Sputnik Day Portugal : cosmo-sonic doom, orbital interceptions & mental astronautism 50 years after Sputnik 1
4-5-6 of October : Porto & Lisbon, Portugal
Mecanosphere & Semaphore
International Sputnik Day :
http://sputnik.iermielin.org
Mecanosphere /Semaphore : live for Sputnik Day at Auditório da Fundação de Serralves
Porto, 4 de Outubro (concerto) 22h
http://www.serralves.pt/actividades/detalhes.php?id=1222
Ewen Chardronnet : conference
Faculdade de Belas Artes
Porto, 4 de Outubro (conferência) 14h
Mecanosphere / Semaphore : live at Galeria ZDB
Lisboa, 5 de Outubro (concerto) 23h
http://www.zedosbois.org/zdbmuzique/index.htm
Ewen Chardronnet : conference + films program at Fábrica Braço de Prata
Lisboa 6 de Outubro (conferência) 17h
Overall Presentation : from outer-space future to inner-space loops and spectral remanence.
50 years after Sputnik 1 reached the geocentric orbit from its launchpad, we have to aknowledge that, strangely enough, the space era – at least in its classic characteristics – is already behind us.
The promises of a collective cosmonautism for all, as it was promoted by the fathers of the space era, Konstyantin Tsiolkovsky, Nikolai Fyodorov and the biocosmicists, was self-discarded almost at the very same moment of its technological faisability. Perhaps the epistemological and cultural rupture embodied by the happening of Sputnik 1 was not so much one of an access to space, but a profound reshape of time and space on earth : a collapsing of the coordinates of time and space onto each other through the manifestation of a radical yet apparently more modest vehicle than the spaceship : the geocentric satellite, a vehicle quietly hidden behind its applications, but the foremost vehicle of all, the inner-space intensificator, the vehicle of invisible flux of data.
Instead of taking off and furiously heading toward the outer-space where the now old-fashioned “historical future” was located (the eschatological or the theological future), the inhabitants of planet Earth woke up from the space Golden Age in a reversed world : a world of intensification of their inner-space in the context of a global gated landscape of motorway ramps and circulation loops, shopping centers, no-go zones, suburbs and parking lots glued together, mentally and socially, by prosthesis of a totally different kind : television, radio, gps, cell phones, personal computers, internet... The fleet of satellites are an orbital barrier and a reversed mirror of the surface of Earth. It creates a gated access to outer-space and acts like a spheric mirror. Earth itself becomes a multi-dimensional forclosed capsule, exponentially self-duplicating itself through its own transmissions, communications and surveillance. A place where reality is now a minor segment of its own accumulated, immaterial, electrical archivation. Inner-space 2 inner-space... self-transmissions in general.
In this context, Earth becomes something close to a crypt : an a-topic space of forclusion, where all dead things cannot die and all past things remains in the state of ghosts. Auto-loop and spectral remanence produced in real time. The critical exploration of such a space takes then the necessary shape of transhistory mythopoesis and psychogeography mapping, ghostbusting and necronautism, using the phantom vehicles of the ghost themselves : counter-surveillance tactics and inner-space escapism for the inner-city kids.
Portugal Sputnik Day : Mecanosphere & Semaphore / Ewen Chardronnet
Portugal once was the country of the navigators and cartographers who opened and mapped the first nautical routes. It would have been a symbolic mistake not to include it on the map of this world-wide nautical and cartographic event of the Sputnik day celebrations. The transonic and trans-national group Mecanosphere teams with Ewen Chardronnet's infosphere monitoring project “Semaphore”, for two live performances in Porto and Lisbon of rough cosmo-sonic mahyem and satellite interceptions. Ewen Chardronnet will also give two conferences to present his work as intermedia artist in the specific projects “Association of Autonomous Astronauts” and “Spectral Investigation Collective”. This 3 days marathon will be concluded by a night of documentary movie projections.
Mecanosphere
Mecanosphere is transnational a music/word project headquartered in Portugal. its morphing, rotative, line up include, amongst many others, french drummer & caveman electronics manipulator Benjamin Brejon, multi-specter machinist and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Uliel Hhy, polyglot portuguese vocalist Adolfo Luxuria Canibal, actor and mouthpiece Diogo Doria ( of Manoel de Oliveira fame) as well as a myriad of co-conspirators like contrabass player Henrique Fernandes or death metal drummer and electro-accoustic composer Gustavo Costa. In time, Mecanosphere has recorded and performed with such as Iggy & the Stooges tenor sax player Steve Mackay and are currently finishing their upcoming album with british vocalist Mark Stewart ( the maffia / On-U-sound).
Mecanosphere is a rough transonic and transgenetic machinery operating, on stage, with two drumkits, electric percussions, electric contrabass, old school electronic circuits and voices. Its music and performances recycle ruins of hip hop, spectral dub, violent chaos rock, briccolage electronica, collage art and free jazz blasts, with dystopic visions and cut ups from sci-fi novels to Khlebnikov, atmospherical reports to Samuel Butler and RKA or Nasa comunications.
Mecanosphere so far has released three albums : mecanosphere ( 2003), bailarina ( 2005) and limb shop ( 2006). their upcoming record, "membrane" will be out in 2008.
http://www.myspace.com/mecanosphere1
http://www.soopa.org
Semaphore / Ewen Chardronnet
Ewen Chardronnet is an intermedia artist and independant author who works and lives in Tours, France. His work investigate the social, cultural and environmental consequences of the usage of technologies. As a real-time visual and sound performer he has been collaborating with several projects, such as “XKV8”, “Signal Sever!”, “Semaphore”, “Radiant Heat” and the just released “Planetarium” concert DVD (Lowave, 2007) for electro-blues musicians Rodolphe Burger and Yves Dormoy. He's the project manager for the curatorial or experimental programs of the Tours based e-ngo Ellipse, wich contributes to different initiatives such as Makrolab, MIR (zero-g flight in Star City, Russia), Acoustic Space Lab, World-Information.Org, Spectral Investigations Collective, The Laboratory Planet. Widely published, he's working now on a new book on dissemination and the future of war dissuasion in the rise of convergent technologies. He has published "Quitter la Gravité" (Leaving Gravity), an anthology on the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA, 2001, Quitter la Gravité. Paris, France, Editions de L'Eclat) and has received in 2003 the Leonardo New Horizons Award together with the Acoustic Space Lab network.
http://www.myownspace.fr/484
http://semaphore.blogs.com
http://e-ngo.org
