Friday 26th May
18.00-00.30
Rich Mix : 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6LA
Live AV Performances, DJ/VJ, Talk + Q&A, Panel Discussion, Screening
Main Space, Venue 1, Venue 2
Buy Tickets
Main Space
Emergency Broadcast Network : This Many Dollars
Opening the festival with a special one-off performance we present the undisputed godfathers of AV remixing, American multimedia group EBN – Emergency Broadcast Network – was formed in 1991 by Rhode Island School of Design graduates Brian Kane, Gardner Post and Josh Pearson.
In a not to be missed special and rare appearance especially for Splice Festival, Kane and Post get back together to perform a piece called ‘This Many Dollars’. During the weekend they’ll also unveil an installation called ‘Full Release’, a new interactive piece containing never before seen archival footage of their original works plus unscreened videos from the 80’s and 90’s.
briankane.net
babygrandmaster.com
Dotokime.Live : Light Particles
Dotokime is a collaboration and passion project between visual artist Emilia Gumańska – performing under the name VJ Emiko – and electronic music producer Artur Śleziak, who goes by the moniker Dot Dot. That shared passion is about combining music, video, experimental art and technology; individually Emiko works with the human body, with shadows and emotions and the music of Dot Dot is about creating tense sound art. With depth and beauty in their collaborative work, the duo venture into what they can only describe as the ‘multidimensional universe’.
As Dot Dot, Śleziak releases on Slovenian label Retrospective Zoology and Polish web-based imprint Minimicromusic, his hypnotic, atmospheric and experimental dub and ambient techno and has been compared to early Orb, and his live shows always encompass emotion and surprise. Emiko’s live work meanwhile revolves around symmetry and the human body in motion and can easily be categorised as experimental video art; Gumańska herself is also a video director, camera operator and editor.
facebook.com/dotokime
vimeo.com/vjemiko
dotdot.fm/2015/03/08/live-shows
Eclectic Method : Video DJ Set
Eclectic Method is Johnny Wilson, his super-charged “Wolf of Wall Street” remix claims more than 5 million views and counting and his Star Wars remixes racked up more than 20 million views. Stephen Colbert, who jokingly called him a “DJ Jazzy jerk-off,” played one of his videos on The Colbert Report, and James Corden aired his “Carpool Karaoke” remix to immense applause on The Late Late Show. Apple made Wilson the main subject of a promotional video before sending him around Europe to perform at its flagship stores. He’s performed live with Chuck D, Questlove and Clyde Stubblefield on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. For Splice, he performs a video DJ set of music videos, film remixes, TV remixes and internet pop culture.
eclecticmethod.net
hfacebook.com/eclecticmethod
twitter.com/eclecticmethod
Aeldryn : Neoform VJ Set
Based in Prague, Czech artist Aeldryn works with both analog and digital technologies in his live animations. Using a camera to create digital feedback and focus on real movement contained within it and those short unrepeatable moments, Aeldryn then uses digital tools to amplify those captured moments, expanding them into other shapes, images and compositions; creating new original abstract noise textures. He’ll perform a live abstract video performance using live camera input, feedback and generated graphics.
(please note: this video is not of the show to be performed at Splice)
A'Bear : DJ Set
A’Bear is a London based experimental avant synth pop artist/electronic poet combining her fascination with unique soundscapes and layered lyrics to invoke a cosmic experience. She plays an eclectic mix of genres including techno, electronica, indie and avant-garde synth wave.
facebook.com/abearsounds
twitter.com/janineabear
DJ Food : Selected Aphex Works AV Set
DJ Food – originally the studio pseudonym for various Coldcut productions – was passed to Strictly Kev in the mid 1990s and he’s been creating music and mixes under the name for the past two decades. In 2008, he and Solid Steel collaborator DK, created the world’s first 2 man, 4 vinyl-turntable AV set-up using Serato’s brand new VSL software. In 2012 he produced a 50 minute 360 degree show for domes and planetariums centered around his album, The Search Engine.
For Splice Festival, DJ Food plays his Aphex Twin set – a selection of work by the Warp artist, complete with video accompaniments specially edited to the track selection. Started as a series of mixes highlighting the best of the 250 plus track ‘Soundcloud dump’ made by Aphex in 2015, the show has evolved into a video version including past catalogue favourites ranging from ambient to acid to AFX’s take on drum n bass.
Venue 1
1024 Architecture : Recession
The third part of the trilogy Euphorie-Crise-Recession is an audiovisual performance, a journey through what’s left of our civilisation.
The show echoes the scarcity of natural resources, diminishing of species, and the ever expanding influence of built matter.
The two performers activate the digital vista in realtime, like busted puppeteers, waiting for something to go wrong.
1024architecture.net
facebook.com/1024official
vimeo.com/the1024
Coldcut : AV Performance
Coldcut need little introduction and Splice are proud to have them as this year’s festival headliner performing their brand new AV show!
Venue 2
Edwin de Koning & Bart van der Ploeg : The History and Future of Resolume + Q&A
The two founders of Resolume, Edwin de Koning and Bart van der Ploeg host a talk about the history and the future of the software, with a sneak preview of Resolume 6.
Sampling in AV : Panel Discussion
With archives opening up and online memes and supercuts now commonplace, has video sampling finally come of age? A discussion panel around the use and abuse of audiovisual sampling and it’s many challenges faced by artists working in this genre, whether creative, technical or legal. Ben Sheppee of Light Rhythm Visuals chairs the panel and discusses issues with some of the pioneers of the art-form.
Graham Daniels (Addictive TV | Orchestra of Samples | Splice Festival co-producer)
Vicki Bennett (People Like Us)
Brian Kane (EBN)
Gardner Post (EBN)
Matt Black (Coldcut)
Johnny Wilson (Eclectic Method)
Athens Digital Arts Festival Screening Programme : #PostFuture. Introduced by Ilias Chatzichristodoulou
Splice Festival 2017 presents a compilation from the Athens Digital Arts Festival: #PostFuture Journey.
The ADAF – Athens Digital Arts Festival – is an international festival celebrating digital culture with an annual gathering, bringing together a global community of artists and audiences. They aim to encourage, stimulate and promote all aspects of digital creativity by hosting both local and international artists / communities with a goal to raise awareness on contemporary digital culture, familiarising audiences with new media art and providing education via workshops focusing on technology and digital arts. Each edition of the festival tackles modern social and cultural issues that relate to innovation and technological advances, it’s wide-ranging programme offering exhibitions, screenings, performances and workshops that display distinctive characteristics of the digital medium.
Athens Digital Arts Festival 2017 is its 13th edition. With the theme #PostFuture, it aims to create a futuristic reality in the centre of Athens to reflect the transition of digital culture by shaping a future ‘beyond digital’ and playing with the idea of ‘real versus virtual’ boundaries.
The compilation features the work of artists Patxi Araujo, Chris Cheung, Rebecca Najdowski, Dénes Ruzsa & Fruzsina, Spitzer, Alexander Pettai, Marta Di Francesco, Max Hattler, Alex Karantanas, Duncan Poulton, Fred L’Epee, Marcantonio Lunardi, Pamela Stefanopoulou, Thomas Valianatos and Maria Tsiroukidou.
Flying beyond digital, reaching the #PostFuture
Digital culture, as an integral part of our everyday lives, is constantly changing in an effort to satisfy our “perpetual eagerness” to exceed technological limits. This continuously shifting form of digital culture shapes a future “beyond digital”, a futuristic convergence of the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’. On this path, travellers encounter this new exciting, but still rather elusive, “post-digital” reality where the digital merges with both the analog and the physical.
#PostFuture Journey selection list:
1. Patxi Araujo (ES) Tera Nullius 09:58
2. Chris Cheung (HK) RadianceScape 02:00
3. Rebecca Najdowski (US) Give them Distance 03:04
4. Dénes Ruzsa & Fruzsina Spitzer (HU) S.C.A.N. – Searching Alternative Nature 07:00
5. Alexander Pettai (RU) Apophonie 05:36
6. Marta Di Francesco (IT) The Waves 02:45
7. Max Hattler (DE) Shapeshifter 00:30
8. Alex Karantanas (GR) Singularity 07:13
9. Duncan Poulton (UK) Pygmalion 07:00
10. Fred L’Epee (SW) Athanasia 05:33
11. Marcantonio Lunardi (IT) The Cage 05:46
12. Pamela Stefanopoulou (GR) The Voices of Silence 01:52
13. Thomas Valianatos (GR) Fractusmachine_Kosmos 03:34
14. Maria Tsiroukidou (GR) Minecrafted Waste Land 05:33
Video Art Curator: Eirini Olympiou
Animation Curator: Nikki Georgiou
Curatorial Assistants: Marianthi Mavroudi – Eleana Damaskinou
Introducing and presenting the compilation will be ADAF director Ilias Chatzichristodoulou.
#Post Future Artists:
Alex Karantanas : Singularity
The video follows the hypothesis of an inevitable emergence of artificial superintelligence. A new species of digital entities is being born, letting us observe the way they experience their cyber bodies, the social construction of time and the concept of absolute void.
Duration: 07:13 min
ARTIST
Alex Karantanas (GR)
Alex Karantanas is a video artist and an architecture student. His videos explore the relation between physical and digital, the power of information technologies and the social construction of reality. His work has been featured in self-organised exhibitions and events, as well as in the previous version of ADAF. He currently lives and works in Athens.
Alexander Pettai : Apophonie
Abstract flow of red tightly sticks to the strange rhythm of electro-acoustic music.
Duration: 05:36 min
ARTIST
Alexander Pettai (RU)
Alexander Pettai works in video art since 2008. He has been participating in various domestic and international art and music events.
Chris Cheung : RadianceScape
RadianceScape is a data-visualizing sonic composition. It based on the live radiation data from the Safecast.org, a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurements, to generate an audio-visual cityscape. It appears in a point-cloud mapping outlook in which the density of the radiation level is representing the visibility of the cityscape. The sequence of the images is grabbed from the Google Streetview API’s hidden depthmap data. The sonic composition is based on the locative data to generate different tonal of drone ambience and noise. The graphical score consists of 2 separated parts. First part is illustrating the route of Hong Kong, where visualising the radiation level from Mongkok to Tsim Sha Tsui area. The second part is illustrating the route of Fukushima, where visualizing the radiation level from the Fukushima Prefecture to the nuclear power plant.
Duration: 02:00 min
ARTIST
Chris Cheung (HK)
XCEED is a new media art collective based in Hong Kong, focusing on digital art installation, spatial design and interactive performance. The works has been selected in various international art festivals, including Ars Electonica in Linz, FILE in São Paulo, MADATAC in Madrid, CYNET in Dresden and Microwave International New Media Art Festival etc… Recent artworks have been selected and commissioned by Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei and Hong Kong Heritage Museum.
XCEED is about transcending boundaries and beyond limitations.
Dénes Ruzsa & Fruzsina Spitzer : S.C.A.N. - Searching Alternative Nature
We discovered that almost every chemical element in our body was formed inside the stars. The formation of our solar system is also caused by previously lived stars. Our galaxy formation is the result of a supernova shock wave. Our existence is a natural consequence of the existence of the stars, so we can suppose the idea that in our distant galaxies our distant relatives lives. We adapted the point of view of a well-known photo technique, ‘photogram’ and the xerox art, copy art into digital moving image form. Each frame in the animation was made or reproduced with a flatbed scanner or with the combination of scanner and projector. The pictorial world and the visual components of this animation is partly from object existing in the real world, and from disembodied, immaterial scanned pixels. The combination of analog and digital technology is created by expanding the scanner goal oriented programs and by inserting additional tools. With the simultaneous use of camera and the copy machine images from outside world can be redefined, the pictures of the universe can be created. At some point the glass surfaces of the scanner is working as like a montage table. From the essential techniques of the xerox art, copy generation and copy the motion is an integral part of the film. With the help of copy motion technique time become pictorial. Due to copy generation the error signals became generated structures, of dynamic microcosmos will come along.
Duration: 07:00 min
ARTISTS
Dénes Ruzsa & Fruzsina Spitzer (HU)
Dénes Ruzsa and Fruzsina Spitzer working together since 2007.They have been making experimental short films and animations. Their films have screened at over two hundred film festivals and exhibitions worldwide in Europe and in Transatlantic Regions, amongst others, at Experiments in Cinema, Cologne OFF – International Videoart Festival Germany, Screengrab International Media Arts Award, International Video Art Festival Madrid, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest. More than ten years they have been making films commissioned by artists, museums and art galleries. They also work as a photographer for books, catalogues and art magazines. Their work is best inspired by avant-garde tendency. They believe that film stands close to fine art, film is nothing more than fine art, music / sound and movement. They prefer using alternative techniques like flatbed scanner, projection, mixed media, computer graphics, collage, etc. This way they can have the possibility for dimension changes in content and form. In their newest works they adapted an old photo technique, ‘photogram’ put into digital moving image form.
Duncan Poulton : S.C.A.N. - Pygmalion
Pygmalion attempts to address how ancient ideas of perfection and beauty have been carried forward into the digital age, considering the difference between crafted original objects and their weightless, infinitely replicable computer-generated doubles.
Duration: 07:00min
ARTIST
Duncan Poulton (UK)
Duncan Poulton has been participating in various domestic and international art events.
Fred L'Epee : Athanasia
“When this corruptible body has assumed its incorruptibility, and this mortal body has clothed itself with immortality (athanasia), then the word that is written will be fulfilled: Death has been engulfed in victory”. (1 Corinthians 15 : 54)
Duration: 05:33 min
ARTIST
Fred L’Epee (SW)
Fred L’Epee is an experimental filmmaker and emergent visual artist. His films and visual works has been shown in several international film festivals, cinemas, symposiums, juried screenings, numerous solo/group exhibitions. He’s working and living between Greece, France and Switzerland. Founder of Helicon Films with co-producers: Ed Alvarado and Jean-Baptiste Lozac’h. An Indie Film Label of Cinematography and Sound design.
Marcantonio Lunardi : The Cage
Food, water, book, language, beauty, earth, sea, love, warmth, man, woman, desire. What is our cage dividing us from? Is it blocking us? Or is it protecting us? The barbed wire is a simple structure, a cylinder-shaped object deformed by a light twisting, which stretches, in the room, from one point to another. Every 10 centimetres there is a small lock: its delicate shape breaks the linearity of the barbed wire like a lock gracefully curled. The barbed wire, thus, marks the border between existing a non-existing, between living and non-living, between being seen and being invisible. The cage envelopes us with its barbed wire from our innermost roots, dragging us in the shadow. This work introduces the solitude imposed on us by the cages we are living in. In the typical style of Lunardi, the work has been built around some tableau vivants which represent, through the body of the actors, some of the conditions which we experience on a daily basis in a society which is pervaded by egotism.
Duration: 05:46 min
ARTIST
Marcantonio Lunardi (IT)
Marcantonio Lunardi was born in Lucca in 1968. Since 2001 he has been working in social and political documentation in the field of Media Art, creating installations, documentaries and video-art works. After the master’s programs at the Festival dei Popoli in Florence with Michael Glawogger, Sergei Dvortsevoy, Thomas Heis and Andrés Di Tella, he began a path in the cinema of moving images, experimenting with languages at the border between the cinema of the real and the video-art. His works have been screened in some eminent international institutions such as: The International Art Center, Toko; Galeri Nasional Indonesia, Jakarta; Fondazione Centro Studi Ragghianti di Lucca; Video Tage Center – Hong Kong; Museum King St. Stephen Museum – Székesfehérvár – Hungary. He also appeared in many other festivals of experimental cinema and video-art, like: Cologne Off; Festival Internacional de Cine y Video Experimental – Bilbao; OCAT Shanghai; Cairo Video Festival – Egypt; Festival Invideo Milan – Italy; Video Art & Experimental Film Festival – Tribeca Cinemas in New York City. He currently lives and works in the mountain village of Bagni di Lucca, about 25 km far from Lucca, in Italy.
Maria Tsiroukidou : Mindcrafted Waste Land
Minecraft is a “first person” videogame in which the player roams freely in a vast three-dimensional environment. The player “mines” the landscape in search of materials to create structures. During this effort, the surroundings alter. For the most part the world of Minecraft is constructed from brick-units of different “materials” which can be used by the player. “Minecrafted Waste Land” is attempting a comparison and correlation of a game review, by youtuber “Tai”, a radio speech of Michel Foucault on the concept of heterotopia and a typed page from Richard Wright’s “Native Son” with handwritten corrections by the author.
Duration: 5:34min.
ARTIST
Maria Tsiroukidou (GR)
Studied Painting in the School of Visual and Applied Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under professors K. Mortarakos, D. Zouroudis, S. Koupegkos.
Marta Di Francesco : The Waves
The waves incessantly and repeatedly dip and crest, crashing, forming and breaking again. They weave into a constantly morphing flow, where different identities knit and merge into each other, losing themselves in pulsing lines and knots. With their hypnotically continuous cycle, the waves question our identity, in permanent state of flux.
Duration: 02:45 min
ARTIST
Marta Di Francesco (IT)
Marta is a London based visual artist, exploring new aesthetics, merging poetics with code. She’s interested in the implication of the digital process on identity and its fragmentation, exploring and questioning it through digital bleed, time displacement, and through the sculptural quality of time in 3D aesthetics. For over a decade, she has been writing and creating radical visual pieces which inhabit and cross over the world of film, dance, fashion, and code. She works through multidisciplinary collaborations to explore new expressions and conversations. Di Francesco’s work latest screenings and exhibitions include the NEW AESTHETIC: Future Bodies Programme at Film Festival Cologne 2016 and KFFK Cologne 2016, Crystal Delays at the Psych Space Event for the EEF Festival, part of the Norman McLaren Retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2016, the Dream:On Digital Event at the Göethe-Institut London curated by Alpha-ville in 2014, and Echoes, an Audio Visual Installation, commissioned by Mother for Digital Shoreditch London, in 2012. Her work has featured in publications and websites like Taschen, WIRED, The Creators Project, Prosthetic Knowledge, and POSTmatter.
Max Hattler : Shapeshifter
Shapeshifter explores video glitches induced by digital signal processing compression artefacts, which have given rise to a whole genre of YouTube videos dedicated to exposing shapeshifting reptilians hiding behind the surface of the video screen.
Duration: 00:30 min
ARTIST
Max Hattler (DE)
German artist Max Hattler works primarily with abstract animation, video installation and audiovisual performance. His work explores relationships between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and politics, sound and image, and precision and improvisation. Max holds a BA in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art, and a Doctorate in Fine Art from the University of East London. His work has been presented at museums and galleries around the world, such as Animamix Biennale Hong Kong, MoCA Taipei, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Zhou B Art Center Chicago, and Tate Britain London. Awards include Third Culture Film Festival, Bradford Animation Festival, and several Visual Music Awards. He has performed live around the world, most recently at Seoul Museum of Art, EXPO Milano and Clockenflap Hong Kong. Max has been on the jury of over 25 festivals including Animafest Zagreb, CutOut Fest Mexico, Punto y Raya, Videoholica, Monstra Lisbon, Filmwinter Stuttgart and Tehran International Animation Festival. He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong.
Pamela Stefanopoulou : The voices of silence
Pamela Stefanopoulou explores binge eating and its range of interpretations, often characterized by a loss of control. In The Voices of Silence, the image of ice cream is repeated and becomes a representation of the direct relationship between the artist and the way she perceives the world.
Duration: 1:52min.
ARTIST
Pamela Stefanopoulou
Pamela Stefanopoulou had her MA in 2015 in Central Saint Martins, London, UK. She Studied with scholarship from State Scholarships Foundation Performance Design and Practice under Pete Brooks. At the present she is studding MA Audio and Visual Arts Department in Ionian University in Corfu. Also she studied in the School of Fine Arts in Athens. She studied painting under Triantafyllos Patraskidis, Vassilis Vlastaras,Agelos Antonopoulos.
Patxi Araujo : Tera Nullius
Nobody never gets to heaven and nobody gets no land. Terra nullius is the “geological” activity of a software entity, in the disembodied and abstract nature of a computer system. This activity creates the variables of its orography, whose movement can be well-read in turn as sound variables. This micro/macro universe is observed/listened from the intimacy of an alien eye/ear that attends (without any intervention) to its natural evolution. Inside an infinite scale, a minimal, uninhabitable, and impossible landscape gets created and destroyed, thanks to the fragile balance between opposite forces. Before, the Gods offered us the Promised Land; Now the promise is offered by machines, and their land is digital.
Duration: 09:58 min
ARTIST
Patxi Araujo (ES)
Artist and Professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Departament of Art and Technology. Artist experienced in the field of fine arts, applied his research in scenery, installations and events, and in immersive and interactive environments. He has made numerous individual and collective exhibitions, receiving awards and mentions in various competitions and international video art animation. His work explores the relationships between art, technology and poetry. The interest of this born Clarke’s 3rd Law (2008), a project that analyzes and recreates the territory of the techno-magic and Tears of Alice (2009), conceived as a meeting point for an aesthetic synaesthesic and hyperconnective world. Currently is developing the project Codex Contaminari_Humana Coded as an exercise of aesthetic criticism and creation around the concept of the human through bodies, perceptions and metaphors from environments of programming, robotics, artificial life and simulation.
Rebecca Najdowski : Give them Distance
“Give them Distance” explores how we comprehend the cosmos and our place within it. Created from hundreds of slides discarded by a university Earth and Planetary Science department, the looped video animates a journey from Earth, through the solar system and space, returning to our planet via fallen meteorites. Juxtaposed with the cycling slide images, droning and degraded audio captured from Walt Disney’s 1979 super-8 sci-fi film “The Black Hole” provides a hypnotic rhythm. “Give them Distance” considers the idea that we have come to know the collectively-imagined cosmos through photomedia and sci-fi films. In this piece, outmoded visual and audio representations of earth and space reveal a cultural and material patina. The video, through its coupling of an unavoidable wearing down with cosmic expanse, attempts to point to the paradoxical coexistence of entropy and the infinite.
Duration: 03:04 min
ARTIST
Rebecca Najdowski (US)
Rebecca Najdowski is a Melbourne-based artist working in photography, video, and installation. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Rebecca received a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil and was the first Artist Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been exhibited and screened throughout the United States, and in the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Brazil, and Colombia. Rebecca has been an artist-in-residence at CAPACETE in Rio de Janeiro, at Signal Fire in Oregon, at the Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred University, New York, and at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California.
Thomas Vallianatos : Fractus Machine Kosmos
The core of the project is an interactive reconstruction of the image and production of video in real time on the basis of the audio information of the image or the visualized image of a natural sound. The sound translation acts in real time to the image’s quality (eg. Texture of a natural pattern or displacement mapping in the 3d version of the image) and produces a different medium (video in real time) on the basis of eg. A change of a parameter in the image through an interactive shader. The purpose of the project is in principle, to explore the route information (image into sound and vice versa) in the medium of parametric motion but also to build a generative image in the form of real time video.
Duration: 3:34min.
ARTIST
Thomas Vallianatos
Thomas Vallianatos is lecturer in Digital- Graphic Arts in the Department Of Audio & Visual Arts in Ionian University. He has also worked as freelancer in animation and comic art in Various Publishers and advertising films in Cinema & TV Companies.