ISEA2004 14 - 22 August 2004 http://www.isea2004.net DON'T MISS THE EARLY BIRD CAMPAIGN! -SAVE 30% ON TICKETS AND BOOK BEFORE 23 APRIL. Secure your access to the ISEA2004 symposium, including the all-inclusive ferry cruise (meals, travel, programme all in one), and register for the event at http://www.isea2004.net/tickets. By doing this by April 23 you will get tickets for the reduced price. CLUBBING AND NETWORKING BY THE POOL: THE FERRY PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS We are delighted to announce some highlights from the ISEA2004 cruise programme that interface live music, performances, funky club acts by the most prominent members of contemporary dj and vj culture, sound installations in unexpected places from lifts to swimming pools, interactive mobile games, networking sessions and panels. The entire ferry is turned into a multi-venue experience on the Main Stage at the Metropolitan Club, the Karaoke and Disco Lounge, the Sonic Pool, the Chill out deck as well as multiple workshop and network meeting modules. Even the Silja Opera ferry itself becomes source material for several projects. American artists Steve Bradley and Tim Nohe for example electrify the elevators with "ferrite" sounds. Each stage offers 24 hours of electronic music and live events spread out over the two cruises. The Interfacing Sound Cruise has a stronger focus on dance music while the Networked Experience cruise explores more experimental edges of electronic music. Participants can also navigate between live performances and interventions by ŒOpen source sailors¹ and various project presentations. Indeed, it is difficult to escape from interesting content on the ferry. When you take a swim in the pool, an underwater sound by Tuomas Toivonen will take you over - or rather in this case, under. The food menu on the ship is "co-curated" by Silja Opera main chef and the gastronomic ISEA2004 production team. It will be tough for the shy ones, as the ship is a true social mixer. However, in the quiet of the cabins TV-channels are programmed with special ISEA2004 screenings. *Interfacing Sound Cruise (Helsinki-Stockholm), August 15, 2004* The cruise kicks off in Helsinki, Finland, on August 15 with some 1400 participants boarding a cruiser ferry, the luxurious Silja Opera. This newest member of the Silja fleet is often described as a floating tropical island with pools, palms, jacuzzi and retractable glass roof. The first part of the trip, the Interfacing Sound Cruise from Helsinki to Stockholm, is organised in collaboration with Koneisto, the largest festival of electronic music in Nordic countries. The Interfacing Sound Cruise creates an electrified environment by mixing clubbing with video and sound art, cruising with installations, actions and sonic experiments. VIDEO NASTY EXPERIENCE Musician and British DJ FreQ Nasty (Darin Mcfadyen) is known for nasty breaks and classic releases, the latest of which ŒBring Me the Head of FreQ Nasty¹ on Skint records. FreQ Nasty has collaborated with a range of digital media artists and image makers to create The Video Nasty Experience, a project extending the club environment by merging sound and vision in an integrated, filmic style. The Video Nasty Experience uses custom-designed graphics, text and seamlessly montaged 2D and 3D animated characters. Currently FreQ Nasty is collaborating with Weta Digital (New Zealand), known for the legendary Gollum character in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Further video material is projected onto smaller screens by FreQ Nasty and VJ Cindy Lee, who have joined forces to create a visual representation and extension to the music as an invitation to an audiovisual experience to watch, participate in and dance to at the ferry¹s groovy Metropolitan Night Club. SANKARI Petri Kola and Minna Nurminen are the artists behind the Sankari Show (Œsankari¹ means hero in Finnish), a live participatory impro show combining stand-up comedy, drama and game. Sankari experiments with bringing aspects of human relations to a game. For this purpose, travellers participate in an interactive cinema-karaoke. In 2003, Sankari won the MindTrek competition for acclaimed emerging Finnish multimedia talent. The session at the ferry¹s multi-screen Stardust disco is hosted by Finnish musician Zarkus Poussa. FLOAT Media artists Tamas Szakal (Hungary) and Tuomo Tammenpää (Finland) are the creators of the locative sound installation Float. In Float, the ship turns into a play-head and the route into a track. The surrounding islands build the score of the sound installation, the ship playing the track as it moves from one city to another. This unique experiment using various streams of data (GPS coordinates, depth, direction, speed etc.) results in a slowly developing soundscape that invites the travellers to take a dose of the moment, to listen. *Networked Experience (Stockholm-Mariehamn-Tallinn), August 16, 2004* After the Interfacing Sound Cruise, the journey continues the next day from Stockholm to Åland Islands and on to Tallinn under the file name Networked Experience. ICOLS STRATEGY DEFENSE AND ARMS FAIR Icols (International Corporation of Lost Structures), a collaboration of artists from across the globe, have designed Œarms fair¹ to act as a catalyst and provocation to covertly animate narratives and histories, such as Leonardo Da Vinci¹s work as a designer of weapons, submarines, tanks, flying machines, military complexes and bridges for the Duke of Milan and Cesare Borgia. Complex shifts have occurred in the relationships between the artist and the idea of warfare during different expressions of modernism. Contemporary new media technology that artists use is often connected with modern warfare, such as GPS, augmented reality systems and VR-technologies. Icols presents a modified Œarms fair¹ in Mariehamn, capital of the demilitarized zone of Åland, to explore these relations. MONOTON Musician, hypermedia developer and content designer Konrad Becker created Monoton, the crucial Austrian electronic music act providing distinguished soundscapes. The Wire magazine (#175) singled out Monoton¹s record Monotonprodukt07 among the 100 most important and ignored - records of the 20th century. Konrad Becker will trigger the ferry audiences with minimalist rigour in a live-gig at the Metropolitan Night Club. (For the Interfacing Sound Cruise Becker will perform Super Mario and other Golden Classics, featuring a medley of 25 years of electronic music and noise with a reference to console 8bit gamesongs and a new flavour of garage.) LIFEBOAT Lifeboat is a project dealing with concepts of sustainability, survival and notions of biological, cultural and ideological re-generation, and its obverse, the degradation of life and all its manifestations. The project is contained within a lifeboat brought onto the Silja Opera ferry especially for this project. The lifeboat has become home to a Biotechnology lab producing tissue culture. Behind the project are the Symbiotica members Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Guy Ben-Ary and Nigel Helyer. Art and science collaborations are a larger theme within the ISEA2004 programme. Lifeboat will be part of a collaboration with Heureka, the Finnish Science Centre as the artists will be doing preparatory works in the centre¹s Open Lab. SYREN Syren is a shipboard version of augmented audio reality developed by the New South Wales University, Australia. This system is developed for a new sea faring experience by artist Nigel Helyer to operate a sonic cartography in and around each of the ports that the ISEA2004 ferry visits with some additional points en-route. Syren is designed to operate with an array of surround sound speakers on one of the ferry¹s outdoor decks. Geo-spatial information will be automatically accessed as the ship navigates the electronic charts associated with each of the ports of call via a high-resolution GPS system coupled to a digital compass. This positional information will in turn be used to render a surround-sound (3D) sound-scape corresponding to proximate physical features. NETWORKING SESSIONS The Networked Experience cruise will also include meetings, panels and roundtable lunches for regional networks of new media practitioners from Africa and Asia; discussion groups from MIT press; a panel on international listserv culture with representatives of a range of new media culture lists that emerged and flourished through the 90s examining strategies in networking and list management to encourage productive online communication spaces and industry specific meetings. After the groundbreaking cruise, ISEA2004 continues in Tallinn and Helsinki. Themes in Tallinn comprise Wearable Experience, Geopolitics of Media and Critical Interdisciplines: research, science, art and collaboration. ISEA2004 culminates in Helsinki with conferences, exhibitions, performances and works in city spaces exploring the themes Wireless Experience, Histories of the New, Critical Interaction Design and Open Source and Software as Culture. DON¹T MISS THE EARLY BIRD! RESERVE YOUR TICKETS ON-LINE HERE: http://www.isea2004.net/tickets Welcome aboard! ISEA2004 crew + terveiset ja hyvää viikonloppua! Mika. Mika Minetti marketing and communications manager, ISEA2004 [log in to unmask] +358 40 719 2280 -- Amanda McDonald Crowley executive producer, ISEA2004 http://www.isea2004.net mobile: +358 (0)440 344 441 [log in to unmask]