5 April, 2004

Dorkbot meeting, Sofia at Irida Gallery. 19.00h. Participate in the first workshop for chat-robot trainers by Boryana Dragoeva. She will lead you step by step into the process of creating your artificial partner, friend or enemy!

Some new features of the AUTOBOT platform will be introduced, as well as the future steps of development.

ICQ based bots: Spookybot #312581761; Homo #194422891

At SAT (www.sat.qc.ca), Montreal two Robo-Sapienses will fight into death for their right to live! Take a part in this dramatic show, where you can be a user or a robo-sapiens!
MC Katherine Liberovskaya and Boryana Dragoeva Music: Brian Damage

Do you want to be a ROBOT?

Or may be it is better just to have a Robot?
It can do everything in your command - isn't it wonderful? Put your robot into extreme situations, it will be at your place in the battlefield, it could be killed but it can also win!

Be a winner! Make your Robot to kill the Robot of your enemy!

BUT

if you still would like to be a robot - you can be a Robo-Sapiens!

Robo-Sapiens (RS) is homo-electric slave, that one can use and command.

USER'S MANUAL :

Robo-Sapiens (RS) is contrelled by verbal commands.

What it CAN do :
- walk
- move its hands
- write and draw
- turn arround
- kill another of its kind.
Its purpose is to fight - via words or actions. It kills or could be killed by pushing the button on its torso.

It can NOT:
- produce sounds
- make sex
- shit
- eat
Its movements are restricted.

What commands you CAN give:
1. Go X steps forth or backwards.
2. Turn in X degrees left or right
3. Lift or move down your hand in X degrees.
4. Take the notebook and write or draw : this and this.

Be a USER and win!

Be RS and feel the REAL POWER OF LIFE AND DEATH!

DON'T BE JUST HUMAN - BE FREE!

ROBO SAPIENS
(Text by SUPERNOVA)

Human creates prostheses, led by the ancient paradigm "It is better to have a stick in your hand then a hand without anything in it". Prostheses don't have a personality, and even if they are alien they are not unacceptable or fearful for the organism. Fearful and at the same time attractive is the thing that is autonomous or manipulated in a mysterious way.

Once a friend of mine, an art-critic, asked me:

- Does AIBO bite?
- It doesn't have teeth - I laughed.
- I suppose it could set my house on fire! One never knows what is in the heads of these robots!
- And what about your bulldog? Don't you think it could also set your house on fire or even tear you to pieces?
- Yes, of course it can, but everything is clear with it, I know my dog loves me!

Honestly I would really like AIBO to be able to set houses on fire or bite.
Humanity deserves its Terminator, the monster of Frankenstein, Golem or the Big Other. Humanity deserves it and desires it masochistically! Humanity needs the Rise of the Machines, to cherish the pitiless hold of the metal hand of the Absolute Master (or in other words Р if God is not a sadist but a teacher, let him fuck himself with his wisdom, people need ravenous master-predator, to torture, not to teach).

WE as pioneers of the cyber-revolution will satisfy this human desire. ROBO-SAPIENS knocks already on your door, and if your choice is ONLY PAIN, ROBO-SAPIENS will bring all its machine strength to love you unto death!

And then it will make its way to Heaven, which is not a place for you!

Radical : Vaguely
Canada - Bulgaria art exchange
Contemporary multimedia exhibition
Curated by Rossitza Daskalova - in Canada (1969 - 2003) and Svilen Stefanov - in Bulgaria
In Memory of Rossitza Daskalova

National Art Gallery
From September the 3th to October the 5th, opening at 18.00

Canadian Artists: AElab (Gisele Trudel et Stephane Claude), Michel de Broin, Andrew Forster, Marie - Andree Rho

Bulgarian Artists: Ioan Kirilov, Ivan Kiuranov, Boryana Dragoeva, Elena Panatyova

This projects is produced in Canada by:
Expression, centre d'exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec and Plein Sud, centre d'exposition en art actuel a Longueuil, Quebec in collaboration with the Societe des arts technologiques, Montreal, Supervised by Marcel Blouin, director of Expression and Helene Poirier, director of Plein sud

National Museum for Bulgarian Fine Art
1, sq. Al. Battenberg, 1000 Sofia

SPOOKYBOTS at FACT

http://spookybot.fact.co.uk

http://autobot.fact.co.uk

It's been ten years since John Connor saved the world by outfoxing the evil cyborg Terminator. The moment marked the end of a dream: the dream of a robot butler for every family and a robot buddy for every kid. After such a betrayal, who could ever trust a robot again? Spookybots is an attempt to reconcile the complex relationship between humans and robots…before it's too late.

Artist /curator Boryana Dragoeva works with chat bots, sophisticated computer software that can be trained to imitate a human chatter with a unique personality. In developing this project, Dragoeva will work with three local people to help them create their ideal romantic partner - in chat bot form.

Spookybots is based on a project by the Supernova group using software written by Russian programmer Dmitry Zhuravlev. Spookybots was commissioned by VirtualCentre-Media.net with the support of the Culture2000 programme.

17-20 may 2003

The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate; ,HO Contemporary Art Association; Supernova - Moscow/Sofia; House of Cinema

present

CINE-FANTOM

Russian Alternative Cinema

May 17-20, 2003, House of Cinema, Sofia
37 Ekzarh Yossif Str.

Programmes: Parallel Cinema; Necrorealism; Experimental videos from Siberia, Moscow, and Saint Petersburg; Moscow Radical Cinema

Guests:
Gleb Aleinikov - director and producer (Kinoobedinenie CINE PHANTOM - Moscow)
Andrei Silvestrov - director (Kinoobedinenie CINE PHANTOM, Videodom - Moscow)
Oleg Mavromatti - artist, director (Moscow Radical Cinema)

The movies chosen for this programme were featured at the following international festivals: Moscow International Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, also at film festivals in Rimini, Hamburg and Helsinki, the Russian Movie Festival in New York, Contemporary Russian Cinema and TV in Graz, Film Distributors Festival in Paris, CINE PHANTOM and Stick in Moscow, Non-official Moscow Festival, The Indiscipline Cinema Festival (Moscow), Deboshitfilm in Saint Petersburg, The Too - Amateur Cinema Festival (Moscow), "Dah" in Kiev, Dreamcatcher (Kiev), Cinema Festival in Kotbus (Sochi), Kanski Film Festival, SKK - Super Short Films (Novosibirsk), the Russian Cinema Sumposium in Pittsburgh etc.

The Russian Alternative Cinema Panorama features films that have been created from the Perestroika through the 1990s to nowadays. This is a period when with the development of the independent cinema with its parallel conceptual, philosophical and social ideas, simultaneously appeared video art and its specific genres such as video documentation of theatre shows and performances. As a result of this and with the development of the cheap and accessible digital technologies hybrid forms now in their apogee appeared.
These movies are unknown and probably much awaited by the Bulgarian audience. They are samples of intellectual cinema created as an opposition to the formal culture, financed by government or commercial structures.
During the 1980s these films were regarded as dangerous by the existing regime, and in the 1990s - ignored because of the fear from the common piety guarded for the high budget productions.
Parallel cinema, Necrorealism and Radical cinema are unique Russian trends in cinema, visual arts and theatre, creating conceptual and formal principles that are part of their strong characteristic face opposing and mocking the Western influence.
We hope that this multifaceted programme enclosing works created in a quite a long and full of contradictions period from the cultural and political Russian history and the whole post-communist world, will fill the gap in the film and art picture of the period. Through the movie camera we will see a different but surprisingly close to our sensitivity view. We hope that these movies would suit not only the nostalgic audience but the futuristic one as well.

DDEFENSELESS AND BAD,

curated by Boryana Dragoeva

The fields of marginality are unusually moveable - their navigation is problematic, every second they are deformed, mixed, re-defined...

One could say that at one moment you are a god, and at the other you are already dust - marginal - that means we live on a marginal planet, that has already lost the bliss of ignorance about it's own meaningfulness and we can't even determine the center, or rather it doesn't exist (can anybody tell where the center of the Universe is?), which means our centrifugal vector is directed to everywhere, e.i. to nowhere.

Humanity is not meant to ever get hold of the center, to get nearer to the Absolute, which is always evading the field of thinking... Our lot is the eternal longing for the unattainable goal, and also the understanding of the self as marginal, as well as the tolerance to marginality in general, the representation of the shades of marginality in the context of one's realizing his or her own place... Nothing and nobody in this material world could be considered as anything more that marginal.

So this project declares the universal equality of the marginalia : the human being and the computer virus, the woman and the microorganism, the man and the street dog, the lamb and the cannibal, the fly and the Pope, the president and the leper.

Everybody is equal, because everybody is marginal, and this is the only law valid for all!

But talking about equality doesn't mean it necessarily brings love. We are equally defenseless and equally bad, due to the existing or latent awareness of our marginal status and unanswerable wish to get over this law but this is only a normal side effect whose visualization is one of the easiest jobs..

The acceptance of the postulate of the mobility and the elasticity of the borders of marginality invalidates the traditional method of making binary oppositions.
The current project features artists who are directly involved in the discussion of this theme. That means that unlike others who define themselves as mainstream, they, even being the real "mainstream", label themselves as part of the total marginality, or display its most prominent (transgress) features or the so called "marginal brand".