Pixxelpoint 2003: The Pixel City

[anna balint]

The Pixel City
Pixxelpoint 2003 - Fourth Edition 
international computer art festival
nova gorica, slovenia, 28 nov. - 5 dec. 2003

Unlike in previous years when the festival was restricted to the call for 
application and the jury assessment, this year?s event will be multilayered and 
intermedia as far as structure is concerned. 

Besides the usual international call for application, the organizers and 
selectors will invite some artists whose work is representative for the 
festival's topic. 

The festival will include a symposium on the given topic, intended to provide 
the participants and the general public with an insight into the accompanying 
discourses and theories of computer graphics and urbanization of the 
cyberspace. The symposium, which will take place from Friday to Sunday, will 
give us the opportunity to extend our knowledge on the specific aspects of 
digital spaces since no discourse has been developed on this topic yet. 

Some of the most interesting lecturers will be asked to run workshops on 
various topics. The workshops will take place during the day in the exhibition 
room, while at night concerts will be organized. The musicians performing 
create music that is based on the visualization of pixel cities or which sound 
quality is founded on graphic hardware. 


The Pixel City
Curator: Jurij Krpan

With each next generation of hardware when the computer performance usually 
doubles, the ability to visualize faces us with new challenges. Undoubtedly, 
both hardware and computer screens face the biggest challenge when it comes to 
3D visualizing, either because three dimensions must be represented on a 2D 
surface or because of the animation or digital film scripts. Until we see 
holograms arise in front of us, the 2D surface of paper, film/video projections 
or sreens remain the only areas for space representation which took shape with 
the invention of painter's perspective. In its attempt to present to our mind a 
spatial experience only in two dimensions, representation is always a deception 
of the sight with regard to either spatial forms, architectures or city spaces 
and non-spaces. 

Yet even the latest tehnological innovations do not neglect the essential rules 
and criteria which have become established with a view of human being's ability 
to watch and perceive. Primitive drawings which functioned like markers of 
space were followed by dosproportionate representations of cities on icons, 
spatial representations and planning which have, in turn, been complemented by 
plane geometries and topographies of cities and territories, thus falling 
predominantly in the domain of painter?s abstractions. But it was quatrocento 
that saw the invention of perspective, as a result of the need to represent the 
city space. However, it was not before the intervention of the computer that 
the representation of architecture and cities gained new impetus and through 
rendering spaces and objects entered the field of animation and eventually film 
which shows us long-gone historical places and not-yet-seen futuristic 
representations. 

Arguably, with the development of electronic media and tools, the ability to 
render 2D presentations of 3D objects and spaces has long ago ceased beguiling 
with abstractions, which were built on construction and colour machines 
(perspectives) for the adjustment of eyesight, thus approaching hyper-realistic 
spatial experiences in, for example, digital film scripts. 

Yet realistic representations are only one of the possible interpretations of 
space. There is another spatial category which struggles to symbolize the 
unspatial internet. Here, connectivity and bandwidth are on the same level, 
similarly as with geometry where the category of the coordinate system 
functions as the basis for spatial representation. If internet represents a 
perfect tool for visualizing and mapping, allowing us to create virtual cities 
and within them real communes, manipulations with space provide us with a 
unique oportunity - by means of the digital interface the Internet allows us to 
act in real space or in the lives of real people. 

In this way the gap between virtual and real spaces is closing, causing the 
real space to search for new standards in representing the space. Projects 
based on the computer-games culture require more and more sophisticated 
interfaces to move around in virtual spaces while projects that are founded on 
scientific and techological paradigms require accurate and responsive 
interfaces since human beings? lives depend upon them. The virtual and the 
video-produced image has become palpable and real through the responsiveness of 
digital fingers and movements of our bodies. VR helmets, VR gloves and other 
cyber extensions provide us with a means to exist in a world which has lost its 
status of a fake, spare and second-rate space, since it provides us with an 
adequate experience of the spatial dimension. In some developed systems a 
specific kind of moving is developed which is not a replacement as it arises 
from the specificity of numerical spaces. Virtual reality is slowly losing its 
abstractness that functioned as the poetics of reading metaphors as reading a 
fake reality, thus positioning itself on par with the reality as a legitimate, 
parallel reality. 

With strategies of rendering on 2D surfaces the possibility which presupposes a 
third dimension on our side of the paper or screen is often neglected. What we 
have in mind here is especially 2D presentations that are responsive or even 
interactive with the user or visitor. The 2D space becomes a groundfloor upon 
which we move and cause it to change, or alternatively, the changes on the 2D 
groundfloor affects our perception. The immersion into the virtual world of 
numerical spaces is not necessarily an escape from reality since by means of 
interfaces, we can experience virtual spaces in the same way as we experience 
real places. 

PixxelCity has become a synonym for the most complex forms of spatial dimension 
in which we find filled spaces as well as emptiness between them, spaces which 
are inhabited and equipped with urban fixtures, both real and imaginary, and in 
which we can move and position 3D objects. This can be either an archaic or a 
futuristic space which constantly changes since it is inhabited with life. 

Jurij Krpan

In 1994 Jurij Krpan, who holds a degree in architecture, took over the Gallery 
Kapelica which then operated under the auspices of ?OU (the Students 
Organization in Ljubljana). In eight years, he brought the gallery into focus 
of contemporary artistic production and presentation in both Ljubljana and 
Slovenia. It comes as no surprise that in 1997 the Slovene weekly Mladina 
listed Krpan among the hundred Slovenes whose work marked the first five years 
of Slovenia's independence. The programme of the gallery includes projects from 
the fields of new media, artistic representations of gallery space and extreme 
body experiments. It is the latter that placed the Gallery Kapelica in the 
limelight of the cultural scene, establishing thus a specific scene and public. 


You are welcome to join the festival with your artworks. Every work must be 
accompanied with an entry form (one entry form per work) available at 
http://www.pixxelpoint.org. Works submitted without entry forms will not be 
accepted. Joining is free of charge therefore the selection of received works 
will be made.
All needed information about technical requirements and conditions are 
available on the forms. For any additional info please contact us. 



THE SELECTION CRITERIA

At Pixxelpoint 2003 we want to build digital spaces and lives within them. 
PixelCity is intended as a selection of prints, projections, animations, 
instalations of interactive and responsive systems, sounds etc., which are made 
of or for digital architecture.We wish to build cities of digital material with 
digital (avatars) or even human inhabitants which would be accessible on the 
Internet not only as a collection of archival paintings but also as an 
experimentation of the possibilities offered by the digital material today and 
those that ? given the speed of computer capacities development ? are 
anticipated for the future. 

The projects will not be evaluated between ganres but rather within each genre 
and software framework separately. Yet each entry will have to meet the basic 
quality of technical relevance and visual creativity. 

In assessing the works presented the following criteria will be applied: 

According to the artistic quality:
-connection of the aesthetics to the topic represented,
-structuring,
-usage of adopted software,
-graphic creativity,
-high quality and originality of end-product. 

According to interaction and responsiveness:
-effect in the real world,
-role of the user,
-responsibility implied by the interaction,
-artisic quality of the presentation or installation. 

According to the dynamics:
-concept's inventiveness,
-poetics of animation,
-originality of usage of the adopted software. 

According to the sound quality:
-spatial dimension of the sound (soundscape),
-graphic basis,
-technical and contents inventions,
-contemporariness. 

According to its futuristic aspect:
-connection to actually anticipated opportunities,
-inventiveness of the anticipation of a futuristic project,
-structuring of a futuristic project. 

According to practical applications:
-artistic originality,
-authenticity of the representation,
-dynamics of representation and animation,
-complexity of the project presented. 

Pixxelpoint 2003, Kulturni dom Nova Gorica
Bevkov trg 4
SI 5000 Nova Gorica
Slovenia 

e-mail: info at pixxelpoint.org
fax: +386 5 335 40 20 
http://www.pixxelpoint.org