A Perfect Match…

I’d been travelling for ten months when I arrived at a small-town airport near the coast. I collected my bag, boarded the airport bus, put on my sunglasses and leaned back to take in the countryside. It was strangely familiar:gentle green hills, autumnal trees under a blue blue sky, water on one side and farmland on the other. If it wasn’t for people around me speaking Norwegian, I could have let myself pretend I was returning to my hometown of Dunedin, New Zealand.

But no, I was about as far from there as I could get. And Trondheim, although a similar size to Dunedin and also a university town, is nestled along a fjord not around a harbour and has been around for several centuries longer than Dunedin. Still, I had a distinctly warm feeling about the place, and this was to be reinforced by my excellent hostess Eva and Trondheim Matchmaking, the reason I’d come here.

The annual Trondheim Matchmaking (TMM) festival is “an arena for presentations of innovative ideas and artistic projects, a place where competence and resources are maintained and developed”. Organised by TEKS Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre, the festival is in its third year and brings artists from Scandinavia, Europe and the wider world together to meet and exchange ideas in “an attempt to bind together resources and competence within the field”. It’s good to have an event that gives meetings between artists the same or higher priority than showcasing work.

TMM 2004 ran from 13 to 17 October and featured 44 artists and groups in presentations, an exhibition and several performances. Boys making noise were a dominant feature in the performances, but overall the programme was very diverse and included theoretical presentations about the state of new media art as well as discussion time and artist talks.

On the opening night, we were treated to “Konsert for Grønland” by Verdensteatret, a performance installation inspired by the landscape and environment of Greenland. Simultaneously eerie and enchanting, the work was created from found objects, video, and digitally manipulated vocals. For me, the most beautiful and magical part was the least technical: driftwood, flotsam and jetsam that came to life as ships, people and other creatures in silhouettes.

Over the next couple of nights our ears were treated to an extraordinary range of sonic art-numerous digital manipulations, an orchestra wrangled from defunct electronic toys, a musician joining his band from Australia via the internet – and one group shocked us all by bringing on a live drummer. Lithuanian Gintas K’s performance was obviously on the same sonic wavelength as the candle on my table – its flame performed a mesmerising dance in response to the pulses and modulations of sound and air (and no, I wasn’t on drugs at the time). By the final night, we were so open to any noise being audio art that it took us quite a long time to realise that an ear-piercing siren was in fact the fire alarm, and not the beginning of another performance.

Our days were spent listening to each other talk and drinking quantities of coffee. Most of the artists who were performing at the festival spoke about their work, and many other artists, theorists and producers also spoke. One fascinating project was “Nomen Nominandum”, an interactive creature that lives in a high school’s LAN, created by Even Westvang from Oslo. The students, who have all been issued with laptops this year, will gradually discover the creature as it appears in their screensaver, and can work out how to influence its development. Other presentations included Anna Hill’s Space Synapse Systems, Natalie Jeremijenko human-animal interaction projects and John Hopkins’ delightful performance about human connection via the internet.

In between the presentations, some took the opportunity to stretch their legs on Susanne Rasmussen’s “Move”, an interactive video installation where a runner on a treadmill generates a mix of live and prerecorded video on the screen in front of the treadmill; definitely a way to attract more artists into the gym!

Just before my presentation was due to start, Espen realised a mistake in the times in the programme, giving a whole hour more for the presenters scheduled on Saturday afternoon. This meant that myself, Natalie and Kerstin Wagner (Ã…kerby Skulpturpark) had plenty of time to ramble on, and we did. The wireless network allowed audience members with laptops to log on to UpStage during my presentation and play around, while I explained the software. My colleagues Karla Ptacek and Vicki Smith were demonstrating from London and New Zealand and entertained everyone with online antics, while I fielded questions from the floor.

The exhibition opened on the final day of the festival in a space was dominated by Laura Beloff’s “Spinne” – giant spiders vibrating in response to the activity of the internet and offering a visual representation of the web. On one wall, three screens seemed at first bland pools of colour, but the patient viewer soon observed faces subtly appearing and disappearing; this work was by one of the TMM organisers, Trine Eidsmo. Leaving the exhibition, we spent some time outside amusing ourselves with a dragon sitting on the roof of an opposite shop and breathing fire down on us: the work of Lars Brunström (Malmö).

With the festival over, Kerstin and I did a spot of sightseeing: after coffee in a quaint old cobbled street, we visited the historic Trondheim Cathedral and peered at the marks left by thousands of pilgrims over the centuries; in another church we encountered a fundraising event for homeless people (yes, even in Norway there are homeless people). As the clear air began to chill we stopped in a pub for a drink, where we were greeted by others who had been at some of the festival events. It really did feel like I was at home. And that night, Eva and I visited Coby and Jaap of Teatret Fusentast, contacts through the Magdalena Project network, another branch of my international family.

Before leaving Trondheim, I met with Letizia Jaccheri at the university; she teaches an interdisciplinary course with a mixture of arts and computer science students, and will offer UpStage to them as a project. The university’s solid old stone buildings and the hilly view again reminded me of Dunedin, so I went shopping for Moomin mugs to reassure myself that I really was in Scandinavia.

Thanks to Espen and Trine for a great festival with an interesting and diverse programme, but small enough for us artists to get to know each other.