Subverted Industries’ W. Aaron Waychoff has created the iSrch Rndmzr 3000! in response to the Boston subway’s “random” searches of riders. He says: “MBTA Police officers stand at a table and occasionally beckon (or, in some cases, escort) passengers to the table where the passenger’s bags and parcels are laid open, emptied, and searched … Potential riders are welcome to decline to be searched, but they will not be allowed to enter the subway…”

The iSrch Rndmzr 3000! is a revolutionary device designed to protect the rights of citizens throughout the world. When properly employed by trained law enforcement officers, the iSrch Rndmzr 3000!™ ensures that so-called random searches are carried out truly randomly.

Upgrade! Östersund-Stockholm: Ecology and New Media Art — Workshop + Exhibition :: June 8 – 13, 2009 :: Birka Folkhögskola, Birkavägen 25, Ås, Sweden :: Free ! Register until June 30 at upgrade [at] likenow.org (limited to 12 places)

The workshop is dealing with the topics of ecology and the new media art/ sound art, and the participants will be working with solar powered installations of small art, sound gardens with mixed contents of plants, electronics and what the workshop participants will find possible. The different installations will together form a bigger collective installation that will be exhibited to the public at the end of the workshop. The workshop is led by french new media artist Nathalie Fougeras together with the sound artist Björn Eriksson, who together initiated and manages the Upgrade projects in Sweden. Continue reading

ABSTRACT: Cloud computing — the creation of large data centers that can be dynamically provisioned, configured, and reconfigured to deliver services in a scalable manner — places enormous capacity and power in the hands of users. As an emerging new technology, however, cloud computing also raises significant questions about resources, economics, the environment, and the law. Many of these questions relate to geographical considerations related to the data centers that underlie the clouds: physical location, available resources, and jurisdiction. Continue reading

The Alter-Globalization Movement – Interventions with Art in Political Movements — Lecture and Film Screening by Oliver Ressler :: June 5, 2009; 6:00 – 9:00 pm :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Flat 6, Azarita, Alexandria, Egypt.

Oliver Ressler’s contribution to A.K.A. EDUCATION – Art Known as Education is part of axis # 2: Citizenship, Community and Art Education and will be a discussion of the alter-globalization movement along the path of some of the projects he has worked on in the last couple of years. Two of his collaborative films will be screened during the lecture “Disobbedienti” (with Dario Azellini), 54 mins and “What Would It Mean to Win?” (with Zanny Begg), 40 mins. Continue reading

“…Unseen geographies of our cities lay around us with areas yet to be discovered. Much of it seldom noticed as we pass through them in our everyday lives. The traces of our journeys through each city leave temporary presences. There was once a time where many would have believed these traces were spirits, psychic remains, registrations and impregnations onto objects and environments, from what was possibly a traumatic event in time. Are contemporary technologies a realisation of this belief? These technologies that record our movements in time, are no longer odd, or alluding to being mystical occurrences but the switching of sensors and transmission of radio waves through the ether. Continue reading

De l’Interprétation — Omer Fast, John Menick, Pascal Poulain, Sean Snyder, Rirkrit Tiravanija :: May 30 – July 11, 2009 :: Zoo galerie, 49 chaussée de la Madeleine, interphone 8, 44000 Nantes, France.

And what if the famous CFR really existed, the Consortium for the Falsification of Reality whose activities are narrated in Antoine Bello’s last two novels? What if they were living among us, these agents of a reality that is truer than nature because it has been tampered with, disrupted through discrete modifications nonetheless powerful enough to influence it course? We live at the heart of a culture of the image, but of an image that has been truncated, rigged; ever since the Golden Calf, our society has been trying to make us interpret the images it presents us as realities other than what they quite simply are: relationships, and not entities. Continue reading

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer :: until September 5, 2009 :: Galerie Guy Bärtschi, 3a, rue du Vieux-Billard, CH-1205 Genève, Switzerland.

This exhibition features a new series of works some of which will be viewed for the first time in Switzerland. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who represented Mexico at the 2007 Venice Biennale, allies the technological experience with the aesthetic through works which require a constant, physical input by the spectator. The main idea of this interactive art is the encounter. Continue reading

Kurye International Video Festival :: June 2-12, 2009 :: Speech by Stelarc: June 5; 7:00 pm :: Body,Technology and Art Panel: June 6; 12:00 pm :: Istanbul.

Kurye International Video Festival is preparing to draw Istanbul’s attention to video art and new media with a wide selection international of videos and extensive parallel events. The guest of honor will be the renowned Australian artist Stelarc, who utilizes medical monitoring technologies, prosthetics, robotics and virtual reality in his works. Setting out to examine the limits of the human body and gaining renown with his works that bring together human body and art with technology and medicine, Stelarc will open up new horizons for the people of Istanbul with his speech on June 5, 2009 at Akbank Sanat. Continue reading

Upgrade! Johannesburg: Re-thinking Media Arts – from Transmediale Berlin to ISEA2010 RUH by Andreas Broeckmann :: June 3, 2009; 1:15 – 2:00 pm :: Digital Arts Seminar Room – Digital Convent (opposite the WSOA, Map), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Since the 1980s, festivals have been the most important hubs for the promotion and distribution of media art. The evolution of these festivals therefore also reflects the way in which conceptions of media art have changed. First founded in 1988, the Transmediale festival in Berlin, for instance, was initially a venue only for video art, and only in the course of the 90s opened its programme for interactive and multi-media art. Continue reading

Ukiyo [Moveable World] — A choreographic installation fusing dance, sound, design and digital projections by dap-lab / dans sans joux :: June 1, 2009; 7:00 pm :: Antonin Artaud Building, Brunel University, West London (UK).

UKIYO explores the layers of perceptions in an audiovisual world that constantly shifts and fragments; the audience is invited to move in and around the space which in its current version features five hanamichi (runways) and several movie screens. Dancers perform simultaneously with digital objects that are projected, and their sounds and voices are sampled and processed. Continue reading