P L A Y T I M E - live gaming nite
Saturday November 2nd, Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona
An interactive show around the videogame culture
Electronic music and "gaming" culture come from the same technological roots - cheap hardware for household allowing creative autonomy and generating a great popular obsession. While the biggest videogames corporations already control Hollywood budgets, the culture of games - like club culture - combines underground and the commercial in a happy and irreverent audiovisual mix.
PLAYTIME takes out the videogames from the living-room to show an eclectic selection of artists who work in the bounds of videogames, art and performance. Featuring the participation of Micromusic.net, a decentralized web community composed of groups and musicians who have recovered the sound legacy from the golden age of videogames, exploring the musical possibilities of microcomputers and obsolete handheld consoles.

At the same time the audience will play a careful selection of commercial and underground games, whose images and sounds will be added to the audiovisual mix in a show created jointly by artists, DJs, video disc jockeys and players.

A lounge area will show all night the best of Barcelona's demoscene together with special shows on the audiovisual culture of videogames.

With performances by Micromusic, JODI, Retroyou fcks Onceonce, Glaznost


Micromusic

After taking part in international events such as Ars Electronica, Expo 2002 in Switzerland or the Transmediale in Berlin, PLAYTIME will host the first Micromusic night taking place in our country. Musicians, DJs and visual artists belonging to this community hosted in the Internet will bring an audiovisual performance to the Mercat de les Flors that explores the aesthetics and sound from Nintendo Gameboy, the Commodore 64, and other mythical consoles and microcomputers.

The Micromusic night will feature shows by:


Teamtendo (FR) ...audio/visuals

Teamtendo fell directly out from a Gameboy-colour game into our world. They are two squirrels that love smoking cigarettes and playing videogames. Sometimes they disguise as human persons to live in comfortable anonymous way in Paris. They also made a movie about their live in the human world which will be shown at the gig.

Gwem & Gwemettes (GB) ... audio

Gwem is an Atari musician and tech geek who plays pop and punk-rock music on a high level. His punk-hit "FYMW" can be found in the DJ bag of people like Cylob.

The C-Men (HOL) ... visuals

Julian van Aalderen (1976) and Sjors Trimbach (1974) have both graduated from the Academy of Arts and Industry in Enschede at the Media-art department. Since 1999 they are operational as the C-men veejays. All their work is homemade and played on 2 Amiga 1200 computers. With the aid of the MNU2/3 VJ-tool, they can alter their low-res animations on the fly.

WangaN'Monsta (SZ) .... audio/visuals

Wanga is part of the main core of Micromusic members, and has been the musical director of the Micromusic events in Amsterdam, Berlin and Moscu. This project is a mixture of Wanga's Gameboy tunes and the incendiary techbeats by DJ Monsta.

Además

Once11 fks Retroyou
The musician Once11 and Retroyou take part in this head-on confrontation between sound and visual experimentation full of digital distortion, graphic pollution and the worship of mistake, on the base of the flight simulator created by Retroyou.

Jodi:Emulator
The new work of the fathers of net.art is based on the culture of emulators: software allowing to reproduce the aesthetics and the processes of computers such as the mythical ZX Spectrum in modern PCs.

Glaznost
Are a group of artists from creative, graphic, audio and multimedia background. Interested in changing videogames in first person, gLanzoL becomes an audiovisual experiment with the purpose of generating graphics and sound in real time.

PLAYTIME is an event directed by artFutura and Fiftyfifty.