PIXELACHE 2005 FESTIVAL REPORT

Pointless Creations were invited to perform at the Pixelache 2005 festival (Helsinki) which took place on 14th-17th April.
The travelling group from Glasgow included David Bernard, Will Adams, Geraldine Greene, FiST, Jay-Go Bloom and Dan Norton as well as Karen, Jam, Bebi and Sarah.

Pixelache is a festival of electronic Art and subcultures. Now in its 4th year, the event has grown to become on of the biggest media art festival of the Nordic region.
The main theme for PixelACHE 2005 is Dot Org Boom. Dot Org Boom is the non-profit version of the Dot Com Boom (RIP). The essential ingredients of this rapidly growing phenomenon are open source community, open content initiatives, media activist networks and myriads of NGOs around the world.

PixelACHE Festival brings together a diverse group of artists, engineers, activists, architects and designers to discuss and develop the future of Dot Org Boom.

PixelACHE 2005 also features the following program sections:
-VJ Culture and Audiovisual Performances
-Experimental Interaction and Electronics
-Interactive & Participatory Cinema
-particle/wave hybrid radio workshop

Pixelache’s events took place At Kiasma’s museum of contemporary art and other venues around Helsinki (Clubs, music academy, streets..) as well as on Suomenlinna island where many of the visiting artists were staying. Suomenlinna is a recently decommissioned 18th century Gibraltar like sea fortress standing a mile south of Helsinki harbour.
The festival offered an exciting program of performances, installations, conferences and workshops. All of them were well attended and serious networking amongst the festival contributors was high on the priority list on such occasion as the dinner-performance-disco around the Ophones (networked amplified telephone handsets) on the Island’s hostel.

Some of our other favourites interventions (there was over 50 presentations and we didn’t see them all !) included:
-Studio Frank +Lisa’s VJ-DJ performance with live ink mixing and typography
-“A day on earth”: a musical cinematic narrative on 2 screens, performed by 2 video artists and 2 musicians from Montreal.
-Memnon’s Kantele (traditional Finnish harp) / audio processing duet featuring pixelache’s stage manager Ville Hyvonen.
-We also spent a very active morning trying out “kick-ass kung-fu” an interactive game-installation.

As part of the festival programme, we presented and screened the Machinista DVD and discussed its curatorial direction with regard to the unmediated call for entry and its free distribution using Creative Commons licences and Bittorrent Peer-to-peer network.
The Pointless Creations collective audiovisual performance took place in the Kiasma theatre on the Saturday evening. Geraldine's stage installation used multiple rotating cube screens and smoke to display video and slide projections. We invited the audience to view the show from various positions around the performers to break the directional (stage/ seated audience) layout of the theatre and instigate playful interaction between the viewers and the imagery.

Our set lasted 1 hour and included the following short audiovisual performances :
-PERM 36: Video Switchboard live audiovisual set (visuals by Will/ Dav, audio remix from tracks by Mr electron (Glasgow) and Spoonbender (Newcastle). Perm 36 is the Gulag museum near the location of the Machinista 2003 festival. The architecture of the prison camp was transformed into a series of visual loops as a playground for the Machinista robot.
-DOUBLE NEEDLE set by FiST (turntable manipulations) and Will (Video Switchboard).
-S1D V1C1ØU5: live av set by Dav. Frantic Video Switchboard triggered micromusic/ punk bootlegs.
-ABLAB set by Dan Norton. Audiovisual labyrinth. Glitch videoscape.
-GABBA.TV by Jay-Go Bloom (short video screenings).

The show got an enthusiastic response from a full capacity theatre (300+) despite the crazy static electricity shocks we kept getting every time we touched metallic parts of our equipment. We were told it was entertaining to watch us as we jumped in reaction to the sparks flying from our fingers.
We rounded up the weekend by a visual set in the MBAR and our very own dance competition.

Thanks to the British Council and the Scottish Arts Council for funding our travel costs.
Many thanks to the organisers (particularly Juha and Ville) for all their hard work, it was great to meet so many interesting artists in such a brilliant environment.

Links:
Pixelache website
More performances photographs
Perm 36 performance description
Machinista DVD description
Download the .pdf of the festival brochure (3Mb)