[mtp-teoria] share

[dusan]

hi!

not much of a theory, just a brief spionage report from the ongoing
workshop of http://share.dj in budapest (19-25 mar 07)



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In january i got e-mail from Milos forwarded from O.blaat asking people
with an interest to organise Share-like workshops in their homelands to
participate in the weeklong gathering in Budapest. Since i was partly
familiar with the background of Share from the interview Slavo and Oliver
made with O.blaat for 3/4 and liked the original idea of it since it
relates to things i am interested in doing now, i subscribed. I was
selected by Ultrahang boys probably due to my involvement in organisation
of Letne dielne last year in Bratislava, along with Slavo and Oliver who
have been doing Zzzvukove dielne in a4 for some time and a number of people
from lemurie/czech republic (3), hungary, poland (7), serbia (4), romania
(2?), russia (2?), lithuania (1), udine/italy (2), ljubljana/slovenia (1?)
and some other places, 25 people. I don't know if anyone else from slovakia
subscribed. Share group was invited by Ultrahang to organise a workshop
already two years ago, but it took a while to find the funding for the
event in europe (finally International Visegrad Fund) and to fly the group
of six artists from new york city (to me unknown US source).

So there is Koosil-ja, a dance performer, doing a bit of management and
documentation work at the spot, Geoff Matters who is a master of
technology (self-made 16 channel audio mix pult, software for controlling
its sound, and for recording), Anton Marini and Adam Kendall and Dan
Winckler - visual guys (jitter, modul8), Keiko Uenishi aka O.blaat (lloopp),
and also people living in europe invited also as lecturers: Tim Blechmann
from vienna - master of pd and python, Alo Allik from dublin
(supercollider), Klaus Filip from vienna (lloopp), Eric Redlinger from
france (ex-waag; streaming media - quicktime, darwin, osc; developer of
quartz composer), and Rich Panciera (visuals).

After coming by train from Bratislava I found the group in a small room at
the back of the Merlin (culture centre) building having the break before
Goeff's introduction into the technological setup of Share that is
basically based on an audio mix pult which in the Share they moved from the
corner of the room to its center so that everybody can plug in and off and
adjust the volume of instrument which is mostly laptop but also guitar or
voice etc. With Keiko they went on with talking about background of Share
and its organisation. They started it four years ago as an audio session
being hosted at different venues in nyc, using their gear and facilities
while they were not used by other program. Event has been going on every
week, later on visual people stepped in. They've been doing it voluntarily
and since the money were not ivolved and they needed to buy sound card,
beamer or other gear they registered not-for-profit organisation including
its legal hierarchy which they say they take as a sad necessity so there is
a director of Share but normally nobody wants to do that - they think about
handing this position every now and then to other person. Keiko seems to
have few organisational mantras that in Share setup proved to be working
well, like: let everybody do what is doing unless he/she want to impose it
to others, or: if it is too heavy for you just leave for a break or cig, it
is also ok, it will calm down, or: we don't curate. Or advice: when the
person plays too loud sitting next to one speaker probably not hearing
himself from the other then if we just pump up his volume at the mixpult
so that he hears himrself much better, usually he's suprised and calms down.

Program-wise we soldered small audio switchers that are to be used in a
final performance on saturday and there were a number of 3-4 hours long
workshops - introduction into graphical environment of pd and max/msp +
intro to msp + intro to jitter with adam and anton; pd and python scripting
with tim (tuesday); video conversion and modul8 vj software with dan; max/
msp best practises with adam (wednesday); lloopp with klaus; quicktime
broadcasting and darwin and osp and keyworx with eric; how to jam practical
advices with rich and goeff (thursday); and for tomorrow there is
supercollider with alo; jitter and gem openGL with anton; and round table
on theory and philosophy of share planned.

Since there was no communication between organisers and participants
regarding the workshop planning in advance, and the workshop program is so
full and particular workshops are so short that they almost end up as being
presentations, and the group of participants is so wide that the
experiences range from abs no knowledge of graphical coding via electronic
beat musicians up to code based sound artists, and the "lowest common
denominator" is so low - basically we only have been doing introductions
to tools possibly usable in share context.

However, lots of social and tech networking; Lemurie has been doing nice
job of evening broadcasts from the spot (will be probably archived at their
website); and yesterday the festival program of Ultrahang started including
also (mostly individual) performances of workshops lecturers and
participants, which makes nice jump from hands-on to the stage.

dusan