Sonic Acts was founded in 1994. Over the years, it has established itself as a thematic festival with a strong focus on contemporary and historical developments at the intersections of art, technology, music and science. Each festival edition explores the chosen theme by means of an international conference, a wide range of concerts and performances, exhibitions and screenings, and embraces a broad spectrum of fields, practices and disciplines.

Sonic Acts has developed into an organisation for the research, development and production of works at the intersection of art, science and theory. It also commissions and co-produces new works, often in collaboration with international festivals, arts organisations, funders and other partners. Recent projects include the three-year art, research & commissioning project Dark Ecology, predominantly taking place in the Arctic region, and its globally touring programme Vertical Cinema. [1]

One of the most important collectives to emerge in the last decade, Paper Rad exploded at the edge of a cultural time zone—before the social web—when subculture was still palpable and also clearly becoming impossible to sustain. They emerged in the early ’00s within a community dedicated to DIY art practice that had strong roots in Providence, Rhode Island, as well as cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, and towns in Western Massachusetts became known for a cartoon cosmos that felt like a psychedelic, subversive response to American pop culture that was hatched out of a sincere and deep engagement to it. Their work began with ’zines and music, and eventually grew to encompass digital animation, videos, installations, and their website—paperrad.org—which became an increasingly central part of their work as it drew attention and followers. [1]

… the page was changed daily, continually layered with new content or reorganized spatially. Amid this constant development, there are a few distinguishing elements to the website that endured throughout its seven-year life. First, it carried over the DIY ethos and aesthetics from the culture from which it emerged—paperrad.org was not an easy-to-navigate online artist’s CV but existed more like a maze of found, remixed, and original content. Visitors were only able to track the identities of participating members through deep research, which lent the site a mysterious and open feel, as if Paper Rad could be as small as one person or as large as a thriving subculture. A second distinguishing factor was that Paper Rad created their own discreet world that blended influences from both analog and digital culture. In the Paper Rad cosmos, hacked and re-versioned My Little Ponies mingled with animated gifs and characters originally rendered in printed ’zines, like Tux Dog, which were digitized and made open source. This straddling of different pop cultural realms—television and the internet, mass media and amateur media—became a trademark of Paper Rad, as did a disregard for medium specificity. The Paper Rad website, presenting recycled cartoon characters like Gumby in Flash animation sagas, was evidence of the eroding boundaries between media we are so familiar with today. [1]

Paper Rad's visual projects often employ bright fluorescent palettes juxtaposed with primary colors to create a distinctive "lo-fi" look. It adopts a variety of techniques and elements to achieve this look, including pop art, collage, punk art, as well as imagery from popular culture. The multimedia projects incorporate MIDI audio, poor recordings of original sound effects and voices, pixelization, and other crude audio and visual components. Paper Rad recycled or appropriated obscure sounds and images from a variety of sources, including old cartoons, commercials, and late-night television. [2]

The collective–which consisted of siblings Jessica and Jacob Ciocci, Ben Jones, and other collaborators–cultivated a unique interest in exploring artistic strategies from other media, especially comics and zines, through web-based and multimedia works. Serially updated during the group’s most active period (2001-2008), paperrad.org was both an archive and a artwork, a riot of brightly colored compositions featuring graphics and a mazelike compilation of characters from otherwise overlooked aspects of ’70s and ’80s pop culture. [3]

Paper Rad Homepages 01-08 Collected by Rhizome

• Welcome to my Homey Page

Selected Webpages

• http://www.paperrad.org/newindex.html
• http://www.paperrad.org/january2007.html
• Puffy Smalls
• Comics Gallery
• http://www.paperrad.org/ben/mb.html

A Fata Morgana is an unusual and very complex form of mirage. It is usually seen in a narrow band right above the horizon. Fata Morgana mirages tremendously distort the object or objects which they are based on, such that the they often appear to be very unusual, and may even be transformed in such a way that it is completely unrecognizable. Fata Morgana can be seen on land or at sea, in polar regions or in deserts.[1]

Solarsteinn / Fata Morgana by Damon Zucconi is an application that removes the map from googlemap, leaving only the names of places. Like in the phenomena of optical illusions / mirage, Zucconi speculates on the actual existence of real locations:[1]

Seasoned explorers, vehemently insisting on what they had seen, set down mountains and islands on their charts where there was nothing but empty sky … Expeditions sent out later to verify these new lands sometimes saw the same fata morgana, further confusing the issue. Only by prolonging their arduous journeys, thereby observing a constant receding of the image, did they prove that the land was not there at all. [2]

From Art & Electronic Media:

In 1956, Philips engineers helped Nicolas Schöffer create CYSP I, which employed an “electronic brain” connected to sensors that enabled the human-scale kinetic sculpture to respond to changes in sound, light intensity and colour, and movement, including that of the audience. The whole sculpture moves on four rollers and its sixteen polychrome plates, which pivot and spin at different rates depending on external stimulus. It premiered in a performance with the Maurice Bejart dance company, interacting with the dancers on the roof of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse, accompanied by concrete music composed by Pierre Henry. This early responsive, robotic sculpture is perhaps the first work of art to explicitly incorporate the principles of cybernetics (CYSP is an acronym formed from the first two letters of the words cybernetic and spatiodynamic). It has had an extensive exhibition history and the sculpture survives in the artist’s estate.

From Leonardo Archive:

The whole is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. The plates are operated by small motors located under their axis. Photo-electric cells and a microphone built into the whole catch all the variations in the fields of color, light intensity and sound intensity. All these changes occasion reactions on the part of the sculpture consisting of combined travel and animation.

For example: it is excited by the color blue, which means that it moves forward, retreats or makes a quick turn, and makes its plates turn fast; it becomes calm with red, but at the same time it is excited by silence and calmed by noise. It is also excited in the dark and becomes calm en intense light.

Inasmuch as these phenomena are constantly variable, the reactions are likewise ever changing and unpredictable, which endows the mechanism with an almost organic life and sensitivity.

From Hackers of Resistance:

The Hackers of Resistance (HORs) is a queer transfeminist hacker collective of artists, activists, researchers, cyborgs, witches, and technologists, of color. Co-conspirators, we build tools to defend our community, educate people to be secure, to demand and make ourselves heard, to fight back and hack tools of oppression. H0Rh0use is 0ur imm3rsive mUltim3dia heisT.

From Ada Gender New Media & Technology:

Hackers of Resistance (HORs) is a hyperreal-multimedia-installation-performance-video-game reimagining feminist activism. It’s immersive theater, video installation, and game design—but mostly, it’s a universe. A power fantasy of the oppressed, we subvert traditionally-white-American-centered dystopian narratives by placing WoC hackers as superheroes willing to risk it all for solidarity (our vision of utopia). Our stylized hyperreality uses shimmery-neon aesthetics, socially-aware comedy, and DIY charm to address serious concerns like the fate of minorities in the hands of the current administration. Some of the projects the HORs are developing and tinkering with are cybersecurity labs, anti-facial recognition, counter-surveillance, social engineering, bio-hacking, dildo-hacking, and DIWO 3D printable abortion kits in collaboration with our incarcerated sister organization Marias Clandestinas.

From URME Surveillance:

The URME Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic demonstrates the latest in 3D printing technology. Made from a pigmented hard resin, this mask is both a 3D scan of artist Leo Selvaggio's face, as well as photo realistic rendering of his features, such as skin tone, texture and hair. This technology is made possible by the folks over at ThatsMyFace.com. Their products have been seen on CNN, MSNBC, Gizmodo, The Big Bang Theory, and now on URME Surveillance.

People have been hiding from surveillance since the begining of networked cameras. Unfortunately wearing a ski mask in public makes you a pretty easy target. its fairly easy to track on camera, and even if the camera doesn't see you, EVERYONE else will. "Why is that dude wearing a ski mask?" Etc, etc. In response, URME Surveillance has developed a state of the art identity replacement tech in the Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic. The basic gist is that rather than hide from cameras, simply give them a face other than your own to track without drawing attention to yourself in a crowd. In other words, when you're out in the world doing whatever you are doing, all your actions, which are being recorded are documented as the actions of someone other than yourself, freeing you from any threat of surveillance.

From Wikipedia:

VNS Matrix was an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt. Their work included installations, events, and posters distributed through the Internet, magazines, and billboards. Taking their point of departure in a sexualised and socially provocative relationship between women and technology the works subversively questioned discourses of domination and control in the expanding cyber space. They are credited as being amongst the first artists to use the term cyberfeminism to describe their practice.

From VNS Matrix:

The first of their works (a large scale billboard), inspired by such theorists as Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, featured their seminal text “A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century”. It was in this manifesto that the term “cyberfeminism” first appeared, and this work was widely distributed. In the manifesto, VNS Matrix stated that, “we are the modern cunt/positive anti reason/unbounded unleashed unforgiving” and that, “we are the virus of the new world disorder/rupturing the symbolic from within/saboteurs of big daddy mainframe/the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix/the VNS Matrix”. The group disbanded in 1997, but occasionally work together on selected projects and presentations. Their parting manifesto “Bitch Mutant Manifesto” gave the finger to all technopatriarchies and capitalist infospheres with the words “suck my code” amongst other blasphemous exhortations.

From transparencygrenade.com:

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. User names, hostnames, IP addresses, unencrypted email fragments, web pages, images and voice extracted from this data and then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

The volatility of information in networked, digital contexts frames a precedent for clamouring (and often unrealistic) attempts to contain it. This increasingly influences how we use networks and think about the right to information itself; today we see the fear of the leak actively exploited by law makers to afford organisations greater opacity and thus control..

This anxiety, this 'network insecurity', impacts not just upon the freedom of speech but the felt instinct to speak at all. It would now seem letting public know what's going on inside a publicly funded organisation is somehow to do 'wrong' -Bradley Manning a sacrificial lamb to that effect..

Meanwhile, civil servants and publicly-owned companies continue to make decisions behind guarded doors that impact the lives of many, often leaving us feeling powerless to effect change, both in and out of a democratic context.

The Transparency Grenade seeks to capture these important tensions in an iconic, hand-held package while simultaneously opening up a conversation about just how much implicit trust we place in network infrastructure; infrastructure that reaches ever more deeply into our lives.

From The Lab:

The Lab gives funding, time, and space to traditionally underrepresented artists and art forms. The organization intentionally focuses on supporting and amplifying the work of experimental artists who identify as African and African-American; Latinx; Asian and Asian-American; Arab and Arab-American; Indigenous American; Pacific Islander; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer; differently-abled; and female. We seek to reach visionary artists whose economic and cultural realities have been ignored for too long, to the impoverishment of us all. The Lab is, above all, a catalyst for artistic experimentation. As a site of ongoing iteration and indeterminacy, it seeks to transform alongside artistic practices in order to engage meaningfully with diverse communities in San Francisco's Mission District and beyond.

We believe it is important to constantly question our own organizational model and to deeply engage with new artistic practices and modes of thinking around the arts. The Lab embodies the desires of creative, critical, and compassionate individuals. We want audiences to be inspired by the way we work, not just what we produce.

To that end, The Lab is W.A.G.E. Certified. W.A.G.E. Certification is a program initiated and operated by working artists that publicly recognizes nonprofit arts organizations demonstrating a commitment to voluntarily paying artist fees that meet a minimum standard.