Atelier Nord is a project base for unstable art forms, such as electronic and new media art. The aim is to create better conditions for these art forms and to maintain a critical reflection in relation to them. In this spirit, “INTERFACE and SOCIETY” investigates artistic strategies and practices which deal with and build upon the transformation of our everyday life through information technology and electronic interfaces.

From 2003-2005, a series of workshops and lectures under the title “Making Sense” took place at Atelier Nord. In focus was the human machine interface as a vital component of the art forms in question. More than a hundred international artists and practitioners took part in the 10 workshops. The aim of these workshops was to introduce technical skills in form of electronic knowledge and programming to interested artists. The general concern was how to sense and control the physical world with computers and how to manipulate electronic media via the physical world. The workshops and additional consulting are reflected in numerous art works produced and exhibited nationally and internationally.

After two years of a more technical and educational focus, INTERFACE and SOCIETY now has a different agenda. The interface is still the point of origin but in the centre of attention is its effect on our everyday life, our society, and the formation of artistic practices and strategies regarding this effect.

An interface is a boundary across which two independent systems meet, act and communicate with each other. The systems in our case are the physical world and the digital realm. In our everyday life we continuously make use of these interfaces. The computer, the mobile phone or the mp3 player, these are all pieces of equipment to serve our need of gaining access to the digital part of our life. This equipment is personal and quite visible when we put it into action. Because of mobile phones, bubbles of temporarily private space float through the public and turn the surrounding people into involuntary witnesses of noisy conversations and urban nomads flock around zones of free wireless internet access. This is the current state. Still everything seems to be in its place and manageable from a personal perspective.

But our interface society is in transition. Marc Weiser from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was among the first to notice and promote the idea of what he called ubiquitous computing: “Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.” (Weiser, 1996). Certain key technologies for this transition are arriving and are implemented, for example RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and its use in the new E-Passports or warehouse facilities. The application and combination of these ubiquitous technologies will result in a variety of consequences in how we live our lives and will hold a lot of risks when introduced unprepared.

This is the techno/social background on which INTERFACE and SOCIETY enfolds its activities, all concerned with the artistic perspectives regarding to the introduced background. INTERFACE and SOCIETY has offered four workshops, and there will be both a conference and an art exhibition. For the exhibition at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, three new artworks by local artists will be produced, namely “ABA Logic” by ABA (Kalle Grude, Jan Løchstøer), “Trolley Singers” by Silver (represented in this occasion by Petr Svarovsky), and the “Flow of Things” by Marius Watz. These artworks will be accompanied by four additional pieces by international Artists like Norene Leddy with her “Aphrodite Project”.
The four topics which were chosen for the workshops continuously contribute to the question of how technology is shaping our everyday life and how Media Art can reveal political and social processes brought on by technology: Software as Material, Art/Fashion/Technology, Art in Public Space and Mobile Art. Around fifty artists, theorists, designers and practitioners took part in four weeks of discussions and experimentations.

The conference at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter brings together an international selection of designers, writers, art historians, artists, programmers, economists and engineers. In presentations, panels and discussions, they will investigate artistic strategies and practices which deal with and build upon the transformation of our everyday life through information technology and electronic interfaces. Among the lecturers will be author and visionary Bruce Sterling, designer Adam Greenfield, art historian Susanne Jachko, and artist Laura Beloff. The conference will set out with a survey of the present and a glance into the close future of interfaces and ubiquitous computing, dealing with ideas of sustainability and ethics. It will investigate why and how technology and its social and political implications is a natural environment for artists, and will introduce respective artistic disciplines.

Erich Berger, October 2006