Exhibition of interactive art in Mostovna gallery
Brida (Slovenia), Klemen Gorup (Slovenia), Balázs Kovács (Hungary), Joost Nieuwenburg (Netherland), Denis Tomasini (Italy), Tsui Shan Tsang (China), Axel Vogelsang (UK), Kurt Schlegel (UK), Frank-Rainer Vollbrecht (Germany)

Exhibition of printed digital graphics in Kulturni dom Gorica
Tit Brecelj (Slovenia) - Izrezanci
Ewan Steel (UK) - Collapsed form I, Developing form II
Bogdan Soban (Slovenia) - Apollo, Etna, Tsunami, Twins
Miriam Tagliati (Italy)- Senza titolo 1–4
Caitlin Masley (USA) - Two Towers, City 4ever, Airport 2 fortress, Frenchone
Šejma Prodanović, Milica Rakić (Serbia and Montenegro) - Visual Poetry

Dec. 9th - 12th 2005

Opening time Mestna galerija and Kulturni dom Gorica:
Dec. 10th - 16th 2005 from 9 a.m. till 9 p.m.

Opening time Mostovna:
Dec. 10th - 16th 2005 from 2 p.m. till 9 p.m.

Friday, 9 December 2005

8 p.m. Festival Opening at the Mestna galerija Nova Gorica

10.30 p.m. Opening Party at Mostovna: BILK (drumnbassbreakbeat)
Admission fee: SIT 500
The Croatian drumnbassbreakbeat collective BILK from Zagreb are Tin (guitar, Korg, Roland, delay, vocal), Luka (bass, vocal) and Janko (drum, samples, vocal), but the collective would not be complete without Damir (mixer, Roland) and Jasmina (VJ, choreography). The excellent rhythm section of drums and a bass guitar flirts with different musical influences ranging from krautrock, reaggae and occasional hip-hop rhythms to ravished funky, jungle and d'n'b beats, providing the guitar player, who also uses the sounds of analogue synthesisers, blurred vocals and numerous samples, with a solid rhythmic base. Their music is a colourful and attractive mixture that could be defined as a blend of postrock arrangements and electronic dance rhythms (chiefly d'n'b). Their energetic live acts thrill their audiences and delight their critics. Some of the awards the collective has received only prove that; BILK can boast of winning the Heineken Fest in 2003 and the 2005 first prize at the Newcomer Festival in Austria’s Graz. They spent the summer in a studio working on a debut CD, which should be released this autumn on Moonlee Records.

Saturday, 10 December 2005

5 p.m. Bogdan Soban (Slovenia): Generating Images through Decomposition, lecture
Mestna galerija Nova Gorica
Two different concepts of computer generated images have emerged, each based on different roles of the computer and author in the process: computer-aided art, where the computer replaces the canvas, brush and paints, and computer-generated art, where the computer plays the role of a creative partner. In computer-generated art defining the algorhythm of colour is of paramount importance besides other rather complicated algorhythms and a great deal of mathematics. Soban will present his own computer program which enables the use of different images as spectrums of colour, and give a clear demonstration of the concept by generating images in real time.

18.30 Martijn Veldhoen (Netherlands): Dislocations, lecture (lecture in English)
Mestna galerija Nova Gorica
Martijn Veldhoen was born in Amsterdam in 1962. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam from 1979 to 1984. He was guest lecturer at the Kunstakademie Minerva, Groningen and at the HKA, Arnheim from 1999 to 2000.

The lecture will deal with one of the central themes of Veldhoen's work: the use of various and hybrid locations as a way of expressing a sense of alienation. In his work, Veldhoen often uses filmed or reconstructed locations from all over the world. These different locations are used in such a way that their actual 'locality' is no longer important. Taken together, the locations create a single “mental landscape” that seems to be free of its actual locality, which simultaneously creates a sense of displacement, because they in fact will always refer to this locality. The lecturer will show works from the last five to six years that specifically deal with this way of working.

Monday, 12 December 2005

8 p.m. feature film
Small Hall of the Kulturni dom Nova Gorica arts centre
Gaspar Noe: Irreversible (2002), feature film (95 min), language: French
Starring: Monica Bellucci, Vincent Cassel, Albert Dupontel, Jo Prestia, Philippe Nahon.

Tuesday, 13 December 2005

8 p.m. feature film
Small Hall of the Kulturni dom Nova Gorica arts centre
Vincent Gallo: The Brown Bunny (2003), feature film (93 min), language: English
Starring: Vincent Gallo, Chloë Sevigny, Cheryl Tieqs, Elizabeth Blake, Anna Vareschi.

Wednesday, 14 December 2005

3 p.m. – 7 p.m. international symposium
Moderator: Igor Španjol
DAMS, Gorizia University (Italy), near Vittoria Cinema at Piazza della Vittoria, White Hall
41, Piazza Vittoria, Gorizia

Vuk Ćosić (Slovenia): Net.Art Nostalgia: Anecdotal History of the First Ten Years of Net.Art
Vuk Ćosić was born in Belgrade in 1966, and lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a retired classic of net.art, co-founder of Nettime, Syndicate and Ljubljana Digital Media Lab (Ljudmila). Internationally acclaimed hero of online creativity. Lectures, publishes and exhibits frequently.
Most notable appearances: Biennale di Venezia; ICA, London; Beaubourg, Paris; Kapelica, Ljubljana; Kunstalle, Vienna; Gugenheim, Venezia; Walker, Minneapolis; Lux, London; Moderna galerija, Ljubljana; Microwave, Hong Kong; Digital Artlab, Tel Aviv; New Museum, NYC; Postmasters, NYC; MIT Medialab; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Artforum; Flash Art; Cahiers du cinema; Liberation; Guardian; NYTimes; and many many more...

A first person account of eating ice cream in Trieste in 1996 while defining net.art, of cheating Ars Electronica by donating one extra work as commission in 1997 and of pronouncing death of net.art in a Bannf forrest in 1998. High possibility of other tremendously significant revelations. Attendance more than obligatory.

Olga Goriunova (Russia): Looking Back at New Media Art, lecture
Olga Goriunova is a co-curator of the Read_Me software art festival series (Moscow 2002, Helsinki 2003, Aarhus 2004, Dortmund 2005), co-organiser of Runme.org software art repository and author of Suicide Letter Wizard for Microsoft Word. She is also a Doctoral candidate in the Media Lab at the University of Arts and Design Helsinki, where she is researching in online platforms-based cultural production. Author of numerous articles on digital culture. Previously she taught at Pro ArteInstitute (Saint-Petersburg, Russia), Center for Contemporary Art (Almaty, Kazakhstan), and elsewhere.

The talk “Looking back at new media art” will address the short history of software art, from 2001, the time of its first definitions, until 2005, when people started speaking of a decline. Five years has become an average life-span of a digital cultural current. Dealing with new media culture, it is impossible not to think about such issues as newness and the rapid ageing, destruction and building of hierarchies to be further destructed. The talk will look at the issues most relevant to the history of software art and discuss various positions within and towards this digital art current.

Valentina Tanni (Italy): The Retro-Future of Digital Art
Valentina Tanni is an art critic, curator and senior university teacher. She is interested in the relationship between art and new technologies. She founded the first Italian forum dedicated to net art, ExiWebArt, in 2000 (http://webart.exibart.com), and set up a daily news service about new media art, Random (http://www.random-magazine.net) in 2001. She curated the Net section of the Media Connection exhibition (Rome and Milan, 2001), as well as the exhibitions Netizens (Rome, 2002) and L'oading (Siracusa, 2003). She teaches applied computer sciences in the field of cultural heritage at the La Sapienza University in Rome. She is also a vice-chair of Exibart and Exibart.onpaper, (www.exibart.com), edits webzines about the economics of culture (www.missmarple.it) and runs a series of books for the Deleyva publisher (www.deleyva.it). She lives in Rome.

Artists who deal with technologies are increasingly often looking back. They look back at the history of science, at old innovations which are no longer useful or have never been successful. They are fascinated not so much by the perfection of the bright future as by the uncertainties of today and mistakes from the past. Low-tech technologies, improvised engineering, organic materials and recycled materials. And also a revision of artists from the past, their rediscovery and reinterpretation. All this is interwoven with a tendency towards the avant-garde, which knows no boundaries or time.

Melita Zajc (Slovenia): I-reversible
Melita Zajc continues combining editorial work and research in the field of media. She was editor of the magazine Mladina and head of the Arts and Culture Department at RTV Slovenija and has PhD in anthropology and philosophy of media. She studied Visual Media at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she curated an international series of lectures Theories of the Visual. She has written several books on the media ("Contemporary Audiovisual Cultures" is in print) and published in international publications ("Keep Him on The Phone, Human Body in the Realm of Technology" in Ars Electronica Facing the Future, MIT 1999). At present, Zajc is head of New Media Training at RTV Slovenija, lectures at the Postgraduate Institute for Humanities (ISH) in Ljubljana and at the Faculty for Electronics and Informatics (FERI) in Maribor and is president of the Expert Commission on Media and Audiovisual Culture at the Slovene Ministry of Culture.

Movement against time (backwards) has been a quite commonly researched phenomena in times when movement through time (forwards) has been most frequently observed, as a progress or a revolution (such as in case of Romantic's reaction against industrial progress). This simultaneity is graphically encompassed in the term "retro-garde," that combines both - retro movement and avant-garde. The movement back only actually became possible with computers (the "undo" option is unprecedented in the history of humankind) so today we are much more aware that both movements are not symmetrical. In the presentation, we are going to look for the way the contemporary cultures deal with the irreversibility of life through contemporary films sharing a non-linear structure, in particular the films of two enfants terrible of contemporary cinema, Gaspar Noe and Vincent Gallo.

Cristiano Poian (Italy): The machinic retro-aesthetics in videogames
Cristiano Poian founded the new.media.lab project at DAMS Gorizia, University of Udine. His research focuses on new media art, game aesthetics, net culture and intersections between narrative and interactivity.
He teaches at the University of Udine and is a Ph.D. student at the International Doctoral Programme in Theory and Technics of Film, Music and Audiovisuals.
He writes for Cinergie, Videoludica.com and Videogiochi. His new book, “Rez. L’estetica del codice” will be published at the beginning of 2006.
Contemporary videogames often investigate the link of the medium to the past of technology.
Remediation and inter-textuality are topics of interest in modern game design: if a large part of the new titles on the market are involved in experimentation with photorealism of the images, there are also authors who prefer to look back to the past of representation and simulation techniques.

8 p.m. Steven Lisberger: TRON (Disney 1982), feature film (96 min)
Mostovna
Mostovna will host a screening of the first ever feature film using 3D technology, which deals with an unknown world inside a computer. Starring Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn/Clu), Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley/Tron), David Warner (Ed Dillinger/Sark), Cindy Morgan (Lora/Yori) and Barnard Hughes (Dr. Walter Gibbs/Dumont).

Thursday, 15 December 2005

9 p.m. Multimedia evening
Mostovna
A show of animations from the previous editions of Pixxelpoint, accompanied by synth-pop music.

Friday, 16 December 2005

7 p.m. Closing ceremony of the festival
Kulturni dom Gorica (Italy)

Georg Holzmann: nogo0.2, audio/video performance for computer and concert
During the concert random audio and video samples of all the other performances and pauses are recorded in a regular interval. These recorded images and sounds are now recycled, condensed and removed from their linear temporal context. A lot of the previous performances are processed at the same time. The performance consists of six independent states. In every state different parts of the concert with different condensations play together. So not-narrating because of too much of too few happenings, because of the simultaneity of the temporally separated parts.

son:DA (video, laptop), Marko Brumen (voice), Miha Ciglar (mixer), Andrej Hrvatin (percussions), Samo Pečar (bass), Luka Prinčič (laptop), Samo Šalamon (guitare), resonance data (turntables, mixer): composition for film - test.A, performance

You will witness a first performance whose authors, ideas and technical solutions began to emerge through »tests 1-4«, that is audio-video signals from the Moderna galerija museum of modern and contemporary art in Ljubljana and the studio on the radio frequencies of MARŠ and Radio Študent. This show will unite all of the project’s authors for the first time. The composition is based on ready-made and improvised parts, on an open and fluid system of free tuning in and out, dialogue, guiding and following. The basis is Slovene film, its parts, its context, techniques, history and the present, as well as the interference of the audio signal with/through the image. The platform of the sound is all the digital and analogue instruments which are turned on at a particular moment, interfaces or parts of the entire connection. The sound affects the image and the image affects the sound, people affect machines. Free communication begins with the acceptance of the present interfaces into one’s inner system.