BOT : virtual networked lab
Initiated by Apo33, BOTs? make up a virtual community, in the continuation of the POULPE project, with a view to assemble a collection of entities in one location in order to diffuse their production to many more places. They stand for a new approach to digital phenomena : networks, multi motionless geolocation, interconnection of on-line produced or processed data, automation in the treatment of reality and, especially in the case of BOTs?, sites for experiments, always accessible, and from anywhere.
« A machine always depends on external elements in order to keep existing. Not only does it act as complement to the man who builds, activates or destroys it, but it asserts its difference from other machines – real or virtual, non-human, a proto-subjective diagramme. » (Guattari)
There is a machinic side to BOT, a call for inter-dependance, for relations and discussions between heterogenous elements, that has as much to do with the way reality is split and reproduces itself (as in a utopian language of an electronic diktat), as with the way we confront the otherness, through our body, our actions, our activity and our environment (urban or « natural »). BOTs? must be seen as long term constructions of a living and spreading machine network ; BOTs? spread from city to city, from countryside to mountains, they invade our living spaces, cupboards, offices, balconies…. Everybody can eventually participate in a BOT, create one and connect it to the community at large, and thus fertilize it, feed it, accompany its development, teach it, make it more autonomous, more or less social, possibly even humanise it ?
A Bot if an excrescence of reality. « There are so many stories on these man-machines ; man tends to multiply and machines stand halfway between us and immortality ». In BOTs?, there is a kind of game that involves time, infinity ; BOTs? play with places and our present, they catch and chew moments – points in time - and transform them ; and there is in them an essential quality that transcends matter… Via their various sensors (audio, data, video…), BOTs? collect information and they process it in different ways, by the BOT network (through on line transmission of digital data) and by the persons who participate in conceiving and programming them.
URL: http://www.apo33.org/dokapo/en/doku.php?id=bot
APO33 , as an interdisciplinary laboratory drawing on the artistic and technological fields, fosters various collective projects associating research, experimentation and social intervention.
In the continuity of the dynamics that has been opened by the free software movement, apo33 is structured as a modular space, initiating collaborative projects and creative processes, as well as exploring new artistic and creative modes of production and diffusion.
Through workshops, seminars, artistic creation, international meetings, on-line contributions, publications and interventions in public spaces, apo33 queries to-day’s transformations in artistic and cultural practices consequent to the current re-appropriation and usage of Communication and Information technologies. This questionment has driven apo33 to work at the edge of the cultural field, by exploring possible passages and crossings between artistic creation and other social fields or practices (political activism, social mediation or action, human, environmental, natural and applied sciences, urbanism, economy, ecology…).
Software:
sme server, vncserver, puredata & libs, jackd, icecast, ices...
