20081120 session#04

In session 04 Bitnik.org gave a brilliant presentation about their general philosophy summarized in the slogan "A hack a day." As an example, they showed images and gave a detailed description of their Opera Calling (Arias for All) presented in 2007, at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich. In this project, they placed "bugs" made with old cellphones inside the Zürich Opera House. This phones were connected to an application fed with the whole city's white pages. During the opera concerts, the computer would call a random number in the telephone directory and connect it "live" with the phone-bugs transmitting from the opera house. This way, everybody could enjoy the performance without having to pay the costly tickets, and without having to leave their homes. For more info about "Opera Calling" see: http://www.opera-calling.com/about

The second part of the day's session was practical. Bitnik handed us all a small manual entitled "Your own private TV Staion Making P2P Television". The manual itself was a nicely design, "do it yourself" booklet of which I'm including a picture. We followed the steps and before lunch time had our own TV station running. I think that we should do this at the JvE as soon as possible. We could even have a live journal for the opening week!

The day ended with an overview of how to use Cinelerra:"The community developed version of this non-linear video editor." Documentation in several languages available here: cinelerra.org
We had some technical problems, so we didn't get to see it running 100%.

That night, at a bookstore, Bitnik set up the TV station at the Quarantaine bookshop in Ixelles neighborhood and transmitted local filmmaker's works for all the "barrio".