Transmediale and Moving Forest

THIS WEEK IN BERLIN, THERE IS AN INTERESTING CONFERENCE GOING ON. Much of it is streamed on the web. Go to http://www.transmediale.de/site/ This is the conference "manifesto": Long before a clandestine military-academic collaboration created the 1960's ARPANET the speculative mechanisms of conspiracy theories have fueled global events. Much like our yearnings for desire, mystery and unpredictability, conspiracy is a human condition used to decipher the way in which we read an increasingly chaotic world of manipulated disinformation. The Internet and its associated Web 2.0 counterpart have begun to move beyond communal and user driven realms of information exchange towards mechanisms fuelling and fanning all forms of popular speculation. They are indicative of a loss of control and a growing sense of surrender to perceived hidden forces and secret societies where mythologies of world domination, corporate control and government induced fear fetishism emerge. Examining the means with which we use and understand contemporary networks, be they digital or interpersonal, the conference will discuss the notions behind conspiratorial acts, structures and speculation, and consider the mechanisms therein as new forms of cultural, technological or political strategy.

Shulea Cheang, who was one of the founding members of Paper Tiger, is doing an even in conjunction with the conference called the Moving Forest. This is how Phil Niblock wrote about it: MOVING FOREST a durational sonica with citywide wifi transmission, February 1, 11:00 - 23:00 a proposal by Shu Lea Cheang + Martin Howse Moving Forest is a 12 hour 5 act sonic performance to be intervened by an expandable citywide operatic manoeuver with public wifi and mobile technology. Derived from Kurosawa's film version of Macbeth, Spider Web Castle (aka Throne of Blood, 1957), Moving Forest renders the film's final sequences (12 minutes in length) into a 12 hour sonica of grand scale.
Moving Forest presented by AKA THE CASTLE---AKA the castle is a temporal performance troop brought together to realize the 12 hour extravangaza Moving Forest. Conceived by Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Howse, AKA the castle pushes the network performance genre by gathering soundists, silk threaders, writers, visual artists, software artists, wifi fielders for a durational performance fueled with remorse, betrayal and a grand act of insurgency from people/s front. The players: Castle (HKW):; omen [Mattin]; remorse [Leif Elggren] - concept/setup; betrayal [Kaffe Matthews]; overthrow [Joachim Montessuis] - details; return [Phill Niblock with Natalia Pschenitschnikova], and many others.

It is available at: http://richair.waag.org/movingforest/ but you have to have ogg software to get it. You can download ogg software at: http://www.nouturn.com/oggdrop/download.php