Piksel - www.piksel.no is an annual event for artists and developers working with
free/libre and open source audiovisual software and art. Part workshop, part
festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, by the Bergen Centre for
Electronic Arts (BEK) and involves participants from more than a dozen
countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects,
doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics
of open source.

The development, and therefore use, of digital technology today is mainly
controlled by multinational corporations. Despite the prospects of technology
expanding the means of artistic expression, the commercial demands of the
software industries severely limit them instead. Piksel is focusing on the
open source movement as a strategy for regaining artistic control of the
technology, but also a means to bring attention to the close connections
between art, politics, technology and economy.

The first Piksel event was arranged in november 2003, and gathered around 30
artists/developers from all parts of the world. It consisted of
artistic/technical presentations, coding workshops and live performances. All
activities were documented in a daily blog: http://www.piksel.no/log.html

One of the results from the event was the initiation of the Piksel Video
Framework for 'interoperability between various free software applications
dealing with video manipulation techniques' - http://www.piksel.org