Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents Levels of Nothingness — a performance-installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, featuring Isabella Rossellini :: September 17, 19, 20, 21, 2009; 7:30 pm :: Peter B. Lewis Theater, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

Levels of Nothingness, co-written by philosopher Brian Massumi, is inspired by Vasily Kandinsky’s explorations of synaesthesia, most notably in his Yellow Sound (1912), a composition in which he proposes linking the senses using levels of abstraction. Lozano-Hemmer employs a computerized microphone to analyze live voice in real time and extract physical and linguistic data that, in turn, controls a full rig of rock-and-roll concert lights, creating a color show that surrounds the theater. Continue reading

FATEBOOK: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party at a Time by New Paradise Laboratorie :: September 4-18, 2009 (times here) @ 2009 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.

FATEBOOK explores what happens when our online relationships collide with our physical ones. A massive undertaking with 13 central characters and 100 secondary characters, audiences attend FATEBOOK in person at the Festival and online (go to fatebooktheshow.com and learn how you can “friend” the characters). In the online world, the actors communicate in character with each other and with you, building an ever-expanding network of relationships and memories that are both real and imagined. Continue reading

Upgrade! Vienna: International Meeting of Net and Media Artists in Vienna :: September 12, 2009; 8:00 pm :: Central Garden Wien, Danube Canal (In case of bad weather, go to Nestroyhof Hamakom, Nestroyplatz 1 (corner of Czerningasse), 1020 Vienna,

The network started in New York, in April 1999. Upgrade! New York developed around the artist Yael Kanarek, deriving from discursive evenings about media culture. There exist 30 nodes of the globally active network by now. Its comprehensive framework — beside the manifold work forms of the individual nodes — entails the communication on net art and media art. Continue reading

Toward the Sentient City —
An exhibition critically exploring the evolving relationship between ubiquitous computing, architecture and urban space :: September 17 – November 7, 2009 :: Opening Reception: September 17, 6:00 – 9:00 pm :: The Architectural League of New York, The Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York, NY.

Organized around five newly commissioned projects distributed throughout the city, Toward the Sentient City aims to catalyze public discussion on the design and inhabitation of near-future urban environments. With projects by: JooYoun Paek and David Jimison :: The Living Architecture Lab and xdesign Environmental Health Clinic :: Haque Design+Research :: SENSEable City Laboratory :: Anthony Townsend and the BREAKOUT! team. Continue reading

Critical Play: Radical Game Design by Mary Flanagan, MIT Press:

For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan examines alternative games—games that challenge the accepted norms embedded within the gaming industry — and argues that games designed by artists and activists are reshaping everyday game culture. Continue reading

Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press (download the Introduction)

What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential.

Wardrip-Fruin suggests that it is the authors and artists with knowledge of these processes who will use the expressive potential of computation to define the future of fiction and games. Continue reading

ART && CODE SYMPOSIUM: Processing, Ben Fry and Casey Reas from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

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yes-man (noun, plural -men): someone who agrees with everything the boss says, even if it’s demented, cruel, absurd, or just stupid.

The Yes Men: A group of people who target bosses they don’t work for, then agree so hard with their targets that their audiences should sit up and take notice …

We call ourselves the Yes Men, and our goal is to fix the world. We even have a new film, coming out in theaters on October 22, that we’ve called The Yes Men Fix the World.

We’ll give away the ending: we don’t actually make everything better. And worse, we’re now spending so much time on the distribution of this damn film that we don’t even have time to do our own silly antics anymore. So: please do it for us. Steal our secrets. Continue reading

FutureSonic:Environment2.0 2009 by Ruth Catlow and Olga Panades Massanet, Furtherfield.org: The stated aim of FutureSonic 2009 was to consider how the city disconnects us from “nature and the consequences of our actions”. As Drew Hemment puts it in the curatorial statement, “the tarmac of the road cuts us off from the earth beneath and the festival set out to find the ‘cracks in the pavement’ and look for ways to reconnect with nature through the use of new media technologies and participatory processes.”

With its theme of Environment 2.0, FutureSonic proposed that we revise our notions of the world we inhabit. Described as the place we all “share, connect with and create”, Environment 2.0 attempts to bring together the enterprise culture of the ‘social Web’ with an ecological understanding of environment (in which interdependent entities and conditions co-evolve). Continue reading