The Jazz Rooms, Ship Street, Brighton
Bitsplitters @ Blip

Visual and sonic laptop artists, media bands, singers and choreographers play a mixed-bag of electronic-derived arts from improvised Game Boy electronica, to abstract audio-visual pop-scapes. MP3s, Quicktime video samples and visual stills are downloadable at www.bitsplitters.org.

As the laptop has become cheaper and more powerful, portable real time digital performance has become commonplace in all areas of arts and entertainment. It is a vibrant but still undefined territory in which to create. From the illegal raves of subculture computer jockeys to research scientists creating generative algorithms that mimic life itself, laptops have immense potential as tools of discovery and as means of expression for artists, scientists and the general public.

The portability of the laptop liberates the creator from the laboratory or the studio; wireless connections to the Internet are possible while in Starbucks, parks or on the beach. Is this the beginning of a symbiotic or a prosthetic relationship?

Sound
Errorsmith (Berlin)
Errorsmith is deeply rooted in club orientated electronic music and the club is an important reference in both his solo and collaborative work. Nevertheless his work is also very much based on research into new forms of digital sound synthesis. The club references are reduced to the core elements, while the sound develops mainly through advanced realtime manipulations. Errorsmith builds his own instruments using a modular software synthesizer. In fact building and improving the instrument while developing a musical piece is the main part of music making. Not positioning itself in a specific genre, Errorsmith's music has its own unique characteristics and is located somewhere in the no man’s land between so called serious and popular music.

ZeroPing - a collaboration between k2 and Sonicvariable (NY, Tokyo)
ZeroPing is a new collaborative effort of Konrad Kinard and Chun Lee. They have performed in Paris at La Nuit De La Coalition II, Waveswarms 1 and 2, 291Gallery, the Foundry and other venues. Musically ZeroPing explores the terrain between sonic soundscapes and song, exploring the stylistic space between the club and the concert hall.

Konrad Kinard (K2) is previously a member of Slash Orchestra (NYC) and is active in the Downtown music and performance scene in New York. A Promoter of new music and electronic performance in Berlin (Sexiland) and in London (The Butterfly Lounge), he is presently alive in London preparing media works. Konrad is interested in the language of performance and is currently working to incorporate gesture recognition as a control device for integrated sound and visual shows.

Sonicvariable is Chun Lee of Taipei and London. Originally a classically trained musician on violin and piano, he is now still a musician/composer but in the domain of computer algorithms and electronics. He works with Max/Msp in conjunction with C to create his generative audio/visual systems. He is also currently researching generative automatism as a compositional method in sonic arts.

Light - live and installations
AÏ-HZ (Paris)
AÏ-HZ is a visual artist originally from Paris. He works on video graphic imagery between poetic noise and pop electronic vision and creates environmental noisy dreams and ambient multi-layered cinematic beauty. He performs on a laptop video sequencing machine. French television music composers from the 7O’s inspire the analogical effects in his works.

Eve Hurford (Berlin)
Eve Hurford originally trained as an architect and began transforming spaces in 1995 in the Berlin club scene with slide projections: dazzling and thought-provoking visual environments, loaded with entertainment and irony. Since then she has produced custom slide and video installations for clients ranging from Love Parade to the Berliner Philharmoniker, designing visuals for both the walls of the Bundeskanzleramt and for illegal venues. Recent exhibitions have been site-specific constellations of monitors, mirrors and projections addressing themes of gentrification and playing visual tricks with the real architecture. Eve Hurford lives and works in Berlin.

Phuong Nguyen (Berlin)
Phuong Nguyen is a dancer/choreographer who works interdisciplinarily in the fields of performance, film and video. Much of the focus of her work is concerned with relationships operating between corporeality and incorporeality and the various modes of the body’s actions within the constructed environment. Central to this mode of working comes through how technology and editing devices inform making dance material. Phuong Nguyen has produced several film works which have been shown in a number of international dance film festivals that recently include The Videodance Festival in Athens. She is currently based in Berlin.

Scott Draves (San Fransisco)
Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a visualist and programmer residing in San Francisco. In 1993 Spot received an honorable mention from the Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria for "Flame #149", and in 1995 he started developing the Bomb, a visual-musical instrument which four years later won the prix du public and 3rd place at Vida 2.0 in Madrid. He began the Electric Sheep project in 1999. It was featured in Wired Magazine in May 2001, then won the Vida 4.0 competition in November, and was selected for ISEA (the International Symposium of Electronic Art) in Nagoya Japan in 2002. His first gig as a VJ was in 1994. Today he regularly projects live video for underground parties and at clubs and his VJ singles are published by Light+Rhythm Visuals. Last summer he was a guest VJ in the main room at the Sonar music festival in Barcelona, and at the Resonant Wave festival in Berlin. He is about to release a solo DVD of abstract animation with original soundtracks by ABA Structure and other electronic musicians.

Audio-visual groups
New Bleep gang (London)
London life is full of things to do or see, but somehow most of them don't fully satisfy you. The club scene is gaining more interesting music but becoming more and more conformist and boring in its format; the art scene is seeing a rise in new media such as audio-video installations which makes it more interesting but still somewhat serious and academic. New Bleep was born in attempt to merge the two scenes in order to gain their positive points whilst aiming to lose the bad ones. To make the combo even more inviting, the concept of 'making the night interactive with the audience via computer games' was thrown into the mix. Computer games have a fun, nostalgic, social and cosy feel to them, and they're something that most people can relate to. In the early days of New Bleep, the theme of the night was towards 80s retro 8 bit arcade games, bleeps & noise, but New Bleep has now evolved into a mixture of extreme rave bleepcore, audio-visual art and games from any era/console. After the first night in October 2002, nine new bleeps have been held around London and the UK. A UK/Europe tour is planned and vinyl and dvd compilations are in the pipeline. The main artists involved are:

sound - Somadril, miu, dogs;

visuals - RGB, Statica, Beflix.

Cartesian Lover (Paris)
Cartesian Lover is a Paris-based audio-visual collaboration. The project is a combination of live electronic music with live video mixes (midi synchronized sound & visuals) and narrative. Cartesian Lover's sound lies somewhere between experimental electro, glitchy trip hop and live laptop, while the visuals lie between video art and club visuals. All of this creates a bed for vocal narratives both sung and spoken that tie the sonic and visual elements together. The set can range from melodic ambient to deconstructed dance floor rhythms. They are currently featured on the Radio Suisse program Planet Blue, and on the French label GG22’s last compilation. They will shortly release an EP on Trenton records. Cartesian Lover is :

Frost, whose use of traditional instruments such as guitars, saxophones, tape machines, and household objects gave him rise in the downtown world of New York in the 90’s. Now armed with a couple of laptops nothing is sacred: from House (must be destroyed) to the voices of world leaders (must be plagiarised);

Tesla, a visual artist with a classical art school background in sculpture, photography, installation and extensive research on her thesis subject, ‘The Aesthetics of New Technology’. Her passion for the moving image and sound has given way to experimenting with real–time digital video manipulation/ mixing and vocal experimentation. Her live visual sets draw from her own short films, cult cinematography and anything she gets her hands on.