+ View Printed Program - Austin Museum of Digital Art

digital showcase
Mohawk Lounge, March 13, 2009
Laptop battle
For the 4th year in a row, AMODA presents a Laptop Battle as part of its March Digital
Showcase. This event features sixteen of Texas’ most skilled electronic musicians competing for the
title of champion.
The battle revolves around contestants using their laptops to musically outperform one another
in a series of elimination rounds. Each performance must be 3 minutes or less and the only
equipment permitted is a laptop and one external controller. Judged by a panel of music and art
experts, the outcome of each match is decided based on a combination of emotional impact,
originality, stage performance, live manipulation, and crowd response.
The Laptop Battle concept originated in Seattle several years ago (from Fourthcity Records), and
has since been held in cities all over the world. The winner of this battle will receive a free trip to
compete in the National Laptop Battle Championships in Seattle later this year.
Contestants:
Kidko (Austin)
DXM (Austin)
Majora (Austin)
Caglioso (Austin)
Blixaboy (Dallas)
Cygnus (Dallas)
Bangalore (Austin)
Sudrok Inalak (Austin)
Traducer (Austin)
Dubbel Dutch (Austin
The Mysterious H (Austin)
Grassnose (Austin)
QuantumEyes Ent. (Austin)
Deejay Yayyay (Austin)
Disco Hospital (Austin)
Skinnebrew the Destroyer
(Austin)
Judges:
Emcees:
Dave Gonzalez (DJ Starsign)
Zeale (Austin)
John Gomi (G on 5 / The Fifth Gallery)
Phranchyze (Austin)
Craig Negoescu (Naka Media / OpenLabs)
Amanda Butterfield (YellowTape)
Jennifer Wijangco (strataTX)
2
schedule
9:0010:15
outside
stage
SCREEN
BEHIND
OUTSIDE
STAGE
SCREEN
NEXT TO
OUTSIDE
STAGE
INSIDE
STAGE
SCREEN
BEHIND
INSIDE
STAGE
SCREEN
NEXT TO
INSIDE
STAGE
SCREEN
UPSTAIRS
(with sound)
Acid Abe
Boling/
Morales
Zeitguised
Learning
Secrets
Daniel
Swan
Mac &
Cheez
Catherine
Ross,
Guthrie
Lonergan,
10:1511:00
11:0011:45
Laptop
Battle
Laptop
Battle
Dan
Winckler
Laptop
Battle
scoreboard
James
Johnson
Dan
Winckler
Controlled
Laptop
Battle
scoreboard
Zeitguised
Melanie
Patiram
James
Johnson,
Boling/
Morales,
Daniel
Swan
Melanie
Patiram,
Daniel
Swan,
11:4512:15
Acid Abe
Video Jams
2013
Mac &
Cheez
Melanie
Patiram
James
Johnson,
12:151:15
Laptop
Battle
Video Jams
2013
Laptop
Battle
scoreboard
Boling/
Morales
Zeitguised
1:152:00
Acid Abe
Melanie
Patiram
Daniel
Swan
Mac &
Cheez
Boling/
Morales
Zeitguised
2
Musicians
Learning secrets ( Austin, TX)
Learning Secrets is Austin’s premier boutique PR/ Event Planning / Graphic Design /DJ Duo. Know
in Austin for curating highly-attended events with artists such as Hercules & Love Affair, Moby,
Tim Sweeney, JD Twitch from OPTIMO, Greco Roman Soundsystem/Hot Chip, Juan Maclean, Riton,
Peaches, etc to handling publicity for the Grammy nominated Grupo Fantasma, Brownout!, Ocote
Soul Sounds, Ume and The Antlers ( among others), the 5 year old firm has managed to create their
own environment in Austin by staying true to their number one desire of exposing people to the
music and lifestyles they are passionate about.
http://www.myspace.com/learningsecrets
acid abe ( Austin, TX)
Acid Abe is the DJ alias for Abraham Freeman, an avid record collector and visual artist. He
frequently DJ’s around Austin at art galleries, house parties, and other events. Based on his
many years behind the turntables, Abe is influenced by a wide range of musical styles and
movements. He strongly believes that DJing is one of the few disciplines where we can explore
and experiment with a constantly revisionist view of how the past and the present connect.
http://www.myspace.com/certus
visual ARTISTS
dan winckler (New York, NY)
Live Video Performance
Dan Winckler is a visual designer, performing artist, programmer and educator in the fields of
new media interaction and performance, improvisational theater, and networked collaboration.
As a visualist and projection designer, he has performed at New York venues such as Eyebeam,
SubTonic, {R}ake, EyeWash, and the Tank, and elsewhere, including the Austin Museum of Digital
Art (at South by Southwest 2008), the MenschMeerMedien Festival 2007 in Bremen, Germany,
and the International Symposium of Electronic Art in 2006. He has collaborated with a wide range
of artists including Benton-C Bainbridge, Bill Etra, Nullsleep, Buck Howdy, Glomag, Ralph’s World,
Bit Shifter, David Sugar, Lance Blisters, Koosil-ja, and Grisha Coleman. His latest software project
is Open Emu, a set of tools for “virtual console bending”, i.e., live manipulation and deconstruction of old school game
consoles including the NES, Sega Genesis, and Game Boy Advance.
http://danwinckler.com
3
4Video jams 2013 (Austin, TX)
Live Video Performance
Video Jams 2013 is born from the collaboration of Video Jamz 2012 with Denton DIY electronics
brain, Lars Larsen (Undoing of David Wright). Tom Blackburn (Transexformers Crew) and Chad
Allen (Low Red Center, Everything In Heaven is TV) squish analog video abstractions and
processed clips into a prismatic pixel paste, projected to perfection. Chad’s hacked, looped,
and bent video hardware chews and regurgitates every carefully mutated clip fed to it by Tom’s
supercomputer. Lars Larsen will be on board to debut his analog modular video synthesizer,
which will be injected into the eyeball stew. Lars’s video synth is the first of its kind to emerge
during the 21st century.
Video Jamz 2012 have performed at the Dallas Musem Of Art and Maker Faire 2008, in addition to many smaller venues,
in support of the DIY techno romp of Operation Playmate.
http://www.myspace.com/zonkout
catherine ross (New York, NY)
Appropriated, Edited Video
Catherine Ross works in video and photography, framing instances that often go unnoticed in
their original context. Isolating the movements of humans and/or objects, her videos create new
sequences that reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. Here she finds that
movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humor that echoes our own vulnerabilities. Her
work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including venues in Brazil,
Finland, France, Ireland, England, Canada and the United States. Ross attended the Skowhegan
School of Painting & Sculpture in 2002, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2003 and received a
2005-06 residency from The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. Ross was recently awarded
“Best International Short Award” at the 2006 Darklight Festival (Dublin, IRELAND). She received her BA in studio art from
Dartmouth College in 1994. Catherine Ross lives and works in
Brooklyn, New York.
http://www.catherineross.net/
mac&cheese + Mistah le (Austin, TX)
Motion Graphics Design
Stephen Hal Fishman, aka Mac&Cheez, is a filmmaker and animator based in Austin, TX. Known
primarily for his commercial work, his narrative and experimental films have been shown in film
festivals around the country.
4
MistahLe is a graphic designer specializing in motion graphics, based in Houston, TX.
http://www.macandcheez.com/
4
Gutherie Lonergan (Los Angeles, CA)
Digital Video
Guthrie Lonergan is an artist/Internet surfer based in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at
the New Museum and Artists Space in New York and the Sundance Film Festival, and written about
in The Wall Street Journal and Rhizome.org. He is also a co-founder of the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing
Club (nastynets.com).
Guthrie Lonergan’s work confronts the new kind of home-made popular culture emerging on
the Internet -- finding something simultaneously life-affirming and disturbing about this infinite
collection of the most mundane moments in peoples’ lives. His work focuses on the defaults of
consumer-level technology, and how these establish a foundation of banality for homemade content. Using these presets
in iPhoto slideshows or YouTube videos, Lonergan approaches the Internet from the most basic user’s perspective. All of his
work can be seen on his website, TheAgeOfMammals.com.
http://www.theageofmammals.com/
James Johnson-Perkins (Newcastle, UK)
Vector Animation
James Johnson-Perkins is an international artist who has exhibited in major art spaces in the
USA, Russia, Japan, Germany, Spain, Romania, Lithuania and the UK. Including the The IMAC
Theatre, New York, Moscow Centre for Contemporary Arts, Russia, Toyota Museum of Modern
Art, Toyota, Japan and Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow. He has recently had solo
shows at Nospace Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand, The King’s Lynn Art Centre, UK, Red Gallery, Hull,
UK, Art Gene, Barrow-in-furnace, UK and Exhibit Gallery, London, UK.
Current artworks include: a giant army of totemic Lego men, which he calls ‘robots’, scrolling
message boards, Lego plaques with retro statements and a dazzling array of animations using 8 bit computer graphics
and modernist geometric shapes.
He has exhibited works alongside critically acclaimed artists including: James Hugonin, Sean Scully, Ross Sinclair, Andre
Stitt, Michael Nyman, Graham Dolphin, Bill Drummond, Mat Stokes, Gustav Metzger, Robin Klassnik, Bob and Roberta
Smith and Alison Knowles.
http://www.johnson-perkins.co.uk/
daniel swan (London, UK)
Video Collage / Animation
Daniel Swan is a 21 year old graphic design student currently living in Brixton, South London. He
spends most of his time drawing, making videos for people, drumming and making zines. His video
work is influenced by a lot of visionary architecture, early video synthesizer experiments and old scifi films, and frequently collages together computer animation with appropriated pictures and videos
found on the internet.
http://danielswan.co.uk/
5
melanie patiram (Schematic, Miami, FL)
Abstract Digital Animation
Melanie Patiram has been working in the realm of digital media for 5 years. She did most of her
abstract video pieces for the Schematic Music Company, an experimental music/art label in Miami,
Florida. She has directed videos for Otto Von Shirach and Phoenecia, the proprietors of the label.
Melanie has performed alongside Phoenecia as a visual accompanist and improviser for many live
performances around the world and produced the visual material for their last three tours. Her last
video pieces were created by taking the audio feed and and syncing the visuals in realtime, using
MaxMSP/Jitter. Melanie is currently working on her thesis project for her masters degree in Film and
Visual Effects from the Academy of Art University of San Francisco. Besides working on experimental
abstract video pieces, Melanie really enjoys shooting. She has shot a documentary for Sony’s Electronic Music Manuscript,
which deals with how sound designers work. It features Richard Devine and Josh Kay. She hopes to direct a short film of her
own soon.
4
http://www.schematic.net/
JOhn Michael boling & Javier Morales (New York, NY)
Appropriated, Edited Video
John Michael Boling and Javier Morales draw their inspiration from found digital material. They
appropriate, remix, and re-edit old videos, images, and sounds found mostly online. The result is
work that incorporates elements of Pop art, conceptual art, music videos, and satirical nostalgia.
Some of Boling and Morales pieces simply involve juxtaposing multiple YouTube videos on the
same page (simultaneously), in order to highlight their absurdity. Other pieces feature heavy
editing of the source material, along with original music composed by Boling and Morales. Still
other pieces may simply feature an animated GIF with some absurdist touch as the part of the
image that is animating.
All of this work is posted on Boling and Morales’ website called 53 o’s. The address of the site is http://www.
gooooooooogle.com, but with 53 o’s instead of the usual 2. Even the name and address of this site helps to illustrate the
clever and playful approach that these artists bring to digital art.
http://www.goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...
6
zeitguised (London, UK)
3d Computer Graphics
Founded in 2001 in Germany and now based in London, Zeitguised is the brainchild of
American sculpture and fashion grad Jamie Raap and German architectural engineer Henrik
Mauler. Zeitguised’s high gloss art school 3D punk blends complex geometries, surreal
composite objects, artificial behaviors and the recycling of digital readymades into their distinct
hallucinatory narrations.
Unspoiled by formal computer graphics training, Zeitguised have been pushing their own
rules onto computer aided art, by creating a dense universe parallel to fashion, art, design and
architecture. In their world, surface phenomena are the content, and unstable structures of color, shape and spatial
motion form a dualism of being the narrative and the protagonists at the same time. In recent years, their motions tend
to originate from generative and scripted dynamic systems without converging to the default minimalist and abstract
aesthetics attached to this field of CG art.
Despite their outlandish apporach, corporations such as Mercedes Benz, Toyota, Verizon and Vodafone are embellishing
their brands with commercials directed and produced by Zeitguised. Zeitguised has been presented in numerous
international festivals and shows like onedotzero, dotmov, nemo and resfest, as well as in galleries like CCRoom Berlin,
Fluctuating Images Stuttgart, Zirkel Gallery. They were nominated for two Media Art Awards at the ZKM in 2001 and
2002. In 2005 they received the award for Best Music Video at the International Film Festival Oberhausen, and later that
year the Best Design Award at Resfest.
http://zeitguised.wordpress.com/
flyer artist
SHINGO SHIMIZU (Toronto, Canada)
Shingo Shimizu is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design’s Communication and Design
program. The Montreal-born, Toronto-bred designer was exposed to drawing at an early age through
his father’s graphic design work. After many successful years working as a full-time designer, Shimizu
pursued to work independently, to follow his passion, Illustration. His vector-based style echoes visual
cues derived from pop art to Manga to his latest obsessions. Music is another driving force in his visual
language, as he DJs nights in local bars and clubs.
Shimizu had produced visual creatives for numerous clients including Coca-Cola, Virgin Mobile and
Toyota. His work has also been featured in Mixmag, Business 2.0 and Popular Mechanics. Shimizu’s
has been recognized by The Advertising and Design Club of Canada and American Illustration and also been profiled
in Vektorika’s ‘Greatest Hits’ issue. Currently, Shimizu works out of his Toronto studio where he takes on various projects
including Illustration, Graphic and Character Design.
http://www.shingo.ca/
thank you
Presented in partnership
with www.laptopbattle.com
This project is funded and supported in part by the
City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and
by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts and
an award from the National Endowment for the Arts,
which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
members
Patron
Samuel Trim
Jeff McIlwain
Jared Tarbell
Full
Claudia Chittim
Greg Headley
Margaret Winkler
Donor
Nick Masiewicki
Kelly Shultz
Basic
Mike Bartnett
Mitchell Dunaway
Student
Brandon Keresztury
Ashley Allen
Vita Haake
Adam De Witt
John Trull
Fishgold Lewis
The Austin Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to engage the public and artists in the creation,
understanding, and appreciation of digital art. The Digital Showcase is an event featuring live electronic music and visual art, ranging
from abstract to accessible, presented in a social setting.
www.amoda.org