May 18-19: 2 days with a car out of Tel Aviv. On the move. Once again, as last time: Cows don't moo. Desert, Valleys, small villages. Sound huntings at bee hives, stung. Late allergic reactions. Barely sleep on car seats. Storms. Totally self-constraint to work on. The Dead Sea. Doctor experience in Jericho. Jerusalem. 1050m of height difference. Huge swollen head, sting reactions getting worse every minute. Sound Huntings at the market. Via Dolorosa. Muezzins rooftops recordings. Google Maps route coming soon. Intense impressions, artistic reflections to follow.

DAY 1: May 14 2009. Surprise, surprise. Stolen photo equipment. Half-empty Peli case at the airport of Tel Aviv.
DAY 2: Camera (Rental) Hunting vs. Sound Hunting. Tel Aviv gallery walk, MoBY Factory artists meeting. Sabbath. Nightly city/beach walk for leadoff field recordings.
DAY 3: Sound editings, software preparations, drafts
DAY 4: Successful equipment rental, MoBY meetings, Sound Huntings in the industrial area of Bat Yam.
DAY 5-6: Sound Huntings across Israel. See separate blog entry for details.
DAY 7: Emergency Room (Sourasky Ichilov Medical Center), Recordings, Editings, Concept, Development

Several other important participations this month: A special video art presentation took place in the Historic Centre of Kalamata in an open space between Agii Apostoli and Amfeia's square in the frame of the "Art Walks" exhibition on May 2nd.

New site-specific SOUND NOMADS works will arise for MoBY's Factory (by an invitation of the Museums of Bat Yam) in Israel May 14-29. First time Guest Nomad: Mangara aka Matthias Cermak from Vienna/A. Various Blog entries will accompany the process. Stay tuned.

A SOUND NOMADS installation is also part of this year's festival edition of Re-New in Copenhagen/DK. Re-New 2009 presents during May 18-22 in Copenhagen a wide selection of the newest ground-breaking works in digital music, video, installations, performative and distributed/ collaborative art.
Works in all genres and categories in multimedia related art forms are included, where digital technologies are an unseparable part: those works that challenge or expand the current vocabulary and practice of digital creation, performance, and consumption.

The Takeaway Festival tries to identify the changing interfaces between technology and practice. It celebrates a D-I-Y praxis that is infusing the creative landscape and challenging the status quo of top down software and proprietary licensing. The platform wants to encourage artists who are ground breaking and original, who find interesting solutions for old problems and demonstrate new relationships between technology and other media. SOUND NOMADS is part of the exhibition at the Dana Centre, Science Museum, London. May 19-30.

A Canadian screening of Lantern Dogs is scheduled for this year's Dérapage 9 at the Centre de Design de l'UQAM on Thu, Apr 23 2009. Dérapage Teaser on Vimeo

The SOUND NOMADS project will be part of this first-of-its-kind event in Las Vegas, USA. Two weeks of Performances and Video Art of a total of 19 artists/artist groups at multiple locations. SOUND NOMADS works are on view at the Contemporary Arts Center Las Vegas in an exhibition in conjunction with works from artist Tony Schwenson April 12-17. The whole 'Off the Strip' event will run from April 2-17 in the context of a city culturally symbolic and conceptually loaded on so many levels.

This Thursday, March 12 at 9PM, 'Black Balloons' will be presented at the European Video Art Highlight Screening Night at the Lagari in Berlin.

Another screening is taking place at the AB Project Galleries/HOF 06 in Berlin on Wed, March 18 at 7PM next week. 'What the Fuck' as part of the Wednesday's Child Screening Video Kills.

The Transfera Video Art # 30, that will broadcast this Friday 30 and Wednesday 4 at 21:00 PM from Madrid by Canal Autor (Orange TV, Euskaltel), offers a program on Video Reenactments, with the works of GER GER, JUANJO FERNANDEZ, FELECIA CARLISLE, SIRO. Transfera is an independent television program produced by Transfera Media Arts under the artistic direction of Iury Lech.

And on February 14, the exhibition 'Unauthorized - Art Without Permission' will open its doors until March 7 2009 at the Gallery RFD, USA. The SOUND NOMADS piece 'What the Fuck' has been honored the Best of Show award.

JAN 07	Art Performance: 'French Fries'
Location	Frozen Lake, Tiergarten, Berlin, GERMANY
Timeframe	1:00-4:00 PM [4h] | 3:57 min. Video Runtime
Preparation	JAN 5-7. sound recordings in the curator's kitchen, composings, sensor callibrations, software development/adjustments
Challenges	impact of low temperatures on the equipment, software issues
Guest Nomad	LAN Hungh | Assistent Dominik Erdmann

The work is on display at the Gallery-33 in Berlin from Jan 10-31.

A metaphorical and fragmentary examination of the relationship 'artist and curator'. On the one hand the feeding of the curator through the artist with demanded works providing the best fair market value. On the other hand the lactation/infiltration of the artist through the curator with black, tainted milk of the art market. A frozen lake, two freezing figures, a curator, who is cooking french fries in his kitchen while singing and giggling. A comparison with the meal, which appeals to the masses, the curator himself detests and even so deals with it just because of the success

The performance produced for the 'T.A.O.M.A.C. vol.2' exhibition not only involves the curator in respect of content but also as means and as a performance actor/guest nomad. The art of manipulating a curator. The working method of SOUND NOMADS with spontaneous, site-specific forms of expression was maintained.

Technology: Sounds get triggered by multiple light sensors attached to the baby bottle and the lips. In addition, the sum of all sensor states influences the continuous soundscape of the playground.

This mashup is part of the open research section on gerger.com. It collects international art calls and opportunities all automatically to offer a daily updated overview and resource pool. If you are an artist, check it out and let me know what you think. One page, two view modes.

Next screenings: Nov 30 2008 -> Detour, Third International Video Festival, Cairo/Egypt. Dec 10 2008 -> Alternative Film/Video 2008, International festival for video art, Belgrade/Serbia. Update: SN works will be also part of the exhibition 'Soundscapes of Memory' in the Big gallery of SCCC, curated by Aleksandra Sekulic.

Hardware: Two thumbs up
Cameras, phones, music players ... gadgets merge all the time, mostly with quantity valued over quality. But this new photography and video convergence is for real, and from my own point of view as an artist working in this wide range of media and techniques the revolution can't arrive soon enough. I'm waiting for this for years. Many upcoming digital SLRs will have outstanding video capabilities and the line between the still cameras an their video counterpart was first blurred with the September announcement of the EOS 5D Mark II which is capable of capturing 1080p-quality clips. RED is supposed to announce its first DSLR on November 13 as well, although the company is more well-known for its high-quality digital cinema cameras.

Software: Two thumbs down
While it looks promising for the merge of DSLR, HD, and film cameras, DAM (Digital Asset Management) software is falling behind. There is no comprehensive solution available with extensive support for not only photography, but also video, audio, graphics, fonts and other types of digital media or documents. Combining a good cataloging/archival strategy with a production/post production workflow for photography, video and audio is a pain in the ass. Full Metadata support, tagging, stacks, and version management for any filetype should actually be built right into the operating system, but will this ever happen? Adobe Bridge lacks a database, Lightroom and Aperture both have a very limited support of filetypes (no video at all), Expression Media's future is uncertain, iMatch is good for images but lacks preview/metadata support for other media types and doesn't offer workspaces or RAW workflows. The list goes on.

Web: New developments arise
With HTML 5 replacing both HTML 4 and XHTML, audio and video tags allow to directly embed a video or sound file in a webpage. This makes embedding of video and audio finally(!) equal to images.
Xiph.Org therefore has announced Theora full public release 1.0 on November 3. Theora is a free and open video compression format which can be used to distribute film and video online and on disc without the licensing and royalty fees or vendor lock-in associated with other formats. As a platform for rich internet applications, HTML 5 and AJAX compete with Adobe Flash, Flex, and Silverlight. Hopefully, video on the Web will finally follow open standards.

Flash for accurate color representation
Interestingly enough, Adobe Flash Player 10 now employs color management to deliver web applications with the most accurate color possible. Support for color management in Web browsers is rare (only Safari supports it by default, and the IE team is apparently missing in action). Images display differently in different browsers. Flash Player, on the other hand, is consistent, reliable, and now offers basic color management support. "stage.colorCorrection = ColorCorrection.ON;" in the Script window will do the job. Using this ActionScript enables an sRGB --> monitor color transform in the Flash Player. You should convert image files to the sRGB color space in Photoshop before publishing to Flash.

Various SN video works were selected for participating in the following festivals this October: Streaming Festival, The Hague/NL, 'HollyWould', 11th Festival of New Media Arts, Los Angeles/USA, and CologneOFF IV, Museum of Contemporary Art (MACZUL), Maracaibo/Venezuela.

After 12 years of this web presence's existence it's about time for this Redesign #5 - there you go! Over the next months the content and design will be further refined and some new features added. The relaunch is again based on the self-developed o0oo CMS which is released in version 5 at the same time - newly structured and for the most part completely rewritten over the last 12 months.

Event Note: The SOUND NOMADS performance/video work 'Luxor 22.145' is scheduled to be screened at the Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Nov 30, 2007. 9.30 PM, Entrepôt. An international programming between new cinema and contemporary art. This edition will take place from November 22 to December 1, notably at the Centre Pompidou, at the movie theater Entrepôt and at the national museum of Jeu de Paume.

The Web 2.0 Expo Berlin conference was held November 5-8, presented by O'Reilly Media and CMP. The conference -for the first time in Germany - was quite interesting, the expo part instead was lousy.

This month gerger.com has successfully moved to a new server. All remaining details of the latest SOUND NOMADS performance in France and sound huntings in Barcelona earlier this month have been published. A picture of the golden rat award which has arrived in Berlin some days ago is still pending ;)

Brilliant field recordings in the capital of Catalonia.

AUG 03	Art Performance: 'Bale'
Location	Fields, Puyvalador, FRANCE
Timeframe	3:00-6:00 PM [3h] | ??:00 min. Video Runtime
Preparation	JUL 9, AUG 4-5. wurstelprater/haunted house recordings, composings, sensor constructions/callibrations, software development/adjustments
Guest Nomad	Jakob Kort

Video Clip: Coming soon!

Unschuld, Leere und Stille abgelegener Landschaften. Äußerer Schein weicht innerer Qual. Bündel des Elends - spielerisch, mit Leichtigkeit. Willkommen Unheil im süßen Schleier.

Technik: Hauptsächlich Licht- und Distanzsensoren lassen Strohballen in diesem in den Pyrénées-Orientales gelegenen SpielFELD zu Klanginstrumenten werden. Samples, Klänge, Tonspuren werden getriggert und in Echtzeit modifiziert sowie rhythmisiert.