so-on.be

saturday may 01, 2004
matrix art project, brussels

On this particular day 10 countries from East and Central europe and the Baltic States will join the European Union. Code31 & so-on will try to connect to people and organizations in or around Europe, crossing borders outlined by political and economical regularities, establishing a creative network for artistic exchange and collaboration.

The first of may -international labour day-, we would like to give an artistic comment on this accession.
We want to offer a platform for artistic exchange and hack the identity of this new europe by countering its' borders.

From brussels we will start sending data packages that make a trip between different european cities over the internet without making a restriction to in- or outsiders.
Each one that joins our network will become a sort of switch able to receive the packages, relaying or reflecting them, altering their content, generating xtra messages/communication.

As a tribute to all workers, these data packages will contain audio- and text excerpts from 'the internationale'.
The format of these packages, apart from the content, will contain sender and receiver, all the relay points and their respective timestamps.
The idea is to create time-delay loops, the communication becomes the message.

How will this network work?
We are setting up a server where everybody will connect to and that does the dispatching of all data packages.
This server accepts all connecting clients using maxmsp tcpClient and keeps status about everybody connected: name/location/local_time.
We use maxmsp tcpClient as most people connect from 'behind' a firewall Netreceive is impossible to use behind a firewall (unless you configure portmapping etc.),as the connection is initiated from the internet towards you (being the server).
It is very important that connections are initiated from the user towards the internet. tTcpclient allows to initiate the connection towards the internet & to use this connection for sending & receiving data -- just what we need.

sites of action :
offf04 festival at MAPbrussels, www.offf04.be/
anatomic, amsterdam
novisad, xgz

date : 1st of may 2004
time : connected performance from 4pm till 7pm CET.

The internationale is the most famous communist song and was, for decades, one of the most recognized songs in the world.
The original (french) words were written by eugène pottier (1816-1887) in 1871 and the music by pierre degeyter (1848-1932) in 1888.
It was translated into many languages. the russian version served as the national anthem of the soviet union until 1944, when it was replaced by the hymn of the soviet union.