telenoia:: free dispersed and computer mediatized mind . asinchronic global connectivity . celebrating the telenoia we reject the lonely, anxious, distracted and neurotically privated individualism of the old industrial culture . on the telematic culture, telenoia replaces paranoia _ by :: Roy Ascott

Telenoika Cultural Association was founded on February 2000. It is a non-profit organization and intends to provide a platform for new artistic, social and cultural experiments through new audio+visual technologies. Telenoia's definition by Roy Ascott describes the critical and connected soul of Telenoika, projecting how TV is afecting the society we are living in and how we reject it to open and share our minds in global networked connectivity.

Telenoika is made up by a group of people related with audiovisual creations and emerging technologies who show a keen interest in research and development of new means of human comunication and artistic expression.

Telenoika was founded because of the necessity of being a legal entity to organize a festival: VideA2000 :: AudioVisuals & New Technologies Festival. The idea of the festival was born from a little e-mail list from Aestesis real/time video software in 1999 . The main point was to organize a meeting of real/time video software users and their coders to share, enjoy, learn and see what other people was doing with similar audiovisual domestic techniques.

From that little mail list intention, the idea of the festival was spread through the internet and 'magically', with lots of ilusion and good intentions it became a 3 days festival with about 40 artists from all around europe, with experimental afternoons, conferences, workshops, and audiovisual nights. The festival was basically organized and promoted through the internet, with really low economic resources, by 4 friends with no previous experience, and just for the pleasure of sharing and communicating.

For this first edition, the Barcelona council let us a space to develop the afternoon activities, but we could not get any subvention or sponsoring from any institution or company. This way, and as being the first year, the budget was close to null and we just could pay for the artists accomodation and technical requirements. As usual in first times, we lost some money.

Definitively, VideA2000 was a great success, satisfying artists, public and organizers as a first experience. Since our first festival, we always received the
support of lots of artists, and that helped us to believe on what we were doing. Need to mention another important part of the festival since the first edition, the off_VideA. Some days after the festival in a country-side house where organizers and artists could share in a more relaxed ambience, and just to enjoy meeting up all together.

Since then, TELENOIKA started to interact and collaborate with lots of audiovisual experiences and experiments, mainly inside the VJ scene with visual sessions in free parties, raves, clubs, festivals and events. TELENOIKA begin to cooperate with other audiovisual collectives from around Europe (Tasmaniak, Rotok, neXus, Fifty-Fifty, LaLavanderia, Absurde, HeadSpace, ...) and 'VideA family' began to grow.

In 2001 we re-defined VideA as a platform for new audiovisual creatives and meeting point for the experimentation and fussion of diferent creations in one space and as an overview of the new audiovisual domestic tecnologies, reflexing the new global society through new expression media. In VideA2001 we tried again to get some sponsoring, but we had no luck again and we began to use the No_sponsor_No_money_Festival as a way of doing. We had no money, but lots of artists interested about coming to the festival and lots of people who wanted to collaborate with us. So, we accepted to work under this conditions.

Finally, 'El Mercat de les Flors', a public theater, let us celebrate VideA_2001 in its installations and BAF -a rental company- help us a lot for having an amazing audiovisual installation: About 16 video beamers in two magnific venues. On the second edition, we tried to fit into it as many artists as we could support, and finally there were about 80 different crews, collectives, artists, films, documentaries, videos, installations, dancers, performances, paintings... all sharing an open festival.

VideA2001 became one of the first meetings of VJ software developers, putting in one festival software developer teams like Electronika, VJamm , Resolume and VisualJockey. As a consequence of this meeting we find the birth of the idea of sharing some work between different VJ software developer teams, and so appeared FreeFrame, an OpenSource plugin architechture which actually is shared by all this softwares and some more, and it is in fantastic development health.

VideA2001 was a success again, but from the assistance point of view it was a little disappointing: we had very few people coming and our low budget and the great number of artists made impossible to pay more than just the accomodation to the artists, and again, we lost money.

From there on, Telenoika continued being part and developing the VJ scene all around Europe, being in touch through the internet with lots of VJ teams all around the world and playing visuals in lots of national and international parties, festivals and sessions.

In 2002, VideA still had no subvention from the Barcelona city hall or any help from cultural institutions so we directly adopted the No_Sponsor_No_Money_Festival motto. During this last years Telenoika structure had been changing and the Telenoik's had been collaborating with many local collectives and groups, so in 2002, Telenoika opened doors to let more people to get involved on the organization and 'open' the festival. By then, VideA2002 was organized by Telenoika + NoSoloTecno (raver collective) + other collaborators from the scene. VA2002 was totally autonomous, auto-organized and auto-produced by Telenoika and the rest of the 'VideA_family', a
collective-work that finally worked quite well.

VA2002 was a success again, considering all the chaotic difficulties that we had to face with our open structure organization, low budgets and low resources. For this time we launched the 'Adopt a VideA artist' campaign, that was basically focused on local artists who where present at the festival to encourage them to accomodate foreign artists, saving costs for the festival and enfatizing the exchange and intercommunication sense of VideA. In VA2002 public assistance was not a problem, so we could cover all the festival expenses and cover the money we had lost in the two previous editions. We have to mention the night sessions we made in an enormous squat old disco inside Barcelona -Discoteca Barçalles. About 1.500 people per night enjoyed a VJ_ALL sessions, where 4 to 6 VJ teams where playing at the same time in 8 big screens. At the end, close to 28 VJ teams were playing in VA2002 in an ambience that nobody who was there will never forget.

After that, in june of 2003 Telenoika organized the JustDataMeeting in Sant Just Desvern(a little village close to Barcelona). The main idea was to develop an event focused on the broadcast of information related with the audiovisual experimental technologies (conferences, workshops, round-tables...). The intention was to give a bit of local continuity to the VideA meetings. Again, it was a collaborative event with the 'VideA family' that was : Telenoika joined with NoSoloTecno, neXus, LaMaquinaDeTuring, HamsterLoco, Rotok and many others. Curiously, that was the last event organized by Telenoika.

Since JustDataMeeting, 'VideA family' was fragmented and the collective force of Telenoika was lost. Internal discussions between getting into show-bussiness or surviving as a non-profit cultural entity ended up to a crisis into the association, and from then it was impossible to rebuild it. A cycle had ended, and there were no more VideA experiences ... :-(

From then, Telenoika dissappeared as an organizative collective and some of their members continue playing in the scene, so Telenoika rested like a meta-collective of diferent audio-visual teams with no common activities, but with a great memory of what they have done together. VJ_pAuse, Lectrovision, OFF//TV and OutputVideo are the most aktive ones. Currently, these people are trying to find another tenable way to continue with the Telenoika project: share and enjoy new experimental ways of living through audiovisual technologies.

eloi maduell , february 2004

related context
> openfridays
> telenoia by roy ascott
> 120 years of electronic music

imago
> what we do?