A10LAB & SCIE PROTOCOL are invited to the MobilFest III – Conference on Cyborgorganism – Open Cities – Electromagnetic Spectrum Research performance by THE NOISER :: November 14-17, 2008 :: Sao Paulo, Brazil.

“The Farther we emerge from the inner city, the more political the atmosphere becomes. We reach the docks, the inland harbors, the warehouses, the poor neighborhoods, the scattered refuges of wretchedness: the outskirts. Outskirts are the state of emergency of a city, the terrain on which incessantly rages the great decisive battle between town and country. It is nowhere more bitter between Marseilles and the provençal landscape. It is the hand-to-hand fight telegraph poles against agaves, barbed wire against thorny palms, the miasmas of stinking corridors against the damp gloom under the plane trees in brooding squares, short-winded outside staircases against the mighty hills. The long rue de Lyon is the powder conduit which Marseilles has dug in the landscape so that in Saint-Lazare, Saint-Antoine, Arenc, Septèmes it can blow up this terrain, burying it in the shrapnel of every national and commercial language. Alimentation, Moderne, rue de Jamaïque, Comptoir de la Limite, Savon Abat-Jour, Minoterie de la campagne, Bar du Gaz, Bar Falcutatif – and over all this lies the dust that here conglomerates out of sea salt, chalk, and mica, and whose bitterness persists longer in the mouths of those who have pitted themselves against the city than the splendor of sun and sea in the eyes of its admirers.” Walter Benjamin “Marseilles – The Return of the Flâneur, 1929”

Using “The City”, as a cyborg organism, driven by the interchangeable machinery of flesh and concrete in equal measure, steered by progress and technology into previously unreachable dimensions, Open Scripts will attempt to amplify the permutations of the city’s interior reactions to its shifting techno-meaderthalls or human glitches in its well oiled machine.

Participants will be asked to embark on the journey of a modern day flaneur as they navigate, observe and impose on the city. These observations, inflections and/or interruptions caused to the natural ebb and flow of the city’s are to be transmitted across the city from a plurality of points. A live mix from these data streams will be returned to each derive / flaneur and simultaneously broadcast across the net, both producing and reproducing the city and its flesh.

Equipped with mobile phones, the participants can team up to create and organize their own derive – their desired path into the belly of this city. During these expeditions into the city’s inertia, our techno-meaderthalls would connect to the pulsating brain of our server – the grey matter of this operation – with its nervous system of mobile phones stimulating its neurons with sensory data – voices, chattering, street sounds, text messages / poetics, videos and images. Information which has designs on the attention of our “deriver” will be collected, manipulated, transformed , reproduced and broadcast. This information may be a description of a situation, place or sound that the participants capture, record or produce and may take the form of a discussion or interview just as easily as being that of an image or text.

Meanwhile, the server, our automated system, will collect the data received from our Derivers and transform this into an audio- visual composition of the city through processes akin to that of Burrows’ cuts-up, the digital design of this neural stem will be both controlled by the participants and/or online users. This automaton will broadcast the data stream over web-radio. By allowing the possibility for anyone to access and to manipulate the data input by our techno-meaderthalls (text, photos, videos, etc) the city will multiply and transform inside-out, outside-in, both virtually and through its physical embodiment!

As a perpetual mirroring of the machine and its participants, a psycho-geographical mind-mapping is created through the flux of desired data yielded from the city, in order to produce, reproduce and reflect a new vision of the city, viewed via the techno-meaderthall’s own path, journey, derive, performance, action and interpretations. A techno-pirate’s geographical disassemblage, a dissemination of interconnected points of views that are all the time crossing over with each other and with themselves. Each path begins from the singular, but become multiplied through the potential of reinterpretation as driven by the machine and/or other derivers. Their ubiquitous presence, catching the real without closing it, opening nodes of bilateral trans-communication, the “deriver” swims in the streets of his own memory and the memory of his fellow city derivers.

Marching to a different beat, The Scie Protocol builds a continuity in the cycles (derive / performance / live stream / archives / interaction) of the city. The workshop is constructed by the exchanges made with individuals or groups desiring lines through the city – maps are to be re-interpreted, re-played whilst the machine will continuously accumulates, archives and processes information given or sent by the participants – this data is then re-injected into the next, new collation of the following day – thus, the past is visibly and sonically returned to the present to create the future.

By J. Pickett & J. Ottavi

more information:

http://www.noiser.org
http://www.mobilefest.com.br

in collaboration with APO33

A10LAB LONDON

As part of Area10 Project Space the new medialab platform is being introduced to facilitate the development of research and art practices using new technology in the media arts.