Intelligrnt Drone Lurks About

Mawhrin-Skel is a fictional character – an intelligent drone that, having failed to meet the conditions of its original purpose, is decommissioned and left to wander aimlessly through a near utopian environment where it becomes a social nuisance and prankster. This character – invented by Ian M Banks in his 1989 novel “The Player of Games” – provides an interesting social and cultural entry point into the study of robots as both cultural artifacts and autonomous members of society.

In related workshops at Vancouver BCs Western Front, the artists will customize circuits by altering the language of the controller, adding sculptural components (static and moveable) adding sensor components, and designing behaviours. These objects are intended to sit on window sills, desk corners, over doorways, nailed to a post on the back deck, in the gravel pit in the basement, etc. The wireless Internet connection allows the devices to talk to each other and mingle their conversations on the web. The “eyes” of one machine can influence the actions of another. Keywords can generate furious activity or silence. Continue reading

March meeting featuring Susana Mendes Silva

Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea welcomes next Thursday, March 30th @19:30, The Upgrade! Lisbon monthly gathering featuring Susana Mendes Silva who will present her online performances artphone and art_room.

Susana Mendes SilvaÂ’s work is about the human beingÂ’s condition, in its intimate, relational and even political aspects. some of her projects have a more
participative and gift-like dimension, questioning several times the contemporary art universe. Silva has freely used and experimented with drawing, photography, installation, performance, video, new media, aware of the specificities of projects and spaces.

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Eighth Annual Conference – July 22 & 23, 2006

Consciousness Reframed is an international research conference presented by the Planetary Collegium at Plymouth University, concerned with advanced inquiry in the transdisciplinary space between the arts,technology, and the sciences, with consciousness research an integral component of its work. Continue reading

Self-Guided Critical Audio Tour

Invisible-5 is a self-guided critical audio tour along Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It uses the format of a museum audio tour to guide the listener along the highway landscape. Download the audio files individually or compiled for CD! Continue reading

virtual biopolitical agora

DemoKino is an anti-entertainment interactive movie that develops according to your vote; a virtual parliament that through topical film parables provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of modern politics: the questions of life. Continue reading

google mapping tools

Glen Murphy is a UI engineer at google who also produces software based art work that explores “what isn’t, but could be”. He says he likes to “computationally connect wonder and reality”. His recent project MeHere is a GPS Tracker for Google Maps featuring Google Earth integration and the ability to share your location with other users and applications (eg Greasemonkey scripts). See his precursor project MovinGmap.

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Processes of Inquiry

Artistsinlabs–Processes of Inquiry, Ed. Prof. Dr. Jill Scott–Editorial Office: HGKZurich, ICS, 2006, SpringerWeinNewYork; 136 Pages with color Illustrations; Inc. DVD 13 documentaries from the artists-in-lab projects; ISBN 3-211-27957-1.

This book verifies the need for the arts and the sciences to work together in order to develop more creative and conceptual approaches to innovation and presentation. By blending ethnographical case studies, scientific viewpoints and critical essays, the focus of this research inquiry is the lab context. For scientists, the lab context is one of the most important educational experiences. For contemporary artists, laboratories are inspiring spaces to investigate, share know-how transfer and search for new collaboration potentials. The nine labs represented in this book are from the Life Sciences, Physics, Computing and Engineering sciences. An enclosed comprehensive DVD documents the results, the problems and serves as a guideline for the future of true Art/Sci experiments. Continue reading

A Multi-Vocal, Improvisational Performance

Ten-sided–by Francis Hwang, with Johannes Gorannson, Jess Kilby, Tao Lin, Brendon Lloyd, Jessica Penrose, Glenis Stott, John Woods, Taren McCallan-Moore, and why the lucky stiff–is a textual performance in which ten authors collaboratively improvise on a single online narrative. For three months, each author will blog as a fictional character. All ten characters must somehow be connected, and all ten authors are responsible for ensuring that this connection is explored through the course of the story. However, authors are forbidden from coordinating the story beforehand. Instead, they can only take their cues from one another’s public entries. The resulting improvisation resembles a jazz performance or a session of exquisite corpse, but in a new form of creative practice that comments on and employs the multi-vocal nature of blogging communities.

“Ten-sided” is a 2006 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from The Greenwall Foundation. Continue reading

Mobile Cartographic Research Endeavour

On Sunday 19th March from 2-5 pm taxi_onomy will host an informal session concurring with Dorkfest 2006 in which participants will be able to user test its prototype software and city editor. The taxi_onomy cab will be stationed outside limehouse town and available for tagging sessions in and around the local area. Interested parties may show up on the day, or email bea[at]taxionomy.net to book a 20 minute slot in advance.

About taxi_onomy: An art-architecture collaboration, taxi_onomy is a live art project and mobile cartographic research endeavour that re-appropriates the taxi cab as the ultimate vehicle for psycho-geography, based on its capacity for metro processing and spatial understanding. taxi_onomy utilizes the taxi for the purpose of enabling artists and the general public to create and utilise emotional, cognitive and networked maps. Inherently concerned with facilitating authorship, it functions as a live and cumulative archiving device that enables the public to log, classify and order their environment, creating their own mental maps and topographies and overlaying them onto physical space. Continue reading

Bio-Data Turned into Financial and Social Status

Acclair, by Luther Thie and Eyal Fried, is a security and neuromarketing service that points to Acclairism, a new form of discrimination based on the individualÂ’s bio-data and membership in an “acclaired” elite.

The project creates a “social fiction” to explore a situation wherein people willingly accept a highly invasive, highly authoritative manipulation in return for tangible rewards and social status. Acclair is a fictional company providing brain-testing services as part of an accelerated security clearance for air-travelers with its use of Brain Fingerprinting technology (BFP). Continue reading