Zagreb

CONCEPT
DJs / VJs / WJs

WJ-S is a software and a flexible public device for web performances allowing WJs (webjays, artists, curators, web addicts, web mutants…) to play live with online text,  sound and visual… WJs take  the  control  of  a multiscreens  environment  and  surf at distance in  different browser  windows simultaneously.  WJ-S  is  a  visible  and  collective  experience  of  the  surf.  WJ-S  is  an  immersive experience in the flux.

Following the steps of DJs and VJs, WJs (weejays, webjays, webjockeys …) directly draw their sources from the Web and mix the network flow in real time. The WJ-S/essions are organized indoors or outdoors in a public space, in front of an audience..

Taking out the network from the web

As it is often related to a solitary adventure led in a very intimate relationship with one’s machine, the virtual experience is seldom extended to another dimension of time-space. Projects involving network actors mostly take place in closed circles, within the network, and hardly ever outside, within a live performance environment.

The idea of the WJ-S project is to disrupt this tendency by offering a public surf where the feeling of being immerged in the flow and the pleasure of browsing are shifted to a live performance environment. Individual and collaborative online productions (in different geographical sites) become collective events (to which an audience is invited).

The web as a medium / the web a giant hard disk

WJ-s/essions make it possible to handle online contents (texts, sound, video, animations…) coming directly from the web, this giant hard disk.

The widened, shared and liberated opening of context creates a sensitive and lively situation that allows the full potential of scenography, writing, forms, combinations and practices to arise and flourish.  The contexts generated in this way develop mobile dynamic display and hybridization.

The multiscreens projection system is a reduced model of the internet, a metaphor of its codes and of the way information flows and appears on the network.

Different WJ-S productions

The WJ-S productions can take many forms : performances, demos, presentations of projects, , parties, workshops, conferences… The WJ-S productions are specifically related to the network’s activity, they can be works in progress, unique or original actions The themes revolve around transmission, communication, dialogue, sharing, open and wide distribution, personal experience, experiments, history, processes and issues of the network.

The artists   (the webjays)

According to the themes and the contexts of the events where the project is presented, the international media artists, famous or emergent, are selected in collaboration with the cultural operators

Webjays explore and experiment with the changing and fluctuating territories of the Internet. They subjectively articulate its intimate contours and zones. They play with an exacting choice of plastic, graphical, sensitive, political, social, aesthetic and narrative works they select on the realm of theweb… Webjays become flux stalkers offering things to see, hear, feel, observe and think about, through progressive and dynamic processes. Guided by their critical spirit and their own personal outlook, Webjays reveal the fragrance of the Web, defragment and confront worlds that make the invisible become visible.

Hundreds of artists and art students have already participated to the WJ-S project, among them : Isabelle Arvers, Sylvie Astiè, Jean-Baptiste Bayle, Lucille Calmel, Agnès de Cayeux, KRN, Olga Kisseleva, Anne Laforet, Jérôme Joy, Marika Dermineur, Jérôme Joy, Mia Makela, Antoine Schmitt, Janez Jansa, Igor Stromajer…

Workshop schedule

Day 1 – Monday, Oct 3rd, 2011
Presentation of the project with its theoretical, esthetic, artistic goals in the context of contemporary
creation.
Presentation of the wj/software and of its potential.
Teaching how to master the software.
Organization of the schedule of the week for the rehearsals

Day 2 – Tuesday 4th, 2011
Selection of the websites for the performance.
In order to look for the websites for the elaboration of the WJ-S playlist , it is advised that
the participants bring they own computer or that the organizer provides computers for the each
participants for the documentation.
Selection of the first websites for the playlist
Test of the websites in the wj/software
Test of the links in the WJ-S environment

Day 3 – Wednesday 5th, 2011
Rehearsals 30/60 minutes required for each participants per day.
Each participant, one by one, needs to practice in order to work on the theme, the concept and the
narration of the performance.
Each participant has to find a coherent way of playing with the web content, the rhythm, the
interaction, confrontation and combination of the sound, visual, textual sources.
Work on the sound and the spatialization.

Day 4 – Thursday 6th, 2011
Rehearsals

Day 5 – Friday 7th, 2011
Performance at 8 pm

Workshop will be held at the net.club mama, Preradovićeva 18, Zagreb.

Application for participation are accepted till Sept 23rd, 2011, via e-mail: csdvu@wowm.org.

Anne Roquigny (concept- coordination – production)
« Internet as a space of creation »

Anne Roquigny, media arts curator, has specialized during these last fifteen years in the production and curating of hybrid digital projects linked to sound, visual arts, flow, networks and to the Internet.. After devising and organising for 3 years (1995-1998) the cultural programs of events of the Web Bar, an internet café cum art gallery in Paris she joins in 1999 the CICV Pierre Schaeffer, one of the first French new media center where she was working as artistic coordinator and curator of  the international urban multimedia arts festivals Les Nuits savoureuses and Interferences     and then as co-director of the center with Pierre Bongiovanni. From 2002 to 2004, Anne Roquigny is in charge of the general co-ordination of the preliminary project for the future Digital Arts Center in Paris, dedicated to digital production and to electronic music, at la Gaité Lyrique.
Anne Roquigny is now developing the web performances project WJS  and co-coordinates with Peter Sinclair and Jérôme Joy the Locus Sonus research laboratory  specialized in audio art and it’s relation to space and networked audio systems.
In November 2009 Anne Roquigny launched WJ-SPOTS #1 “15 years of artistic creation on the internet”a special edition of MCD (Musiques et cultures digitales Magazine) in which artists, critics, thinkers, inventors, researchers, curators, organizers and producers of cultural events look back on 15 years of Internet history.

http://www.roquigny.info

http://www.locusonus.org

http://www.wj-s.org/WJ-SPOTS-1-15-years-of-internet

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