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2/6/2010

Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art

iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology, Bruxelles

Curated by Domenico Quaranta

iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technologies is proud to announce Playlist. Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition focused on the artistic reinvention of obsolete digital media. Produced and hosted by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón, Asturias) in the frame of the Mediateca Expandida, Playlist now moves to Brussels enriched with twelve new participants and a broader range of artworks.

Playing Games, Music, Art
What happens when the emotional investment you made in your old computers brings you back to the garret where you sent them years ago? When you can’t no longer suffer to work with sophisticated machines that, while promising you more freedom, actually force you to wear the straitjacket kindly designed for you by some corporate guy? When you decide that’s time to put your hands on the machine?

Reinventing the medium: from music to visual arts
What happens is an act of reinventing the medium. Along the Nineties, many artists started working on the reinvention of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies such as vinyl’s, vintage computers, game platforms and alike. Hacking software, circuit-bending hardware, they turned “dead media” into powerful tools of artistic creation. Playlist is an exhibition that explores this kind of research, focusing on the relationship between musical research and visual research, in the belief that the first, rather than the latter, has often been the driving force in this process.

Chiptune, 8-bit punk et arts médiatiques.
The core of Playlist is the exploration of the “chiptune scene”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music. The show demon- strates that the retro-gaming phenomenon in visual arts can be considered an outfit of a pretty musi- cal phenomenon, that in a bunch of years spread out all over the world through festivals and clubs, occasionally influencing mainstream musicians; and that visual and musical research progressed on parallel paths, in the quest for lo-fi sounds and low-res aesthetics, synthetic colors and notes. Playlist proposes artists from the chiptune scene and the media arts world sharing attitudes such as DIY, recycling, subversive refusal of programmed obsolescence, aesthetics of the glitches from electronic materials. On display, artworks (objects, installations, videos, computer-based and printed works), but also instruments, tools, software’s, hardware’s, records, 8-bit music, movie documentary, platforms and communities.

Presented artists
2 Player Productions (US), Alex Bond / Enso (US), Boogerlab (NZ), The C-Men (NL), Paul B. Davis (UK), James Dingle (US), Jeff Donaldson / noteNdo (US), Julien Ducourthial (FR), Entter (SP), Dragan Espe- nschied (DE), Gino Esposto / Micromusic.net (CH), Gijs Gieskes (NL), André Gonçalves (PT), Chantal Goret (BE), Goto80 (SE), Jodi (BE / NL), Mike Johnston / Mike in Mono (UK), Joey Mariano / Animal Style (US), Rosa Menkman (NL), Raquel Meyers (SP), Mikro Orchestra (PL), Don Miller / NO CARRIER (US), Erik Nilsson (SE), Nullsleep (US), Tristan Perich (US), Rabato (SP), Gebhard Sengmuller (AT), Alexei Shulgin (RU), Paul Slocum (US), Tonylight (IT), VjVISUALOOP (IT)

Production
Playlist is an exhibition produced by and firstly exhibited at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon (Spain) from 18.12.2009 till 17.05.2010. The Brussels adaptation is produced by iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology.

Contact Yves Bernard
yb@imal.org
Phone: +32 2 410 30 93

Opening the 3rd of June, 18 - 23

iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology
Koolmijnenkaai 30 Quai des Charbonnages, 1080 Brussels
Open Tuesday - Saturday: 11 - 19

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