OWEN WALLIS + JORDAN HOCHENBAUM - Los Angeles, US

Roots
“Roots” is an interactive and multi-touch interface, where multiple people can collaborate in making music in a dynamic & visually responsive environment. When a user presses their finger on the tables surface, a vine-like structure will branch out and generatively maneuver around the surface, actively triggering sounds and loops. Harnessing “multi-touch” technology, a single user, or multiple people can very quickly create dense and lush generatively evolving sound collages and compositions, simply by pressing their fingers anywhere on the tables surface.


DILO - Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA

Percussa Audiocubes – Live performances
Imagine beautifully designed cubes made of white plastic, with built-in full colour lighting and powerful wireless computer technology, capable of sensing your hands and cube placement and orientation. These are the Percussa AudioCubes, which let you create sound and music with your computer in hands-on and powerful ways. The cubes let you explore, discover and enjoy, without the usual complexity that comes with music technology. Through their MIDI capabilities, AudioCubes work with music software such as Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason.


SENSEable - Boston, US

City Lab (MIT)
New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?


JAMES PATTEN - New York, US

Audio Pad
Audiopad is a composition and performance instrument for electronic music, which tracks the positions of objects on a tabletop surface and converts their motion into music. One can pull sounds from a giant set of samples, juxtapose archived recordings against warm synthetic melodies, cut between drum loops to create new beats, and apply digital processing all at the same time on the same table. Audiopad not only allows for spontaneous reinterpretation of musical compositions, but also creates a visual and tactile dialogue between itself, the performer, and the audience.


MARIUS WATZ - Oslo, NORWAY

Visual processing
Marius Watz is an artist concerned with generative systems for creating visual form, still, animated or realtime. His signature is a brand of visual hedonism, marked by colourful organic shapes and a maximalist attitude. Most of his works deal with drawing machines implemented in software, live visuals for music or large-scale projections of plastic visual systems. Watz just moved from Berlin to New York. His tools of choice are Java, Processing, VVVV and Flash.


BURAK ARIKAN - Istanbul, Turkey

Visual processing
Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who is based in New York and Istanbul. At the festival, Burak will perform pieces from the Meta-Control project. It will include the new versions of existing pieces and three new softwares. Meta- Control is a collection of visual/ kinetic performative artifacts. It contains visual software pieces that are often designed to expose their own control mechanisms. Meta-Control is a project started by Burak Arikan and Ali Demirel, and first performed with Richie Hawtin’s music.


PAUL PRUDENCE - London, UK

Visual procesing
Paul is an artist and real-time visual performer working with generative/computational systems, audio responsive visual feedback and processed video. His projects « SonLattice /Talysis » is a real-time audio responsive work and is part of a larger group of works exploring software simulated video feedback .It is made using the video synthesis toolkit VVVV. In mythology the process could be identified in the form of Ouroborous, the snake who eats his own tale, a symbol of self-perpetuating loops and a symbol as ‘output as input’.


DEVAN SIMUNOVICH + NIKA OFFENBAC - New York, US

Video Installation
Devan Simunovich and Nika Offenbac founded CTRL in 2004 as a vehicle to create films, experimental multimedia projects and installations. They will present you two installations from their "Extended Room" series. ”Speak My Language” invites attendees to experience an ultrasensory environment to re-imagine how we interact with urban modes of sign communication. “Volume” is an illusionary extension of a physical architectural space.


NORMAN FAIRBANKS - Berlin, GERMANY

Tenori-on performance
Audio conceptualist Norman Fairbanks has always remained at the cutting edge of music production, so when he first heard about Tenori-on back in 2005 he felt compelled to investigate the myriad possibilities of this hybrid instrument. His audio concept “7 Days Microsleep” is deemed to be the first album solely made with a Tenori-On. Fairbanks’ 90 minutes live set at Minitek will be an eclectic sonic trip combining a Tenori-On performance with electronic sounds created by custom-made machines, including a rather unconventional black robot...


ALBERT HWANG - New York, US

wiremap
Albert Hwang will show the Wiremap, an innovative projection technique that builds a real and interactive 3d image by manipulating light from a projector. The projector throws its beam on an array of vertical wires. From the projectors single-point perspective, all the wires are evenly spaced from one another. However, due to the randomized dimension of depth, from any other perspective, the wires create a 3d map of cyberspace. The result is a floating, glowing 3D object made entirely of light. This object will move around, change in color or size ac- cording to keyboard and mouse input.