X-OP: OPEN SOUND LAB - Tengal, Marko Batista and Ana Pečar

X-OP: OPEN SOUND LAB
MMC Kibla, Monday, 2.11.2009, at 7 pm

TENGAL - media artist
SABAW - not-for-profit, artist-run cultural organization
MARKO BATISTA - mixed-media artist
ANA PEČAR - intermedia artist

A collaborative improvisational audio-video performance between Tengal (Manila), Marko Batista (Ljubljana), and Ana Pečar (Maribor) as they open up their creative space to the public as they negotiate their way around the creative process, strategies of collaboration, methods of performance and composition of electronic music and video transmission.

The event was part of X-OP project, that was hosting Tengal, a residential artist from Philippines.
X-OP - eXchange of art operators and producers is gradually growing network of artists, researchers, operators, producers and centers with the aim to establish European platform for creation of art and exchange. With its places, spaces and user accustomed technological infrastructure it fosters mobility of artists, theoreticians and executives. It is built to strengthen the pan-European collaboration, common production and interdisciplinary approach to art.
The X-OP project is multi-annual project, from 2008 to 2011, and is supported by European Commission – Program Culture and Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and Municipality of Maribor.

Tengal is a Manila-based interdisciplinary media artist, composer-musician, curator/producer, and filmmaker working with various mediums. He producers and organizes, as well as participates in various media art related projects in the Philippines and abroad. His work puts the focus on direct experience, risk-taking and personal interaction between artists and audience, and emphasizes the situational potential of live performance, the interplay of various media – sound and image, in particular – and candid exchange between sub-cultural and academic initiatives. He founded SABAW Media Art Kitchen – a not-for-profit, artist-run umbrella network and platform for all kinds of information and communication carried via modern electronic media with emphasis on the region of South East Asia.

Marko Batista is a Slovenian multimedia artist who began experimenting with digital sounds as a member of the Klon:Art:Resistance group. His sound projects mainly focus on dislocated sound records, technology, network systems, hybrid signals and digital processing. He often performs live sound synthetisation at various festivals and cooperates with various authors of experimental music. At the incentive of son:Da tandem, they performed the project 'Kompozicija za film / Composition for a film’ in the Gallery of Contemporary Art and the Pixxelpoint festival with participants Samo Salomon, Luka Prinčič, Miha Ciglar, Samo Pečar and Boris Šaletić.

Ana Pečar (1977) Artist on the fields of video, audiovisual space installation, intermedia performance, editing and live video processing. Active in groups: *So0gledi* (a new production unit, derived from various art territories: curating, producing, theory, criticism, journalism), *Digital commune** *( intermedia group of movement, video and sound),* **Byzantine Cadillac** *(audio – visual cabaret), *Trak 47** *(multimedia collective, performing on the fields of computer generated music, acoustic sounds, live painting, video and public provoking), *BBM group *(Berlin based group, specialized on prototype development of new media art devices and media art objects, such as robots, video-walls, sound and video streaming machines).

SABAW is a not-for-profit, artist-run cultural organization, and is organized as a platform for several real and virtual organizations that work within the vast territories of art and technology with emphasis on the region of South East Asia. SABAW is an umbrella consisting of several individuals, collectives, organizations, and communities whose number nor identity is fixed. In this sense, SABAW as an organization thrives on having open structures and favors decentralized networks so that sharing and connecting is more dynamic, diverse, and open as required. SABAW is organized as a distributed laboratory composed of people, projects, organizations, and partners. The network supports and sustains larger projects, keeping the adaptable and flexible smaller labs (which we like to call Kitchens) able to chop, simmer, and cook up creative experiments and initiatives.
and“SABAW” is directly translated as “soup” in Filipino. A soup is a formless, liquid-based mixture of various food ingredients that are set to boil, until flavor is extracted, spices are added, forming a delicious broth composed of elements that move freely among themselves but do not tend to separate. Similarly, SABAW takes its shape within a container that holds it, where its “ingredients” are open and move freely within interdependent and diverse spaces and create and design, research and educate, archive and disseminate transdisciplinary experiments in the domain of technological ar culture. These ingredients are broad and diverse, but some pervading themes are: the digital, the network, the environment, the algorithm.