DorkbotBRU#13

Wednesday, 30 March 2016 | 18:00 - 20:30

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People doing strange things with electricity

For this 13th edition of the DorkbotBRU, we’ve invited Lionel Maes, Romain Marula + Ivan Murit and François Zajéga to share with us their ongoing projects and/or experiments.

Lionel Maes will present his project Homeopape, an installation that reacts to the newsfeed of the Belga news agency. He will talk about the creation context and the constitutive elements of this recent work and other researches related to Internet newsfeeds. This presentation will conclude his one-month residence at iMAL, during which he will be working on a new version of the installation. The first version was presented during Nuit Blanche Brussels in October 2015.

Romain Marula and Ivan Murit will talk about Autopost, an interactive installation that starts out from the social network accounts of a single user, both on Twitter and Facebook. The viewer is invited to write a message on one of these accounts. The message is automatically "retweeted" or "reposted" to the other account. Nowadays, automatic diffusion is an increasing practice in online social exchanges. But this project takes things a step further, by creating a ping pong between the two networks. The message will be forwarded indefinitely but is slightly modificated at each occasion. Its metadata will increase, by using signs like # and @ and words will transform, once a new recipient or hashtag (acting as contextual key-words) is added.

François Zajéga will present Tanukis, a project inspired by the tanuki, a Japanese mythological figure that has the ability to change shape. After a first performance version, he is now developing an installation, in which an impersonal avatar is presented to the spectator. The form of the tanuki is slowly evolving and individualising: this is not just a copy of the real person, but an hybridisation of the original. By mixing the original with algorithmic processes, a unique identity is created that characterises form, texture, movement and relationship with the environment and the music. François was in residency in iMAL in January, where he experiemented with realtime motion capture in a multi-kinects setup.

About the speakers

Lionel Maes is an artist, graphic designer and software developper. He is the cofounder of the graphic design studio La Villa Hermosa. The subject of Internet newsfeeds is recurrent in his work, both personnal and with La Villa Hermosa. He teaches in the "code writing" and "digital images" classes at the Brussels art schools ERG (École de Recherche Graphique, Brussels) and Le 75 (École Supérieure des Arts de l'Image le 75).

Romain Marula and Ivan Murit both graduated from the Art and Design School in Valence (FR), where they first started working together. They develop their artistic research in this complicity. Roman is interested primarily in digital social interaction and Ivan in the impact of algorithms. They both participated to digital art festivals like Désert Numérique (St Nazaire), électroni [k] (Rennes) or Global Proxy at the NEMO Biennale (Paris) and also works as independent graphic designers.

François Zajéga is a digital artist, working and living in Belgium. He works as a researcher at the insitute for new media technologies Numédiart, in the field of computer vision. He's teaching at l'École supérieure des Arts "Arts au Carré" and he is involved in several artistic projects supported by the Commission des Arts Numériques de la Communauté française. He's also organising a monthly workshop about the blender's python API at Constant VZW.