transmediale.03 awards
The transmediale.03 prizes for the best works of this year's competition were
announced at the international media art festival in Berlin. Transmediale is one of
Europe's leading and most innovative new media art festivals.
A jury made up of international media experts awarded the prizes, worth 5.000 Euro each,
at the award ceremony on February 4, 2003 in the House of World Cultures.
Five projects were shortlisted in the two categories Image and Software, from about
900 entries.
The award winner in the category Image were the 242.pilots with their live video
performance "Live in Bruxelles".
Jury statement:
"The 242.pilots through their work, translate the multifarious aspects of image
production under the conditions of digital, interactive and networked based
media. The work is convincing above all in the play of collective live production,
the presentation mode of large-scale image production, the contextualisation of
live images in the scope of contemporary image culture and the development of
specific technological production tools as well as distribution. The combined
introduction of all these 'production strands' in the space of a collective process
finally relativises the still prevalent myth if the image as a form of subjective and
subject-centered activity. 242.pilots through their work, translate in a thoroughly
convincing manner the multifarious aspects of image production under the
conditions of digital, interactive and network-based media."
jury: Reinhard Braun, Gina Czarnecki, Piotr Krajewski
Reviews of 242.pilots DVD "Live in Bruxelles"
___Res Magazine 12.02
HC Gilje, Lukasz Lysakowski and Kurt Ralske are expert navigators in the skies of
audiovisual performance and experimentation. Unique artists individually and skilled
when collaborating, the pilots have built custom software using Nato.0+55, allowing them
to fluidly and expressively mix real-time film + graphic design visuals on the fly.
The live performance disk features trio improvisations and solos [Ralske's is a standout],
as well as a short but insightful documentary commissioned by Belgian national television.
242.pilots strive to "reinvent video mixing for the digital medium" and do so with
artistry and grace. (Sue Apfelbaum)
___junkmedia.org 12.02
Carpark have already released one DVD, Takagi Masakatsu's Opus Pia, a companion piece
to a CD of the same name. In the next logical step for the adventurous New York label,
we have 242 Pilots' Live in Bruxelles, which is essentially a collection of video art
released by a record company. The trio of HC Gilje, Lukasz Lysakowski and Kurt Ralske
work with laptops and self-programmed video software to interact in real time to pre-recorded music.
The DVD opens with a trio improvisation. The group charge forward at a relentless velocity,
preferring the comfort of forward momentum to the uncertainty of a gradual and unhurried
aesthetic. As Justin Bennett's slow chamber orchestrations and reverberating raindrops
tinker away, 242 Pilots piece together rapid-fire images of crashing surf juxtaposed with
plumes of industrial smoke, clouds and birds. The trio piece is an unswerving jumble of images
that are doubled, tripled, stretched and filtered like their analogues in modern electronics.
242 Pilots seem to draw an intentional arc here between video editing and production and
the equivalent processes common to recent experimental electronic music.
Following the trio are solo works by each artist. HC Gilje's entry, with music by Norway's
fantastic Jazzkammer, sets street sounds and roiling, unsettled clicks against a simple
urban scene that is hemorrhaged and overlain in a confusing sea of images. Taxis and
foot-bound citizens are separated out onto temporary, shifting split-screens that are
frozen and released in a ghostly stop-time.
Kurt Ralske weighs in with a set of lush, implacable images (seemingly extracted from natural objects)
that flutter and ooze into dark shades and empty white squares. A shifting keyboard drone,
composed by Mr. Ralske as well, floats gently along with the images.
Lukasz Lysakowski's piece is the most formally experimental composition on Live in Bruxelles,
as well as the most arresting. A harsh, telephone-signal feedback drone shifts in violent fits
and jumps in perfect time with pinstripe red and white test pattern lines. The alignment between
video and audio is so sharp that they appear to be triggered from the same source. This gives way to
abrupt clicks that squawk along with corresponding color fields set in pastoral oranges, purples and blacks.
The pace ratchets up to epileptic levels in a disconcerting, even nauseatingly sharp, treatment.
The outcome is brutal and compelling, like a televised execution; it's hard to watch and
harder still to take your eyes off.
242 Pilots weave an abstract and absorbing fabric of image and tone. (Ben Sterling)
___The Wire 01.03
As if to emphasize the decentralized and borderless flow of new audiovisual data streams,
the 242.pilots are drawn from a wide geographic sprawl: New York's Kurt Ralske (formerly of
post-structuralist rock outfit Ultra Vivid Scene), Polish cinematographer Lukasz Lysakowski,
and Norwegian media artist HC Gilje. The event documented here took place at Le Petit Theatre Mercelis
in Brussels, with music by Justin Bennett, a British composer now based in Holland.
With increasingly sophisticated software permitting thelive interplay of the abstract
and the figurative, the representational and what Duchamp chose to sall the "non-retinal",
fixity of location has become less important than the permanent shifting of relationships.
The visuals are an undifferentiated mixture of geometric complexities, street scenes and landscapes,
interspersed with fragments of found footage.
The perpetually unresolved relationship between these elements ultimately becomes more engaging
than any intrinsic meaning orimpact they might convey. The issues of focus, interpretation and attention
thrown up during the live collaboration don't seem to be fully confronted by the group themselves.
In an accompanying interview feature for Belgian TV at the end of the DVD, they express a clear
preference for presenting their work before a seated audince in a theatre rather than in the random swirl
of a club environment. But do new technologies and approaches belong in such old structures?
It's interesting that Bennett, in supplying a live soundtrack to the visuals, speaks of trying to determine
a narrative development in the spontaneously generated imagery. Undoubtedly, he won't be the only one
attempting to do so within the confines of an auditorium. The members of 242.pilots have the technology
and skills to cover all four walls of a space, not just the one the audience is facing. It would be
great to be there when they do it. (Ken Hollings)
___Exclaim 01.03
242.pilots is a trio of digital video artists who employ their own custom software in pursuit of
uncharted cinematic realms. To the accompaniment of a beatless soundscape, the pilots paint
the screen with shards of concrete and geometric images, augmenting received modes of visual manipulation,
like chromatic reversal, with a host of unduplicateable real-time techniques. While many A/V performances
subordinate one medium to the other - by deeming that a given change in the aural will automatically trigger
a preset change in the visual - live in bruxelles is a truly organic enterprise. As musician Justin Bennett
says during the disc's bonus interview: "it's like improvising a soundtrack to a film, but the film
also responds to what I do. [the pilots] are also listening, obviously. So it's very much a two-way process."
MUTEK's curators would do well to book 242.pilots for the 2003 festival. They're at the leading edge of
a newly energized field. (Martin Turenne)
___xlr8r 01.03
242.pilots take advantage of the new technology-powerbooks and Max/Msp and Nato software currently powering
the experimental electronic music scene. The best way for initiates to view this disc is to work backward --
start with 242's interview from Belgian television, in which the trio explains their working methods.
Move on to the solo pieces that display the strengths of each individual player - Gilje's systematic
destruction of image and time in a short clip of an ordinary street is particularly compelling.
Finish with the centerpiece: a long group improvisation. "Live in bruxelles" is a fascinating document of
the possibilities of applying ultramodern electronic instruments to video art. (Rob Geary)
