Marc Tuters

Formerly known as Re-lab, the RIXC organization headed by Rasa and Raitis Smite, came to prominence within the highly circumscribed new media art world in the early nineties for their pioneering work with streaming media. Their Xchange Network, essentially an email list for streaming media enthusiasts (which Geert Lovink extensively covered in "My First Recession"), garnered them an Award of Distinction at Ars Electronica in '98. Having worked with them (on a mostly voluntary basis) on a number of occasions over the past 5 years, I can however attest that it's often hard to clearly encapsulate their events. Rasa, however, perhaps once best explained it to me when she described their project as "making visible the invisible".

There is always a strong emphasis on art/science collaboration and general atmosphere of playful experimentation at all of RIXC's events. A good example of this was the Acoustic Space Lab project which brought group of radio enthusiasts to commandeer --of all things- a Soviet-era satellite dish, towards "creative" ends. Indeed "Acoustic Space" is the name which RIXC has also given to its book series, now in its 7th volume.

Following a residency for the GPSter project two years prior, during which my colleague Karlis Kalnins and I proposed the term "locative media" (locative is a noun tense in latvian), I had the good fortune to work with RIXC extensively over the summer of 2004. The TransCulture Mapping Network which helped produces a series of workshops as well as a conference I worked to coordinate, and a book (found here online), the printed version of which I edited.

Marking 10 years of event coordination in the field, this latest event of RIXC's was their largest exhibition, held at the Latvian National Museum of Art's ARSENALS Exhibition Hall, a converted munitions depot in Riga's old city --as well as one of their most ambitious conferences. The event was an international coming together of an older generation of pioneers (Robert Adrian, Joyce Hinterding) along with a current generation of renouned media artists (Marko Peljhan, Luke Jerram) and a strong representation by emerging and local artists.

The exhibition featured a good many interesting pieces that worked in a wide range of media, but which all somehow shared the common denominator of waves. More at the DIY tool-building end of the spectrum for example was Wifio, by Adam Hyde and Aleksandar Erkalovic, a spoof on a next gen snooping technology combining a packet sniffer, and text to speech software in order to allow the listener to tune in to local wireless internet traffic through an old fashioned radio dial interface, and listen-in on snippets of personal communications traveling through the ether. By contrast Camera Lucida by Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch, pictured above, was entirely another sort of project well represented at Waves, which showed art through hard science, in this case the physics of a phenomenon called sonoluminscence. Inside a pitch back room, Gelfand and Domnitch mounted a hydrophone and transducers inside a fishbowl filled wit

Though, not neccesarily intended as a criticism of the works themselves, a good many of the pieces seemed as though they would display equally well in the context of a science museum as that of an art gallery. A few pieces, however, seemed to capture the theme of the exhibition in a particularly moving manner. Of these, one piece by the emerging Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard, may have best captured the overall zeitgeist of Waves, a piece by the emerging Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard.

Named, Latin for "eternity", Kirkegaard's Aeon is a multimedia installation which manages to capture a haunting ambience trapped inside abandoned spaces in the heart of Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion. In the artists words, the piece "deals with the sonic and visual experience of time, absence and change -in an area haunted by an inaudible danger, amidst the slowly decaying remains of human civilization". A graduate of the Media Art Academy of Cologne Kirkegaard was lecturing on the sound and built environment at the Coppenhagen School of Architecture when he concied this work. Online research brough him to a website for the office of the Zone of Exclusion, based nearby Chernobyl in the Ukraine. In October of 2005, Kirkegaard then took a trip, with a guide like Tarkofsy's Stalker, through multiple checkpoints and into the Zone. Inspired by Alvin Lucier's famous sound experiment "I am sitting in a room" (1970), Kirkegaard recorded the sound of empty rooms, and then played them back carfully calibrating the volume to acoustics of the space, while re-recording the sound of the room. After repeating this process up to 10 times, the effect of this feedlback was of a harmonic emerging from the room tone. For the installation at Waves, Kirkegaard coupled these sounds with processed video images of the spaces. By refilmed the image, again and again, Kirkegaard achieves an effect where the space seems to become burried in a snowdrift, as all detail fades but the dimesnsions of the space.

Aeon somehow found beauty in the landscape of devastation wrought by humans. While not necessarily the most aesthetically or conceptually compelling piece, Aeon never-the-less perhaps best fit the context of the WAVES exhibition as it made "visible the invisible" through observing the eternal memory of the Soviet-era. The recent past sometimes seems to have been forgotten in an era of European integration in Latvia, but Aeon reminded us that not far-off, it remains frozen in time, silently unfolding for the next 70,000 years.