Territorial Play

Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham & Various Locations across the city
14 May
12pm – 12am
PERFORMANCES, SCREENINGS & ARTISTS TALKS

Taking a curatorial lead from the wider themes of Radiator’s Tracing Mobility programme, Trampoline will present the first in a new series of platform events, called Territorial Play. This event will launch the Tracing Mobility programme and seeks to illustrate and annotate the critical debate of the Tracing Mobility Symposia by presenting a day long event of performances, screenings, live music, pervasive & locative gaming and artistic interventions. Territorial Play will feature the work of emerging artists by submission alongside many of the international artists participating in the symposium.

I’ve been invited to do a public performance with some citizens from Cartagena interested in trying out the Constraint City jacket in January. It was an interesting experience watching other people than me wearing the corset. Around eight people (3 women among them!) wore the corset and subjectively experienced an enhanced psycho-geographic walk through emblematic signs and ancient monuments in the maritime city of Cartagena!
The walk has been recorded and each progressively attacking network has been rendered into a Constraint City map of Cartagena.

A hub of participatory projects inviting visitors to the art fair and citizens in Murcia alike to take part in real time from February 11th to 16th 2009. All other selected works are presented on the Techformance website (both in english and Castellano). Take a look and contact me if you are around Madrid. I’ll be there from 11th till 13th of February!

A chest strap (corset) with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as fetish object. The higher the wireless signal strength of close encrypted networks, the tighter the corset becomes. Closed network points improve the pleasurable play of tight lacing the performer‘s bustier. Thus, constituting the aether as a space of possible pregnancy, filled with potential access-points to the networks of communication. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a schizogeographic pain-map which is fetched from GoogleMaps servers with automated scripts. By wearing the straight-jacket, the artist not only writes, but is at once also able to read the city code.

The outcome of his walk provokes an emergence of a city-shaped body. The map keeps not only tracks of all wireless networks along the route, but also the wearer’s détournement when entering a very dense network place, a so called pleasurable pain zone. Therefore, the artist becomes the 21st century flaneur who balances along sensual perceived pain and the torture of everyday routes in a very special Arcades Game Project.

“The pain of everyday life” is a critical performance addressing public and private space and their paradigm shift in the realms of everyday constraints, therefore the relation of abstract information layers to our everyday life. Within urban systems, as we are experiencing them right now, an invisible architecture is perceived and superimposed which constantly re-assembles a resonant landscape, consisting of electromagnetic waves. It bypasses human, buildings as well as vehicles through the streets of a so called Maxwell City. The restriction as such and its augmented invisibility are the source material for Gordan Savicic.

A chest strap with high torque servo motors (muy fuerte mi amigo!) and a wifi-enabled gaming console (Nintendo DS lite) are worn as fetish object. Thus, when approaching an enclosed encrypted wireless network, the strap reacts immediately. The higher the wireless signal strength, the tighter the jacket becomes. This technique, also called Inverse War-Driving, challenges the much overhyped discourse about locative and wearable media. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a schizogeographic* pain-map. The 21st century flaneur balances along sensual perceived pain and the torture of contemporary Arcades sans fil.

Michel de Certaeu stated about citizens and their everyday movements:

They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers “Wandersmaenner”, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen.(2)

By wearing the straightjacket, the Wandersmann not only writes, but is at once able to read the city code. Electromagnetic waves are forming the chest strap, thus shaping the invisible architecture directly onto the human body. As another countermove the mapping procedure is recorded on a GIS-layered map which keeps track of ordinary everyday walks and its chosen alternative routes. By displaying the playful approach of the wearer, it reveals not solely a psychogeographic pain-map, but as a result also the wearer’s admiration for gentle tortures as well as the alteration of everyday routines in RealPlay.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure. (Marquis de Sade)

The friendly and very supportive people from RIXC invited me to this year’s festival Spektropija in Riga/Latvia with the focus of artistic explorations within the invisible electromagnetic field surrounding us.

I performed a Constraint City walk yesterday and vola, here’s the KML file of my subjectively Riga Pain Derive (see below the map of Riga).

Apart from the exhibition which takes place in Riga’s Maklas Telpa, there’s a 2day conference announced from 17th October, performances and a workshop with the the title TEMPEST, the latter organized by no other than Martin Howse. Take a look on RIXC’s website for the full schedule.

Furthermore, this weekend laboral will host a symposium exploring games as a critical element in our daily lives.

Walk along the Constraint Route by downloading this kml file

Read Story and Concept here

PLAY AS A FORM OF SOCIAL INTERACTION HAS A RICH TRADITION IN VARIOUS BRANCHES OF THE ARTS. BUT IT WAS ONLY RECENTLY THAT HUMAN-CENTERED-TECHNOLOGY DESIGNERS REALIZED PLAY OFFERED INTERESTING NEW APPROACHES AND TECHNIQUES FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR FIELD. THIS BRINGS THEM TOGETHER WITH CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS WHO EXPLORE PLAY BY EXPERIMENTING WITH A WIDE RANGE OF (OFTEN WEARABLE) HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACING TECHNOLOGIES. SUCH EXPERIMENTS OFTEN COMBINE A STRONG DIY ATTITUDE TOWARD TECHNOLOGY DESIGN WITH A DESIRE TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF PEOPLE’S NAIVE OR INTUITIVE UNDERSTANDING OF TECHNOLOGY THROUGH PLAY.