August 22, 2005

Asterisk*: Artists Residencies

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The Centre for the Study and Development of Narrative

Asterisk*, (the centre for the study and development of narrative) is based at Shandy Hall in North Yorkshire where Laurence Sterne wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is a concept developed by The Laurence Sterne Trust that aims to use the spirit and intellectual resources of Shandy Hall to inspire artists and the public to explore and experiment with nonlinearity, and to examine and develop the convergences between art forms within our contemporary culture. It aims also to illustrate how new technology can, in the hands of artists, be used to deliver entirely new artistic opportunities. In the autumn and winter of 2005, Asterisk* will offer two residencies of three weeks duration each. These will provide exceptional opportunities for artists keen to experiment with current practice in diverse media, specifically exercises in non-linearity, with an emphasis on interactivity and audience participation. Intersections with technology are encouraged and technology specialists will be available for collaboration. Deadline Friday 26 August.

Posted by jo at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2005

FIVE HOLES:

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A Matter of Taste

FIVE HOLES--curated by Paul Couillard--is an ongoing series examining the significance of the body and the senses. Fado invites artists to submit proposals for a matter of taste, the final installment in the FIVE HOLES series. We seek performance art works, including conceptual, site-responsive and installation-based performances, that deal with the sense of taste. Approximately seven proposals will be chosen to create a simultaneous ensemble of events to be held in the summer of 2006 in Toronto. The focus will be on Canadian artists (i.e. at least four of the projects will feature Canadian artists).

Taste is perhaps the most 'personal' of all the senses. It is both primal -- providing the impulses that drive consumption -- and individualized: one person's desire is another's poison. While the word 'taste' is often associated with the concept of aesthetic discernment, a matter of taste places its emphasis on a specific, visceral definition of taste: the perception of flavour (and perhaps texture) that takes place inside our mouths. This series will focus on projects that explore the implications of a sense that operates through the placement of foreign material inside one's body.

A matter of taste is not concerned with the familiar social terrain of banquets and dinner parties so much as the links between physical sensation, unconscious/conscious drives, and our mouths as a point of contact with the external world. How does one orchestrate a performance for another's mouth? What are the dynamics that seduce, persuade or convince others to put things in their mouths? What intentions are bound up in the impulse to stimulate one's taste buds? What does our sense of taste reveal about our internal desires and external projections?

TORONTO.... Fado Performance Inc. announces two calls for proposals for performance art projects.Fado is a non-profit artist-run centre for performance art based in Toronto, Canada. Fado present an ongoing international programme of conceptual and site-specific performance art, and pays professional fees to the artists it presents.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Deadline for submissions: August 26, 2005
Please include:
*1-page proposal
*c.v.
*documentation of previous work
[NTSC video in VHS, mini-DV or DVD format; Mac-readable CDs; URLs; and/or slides]
*e-mail submissions will not be accepted except with prior approval (no large digital files!)
*press material optional
*only submissions with self-addressed stamped envelope or funds to cover shipping and packaging costs will be returned

Send proposals to:
Fado
"FIVE HOLES proposal"
273B Carlton St.
Toronto, ON
Canada M5A 2L4

info: http://www.performanceart.ca or email info@performanceart.ca

Posted by jo at 05:54 PM | Comments (0)

What Comes After: Cities, Art & Recovery

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Remembering and Rebuilding after Tragedy

What Comes After: Cities, Art and Recovery: An International Summit September 8-11, 2005. Registration begins August 22. Thirty cultural leaders from 19 countries will come together for three days of roundtable discussions, performances, films, and art installations in all media. Cities, Art and Recovery will consider how people remember and rebuild after tragedy and how the arts have been crucial to such recovery.

Including: The New York Premiere of Diamanda Galás: Defixiones, Orders from the Dead and Political Cabaret with Danny Hoch, Rennie Harris, Carl Hancock Rux and Suheir Hammad.

Exhibitions:

After Effects After the World Trade Center residency, LMCC artists look at what comes next.A Knock at the Door... Is it art or is it dangerous? Homeland Security Garden transforms the Winter Garden into a participatory sculpture that reveals our notions of safety and freedom. book A sketchbook travels between Brooklyn and Belfast.Greetings Without Flowers Large scale photo-portraits taken in Iraq.Chat the Planet Young people in NYC and around the world connect by video chat in real time conversation.

Panelists:

Ammiel Alcalay, USA
Sultan Barakat, UK
Elazar Barkan, USA
Gillian Caldwell, USA
Clifford Chanin, USA
Craig Dykers, Norway/USA
Horst Hoheisel, Germany
Vannak Huy, Cambodia
Suada Kapic, Bosnia
Avila Kilmurray, UK
Robert Kluyver, Afghanistan
Duma Kumalo, South Africa
Gerald McMaster, Canada
Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Bosnia/USA
Ana Miljanic, Serbia & Montenegro
Dijana Milosevic, Serbia & Montenegro
Vasuki Nesiah, Sri Lanka/USA
Brigitte Oleschinski, Germany
Maysoon Pachachi, Iraq/UK
Leo Rubinfien, USA
Biljana Srbljanovic, Serbia & Montenegro
Jad Tabet, France/Lebanon
Lyonel Trouillot, Haiti
Patricia Tappata de Valdez, Argentina
Clive van den Berg, South Africa
Camilo Jose Vergara, Chile/USA
Eyal Weizman, Tel Aviv/London
Lebbeus Woods, USA
James Young, USA

Posted by jo at 05:48 PM | Comments (0)

August 16, 2005

TECHSTYLE NEWS: Issue #52 - August 15, 2005

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Next Generation Mobile Technology

Techstyle News is a free monthly newsletter providing summaries and commentaries on stories related to the next generation of mobile technology and style, produced by Thinking Materials.

In this issue: (1) Hardwear News: Motorola and Oakley announce cellphone sunglasses; Texas Instruments launches mobile single-chip solution; MP3 sunglasses from Global American Technologies; Digital locket from Beatsounds; Digital picture pendant from Spectare; (2) Softwear News: IBM software lets you carry your PC around your neck; and (3) Events: Mobicom 2005 in Cologne; Ubicomp 2005 in Tokyo; Wearable Futures in Newport.

HARDWEAR NEWS

MOTOROLA AND OAKLEY ANNOUNCE CELLPHONE SUNGLASSES

Motorola and Oakley has announced the expected availability of RAZRWIRE Bluetooth eyewear in early August. The Bluetooth module is designed to complement the overall look of the sunglasses, creating truly wearable technology. The controls include two volume buttons and a single button used to handle incoming and outgoing calls. RAZRWIRE allows you to carry on phone conversations while up to 30 feet away from your compatible Bluetooth-enabled cell phone. Bluetooth Sniff Mode technology increases the battery life of RAZRWIRE, offering continuous talk time of more than five hours and standby time of up to approximately 100 hours.

http://oakley.com/about/razrwire/

TEXAS INSTRUMENTS LAUNCHES MOBILE SINGLE-CHIP SOLUTION

TEXAS Instruments has announced the launch of its single-chip mobile solution. Manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson are expected to launch handsets based on the solution in nine months. Mr Tom Engibous, Chairman, said: "The single-chip solution will bring down power and space consumption by 50 per cent and cut costs by 30 per cent". With this, he said, there is the possibility of $20 cell phones on the horizon. The small chips can be easily integrated, bringing phone technology to all kinds of products.

http://news.com.com/Is+a+20+cell+phone+on+the+horizon/2100-1039_3-5823239.html

MP3 SUNGLASSES FROM GLOBAL AMERICAN TECHNOLOGIES

Global American Technologies have launched the Fio MP3 sunglasses. The retail prices are $200 to $400 at storage capacities of 128MB up to 1GB, include 3D stereo sound earbuds in each arm, support MP3/WMA/ADCPM and have a reported battery life of 8.5 hours. Transfer is via USB 2.0 to either a Mac or a PC, with an integrated microphone providing digital voice recording capabilities.

http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=5284&cat_id=505

DIGITAL LOCKET FROM BEATSOUNDS

The Digital Locket EMP-Z II Plus from BeatSounds tries to be more than just a wearable MP3 player. This tiny music player has a small, oval color screen that can display a photo. The Digital Locket measures 2 inches by 1.8 inches, weighs 0.9 ounce and has a battery that lasts up to 16 hours before it needs recharging. It can play digital audio files in the MP3 or Windows Media audio formats and comes with its own software for transferring photos and music from a computer over a USB connection. An FM radio tuner and a voice recorder are also tucked inside. Prices start at $80 for the 256-megabyte version and go up to $150 for the model with a full gigabyte of memory.

http://beatsounds.com/Pb/index.asp?CurrentCatID=C1035889862578133

DIGITAL PICTURE PENDANT FROM SPECTARE

The Pixi Digital Picture Pendant is a necklace with a 1-inch, 96 x 64 pixel LCD screen and enough memory (512 KB) for storing up to 54 extremely low-res digital photos. For viewing up to 2 hours in slideshow mode, or longer in manual mode. The pendant is USB 1.1 compatible and compatible with photos in JPEG format.

http://chipchick.blogs.com/chip_chick/2005/08/pixi_digital_pi.html

SOFTWEAR NEWS

IBM SOFTWARE LETS YOU CARRY YOUR PC AROUND YOUR NECK

Researchers at IBM are testing software that would let you tote your home or office desktop around on an iPod or similar portable/wearable device so that you could run it on any PC. The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from a x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer's display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk. After the person disconnects the system, SoulPad saves all work to the device, including browser cookies or other digital signatures that a PC keeps in its short-term memory.

http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/SoulPad/soulpad.html

EVENTS

MOBICOM 2005 IN COLOGNE

ACM MobiCom 2005 is dedicated to addressing the challenges in the areas of mobile computing and networking. This single-track conference serves as an international forum addressing networks, systems, algorithms, and applications that support the symbiosis of mobile computers and wireless networks. It will be held August 28 through September 2 in Cologne. Speakers include representatives from Bell Labs, Daimler Chrysler, NTT DoCoMo and MIT. Particularly interesting could be the panel on Wearable computing with, among others, Steve Mann.

http://www.sigmobile.org/mobicom/2005/

UBICOMP 2005 IN TOKYO

UbiComp 2005, the Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, will be held September 11-14, 2005 in Tokyo. The conference provides a forum in which to present research results in all areas relating to the design, implementation, application and evaluation of ubiquitous computing technologies. Papers include submissions from Intel, NTT, Nokia, Microsoft and IBM. There are also thirteen workshops to participate in.

http://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2005/

WEARABLE FUTURES IN NEWPORT

Wearable Futures is an interdisciplinary conference, to be held in Newport on 14-16 September, which aims to bring together practitioners, inventors, and theorists in the field of soft technology and wearables including those concerned with fashion, textiles, sportswear, interaction design, media and live arts, medical textiles, wellness, perception and psychology, IPR, polymer science, nanotechnology, military, and other relevant research strands. We will be examining how some broad generic questions will be explored in relation to wearable technology including but not restricted to: aesthetics and design, function and durability versus market forces; the desires, needs and realities of wearable technologies; technology and culture; simplicity and sustainability; design for wearability.

http://artschool.newport.ac.uk/smartclothes/wearablefutures.html

Posted by jo at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)

MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES

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Exploring Digital Technologies in the Context of Public/Shared Spheres

MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES is Cardiff’s inaugural festival of creative technology - a three-day programme of events being held across the capital. The festival is being developed between Chapter and Bloc (Creative Technology Wales) and includes a two-day conference, new commissions, residencies, screenings, and artists’ projects in public sites across the city.

Artists are increasingly engaged with or inspired by digital technology - exploring consumer and communication technologies such as the worldwide web, mobile networks, file sharing, and computer gaming. Because digital technology is a participatory medium with global reach, artists tend to explore digital technology in the context of public and shared spheres. Often digital art is situated somewhere between public art and street culture where the technology itself is used as a ‘site’ for the production and presentation of art works. Although digital technology is often claimed to go beyond physical limitations, engagement with technology is always embedded in real spaces, whether this is explored from a user or network perspective.

Artists include: Blast Theory, Anri Sala, Grennan & Sperandio, TJ Wilcox, Jen Southern & Jen Hamilton, Scanner, Sarah Morris, Michelle Teran, Eddo Stern, Stefhan Caddick, Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie, Tim Davies, Rosalind Nashashibi, Tenant Spin, Andy Fung, Paddy Jolley, Mircea Cantor, STAR Radio, Valérie Jouve, Chris Evans, Mike Mills, Artstation, and many more.

Conference day 1: 28 October - Locative media and emplacement Speakers include: Prof Michael Corris, Head of Art & Photography, University of Newport; Claire Doherty, Director, Situations; Nina Pope, artist; Heath Bunting, artist; Giles Lane, Proboscis; Steve Benford, Professor in Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham; Dr Sarah Green, Social Anthropologist, University of Manchester; Jen Southern & Jen Hamilton, artists.

Conference day 2: 29 October - Gaming Speakers include: Ju Row Farr, artist, Blast Theory; Stuart Nolan, researcher; Christopher Sperandio, artist; Eddo Stern, artist; David Surman, Lecturer in Computer Games Design, University of Newport; Alex Mayhew & Emma Westecott, Games Producers & Directors.

Conference Prices: £50 per day / £90 weekend ticket – organisations; £30 / £50 – early bird booking before 7 October £20 per day / £30 weekend ticket – individuals /concs; £15 / £25 – early bird booking before 7 Oct Party, The Point, Cardiff, 29 Oct, 8pm: Special Guests Scanner, Michelle Teran, Proober Glombat, Cymbient, Christopher Rees DJs.

The site will feature live streaming, artists’ projects, downloads, full biographies and images, conference booking and travel details, press section and the chance to receive regular updates on festival activity.

For further information about the programme and conference please contact: Gordon Dalton, Festival Coordinator: gordon@mayyouliveininterestingtimes.org 44 (0) 29 2031 1059 / 0779 234 1654

The festival is a Cardiff 2005 event and is presented with the support of: Cardiff County Council, Millennium Commission, the Arts Council of Wales, WDA, Cywaith Cymru . Artworks Wales, BBCi, Creative Mwldan, Millennium Stadium, Mute, G39, The Big Sleep, Elfen, Zenith Media, UWN, National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Sequence, Coolpants, Ping Wales, Oriel Mostyn and @Wales. http://www.bloc.org.uk/cgi-bin/showbig.cgi?id=55

Posted by jo at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

Do we have an Image Problem?

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Performance and Media Art caught between Art History and Visual Culture Studies

The first Media Art Conference in Osnabrück will take place from the 15th to the 17th of May 2006 as a three-day specialist symposium at the University of Osnabrück and is sponsored by Department of Kultur- und Geowissenschaften. It will be held immediately following the 19th European Media Art Festival (EMAF, 10th to 14th May 2006), one of the largest media art events in Europe. This conference in will direct attention to timely questions confronting art history, in particular the multimedia aspects concerning the production, critical appraisal and dissemination of performance and media art. Thus the following aspects will be addressed:

1. art history’s repositioning itself in relation to Visual Culture Studies, Media Studies and Cultural history; 2. the development of a modus operandi which takes into consideration a wide range of methodologies and the interpenetration of different genres; 3. the description and analysis of media art in the face of the instable status of the work concept in Media Art, and art in general.

The key issues to be addressed by the first Media Art Conference in Osnabrück can be summarised by the following question:

Given the increasingly complex demands which the wide range of visual, media, critical, performance, cultural and gender studies exert on the teaching and research environment, how can the history of art maintain its ability to deal aptly with representations, new media and art and simultaneously incorporate interdisciplinary strategies?

By focussing on time- and action-oriented art forms, the traditional discourse will be broadened to include the following questions: Can an (inter)active beholder play an integral role in the making of a work of art without jeopardising its intrinsic artistic value or reducing the “autonomy of the work of art” to a mere attribute? Where exactly do performance and media art fit into the already inflated body of terminology for denoting images?

A glance at the large number of university graduates dealing with art and visual culture (Berlin, Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Basel) documents the current popularity of the image-discourse. Similarly, the flood of specialist literature in recent years as well as related conferences (e.g. Art Historians Day, Bonn 2005) confirm this trend.

If we take a look at the origins of performance and media art in the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent development of the iconic/pictorial turns, the suspicion arises that recent efforts to expand the boundaries of art history to absorb current visual culture occurred in part to circumvent the challenges posed by these new art forms.

By investigating art forms which defy traditional definition while exploring the definitions themselves, this conference will attempt to graft these two ambivalent discourses. At the same time it will lay the foundations for a reinterpretation of the relevant academic fields. An impressive series of arguments presented by artists, art historians and experts in media studies address the need to conjoin these conflicting fields of study.

Call for Papers

The conference will focus on the growing affinity between art forms produced, experienced and distributed by the media on the one hand and the highly debated iconic or pictorial turn on the other. One of the central issues will be to question whether the recently developed aesthetic terminology can sufficiently deal with the time- and action-oriented art forms of performance and media art.

In addition to a number of distinguished experts invited to present papers, the speakers will include young scholars as well as contributors selected on the basis of the abstracts they submitted to this call for papers.

Enclosed you will find further information concerning the background and objectives of the conference. Please do not hesitate to ask us questions at any time.

We would be very pleased to include you among the speakers or authors for our planned publication.

Topics for Talks and Articles

1. Performance and media art in the context of the contemporary debate between art history and Visual Culture Studies and where art history is positioning itself in relation to Visual Culture Studies, Media Studies and Cultural History.

2. Media art, art history’s cultural orientation and the scientific modus operandi given the wide range of methodologies and the overlap of genres.

3. Examples of art historical and media studies descriptions and analysis of performance and media art.

In addition to a description of content, the abstracts for papers (c. 400 words) should clearly demonstrate both their relevance to the theme of the conference and their originality.

A publication of the conference findings is planned. All contributions will be considered.

Please submit your abstracts by 30 October 2005 to the EMAC office:
Media Art Conference Osnabrück
http://www.media-art-conference.com
Universität Osnabrück
Fachbereich Kultur- und Geowissenschaften
Kunstgeschichte
Katharinenstraße 5
49069 Osnabrück
Germany

Junior professor Dr. Slavko Kacunko (Organisation)
skacunko@uni-osnabrueck.de
Priv. Doz. Dr. Habil. Dawn Leach (Organisation)
dr.leach@kunstakademie-duesseldorf.de
Björn Brüggemann (Büro)
bjbruegg@uni-osnabrueck.de
Phone: +49 (0)541 969-6041
Fax: +49 (0)541 969-4103

Posted by jo at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

From database and place to bio-tech and bots:

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Relationality vs Autonomy in Media Art

Two predominant theories have emerged in the discourse surrounding new media: autonomy and relationality. On the outset, these notions seem to contradict each other. The theory of autonomy focuses attention on the discrete elements involved: individual pieces of information, individual artists or viewers, and separate components/artworks. Relationality puts the emphasis on interconnectedness: data, artwork, artists, and viewers are inextricably intertwined, without a single predominant object or viewpoint and no fixed, absolute form.

While these theories may seem to be contradictory, contemporary media art relies on a notion of autonomy and, yet, suggests that no information is autonomous—while discrete variables exist, nothing can be separate and complete in itself. The same is true of the relationships between viewers, artists, and their work constructed in the context of media art. While the topics of autonomy and relationality have long lineages in art history, this panel will discuss their contemporary status from the perspective of media art practice and theory.

Papers can address a range of topics including but not limited to: hacktivism and parasitic media, appropriation/sampling/remixing, open source theory and culture, locational media, biotechnology, video games, narrative, net art, software art, networked performance, video, sound art, and VJ/DJ practice. Consideration will be given to more "traditional" academic papers as well as artist talks that introduce artistic work and practices that contribute to the discussion of autonomy and relationality in media art.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The New Media Caucus panel at the College Art Association's 93rd annual conference.
DATES: February 22-25, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts
DEADLINE: Proposals must be e-mailed to
marisaso(at)gmail(dot)com by Friday, September 16, 2005.

NOTE: Panelists are NOT REQUIRED to be members of CAA.

Panel Chair: Marisa S. Olson, Artist; Editor and Curator at Large, Rhizome.org; UC Berkeley, Rhetoric/Film Studies.

PROPOSAL FORMAT:
* Proposed paper title
* An abstract of 300-500 words
* A note on presentational format: will you present a "traditional" paper, will you emphasize visual materials, and what—if any—audio/visual equipment will you need? (Please minimize.)
* Confirmation of ability to attend the CAA conference, Feb 22-25, 2006, in Boston
* A current CV with full contact information

Posted by jo at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)

The Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture

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Evolved from Nothingness

September - December 2005, Utrecht, generated by socialfiction.org, hosted by impakt.nl: Hidden in the former utility area of a vacant 13 floor office in Utrecht, the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture will evolve an empty room from nothingness into unknown states of technological enhancement. Unlike the alphabet that always knows where it is going, this workshop does not.

A Room of a Crystalpunk's Own: The Headmap manifesto, the Coleridgian masterpiece of independent software development for spaces and places, observed: "Every room has an accessible history, every place has emotional attachments you can open and save". New technologies can associate places with layers of free and editable content from which the past can be re-enacted, like a murder at the scene of the crime is re-enacted, to re-experience and stir vanished memories.

Little minds living in software can eat any piece of data, extract meaning from it and email it to you when the right criteria has been met. Our Crystalpunk Manifesto famously drew connections between disconnected fields of knowledge and explained to the world our intention to program minds and matter simultaneously. This workshop marshals these manifestos of inspiration into real practises with scars of happy absurdi(r)ty engraved on their souls.

Lexicon

Crystal: The inorganic strategies of the crystalpunk are both chemically and metaphorically informed by the lessons learned from the transformation from moleculline mayhem into crystalline order. Crystal growth is adaptive, particle-noise disrupts tessellation but the crystal works its way around it softly. Roomology as crystallography? The analogy with crystals finding form permeates every aspect of this workshop: the room is filled with latent possibility, the workshop seeds these powers laying dormant, what remains after 4 months is outward form pushed and moulded and beaten into shape by events and persons working inside the room with the material produced by their own every moves inside the room.

Punk: Despite appearances this workshop is not technology-driven but propelled forward by social interaction and a healthy disrespect for specialists of all kinds. Punk is not a style or a genre but a principle of self-education: taking up a technology (an electric guitar, a sensor, a programming language) ignoring all good practise, refusing to draw a line between student and teacher. Punks don't spend years practising: they immediately start a band with the intention to change the world.

Workshop: Knowledge is generated collectively, collectives generate their own special flavours of knowledge. This workshop creates a social situation by providing resources to those persons unknown curious enough to come round and actively encourage those people whose past work we like. Different interests, backgrounds, talents, skills will mix, seek alliances and run amok; rapidly the room enhanced starts to generate data, ad-hoc collaborations find challenging ways for this data to be interpreted. Within the workshop countless micro-workshops will focus on specific topics, introducing high-level ideas and technologies to the uninitiated or to keep everybody up to date on the workshop's output, helping each other to make sense of the magic properties of technology. This workshop is a sustained stream of consciousness you can wash your mind/sharpen your capabilities/empower your potential with.

Soft + Architecture: Buildings learn, rooms have memories, design does not need its designers, the language of time (piecemeal extensions, reinventions, rephrasings, accidents, entropy) rewrites their script. A room, by implication, refuses to be belittled into the function of a radio, it wants to be a broadcaster too. Continuous sending information to the world, a room can have a virtual identity and under this guise live a secret life. For instance: a crystalpunk moves his leg for comfort, a crystalpunk shakes her head in disagreement, sensors pick up on it, triggering a wide range of reactions known and unknown, local and faraway. To paraphrase Ezra Pound: in soft architecture each gesture creates content that has form as water poured into a vase has form. Content is recyclable, routed multiple times, finally ending up back where it initiated: causing a sound closing a door illuminating a cryxal on-screen. A crystalpunk walks through the room and, like in a crappy disco, the floor lights up underneath her feet, too bad he is not feeling very much like a dancing queen tonight. Soft Architecture is a home grown architectonic freak show: what the Elephant Man is to the Athletic Body, the Crystalpunk Room will be to the Smart House.

Now that we have found data, what are we going to do with it?!

Technologists have for decades been playing with the idea of the supposedly smart home: the entire house adaptive and responsive and proactive, providing conveniences like that resurfacing dystopian killer-app: the refrigerator that makes sure the milk never runs out. No matter how device-centric and profit-inspired these efforts are, and as such divided by a royal mile from the super-serendipity of Crystalpunk roomology, this workshop is moving in the same problem-space of obvious possibilities and unresolved puzzles of making sense from the surplus of automated data production. Everybody can generate a source of water by opening the tap, few are given to come up with conceptually stimulating ways to process the output.

On Being Soft

Knowledge, so it is said, is the agitator of economic growth, a good education the only insurance against unemployment. Self-education in this respect is a scrapyard challenge: without any experience you can master the use of a jet engine, but when announcing yourself at the job centre it will be back to washing plates or carrying big things if you know what I mean. But self-education is part not of the world of schools and jobs and financial solvency and mortgage opportunities, but an involuntary by-product of the personal creative urge of the kind that start with one innocent question: "what if....?".

What if I make a lot of noise?

From the small but liberating gesture of doing so, its miracle usually diminishing quickly, you may be inspired to find a way forward in a process easily labelled crystalline. Learning to control the machine that makes the noise proposes new questions that need further understanding to be answered. In a different context Sherry Turkle suggested that self-education is rooted in the curiosity in finding out if, by playing around with it, you can make things work for the sake of it. This way to deal with problems, she says, is at odds with the goal oriented alphabetic way of making things as taught at schools. This 'soft mastery' over problems relies in a very real sense on the fact that answers will come to you. A 'lazy' and very unprofessional approach, as you can never explain what you will do beforehand. The Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture is really entirely very splendidly softly unprofessional indeed.

On Participating

The Crystalpunk Workshop of Soft Architecture workshop lives in 2 distinct spheres: in the corner of a gigantic building in a tiny Dutch city and online where as much realtime roomness is broadcasted as possible. Participation is local, you are invited to bring your laptop and start making noise, to join a workshop or to come listen to a presentation. To those faraway we must mention that, apart from this workshop, there are very few reasons for visiting Utrecht and the more we admire you for doing so. From the deepest Africa you are encouraged to turn yourself into a soft architectonic bootlegger: to render on-line data into representations formal and fluid, in monotones or RGB, spatially exact or rolling like a wave. Or perhaps you are more philosophically inclined and prone to profound reflections, or perhaps breaking things only to rebuild them is the tea you drink: the social infrastructure will be in place to work and think along wherever you are.

We do not care if participants don't know anything useful, and likewise we will welcome you with as much enthusiasm if you do know something useful. We are not like an alphabet but we are neither a cheap bar: we do ask from our participants the desire to unwind their own what-if soft scenarios. If you only want free internet access Beelzebub will bite your head off and create content that has form as a main artery needing urgent medial attention has form.

For a workshop that wants to shake the language and experience of roomness, 4 months is little time, but like with every education, it is never finished A fact learned can reveal itself useful only years after. Come as you are: you can be crystalpunk too.

crystalpunk |at| socialfiction |dot| org

Posted by jo at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

August 13, 2005

KISSS

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The Kinship International Strategy on Surveillance and Suppression

Are you seeing what we're thinking? The Kinship International Strategy on Surveillance and Suppression | KISSS is a series of performance events and interventions addressing surveillance and suppression.

KISSS is happening at an important moment. In the current political and social climate, surveillance has become an accepted and unquestionable part of everyday public life. Suppression of behaviour, information and desire occurs both privately and publicly. What is the relationship between surveillance and suppression? Consequence or reason for? How do issues of surveillance and suppression affect the work we make as artists and the way in which we work? How can we as artists, living in different countries, engaging in multi-platform possibilities and utlising varied perspectives, respond to these issues in a cohesive and powerful way?

A KISSS Policy Briefing will be held on August 19, 2005 at Elastic residence from 1500 to 1800.

This is an opportunity to meet the team, see work in progress and find out more about KISSS and how you can contribute and be involved. If you are interested in proposing a performance or contributing work, please come prepared to discuss it with a member of the team.

For further information on some of the strategies identified for KISSS visit:
http://www.elastic.org.uk/KISSS/strategies

KISSS Policy Briefing will take place at: Elastic residence, 22 Parfett St, Whitechapel / Aldgate East t: 0207 247 1375 e: kisss[at]elastic.org.uk

KISSS is supported by the University of Wales, Resonance 104.4FM and Concial Gallery, Australia.

Posted by jo at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION ISEA2006

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TRANSVERGENCE

This is an invitation by the ISEA2006 TRANSVERGENCE Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge to groups and individuals to submit proposals for exhibition of interactive art work and projects reflecting on the thematic of the transvergence.

Creative interplay of disciplines to catalyze artistic, scientific, and social innovation is evidenced by decades of multi-/ pluri-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary discourse and practice. Emphasis on the dynamics subtending this interplay has led to the notion of transvergence, a term coined by Marcos Novak which overrides discipline-bound issues and demands, and serves as the focus of the present call. Proposals are sought that address but are not limited to themes outlined below, challenging the boundaries of disciplines and conventional (art) institutional discourse, and indicating creative strategies for overriding them. Proposals may consist of art projects, residencies, workshops, standalone conference papers, or group conference sessions.

"While convergence and divergence are allied to epistemologies of continuity, transvergence is epistemologically closer to logics of incompleteness, to complexity, chaos, and catastrophe theories, dynamical systems, emergence, and artificial life. While convergence and divergence contain the hidden assumption that the true, in either a cultural or an objective sense, is a continuous land-mass, transvergence recognizes true statements to be islands in an alien archipelago, sometimes only accessible by leaps, flights, and voyages on vessels of artifice.

"Central to transvergence is speciation. We want to draw proposals that constitute new species of effort and expression and that both enact and reflect on our construction of new species of cultural reality -- not by being merely novel mutations within known areas, but by boldly challenging known areas and yet being potentially viable to the point of becoming autonomous entities -- not dancing about architecture or architecture about dancing, for instance, but dancing architecture... or, better still, something else, as yet alien and unnamable, but alive and growing."--Marcos Novak

ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS OFFERINGSETTINGS FOR TRANSVERGENCE

Transvergence is conditioned by exodus and invention. New idioms of expression do not happen in isolation. Although creativity is a resource that works best when shared, there is no clear form of revenue or infrastructure for the practices of collaboration that characterize transvergence. Collaboration in this context does not arise from democratically disseminated, proportionally allocated property, but from the permanent re-appropriation of shared resources, and resultant re-territorialization of production, creation and artefacts. The models of the think-tank, media lab and research centre have shown their limits since the 80s and 90s, as have tactical media activism tied to the logic of events, and NGOs facing the donor system's arduous accountability requirements; university research is often encumbered by best-practice driven managerial culture, and "creative industries" clusters are subject to economies of scale and uneven divisions of labour. As a technics of expression immanent to media of communication, transvergence requires settings that instantiate structures of possibility. Such settings might derive from models offered by ecologies, fields and membranes, and from the emergent institutional forms of organized networks, whose constant configuring of relations between actors, information, practices, interests and socio-technical systems corresponds to the logic of transvergence.

ISEA seeks new visions of organizational and participatory models as structures of possibility for transvergent practice.

TRANSVERGENT ETHICS AND REDEFINTIONS OF ART

Institutions which purportedly back new art practices are not always the bravest when it comes to work which challenges basic assumptions about what art is, what the artist is, what the relationship between artwork and audience might be, and what the outcome of an artwork might be. Counter intuitively, business corporations can be much quicker to support radically new ways for artist, artwork and audience to speak to each other: every time a viewer/player engages with an interactive creation, a kind of commerce occurs - a series of transactions, a litany of offers and purchases. Similarly, organizations devoted to healthcare, social well-being and political activism may more readily recognize exchanges that privilege the contingent yet compelling "we", and the urgency of the encounter. Art and cultural institutions remain reluctant to take on these new forms because they destabilize old views of the artist as a person making a proposition about the world and of the audience as consumer/ interpreter of this proposition, whereas transvergent work instates audiences as key f/actors in communication processes. This implies a shift in – but not necessary the demise of - the artist's role, and a change in the nature of artworks, formulated as public experiments raising questions as much to do with ethics, as with aesthetics and poetics.

ISEA encourages proposals querying the role and relevance of art in public arenas that are being redefined by interactive, inclusive ambitions and tools.

BIO-TECH-BIOINFO-BIOART-ECOART

Over the past 20 years, biotechnology has revolutionized the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries, and the fields of animal and human medicine. Biotechnology implementations direct areas such as food production and consumption, global trade agreements, human and animal reproduction, environmental concerns as well as biosecurity and biodefense. The Human Genome Project and stem cell research have stimulated the merging of computational research with areas of the life sciences. Disciplines such as bioinformatics and ecoinformatics currently enjoy broad public attention and funding. Although artists have long been engaged with depictions of "nature", BioArt, which includes the use of biological matters as part of artistic production and context creation, and EcoArt, where artists attempt to influence the ecologies in which we live, are relatively young areas demanding new exploratory and creative strategies.

ISEA is interested in projects engaging with the materials and broader ecology of life sciences, rather than simply their symbolic representation.

TECHNOZOOSEMIOTICS AS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PLATFORM & PLAYGROUND

Technozoosemiotics is the study of signs elaborated by all natural or artificial living species to communicate in intra- or extra-specific ways (zoe = life). Humans and their more-or-less intelligent artefacts ignore the quality and singularity of information elaborated and emitted through the myriad channels and networks which traverse terrestrial, celestial, marine and intergalactic spaces. As art forms migrate from institutional sanctuaries to other areas of experience – the everyday, public, intimate/private, the biosphere, the universe – they must tune to the diverse communications that animate the technozoosphere. This means inventing interfaces that favour interactions of like and unlike kinds of intelligence, and emergence of new species of conversational agents. It means creating epistemological platforms and playgrounds for the transduction and translation of codes that open up novel ways of thinking and domains of knowledge.

ISEA is soliciting art that extends beyond human-centred design, to questions of living systems and new species of cultural reality.

TRANSVERGENCE CALL COMMITTEE:

Chair, Sally Jane Norman, Louis Bec, Andy Cameron, Beatriz da Costa, Bojana Kunst, Maja Kuzmanovic, Anne Nigten, Marcos Novak, Ned Rossiter.

Timeframe:
Announcement August 1, 2005
Submissions due October 3, 2005
Jurying due December 1, 2005
Accepted proposals announced December 15, 2005

http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/transvergence/index.html
If you have questions contact transvergence[at]yproductions.com
Sign up for the ISEA2006 mailing list: http://cadre.sjsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/isea2006

Steve Dietz
Director, ZeroOne: The Network
Director, ISEA2006 Symposium +
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu : August 5-13, 2006
stevedietz[at]yproductions[dot]com
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/index.html

Posted by jo at 09:12 AM | Comments (0)

HARVESTWORKS

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ARTIST IN RESIDENCE PROGRAM: New Works

The Harvestworks Artist In Residence Program offers commissions of up to $4000 to make a new work in our state of the art digital media facility. Each artist receives a $700 fee with the balance of the award posted in a' "facilities account" which is used to manage and produce the work. The artist works with a team comprised of a project manager, engineer and programmer (if required). Work produced in the program is premiered in the Harvestworks' 5.1 Presentation Lab. Residents are also included in Creative Contact, an Internet compilation of digital art work on the Harvestworks website. Deadline: Tuesday, November 1, 2005.

New works may include the creation of a new video work with a surround sound audio mix, audio recording and mastering of a surround sound piece, the creation of a new web art work and the development of a live interactive music/video/installation system using Max/MSP/Jitter.

Up to 12 residencies will be selected (depending on project size and funding) along with two alternates in the event any resident artist cannot participate. Priority will be given to the creative use of the Harvestworks' production facility and the innovative use of sound and/or picture. Emerging artists and artists of color are encouraged to apply.

How to apply: Instructions on how to apply and application forms can be found online. Application seminars may be held in late September to assist artists in the development of their projects. Check our website for dates and times.

Questions: Questions can be directed to Hans Tammen at 212.431.1130 ext. 13 or by email at hanst[at]harvestworks.org.

Harvestworks Inc. is a non-profit arts center in Lower Manhattan. Funding for our programs has been provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, LMCC/ADNY, the Booth Ferris Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the James E. Robison Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Greenwall Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial, the Rockefeller Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, the Experimental TV Center and mediaThe foundation inc. Additional support by Tekserve, Digidesign, Inc., NHT Pro, Waves, Propellerhead, Ableton, MOTU, Universal Audio, Antares.

Carol Parkinson
Director
Harvestworks, Digital Media Arts Center
596 Broadway Suite 602 NYC 10012
212-431-1130 x 12

Posted by jo at 08:34 AM | Comments (0)

August 12, 2005

If I Can’t Dance – I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution

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Performative Thinking and Practice as Understood Today

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution--curated by Frederique Bergholtz, Annie Fletcher and Tanja Elstgeestis--is a visual art project which travels throughout 2005 in different forms from Utrecht (Festival a/d Werf), to ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Theaterfestival Boulevard) and Leiden (de VeenFabriek).

"If I Can’t Dance – I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution" takes as its point of departure this famous quote of Emma Goldman (b. Lithuania 1869). By using Goldman’s exclamation as a title for our programme, we contend that art has the power to position it self politically, determinedly and critically in the world, but also to be celebratory. Performativity contests the notion that the self is stable or separable from the context within which we operate. Identifying this heightened awareness is perhaps a way of analysing or even contesting the conditions in which we live. If I Can’t Dance… asks artists to engage with both the legacy and continuing importance of performative thinking and practice as understood today.

The Structure: We intend to use the vitality and event-based context of these festival platforms to explore the legacy and on-going developments of performativity as a rich philosophical trajectory through which to produce contemporary art practice. This is perhaps particularly appropriate within a theatre festival, where the whole dynamic of performance as a conscious act can be directly contrasted to the more subtle and critical sense of the performative, which also occurs in non- prescriptive and unconscious ways.

The Programme: At Theatrefestival Bouelvard we launch the second phase of If I Can’t Dance... This August we will present the latest developments in the performances and on-going projects of these five international artists namely; Johanna Billing - You Don’t Love Me Yet, Matti Braun - The Alien, Gerard Byrne, 1984 and Beyond, Yael Davids - End On Mouth, Ligna -Invasion of the Radio Listeners. By working with people and places in ’s-Hertogenbosch, we directly relate ourselves via the arts with the existing (artistic) structures of the city. With the piece of Johanna Billing the local music scene is presented. The group Ligna examine the functioning of the social and public space in the city through the medium of radio. Both Yael Davids and Gerard Byrne generate live performances, which explore the apparatus of theatre and notions of acting in very specific locations in and around the city. The project of Matti Braun exists of a series of staged present ations that together form part of his new project. The context of the festival gives us the opportunity to programme in a concentrated way for five intensive days, each day is defined by the work of one artist. Further, a documentation centre will be installed at the artists’ initiative space Artis dealing with the developments, ideas and the research during the development of these project from when we began in Utrecht last May until now.

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution - the publication documenting the ideas and work developed during this three-stage project is forthcoming in March 2006.

For further information see:
http://www.ificantdance.org / http://www.festivalboulevard.nl
Or call 00 31 73 613 7671 for reservations and information
Phone lines open daily from 15.00

The project is generously supported by Mondriaan Foundation and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual arts Design and Architecture. Theatrefestival Boulevard is structurally subsided by the Ministry the Province of Noord Brabant and the municipality of S-Hertogenbosch

Posted by jo at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

August 11, 2005

PERFORMA05

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First Biennial of New Visual Art Performance in NYC

PERFORMA, the nonprofit organization committed to new visual art performance, is pleased to announce PERFORMA05, the first biennial of new visual art performance in New York City. More than 20 venues throughout New York will present a multidisciplinary program of live visual art performances, exhibitions, film screenings, and lectures from November 3 through 21, 2005. Ten major new works will be premiered and more than 60 artists will participate in the three-week program. PERFORMA05 is organized under the artistic direction of its founder RoseLee Goldberg.

Programming Highlights

To launch PERFORMA05, Danish artist Jesper Just will premiere his first multimedia live performance at Stephan Weiss Studio, with The Finnish Screaming Men’s Choir and 3-D set design by VISION4. Visual artist and composer Christian Marclay will present a moving image musical score interpreted by live musicians at Eyebeam. The Music of Regret, a movie by Laurie Simmons, will incorporate puppetry, and elements of musical theater in three tales of regret at Salon 94. “24-hour Incidental,” a performance program at the Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art will feature works by ten artists, including Peter Coffin, Jason Dodge, and Karl Holmquist. Anthology Film Archives will present live performances by Ei Arakawa, Jutta Koether, Emily Sundblad/ Reena Spauldings, and the world-premiere of a film retrospective on Bas Jan Ader. Art in General will exhibit a three-channel video installation by Sharon Hayes documenting five imaginary protests throughout New York City. Art P roduction Fund will present Free Play—a public jukebox interactive artwork by Christian Holstad. Other participating artists include Tamy Ben-Tor, Coco Fusco, Pablo Helguera, Paul D. Miller, Michael Smith, Sislej Xhafa, among many others.

WPS1.org is the Internet radio sponsor of the biennial and will feature live recordings and interviews, while PERFORMA RADIO will expand the field of performance into radio space with new projects by artists in the Biennial broadcast on FM radio. LISTEN UP! Lectures as Performances at The Kitchen, is a series highlighting artists who use the formal lecture as an art form. PERFORMA05 will also introduce the next segment of NOT FOR SALE: Writing about Performance and New Media at New York University, a symposia on the art of writing about multimedia and performance art, which will include Katy Siegel, John Rockwell, and Philippe Vergne, among other leading artists, curators and critics.

PERFORMA05 is organized in collaboration with some of New York City’s leading museums, arts organizations, galleries, and independent curators, including Anthology Film Archives, apexart, Art In General, Artists Space, Eyebeam, The Kitchen, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York University, Participant, Inc., Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art, and White Box. Participating galleries include Leo Koenig Inc., Paula Cooper Gallery, Salon 94, and Yvon Lambert.

Concurrently with PERFORMA05, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Marina Abramovic: Seven Easy Pieces, seven consecutive nights of performances in the museum’s rotunda from November 9 through 15. The works include a new piece by Abramovic created specifically for this project, as well as her renditions of seminal performances by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman, and Gina Pane.

About PERFORMA

Established in April 2004 by art historian, critic, and curator RoseLee Goldberg, PERFORMA is a nonprofit interdisciplinary arts organization committed to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists from around the world. PERFORMA will commission new performance projects in visual arts, establish a dedicated performance biennial, and provide year-round educational programming for this critical area of visual art and cultural history.

A full program of events will be available online at http://www.performa-arts.org in September 2005.

Media Contact
Blue Medium, Inc.
T: (212) 675-1800
F: (212) 675-1855
E: info@bluemedium.com

Posted by jo at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)

August 09, 2005

16Beaver

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Continental Drift Seminar with Brian Holmes

We are pleased to invite you to participate in a Seminar with Brian Holmes this September and October online and at 16Beaver. There are two possible ways of joining: 1. to physically attend in NYC and 2. to participate via webcast. We will give more information about the online version, as we have details, so for this email, we focus on the physical participation.

Continental Drift is a modular and experimental seminar that will attempt to embark upon the "impossible" task of articulating the immense geopolitical and economic shifts which took place between 1989-2001, the effects of those changes on the emerging bodies of governance (i.e., the formation of economic blocs like EU or NAFTA) and in turn the effects on subjectivity. Having witnessed the incredible vibrancy of social movements which took hold in that same period, the seminar acknowledges that new modes of control and channeling of various flows have merited a shift in tactics and strategies. The question of "what now?" is precisely at the core of our study.

"The goal, then, is to map out the majority models of self and group within each of the emerging continental systems, to see how they function within the megamachines of production and conquest – and at the same time, to cross the normative borders they put into effect, in order to trace microcartographies of difference, dissent, deviance and refusal."

We hope you will be able to join us in what should be an open and critical discussion.

1. Dates

Part 1 of the seminar will be September, (12) and (15-18): We have spent the last year coordinating and developing the format and context for this event. The seminar is open to all who are interested, however, for practical reasons we want to limit enrollment. Please see directions for enrollment below.

Part 2 will take place in October (20-24). (details forthcoming), if you already know that you are interested in part II please let us know.

2. About Seminar Format and Schedule

It has been 6 years now since we have been initiating various events, activities and discussions. We have over this time sought opportunities to find partners in organizing small colloquia, workshops, and seminars which take on a subject in a more focused manner. This collaboration with Brian is further development of this desire for a more concentrated involvement and discussion around a specific set of questions.

The schedule will be the following:

Monday September 12 -- Introduction / Conversation with Brian -- 7:30 PM
Thursday September 15 -- Lunch -- 12:00 PM -- Participant Introductions
Thursday September 15 -- Session 1 -- 6:30 PM
Friday September 16 -- Lunch -- 12:00 PM -- Participant Introductions II
Friday September 16 -- Session 2 -- 6:30 PM
Friday September 16 -- Dinner Event -- 9:30 PM
Saturday September 17 -- Session 3 -- 1:00PM -5:00PM
Saturday September 17 -- Social TBA -- 6:00PM
Sunday September 18 -- Session 4 -- 1:00PM -5:00PM
Sunday September 18 -- Social TBA -- 6:00PM

Participants who are traveling to NYC can of course attend from Thursday to Sunday.

We should also note that we are making arrangements to stream the seminar online, so those who are not able to attend can follow and hopefully still participate.

3. How to Enroll? + Funding

To enroll in this seminar please send an email to: seminars[at]16beavergroup.org

The participation fee is 25-50$ (sliding scale). We will waive the fee for those who have great difficulty in paying but have a strong desire to participate.

Last year, we were given $700 by RepoHISTORY as they officially closed their bank account. We will be applying all of that money towards Brian's airfare. We would like to extend a thanks to their assistance in realizing this event.

4. Continental Drift - An Overview by Brian Holmes

Continental integration refers to the constitution of enormous production blocs – and particularly, to NAFTA and the EU (while awaiting the emergence of a full-fledged Asian bloc around Japan and China).

But continental drift means you find Morocco in Finland, Caracas in Washington, "the West" in "the East" – and so on in every direction. That's the metamorphic paradox of contemporary power.

The continental blocs are functioning governmental units one scale up from the nation-state. They represent specific attempts to articulate and manage the vast constructive and destructive energies that have been unleashed by the last four decades of technological development, from the introduction of the worldwide container transport system in the sixties, all the way to the emergence of widespread satellite transmission in the eighties and the Internet in our time. Military strategies, the competitive rush for markets, but also the uncertainty and turbulence of the neoliberal globalization process itself has led capitalistic elites to seek forms of territorial stabilization – however violent this "stabilization" may be. This means re-organizing, not just spaces and flows, but also hearts and minds, whether in the centers of accumulation or on the peripheries. We are all affected, wherever we are living.

The main hypothesis I want to put out here is that the two really-existing blocs – NAFTA and the EU – are both developing not only a functioning set of institutions, but also a dominant form of subjectivity, adapted to the new scale. This form of subjectivity is offered to or imposed upon all those who still live only at the national level, or on the multiple edges or internal peripheries of the bloc, so as to integrate them. At the same time it serves to rationalize – or to mask – the concomitant processes of exploitation, alienation, exclusion and ecological devastation. In what different ways does this integration of individual and cultural desire take place? How is it resisted or opposed? How to imagine an excess over the normative figures of continentalization? Where are the escape hatches, the lines of flight, the alternatives to bloc subjectivity? And what types of effects could these exert on the constituted systems?

To answer such questions in any meaningful way requires several different levels of investigation. First, the driving forces of the globalization process – including neoliberal doctrine, the globalized financial system, the transnational institutions and Imperial infrastructures such as the Internet or the GPS satellite mapping system – have to be identified and observed in operation. Second, the evolving forms of territorial governance and the constantly shifting territorial limits of the major continental blocs have to be described and differentiated from each other. Third, the dominant forms of subjectivity in each bloc - the models of success and jouisssance - have to be characterized, using the tools of social psychology. But the most interesting and probably the most urgent thing is to conduct singular and transversal investigations on the margins of these majority formations, to see how people are reacting, innovating, resisting and fleeing.

The goal, then, is to map out the majority models of self and group within each of the emerging continental systems, to see how they function within the megamachines of production and conquest – and at the same time, to cross the normative borders they put into effect, in order to trace microcartographies of difference, dissent, deviance and refusal. For that, it's necessary to travel and to collaborate, to invent concepts and also set-ups, ways of working. One tactic is to juxtapose sociological arguments with activist inventions and artistic experiments. Another is to crisscross the languages, and even better, the families of languages, and to reside in the gaps between their truth claims and sensoriums. But still another is just to drift and see what happens. The ideas of Felix Guattari, particularly in Chaosmosis and the untranslated study, Cartographies schizoanalytiques, can provide a kind of crazy compass for these attempts to articulate something subjectively and collectively, outside the existing frames.

Obviously, this kind of project is scientifically "impossible." No conceivable group of researchers, and certainly not an ad-hoc operation, could possibly synthesize the varieties of knowledge needed at these scales. This is where a de facto censorship begins to operate, with all kinds of consequences. To accept the impossibility is to condemn oneself to ignorance, not only of the contemporary macrocosm (the world-space), but also of the dynamics of your own microcosm (what happens in your head, what pulses in your veins). So we're gonna try the project nonetheless.

Modularity and experimentalism will be the strategies for eluding any tacit censorship of this irrational desire to know. Modularity, because it refuses the totalizing construction and always leaves room for an extra module to be inserted in a line of questioning, completing it, problematizing it, or opening up a new bifurcation. Experimentalism, because the existing rationalities and protocols of truth are simply not enough to make a world, and only the undiscovered form or order holds a chance of breaking the deadlocks that confront everyone, at the micro and macro scales of disaster in the twenty-first century.

This project stems from the geophilosophical desire of an individual, but demands only to multiply. The research will be done through the opportunities of various collaborative projects, on location and over the net. The seminars in which the major hypotheses will be formulated and explored, and certain case studies presented, will be carried out with a series of mostly non-institutional partners, beginning with the 16 Beaver group in New York, for a seminar extending from September 12 to 18. Certain research modules will be published with cooperating institutions, and/or presented at conferences. Results of the research and contributions by participants will be posted on here on www.u-tangente.org, and perhaps on a specific project website.

5. About Brian Holmes

Brian Holmes is an art and cultural critic, activist and translator, living in Paris. He has a doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley, but prefers to develop research outside the academy. He was the English editor of publications for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, 1997, worked with the French graphic arts group Ne pas plier around the turn of the c entury, and has collaborated with the critical mapmakers Bureau d'Etudes, most recently on the website Tangent University. His essays appear on the mailinglist Nettime, in the art magazines "Springerin" and "Brumaria" and in the philosophy and sociology journal "Multitudes," among others. He is the author of a book of essays, "Hieroglyphs of the Future: Art and politics in a networked era" (Zagreb:
Arkzin/WHW, 2002). That book, a forthcoming volume called "Unleashing the Collective Phantoms," and a range of other work in various languages can be found in the archive at www.u-tangente.org, along with all the material for the current project "Continental Drift."

6. Specifics

As Brian is updating the program daily, we will for the interim rely on the following website:

http://www.u-tangente.org (click continental drift) or http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=14&Itemid=125

16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th / 5th fl.
New York, NY 10004
phone: 212.480.2093

for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org

TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,M Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry

Posted by jo at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)

In Memory of Franz Feigl

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The Myth of Bolshevik

Network activists and friends of the medien.KUNSTLABOR want to travel by boat from Amsterdam to the Black Sea. Final destination of the journey is the island St. Anastasia, formerly known as Bolshevik (1945 - 1990). The boat is named after Franz Feigl, an Austrian artist and network activist who lived in Amsterdam and died in 2001 at a young age.

The boat will record on its journey all open wireless lan access points. This activity, if conducted by car, is called war-driving. The peaceful goals of the Motorship Franz Feigl aim at highlighting the possibility of opening up networks and creating a free infrastructure (see Funkfeuer, Freifunk,
Consume).

The boat will also communicate via packet radio and pictures will regularly be sent by GPRS to http://stroem.ung.at. MS Franz Feigl has already travelled from Amsterdam via Linz to Vienna. In Linz at the wharf of the Times Up collective repair work on the boat was done. It has travelled safely from Linz to Vienna under captainship of Franz Xaver.

Tomorrow, Wednesday August 9, the MS Franz Feigl is due to leave for Bratislava, where it will arrive om Thursday or Friday. On Monday, August 15, it will arrive in Budapest.

The project is carried out in collaboration with 05-trov and mobil.KUNSTLABOR.at

SMS Kontakt: 00436764902223
Chat: irc.kunstlabor.at#kunstlabor
E-mail:boot[at]kunstlabor.at

[via netbehaviour]

Posted by jo at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

CONNECTIVITY:

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THE TENTH BIENNIAL SYMPOSIUM ON ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY

The Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College is pleased to announce Connectivity: The Tenth Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, March 30 – April 1, 2006. The mission of the symposium is to present new works, research and performances in the areas of technology and the arts. The symposium will consist of commissioned works, paper sessions, panel discussions, art exhibitions, interactive environments, music concerts, screenings and multi-media performances. In an effort to demystify the artistic process and create a forum for dialogue, we are encouraging all presenters and artists to speak about their work at the symposium.

The Center seeks submissions in the general areas of Interactivity, Cognition, Compositional and Artistic Process, Social and Ethical Issues in Arts and Technology, Art, Music, Video, Film, Animation, Theater, Dance, Innovative Use of Technology in Education, Scientific Visualization, Virtual Reality, and other pertinent topics relating to arts and technology.

SUBMISSION CATEGORIES

COMMISSIONED WORKS: Proposals for new, original, interdisciplinary works will be accepted for a “Commissioned” category. Works must be created by a team consisting of two or more members, and must combine two or more areas of creative expression and contain a major technology component. Proposals will be accepted for performances, concerts, showings or installations; completed works will be presented during the symposium. Proposals must include detailed technical and production requirements, and a proposed budget. Limit of one proposal per team. The piece must not have been previously published, performed or exhibited. Awards will be granted at the discretion of the Center. Submissions not accepted for the commissioned category will also be reviewed for the general submissions category. Accepted commissions will be awarded a stipend of $3000 and a residency at Connecticut College between March 27 and April 1 that includes:

- performance or installation of the accepted work
- workshops with students
- attendance at the symposium
- presentation at the symposium


PAPERS: A two-page extended abstract or complete paper, including technical requirements, must be submitted by email or mail. Upon acceptance, revised papers must be submitted electronically by January 31, 2006 as a PDF. Complete technical requirements for presentation must be included. Papers will be published by the Center in the symposium proceedings. All rights will remain with the author. Papers will be selected for twenty-minute presentations as part of the daily schedule of speakers. Papers may be grouped by the Center in a panel discussion format.

PANEL DISCUSSIONS: Proposals for panel discussions are encouraged. Proposals should include names of prospective panelists and topic, which should address the general areas of the symposium. Papers may be grouped by the Center in a panel discussion format.

CREATIVE WORKS: In addition to academic and theoretical papers, submissions of technology-based or technology-oriented creative works are encouraged. Maximum one proposal per person or team, and we reserve the right not to review multiple pieces in a single submission. All submissions must be accompanied by a one-page description/abstract for presentation at the symposium about the work, a list of complete technical needs, biography and contact information. See specific categories for additional requirements. All presenters and artists are encouraged to speak about their work at the symposium. Symposium registration will be required for all symposium attendees.

MUSIC COMPOSITIONS: Music submissions (composition, performance, theory, interactivity, signal processing and music understanding) are encouraged. Works for instruments, digital media, CD or interactive compositions are also being solicited for “tape only” concerts or live performance. Works should not exceed 15 minutes in length and should be submitted with accompanying score, where appropriate. Music must be submitted on CD for review, with accompanying scores as required. Musicians, dancers and actors may be available for live performance pieces. All submissions must be accompanied by a one page description/abstract for presentation at the symposium about the work. Complete technical and performance requirements must be included.

ART: Submissions of digital art, web art and other technology-based or technology-oriented art forms are encouraged. Submissions of desktop interactive works, self-contained web works, time based work, performance and installations will be considered. Acceptance may be constrained by technical needs, security and financial considerations. Artworks will be reviewed on the basis of documentation of the work presented in the form of a website, CD, DVD, VHS or slides. Submissions must include a one-page description/abstract for presentation at the symposium about the work, portfolio (maximum 4 jpegs, no larger than 2 Mb each), brief biography, contact details, and complete technical needs and spatial requirements

VIDEO AND FILM: Submissions of short video or film works that include a significant 'technology' component in their creation, aesthetic or theme are encouraged. The 'tech' involved may be 'high' or 'low', ranging from digital animations and motion capture work on the 'high-tech' end to various methods of creating film without photography, or novel uses of the projector beam on the low tech side. Works that display worthy reflections on the nexus of art, society and technology, even if created by primarily 'conventional' means, are encouraged. Submissions in the category of 'expanded cinema' and projection performance will be accepted, but resources are limited and artists presenting such work should expect to bring all or much of their own essential gear. Submissions must include a one-page description/abstract of the work and VHS, DV or DVCAM tape, DVD (tape preferred). For works involving anything other than standard video or 16mm projection, a complete description of technical and space needs is required. Exhibition format will be DV, DVCAM, or 16mm film (no home-burned DVDs).Selection for screening may be made in part on the maker's willingness/ability to attend the symposium.

DANCE AND THEATER: Computer-generated or computer-aided dance compositions and theater works are being solicited for live demonstrations or for videotaped presentations. Specially produced dance or theater videos are of particular interest as opposed to concert tapes or other archival uses of video. Also of interest are proposals for workshops, demonstrations of software for dance or theater notation, choreographic analysis, interactive studies and/or multi-media studies of performance in dance and theater. Performances may be accepted, but will be limited by technical needs and financial considerations. All submissions should be accompanied by a web site, CD, DVD or VHS, and one page description/abstract for presentation at the symposium about the work, biography, contact details, and complete technical needs and spatial requirements.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS:

DEADLINES (must be postmarked or emailed by date)
November 1, 2005: Commissioned Works Deadline
December 1, 2005: Commissioned Works Notification
December 1, 2005: General Submission Deadline
December 22, 2005: General Acceptance Notification
January 31, 2006: Final papers must be received as a PDF
March 27 – April 1, 2006: Residencies for Commissioned Works
March 30 – April 1, 2006: Symposium

RETURN: Submissions, art works, slides, CDs, DVDs, VHS, tapes or scores will only be returned if a self-addressed stamped envelope or packaging is provided.

SEND SUBMISSIONS TO:
Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology
Connecticut College
270 Mohegan Avenue – BOX 5365
New London, CT USA 06320-4196
phone: [860] 439-2001
email: cat@conncoll.edu
http://cat.conncoll.edu

The 10th Biennial Symposium is sponsored by Citizens Bank, USA.

Posted by jo at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)

TRANSITIO_MX 2005 (MÉXICO)

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FIRST VIDEO AND ELECTRONIC ARTS CONTEST

Transitio_mx 2005 International Video and Electronic Arts Festival is a place for the expression of contemporary artistic creative practices through electronic media. The main focus of this festival is showing the current production and research in the field, in function of the constant mobility of its epistemological, technological, cultural, aesthetic and social boundaries. These dissolutions invite us to explore the nature, scopes and conflicts between, art, technology, sciences and humanities making the Festival a permanent site for the expression and reflection of the above mentioned relationships.

This first edition of the Festival has chosen the "Imaginaries in transit: poetics and technology" as its main theme. The thematic proposes to go deep into the paradigm that provides of contents and expands technology right from the poetics or sign's site, rather that emphasizing the research concerning technological support itself. "Imaginaries in transit: poetics and technology" seeks to explore the aesthetic and cultural re-signification modes that accompany electronic art production and research, inviting the participants of the contest to reflect about production within this context.

Transitio_mx will count with the presence of well known personalities such as Marina Grzinik, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Arlindo Machado, Jorge Laferla, Príamo Lozada, José Luis Barrios, among others. The jury for the First Video and Electronic Arts Contest will also be made up of important artists and theoretitians in the electronic arts field. Three prizes will be awarded: first prize consisting in N$120,000.00, second prize consisting in N$90,000.00 and third prize of N$75,000.00. The previous amounts are in Mexican pesos.

The National Culture and Arts Council, through the Center for Multimedia of the National Center for the Arts, invites all artists of this field to participate in the First Video and Electronic Arts Contest that will take place within the framework of this Festival from December 6 to 11, 2005.

The deadline for the contest is September 30, 2005. For information on the required documents, and in order to complete the entry form visit: http://transitiomx.cenart.gob.mx or write an email to Ana Villa: concursoae[at]correo.cnart.mx

Posted by jo at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)

August 08, 2005

Futuresonic 2006

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Independence: 10 Years of Futuresonic

Celebrating collaborative cultures and independence movements - from independent labels to peer-to-peer culture, from free parties to free networks, from locative media to local food.

The Futuresonic 2006 festival will explore the theme of Independence, looking at collaborative cultures and independence movements in art, technology and culture. Futuresonic was formed 10 years ago at a time when there was a emergent musical and digital culture that was outside the mainstream, collaborative and peer-to-peer. Today a centre of gravity has shifted towards the world of hackers, bloggers, free networks, open source, social software and civic technologies. What has remained constant has been the emphasis on social autonomy and independence of creative practice. Futuresonic 2006 will explore the state of independence today, and showcase independent music, arts and technologies that are open, emergent, collaborative and ad-hoc.

Futuresonic 2006 will also host the final exhibition and conference of PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network.

Posted by jo at 08:49 AM | Comments (0)

VIDA 8.0

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ART & ARTIFICIAL LIFE

VIDA 8.0 is the seventh edition of this international competition, created to reward excellence in artistic creativity in the field of artificial life. In previous editions, prizes have been awarded to autonomous entities able to bring us pleasure (Tickle 2.0, Tickle Salon 5.0), engage us in irrational conversations (Head 3.0) or invade our social space (Cour des Miracles 2.0); virtual ecologies that evolve with user participation (Autopoiesis 3.0, Electric Sheep and Remain in Light 4.0), autonomous systems that use the feedback obtained as a mechanism and metaphor for transformation (Appearance machine 3.0, Levántate 5.0) and works highlighting the social side of artificial life (Novus Extinctus 4.0, The Relative Velocity Inscription Device 5.0, The Central City 6.0 and Spore 7.0).

Other themes are addressed in works that have been given honourable mentions: avatars and players in their unique worlds (Iconica 2.0, Life Spacies II and Unconscious Flow 3.0), new interpretations of the roots of artificial life, such as cellular automatons (Sandlines 3.0, Dadatron 5.0) and system feedback or autonomy translated into simple familiar media (Breathe and Autistic-Artistic Machine 4.0, The Responsive Field of Lattice Archipelogics 5.0).

We are looking for art that reflects the panorama of the possible interaction between 'synthetic' and organic life, e.g. - Autonomous agents that shape and perhaps interpret the data-saturated environment we have in common. - Portraits of inter-subjectivity or empathy shared between artificial entities and ourselves. - Intelligent anthropomorphisation of the datasphere and its inhabitants. - User-defined exploration and interaction designed to reduce fear and stimulate interest in the emerging phenomena which, by definition, are beyond our control.

An international jury will award prizes to the most outstanding projects in electronic art which use techniques such as digital genetics, autonomous robotics, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots, computer viruses, virtual ecosystems and avatars.

There is a total of EUR 20,000 in prizes for the three projects selected by the jury:

First prize: EUR 10,000
Second prize: EUR 7,000
Third prize: EUR 3,000

There will also be special mentions for a further seven projects chosen by the jury. Each project must be submitted as a 5-10-minute video with voice-over narration describing the artistic concept and the technological realization of the project presented. The project must be post-September 2003. The jury's decision will be based essentially on the video.

Participants must provide a VHS tape (PAL, NTSC or SECAM format) or DVD for the jury. If your work is awarded a prize or a special mention, you will be asked to provide a video on professional-quality format (Dvcam, Betacam, U-Matic, MiniDV) for inclusion in The Best of VIDA 8.0 .

The competition is open to participants from all over the world; however, each participant may present only one project. To register, read the competition rules, complete and sign the application form and submit it together with the tape to Fundación Telefónica before 30 September 2005.

Posted by jo at 07:08 AM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2005

Science and Art Conference

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A Collision of Politics, Ethics and imagination

This international Science and Art Conference challenges the serene vision of art and science as a warm, fuzzy continuum and asks instead what really happens when different perspectives, expectations, interests and languages converge. Presented by Arts Council England, Yorkshire in partnership with CNAP, a bioscience research centre at the University of York, it will take place September 5-7, 2005 at University of York.

Art and science each hold the allure of a powerful cultural 'other'. Artists wish to appropriate science, scientists to harness art, for the benefit of their own practices. To what extent can this desire be collaborative or mutually beneficial? [see also Artists on Science: Scientists on Art, Nature, Vol. 434, No. 7031 pp293-324.]

When artists are natural transgressors and scientists trained to be cautious, are there risks as well as benefits? What happens when science is taken out of the lab, away from its safety procedures and cultural assumptions? Do artists have any responsibility towards scientific data, how it is manipulated and presented? In its interplay with science, is art contributing to knowledge, creating meaning or on a quest to change the world?

In this collision of politics, ethics and imagination--spanning ecology, bioscience and deep space--what are the Rules of Engagement?

Speakers and participants include: Andrew Stones; Lloyd Anderson (British Council); Oron Catts (SymbioticA); Nicola Triscott (The Arts Catalyst); David Buckland (Cape Farewell); Lise Autogena; Josh Portway; Brandon Ballengée; Adam Zaretsky; Lucy Kimbell; Simon Gould; Ian Hunter (Littoral); Jo Joelson (London Fieldworks); Darren Wright (Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group); Comma Press; Dianna Bowles (CNAP); Ruth Ben-Tovim; Lizzie Coombes; Andrew Cleaton; Lucy Cullingford; Lizz Tuckerman; Andy Gracie (Hostprods); Andrew Webster (SATSU)

Delegate fees: £165 full, £75 concessions (including refreshments, meals, accommodation and events). Prompt booking is advised.

For further information, please contact Arts Council England, Yorkshire:

Rachel Chapman, Science and Art Coordinator Email: yorkshire.science[at]artscouncil.org.uk

or Chloe Smith, Assistant Officer Tel: +44 (0)1924 486215

Posted by jo at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)

August 03, 2005

INTERACTIVE FUTURES 06:

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Audio Visions

CALL FOR PAPERS, PANELS, PERFORMANCES, & INSTALLATIONS

INTERACTIVE FUTURES is a forum for showing recent tendencies in new media art as well as a conference for exploring issues related to technology. The theme of this year's event is Audio Visions. IF06 will explore new forms of audio-based media art from a diverse body of artists, theorists, and sound practitioners. Sound poetry, web-based audio and multimedia, mobile audio performance, new forms of music theatre, synaesthetic performance, hybrid forms, sound-based installation, video and sound, and environmental sound are all of interest to Audio Visions.

The proliferation of audio technologies, audio-visual collaboration, and hybrid forms of live performance in the new millennium is striking. Audio artists are exploring the areas of mobility, virtuality, performance, and audience interaction from an experimental point-of-view. Audio Visions invites scholars, sound-artists, and performers of all stripes to submit paper, panel, performance or installation proposals in one of the three following categories.

1. "Sound and Vision" lecture and panel series - Scholars, artists, and practitioners working in audio or audio-visual-based new media are encouraged to submit proposals for IF06. We are interested in a broad range of audio including: computational, interactive or generative audio; the creation of digital audio tools; synchronization between sound and visuals; performative art that explores language, voice and body; streaming radio and mobile sound works. Presentations should be, in part, demonstrative. We recognize that sound art is evolving and that categories have become increasingly irrelevant - we encourage proposals that push the boundaries of the traditional conference paper.

2. "Earshot" performance series: "Earshot" is seeking experimental audio-based performances that challenge assumptions about audio forms and performance conventions. Avant-garde, post-avant-garde, techno, electro-acoustic, synaesthetic production, liminal art and hybrid performance are all within our desired range. "Earshot" is primarily interested in new types of electronic audio-visual performance as well as models for audience participation in sound works. "Earshot" will run performances at Open Space for each night of IF06.

3. "Tangible Frequencies" installations. We are interested in audio installation works that consider site, space, vision, volume and perception and how physical location 'matters' to the reception of audio frequencies. IF06 has identified areas within Open Space Gallery to function as controlled locations for sound installations.* We welcome proposals that respond to the particular characteristics of these locations through their acknowledgement of private and/or public space and use. Installations may provide audio continuity to the existing locations, or respond as intervention and critique.

INTERACTIVE FUTURES is part of the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival and applicants are encouraged to check the Festival website for more information on the broader program.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS / ARTISTS

Greg Hermanovic of Derivative software is a visionary software-engineer involved in the creation of real-time visual tools. In 2003 he received an Academy Award for the pioneering of modeling in the film industry with PRISMS and Houdini. Greg coordinated the realtime animation at SIGGRAPH 98's Interactive Dance Club, and directed special effects for Michael Snow's Corpus Callosum. Derivatives Touch software, a range of tactile interfaces, brings advanced realtime animation tools to a diverse cross-section of artists, including Richie Hawtin and Rush. Greg will perform live visuals with Toronto-based DJ Tom Kuo.

Tom Kuo uses a grounding in techno to pursue a varied range of precise electronic strains. Tom was recently named one of Toronto's Top Ten DJs by NOW magazine.

Atau Tanaka is known for his work in interactive music, including performances with biosignal gesture systems. He has conducted research at IRCAM in Paris and was Artistic Ambassador of Apple Computer Europe. His work with sensor-based musical instruments and network audio installations have received prizes and support from Ars Electronica, the Fraunhofer Institute, the Japan Foundation, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. His current research at Sony CSL Paris focuses on harnessing collective musical creativity on mobile devices.

J=FCrg Gutknecht is a computer scientist with a passion for new hybrid art forms. He has actively participated in culturally-oriented "wearable computing" projects, including "Instant Gain in Grace" (motion tracking of a Butoh dancer), "Going Publik" (distributed orchestra based on mobile electronic scoring), and "On the Sixth Day" (multi-channel video system for interactive storytelling). Together with Sound Artist, Art Clay, he organizes the Digital Art Weeks which offers performances and provides courses in the areas of computer-aided art and music.

Art Clay is a specialist in the performance of self-created works with the use of inter-media, and has appeared at international festivals. Recently, his work has focused on large-scale performative music-theater works and public art spectacles using mobile devices.

Jim Andrews publishes vispo.com. It is the centre of his work as a visual poet, audio artist, programmer, and critic. His work in interactive audio and word-based web media has been published and shown widely in such venues as turbulence.org, rhizome.org, and the trAce Online Writing Centre.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

INTERACTIVE FUTURES is interested in artistic and theoretical work that relates to audio performance, production and hybrid forms.

Papers, Panels, and Presentations can include DVDs, audio CDs, video tapes, games, web-sites, etc. and should be 45-minutes in length. Proposed artwork for exhibition may take the form of performances ("Earshot"), installations ("Tangible Frequencies"), or audio-related screenings ("Earshot" or "Tangible Frequencies"). Applications should not exceed 500 words. Applicants should indicate one of the three festival categories in the subject of the message. Please include a 200 word max bio. All proposals must be submitted in text only format either as an attachment or within the body of the email message. Please present examples of your work as a URL to a web-site. If your presentation requires specific technologies please describe your needs in detail.

Proposals should be submitted electronically to ONE of the following persons:

"Sound and Vision" lecture and panel series - Randy Adams runran@runran.net
"Earshot" performance series - Steve Gibson sgibson@finearts.uvic.ca
"Tangible Frequencies" installations - Julie Andreyev lic@telus.net

* SPECIAL NOTE FOR INSTALLATION ARTISTS APPLYING TO TANGIBLE FREQUENCIES:

Open Space has the following areas available to install sound installations:

Parallel gallery (opens onto the street)
Bathrooms (2)
Back Stairs (opens onto the back alley)
Main gallery (low volume or headphones only)

A floor plan for Open Space can be downloaded at
http://www.openspace.ca/img/floorplan.pdf

Please indicate a preference for one of the above areas in your proposal. Artists should keep in mind that Open Space is a shared space and therefore low volume will be required. Other venues may be organized by special arrangement if louder volume is required.

FUNDING

INTERACTIVE FUTURES does not have funding for travel or accommodation. Presenters and artists are expected to apply for travel funding from their home institutions and/or granting bodies. INTERACTIVE FUTURES is applying for funding for performance and installation artists exhibiting at Open Space. If this funding is obtained, performance and installation artists will receive a modest fee according to CARFAC (http://www.carfac.ca/) regulations.

All presenters and artists will be given a pass to all INTERACTIVE FUTURES events and will have access to the Hospitality Suite at the Festival hotel (food and drinks). All presenters and artists will be eligible for the conference rate at Festival Hotels (between $40-110 per night).

DEADLINE FOR ALL PROPOSALS: Friday, September 23, 2005.

Notification of acceptance of proposals will be sent out on or before October 7, 2005.

EQUIPMENT ACCESS

Laurel Point Inn--Presentations

The following equipment will be made available for all presenters:

Mac computer with Monitor, keyboard, DVD/CD-ROM drive.
Data/Video Projector.
VHS Player.
Sound system with amp and two speakers.
Wireless high-speed internet access.

Open Space--Performances and Installations

The following equipment is available for artists at Open Space. Artists should be aware that equipment will have to be shared and therefore should not propose to use all of the below devices simultaneously. Installations and performances should be easy to set-up and take down. Wherever possible artists should apply their own technology.

2 Data/Video Projectors.
VHS Player.
DVD Player.
3-4 Macintosh computers.
Sound system with amp, 16-channel mixing board, mics, and four speakers.
Cable modem internet connection.

For a full list of resources available at Open Space go to: http://www.openspace.ca/space/resources.htm

CONTACTS:

Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival Director: Kathy Kay director@vifvf.com

INTERACTIVE FUTURES Co-Curators: Steve Gibson sgibson@finearts.uvic.ca; Julie Andreyev lic@telus.net

INTERACTIVE FUTURES Paper Editor: Randy Adams runran@runran.net

OPEN SPACE New Music: Tina Pearson newmusic@openspace.ca

Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival
Co-sponsored by Open Space Artist-Run Centre
Parallel event Digital Art Weeks, Summer 2006, Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology

Conference hotel - Laurel Point Inn

Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival:
Mailing Address - PO Box 8419, Victoria, BC, V8W3S1, Canada.
Office Address - 808 View Street, Victoria, BC, V8W1K2, Canada.
Tel: (250)389.0444. Fax: (250)389.0406. E mail: festival@vifvf.com

Posted by jo at 08:43 AM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2005

The Upgrade! Montreal:

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The In & Out of the Sound Studio Conference

Thursday, July 28 - 7pm - free: The Upgrade! Montreal presents the In & Out of the Sound Studio conference on gender and sound technology, in collaboration with Concordia University. Featuring performances by artists Sylvie Chénard, Ellen Waterman, Airi Yoshioka, Shona Dietz & Éveline Boudreau. With hosts Liselyn Adams & tobias c. van veen.

Posted by jo at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)

Audio Signal Processing Workshop

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Audio Data, Synthesis, Patching & Streaming

Audio Signal Processing/Digital Sound Workshop: Rotterdam, 1 - 4 September 2005; Applications Deadline August 19, 2005--In a four-day workshop hosted by V2_, sound artists Frank Barknecht and Aymeric Mansoux will introduce the basics of Audio Signal Processing (ASP) in the fields of real-time music production. This workshop specifically targets people who want to develop their work in the digital sound field or those people curious about the processes involved behind the audio software they already use.

The program starts with a theoretical introduction to the basics of digital sound, after which participants will work with the open source software Pure Data (PD) to turn theory into practice. The workshop also teaches and demonstrates which free technologies are available for audio streaming, such as icecast, ogg and vorbis. A Rotterdam Headphone Lounge will wrap up this four-day workshop on Sunday 4 September.

SCHEDULE AUDIO SIGNAL PROCESSING WORKSHOP

Registration fee: euro60 (food & drinks included)
Reservations via v2@v2.nl
Location: V2_, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam
URL: www.v2.nl
www.goto10.org

DAY 1 11:00-18:00 hrs // ASP and Audio Synthesis
A day with the blackboard: the physics of sound, the digital representation of sound, basic audio signal processing, synthesis, samples and soundfiles

DAY 2 11:00-18:00 hrs // Pure Data
Applied theory: messages versus audio signals, audio building blocks and operators, delay & filters, building an FM patch, a sample playing patch and an effect patch

DAY 3 11:00-18:00 hrs // Pure Data next level + streaming audio
how to do basic physical modelling, waveshaping and additive synthesis, introduction to audio streaming, presentation of: icecast, ogg, and vorbis, and building an audio streaming system

DAY 4 11:00-15:00 hrs // Patching and streaming
putting things together: working on a patch
20:00-23:00 hrs // Le Placard: Rotterdam Headphone Lounge

APPLICATION

WORKSHOP DATE: Thursday 1 - Sunday 4 September 2005, 11:00-18:00 hrs
HOST: V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media
LANGUAGE: English
FEE: 60 euros
LOCATION: V2_, Eendrachtsstsraat 10, Rotterdam
FOOD & DRINKS: free tea+coffee, lunch included
HOUSING: not included
HARDWARE: computers are provided
BOOKING: v2@v2.nl
DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: Friday 19 August 2005

V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media
Eendrachtsstraat 10, 3012 XL Rotterdam, NL
PO Box 19049, 3001 BA Rotterdam, NL
Tel + 31 10 206 72 72 | Fax + 31 10 206 72 71
E-mail info AT v2.nl | URL http://www.v2.nl

Posted by jo at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2005

INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR PERFORMANCE:

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FINAL DAYS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE SELECTION!

These are the final days to submit an application for the first International Prize for Performance, a unique and innovative initiative, launched by the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento (Italy), in collaboration with drodesera>centrale fies and with the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto.

Artists of all nationalities, thirty-five years or younger, can participate by completing the electronic application located on the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporea of Trento’s website by August 1, 2005 (For more information, consult the official announcement at http://www.workartonline.net or send inquiries to performance[at]galleriacivica.it).

Award: 5,000 Euro and other minor prizes

Contact: Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento
Via Belenzani 46, 38100 Trento - Italy
http://www.workartonline.net
Phone +39 0461 985511
performance[at]galleriacivica.it

The internationally renowned jury includes the “Mother of all Performances” Marina Abramovic, Renato Barilli (art critic and performance expert), Mathias Lilienthal (Director of the Hebbel Theater, Berlin), Andrea Lissoni (Associazione Xing), Virgilio Sieni (Dance company Virgilio Sieni), Barbara Boninsegna (drodesera>centrale fies) and Fabio Cavallucci (Director of the Galleria Civica, Trento).

On September 9th and 10th, 2005, twelve (12) finalists will conduct live, unedited performances for the international jury at the Centrale di Fies (Dro, Trento). First place winner will chosen and awarded a prize of five-thousand (5,000) euro by the jury, who will also grant various minor prizes.

Submission Requirements and Deadline: All artists, of all nationalities and origins, from all backgrounds (visual arts, dance, theatre, music, poetry, etc.) thirty five years or younger, are invited to participate by completing the electronic application located on the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea’s, website (http://www.workartonline.net directly send to performance@galleriacivica.it).

Participants are required to send: - a never-before-seen performance project (descriptive, no longer than 3,000 characters, spaces included) - an artistic resume; - a scan of a current identification document; - two to four excerpts from previous performances (in mpeg format, more or less one minute each).

Participants may also send descriptions of previous performances (no more than three of narrative character, no longer than 1500 characters each one), and images (no more than 10 total). Additionally, they may also send up to two reviews appearing in catalogues, magazines or newspapers.

The paper material must be written in either Italian or English languages.

The video material may be sent in diverse languages whenever the comprehension of discourses is not considered a necessary element in order to understand the sense of the performance.

Together all of the sent material must not exceed 4 megabites.
The expiration date for the application and materials is fixed at 5 PM on August 1st, 2005 (Italian time).

Note: The following people can not participate in the Prize: members of IPG (International Performance Group) and those that have a familiar relationship or are in strict collaboration with the members of the jury.

Finale and Awards
12 (twelve) finalists will be selected to present a performance on the evenings of September 9th and 10th, 2005 in the Centrale di Fies (Dro, Trento).

The participants in the final selection are guaranteed travel expenses and hospitality for the time needed to realize the performance in Trento. Production costs will be sustained directly by the organization. It will be an assessable element on the part of the jury in the selection phases, as well as the relationship between the final effect and the economic commitment required for the production of the performance. The specific request for actors or other possible personnel involved in the performance will be organized by the artist or group.

The first prize is fixed at 5,000 (five-thousand) euros (net) and can not be divided. There will also be minor prizes awarded.

For more information and registration, +39.0461.985511; performance@galleriacivica.it

Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea
Via Belenzani 46
38100 Trento, Italy
T: +39 0461 985511/986138
F: +39 0461 237033
E: galleria_civica@comune.trento.it
W: http://www.workartonline.net

Posted by jo at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2005

History of Networked Art:

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People, Places, Events, Technologies and Theories

History of Networked Art: People, Places, Events, Technologies and Theories--a conference curated by Tommaso Tozzi and Alessandro Ludovico; Friday, July 29, 2005; 9.30am - 1.30pm / 3pm - 7pm; Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts) Via Roma 1 - Carrara (Tuscany, Italy) tel. +39 0585 71658.

In the networked art the artwork's boundaries dissolve in the intertwined relationships between subjects, objects, strategies and theories. This process not only modifies artistic, political and commercial models, but it transforms the culture, the languages and the logic behind the theories of the interconnected society. Inter-disciplinarity, indetermination, transformation, decentralization and interaction, are among the key concepts of the sixties. But they are also the background of the artists that have used the telematic networks to plan new worlds or to critique the existing ones. The conference 'History of the Net Arts' has the purpose to gather some important experiences about some of the most active subjects, their actions and external collaboration with institutions, groups and movements, the technologies they used and, even more importantly, their theorical, social and cultural goals.

with (in alphabetical order):

Robert Adrian (Wien, AU)
Hans Bernhard (Wien, AU)
Arturo Di Corinto (Roma, IT)
Steven Kovats (Rotterdam, NL)
Enrico Pedrini (Genova, IT)
Cornelia Sollfrank (Hamburg, DE)
Luca Toschi (Firenze, IT)

installation:
Giuseppe Chiari (Firenze - IT)
"Audio and Video recording from the seventies and eighties"

program:

9.30am - 1:30 pm

- Tommaso Tozzi - coordinator of Multimedia Art
Department, Academy of Fine Arts Carrara,
Florence, IT

- Enrico Pedrini - critic, Genova, IT

- Luca Toschi - director of the Communication
Strategies laboratory and head of the
Communication Theory master's degreee, Florence,
IT

- Robert Adrian - artist - Wien, AT

- Arturo Di Corinto - teacher of Online Communication Psichology - Rome - IT

- discussion


3.00pm - 7:00pm

- Alessandro Ludovico - new media critic, Neural.it - Bari, IT

- Hans Bernhard - artist, Ubermorgen, Etoyholding - Wien, AT

- Steven Kovats - international programs
developer, V2_Institute for the Unstable Media -
Rotterdam, NL

- Cornelia Sollfrank - artist, Old Boys Network - Hamburg, DE

- discussion

Biographies.

Robert Adrian X (CA/AT) Celebrated contemporary artist, produces installations, radio art and sound art works from 1957, and he's one of the recognized pioneer of telecomunication art. He started to work and experiment in this field already in 1979. He lives in Vienna.

Hans Bernhard (CH/AU) One of the Etoy founders and creator of practices like the 'digital hijack'. He founded the Ubermorgen group with Lizvlx, and realized famous net.art works like 'Vote-Auction', 'Injunction Generator' and 'Google Will Eat Itself'. He won many awards like the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica's 'golden nica'. He lives and works in St.Moritz and Vienna.

Giuseppe Chiari (IT) Musician and artist. He's a composer from 1950 and he's the most important Italian representative of the Fluxus movement, and one of the most important italian artists of the 20th century. He wrote books, essays and writings that have changed the music system, and his works are exhibited in museums all around the world. He's author of happenings and music experiments and he wrote music for different media.

Arturo Di Corinto (IT) Cognitive psychologist and new media expert. Researcher at the University of Stanford (1997-1998), teacher at the Carrara Academy of Arts and University of Rome. He's author of essays on the technological innovation and social behaviours relationship. He's a founding member of the Avvisi Ai Naviganti BBS, Isole nella Rete and Cittadigitali. He also writes for the national newspapers Il Manifesto, La Repubblica and for the magazine Aprile.

Stephen Kovats (CA/NL) Canadian born architect and media researcher Stephen Kovats spent a decade upon German unification designing and establishing media art and culture related programs at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. His "Studio Electronic Media Interpretation" hosted numerous international projects, symposia and exhibitions. Kovats founded several media culture oriented exchange and network programs including Archi-Tonomy, EMARE, ECX and the Bauhauskolleg. Editor of the book "Media Revolution. Electronic Media in the Transformation Process of Eastern and Central Europe". Currently Kovats is international programs developer at V2_Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

Alessandro Ludovico (IT) Media critic and editor in chief of Neural magazine from 1993. He has written media culture books and essays. He's one of the founding contributor of the Nettime community and one of the founders of the 'Mag.Net (European Cultural Publishers)' organization. He writes for various international magazines and he's also an expert in the Runme.org board and a collaborator of the Digitalkraft exhibitions.

Enrico Pedrini (IT) He curated international exhibitions and he was one of the curators of the Taiwan Pavillion in the 1995 Venice Biennale. He has written many essays on contemporary art. Actually he's studying the interactions amongst the Dissipative Systems, the Theory of Chaos and the Possible Worlds that bring to the art universe the cathegories of the dissipation and possibilism.

Cornelia Sollfrank (DE) Studied Fine Arts in Munich and Hamburg, taught at the Hochschule f�r Bildende K�nste, Hamburg, founder member of the female artists' group �Frauen und Technik� and '-Innen'. She's a founder-member of �Old Boys Network� and facilitator of the conference series 'Next Cyberfeminist International'. She works in the field of Internet art. She lives in Hamburg and Berlin.

Luca Toschi (IT) Director of the 'Laboratory of the communication strategies' and head of the master's degree in Communication Theory, University of Florence. Author of the book 'Il linguaggio dei nuovi media', he has written essays on the relationship between education and the language of new media. Ha has started his career as researcher in 1970 at the UCLA, during the establishment of the first Arpanet nodes. He's a consultant for private and public firms.

Tommaso Tozzi (IT) Teacher at the University of Florence and at the Carrara Academy of Arts, where he coordinates the Multimedia Arts Department. Director of uCAN - Center for Research and Documentation on Networked Arts and Digital Cultures. He has been the head of the cultural association Strano Network. Editor of Hacker Art BBS (1990) and creator of the first worldwide netstrike (1995). Founding member of the italian newsgroup Cyberpunk (1991) and of the net Cybernet (1993).
--

Alessandro Ludovico
Neural.it - http://neural.it/ daily updated news + reviews
English.Neural.it - http://english.neural.it/
Neural printed magazine - http://neural.it/n/nultimoe.htm

Posted by jo at 06:07 PM | Comments (0)

@ SIGGRAPH 2005

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ART & THE NETWORK SPACE over Access Grid

There will be a presentation on ART & THE NETWORK SPACE over Access Grid organized for Siggraph on August 4 at 17:30 London time. The panel will consist of Woody Vasulka at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Jon Ippolito at the University of Maine, Mathias Fuchs and Don Foresta at the Wimbledon School of Art and Pavel Smetana, director of CIANT, present at Siggraph.

The discussion will center on issues of the network as an art space, specifically, questions of archiving and accessibility of work and integrating it into a larger academic context. The discussion will last for one and a half hours. The projects discussed will be:

1. MARCEL
2. ALTERNE
3. Variable Media
4. OASIS
5. Global Threads

If you are interested in the discussion, please let me know and I will put you in contact with the appropriate people. There are a limited number of online slots available at Siggraph and you would have to be registered before to receive it.

Best, Don

Don Foresta
27, rue du Rhin
75019 Paris, Fr.
Tel. 33 (0)1 4245 3186
don[at]donforesta.net
www.mmmarcel.org

Posted by jo at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2005

Zapped! Workshop

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RFID Keychain Detector

Zapped! Workshop by Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Heidi Kumao, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer): July 15, 2005 - 6:30 - 9:00pm at Eyebeam, NYC.

You may have heard the term RFID and possibly even brought one home unknowingly. But what exactly is a Radio Frequency Identification tag? Why are Wal-Mart, the Department of Defense and the Food & Drug Administration sinking big bucks into these little chips and paving the way for mass implementation? After a brief overview of the technology and its potential impact on our lives, each participant will receive a Zapped! RFID Kit complete with a colorful workbook and materials for the hands-on portion of the workshop. Preemptive Media will guide the group through building an RFID keychain detector that plays a jingle when a reader is within range and scanning the airwaves for data. Participants can program tags that "talk back" to a RFID reader uncovered by a Zapped! keychain. Registration fee is $25 general public, $20 for Eyebeam members. Sign up here.

Posted by jo at 09:25 AM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2005

Creative VR Futures

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Creative Arts & Sciences in Virtual Environments

Creative VR Futures: Creative Arts & Sciences in Virtual Environments, 22-23 July 2005--A two day symposium for professional artists, designers and creative practitioners offering a range of artistic presentations, demonstrations and hands-on experience of current immersive and augmented virtual environment research. The event will take an in depth look into current artistic applications and developments of virtual/mixed reality, ranging from telepresent networking, tele-immersion and collaborative VR interaction to both painted and virtual urban landscape panoramas.

Following the symposium participants will be invited to apply for one of two artist-in-residence opportunities at The University of Salford Centre for Virtual Environments for a period of six months to develop and showcase their work.

This two day event is free. For further information and symposium booking details please contact Nathalie Edwards on 0161 295 2801 or email n.j.edwards[at]salford.ac.uk

Friday 22 July, 9.30am to 5.00pm

Centenary Building Lecture Theatre, School of Art & Design, The University of Salford, Centenary Building, Peru Street, Salford, Greater Manchester, M3 6EQ

Presentation by:

Maurice Benayoun - Interactive Media Artist, Paris
Steve Benford - Mixed Realities Lab, University of Nottingham
Monica Fleischmann - Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen
Horst Hoertner - Ars Electronica Futurelab
Ben Johnson - Commissioned Artist for Liverpool Biannual
David Roberts - The Centre for Virtual Environemnts, Salford
Paul Sermon - School of Arts & Design, Salford
Anthony Steed - University College London
Wolfgang Strauss - Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen

Saturday 23 July, 9.30am to 5.00pm

The Centre for Virtual Environments, The University of Salford, Business House, University Road, Salford, Greater Manchester, M5 4WT

Presentations and Demonstrations of:

Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen - Introduced by Monica Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss
Ars Electronica Futurelab - Introduced by Horst Hoertner
World Skin - Introduced by Maurice Benayoun
UCL EQUATOR - Introduced by Anthony Steed
The Centre for Virtual Environments - Introduced by David Roberts

Support by The Arts Council England and The University of Salford

Presented in association with Futuresonic 05 http://www.futuresonic.com

Posted by jo at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2005

URBAN SCREENS 05 PROGRAM

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Discovering the Potential of Outdoor Screens for Urban Society

The final URBAN SCREENS 05 PROGRAM is now available.

Time: September 23-24, 2005; Location: Club 11, TPG Building, Oosterdokskade, Amsterdam; Organisation: Institute of Network Cultures, HvA/UvA, Amsterdam, Department of Art and Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academy, UvA, Amsterdam Urban||Research, Berlin.

URBAN SCREENS 2005 is an international conference ranging from critical theory to project experiences by researchers and practitioners in the field of Art, Architecture, Urban Studies and Digital Media. The focus is on understanding how the growing infrastructure of large digital displays influences the visual sphere of our public spaces. How can the commercial use of these screens be broadened and culturally curated to contribute to a lively urban society involving the audience interactively?

In the context of the rapidly evolving commercial information sphere of our cities, developers are bringing new digital display technology into the urban landscape like large daylight compatible LED screens or high-tech plasma screens. Meanwhile there is a growing interest in exploring their potential of a non-commercial use, asking for new strategies and cooperations in content production and management. Besides infiltrating some "artcoockies", lets look at them more in terms of open "screening platforms" and how that can have a social or cultural impact on our urban society!

Public space has always been a place for human interaction, a unique arena for exchange of rituals and communication in a constant process of renewal, challenging the development of society. Its architectural dimension, being a storytelling medium itself, has played a changing role of importance in providing a stage for this interaction. The way the space is inhabited can be read as a participatory process of its audience. The (vanishing) role as space for social and symbolic discourse has been often discussed in urban sociology. Modernization, the growing independence from place and time and the individualization seem to destroy the city rhythm and its social systems. Besides experiments with social networks and new media tools emerged. Starting with the development of virtual cities with its chat rooms and spaces for production of identity, we now face community experiments like collaborative wikis, blogs or mobile phone networks in the growing field of social computing.

Parallel to this development an "event culture" has evolved in the real urban space among the internationally competing cities, focusing on tourism and consumption. Considering the social sustainability of our cities it is necessary to look closer at the livability and openness of public spaces and start to address the urban users as citizens not as passive consumers. The experience, made in the new digital communication spheres, might serve as an inspiration for this social enhancement. Could large outdoor displays function as experimental "visualization zone" of the fusing of the virtual public spaces and our real world? Can screens function as a new mirror reflecting the public sphere?

URBAN SCREENS 05 wants to launch a discussion about how digital culture can make use of the existing and future screening infrastructure, in terms of art and social or political practices, generating a higher value for its operators and "users". We want to address the existing commercial predetermination and explore the nuance between art, interventions and entertainment to stimulate a lively culture. Other key issues are: mediated interaction, content management, participation of the local community, public private cooperation, restrictions due to technical limits, and the incorporation of the screens in the architecture of our urban landscape.

The conference aims at an interdisciplinary audience with the intention to exchange experiences and start a network to initiate future collaborations. Preparation of the event will include the launch of an online discussion on the urban screens mailinglist.

PROGRAM:

DAY 1 (23.09.05)
**************************************************************

09:30 - 10:00 Doors open

_____________________________________________________________
10:00 - 11:40 Introductory Keynote Lectures
_____________________________________________________________

Introduction by Jeroen Boomgaard and Mirjam Struppek
Moderator: Geert Lovink

Scott McQuire (Melbourne)
The Politics of Public Space in the Media City

Lev Manovich (San Diego)
Urban Media Surface: First Steps

11:40 - 11:50 10 min Break
_____________________________________________________________
11:50 - 13:00 Session 1 - Shaping the Urban Media-Scapes
_____________________________________________________________
Moderator: Bastiaan Gribling

Infoscape for the International Center of Design, St Etienne, France
Giulia Andi in collaboration (Berlin/Paris)

Integration of Screens in Architectural and Urban Design
Peter Lavery (Australia)

Intelligent Skin. Houses that Oikoborg
Vera Bühlmann in collaboration (Basel)

13:00 - 14:00 Lunch
_____________________________________________________________
14:00 - 15:30 Session 2 - Addressing the Social Value and Civic Culture
through Participation
_____________________________________________________________
Moderator: Scott McQuire

Soft Urbanism: Public Urban Media
Elizabeth Sikiaridi in collaboration (Amsterdam)

Urban Video Displays as the New Voice of Public Communications
Louis M. Brill (San Francisco)

The Shape of Content on the Urban Screen
Perry Bard (New York)

Beaming and Streaming: Developing Infrastructure for an Urban Screen
through the Creative Collaborations Project
Frank Abbott in collaboration (Nottingham)

15:30 - 16:00 Tea Break
_____________________________________________________________
16:00 - 16:30 Three Project Sketches
_____________________________________________________________
Moderator: Mirjam Struppek

'netropolis' - Information Space for Izmir Metropolitan City
Koray Tokdemir in collaboration (Ankara)

The Art of Interaction, Love Connection and Global Culture Broadcast
Valentin Tomic in collaboration (Yugoslavia)

Knowledge Spaces for Urban Screens
Studiometis (Saint Germain les Corbeil)

_____________________________________________________________
16:30 - 18:00 Session 3 - Opening the Commercial Use of Outdoor Screens
_____________________________________________________________
Moderator: Rob van Kranenburg

Art vs. Advertising - Comparative Use of Corporate Screens for Video Art
Raina Kumra (Cambridge, MA)

Commercial versus Public Service Applications
Johan Muijderman, (Eindhoven)

Social and Cultural Aspects of Outdoor Video Technology
Vladimir Krylov (Moscow)

Token Screens or Opportunity for Difference? Art Screens and the
Branding of the City
Julia Nevárez (New York)


**************************************************************
DAY 2 (24.09.05)
**************************************************************

10:00 - 10:30 Doors open
_____________________________________________________________
10:30 - 11:50 Session 4 - Future Technology of Outdoor Screens
_____________________________________________________________
Moderator: Geert Lovink

Media-Facades: Use, Mutation and Technologies
Jürgen Meier (Leipzig)

Future Urban Screens - New Concepts for Urban Screens
Florian Resatsch in collaboration (Berlin)

Cityspeak : From Private Expression to Public Performance
Jason Lewis (Montreal)


11:50 - 12:00 10 min Break
_____________________________________________________________
12:00 - 13:45 Artists Presentations
_____________________________________________________________
Moderator: Jeroen Boomgaard

Architectural Media Space
Linda Wallace (Amsterdam)

(Tele)interventions in Cybrid Public Spaces
Giselle Beiguelman (Sao Paulo)

Stalk Show
Karen Lancel (Amsterdam)

Etre = Réseau: From scenography to planetary network
Franck Ancel (Paris)

Energie_Passagen [Energy_Passages] - Reading and (De)Scribing the City
Wolfgang Strauss in collaboration (Germany)


13:45 - 14:30 Lunch
_____________________________________________________________
14:30 - 16:15 Session 5 - Experiences with New Content Creation and
Curation
_____________________________________________________________
Moderator: Bill Morris

Curating the Zuidas Urban Screen
Jan Schuijren (Amsterdam)

Audiences on the Move - The Bigger Picture
Kate Taylor (Manchester)

Video as Urban Condition
Anthony Auerbach (London)

Outvideo - International Videoart Festival in Public Spaces
Arseny Sergeev, a.o. (Ekaterinburg)

Near Documentary - the Public Screens of the Schaulager
Sabine Gebhardt Fink (Zurich)

16:15 - 17:00 Final Keynote Speech
_____________________________________________________________

Two Years Public Space Broadcasting in the United Kingdom
Mike Gibbons (London)


**************************************************************

For more information on the sessions, lectures and speakers see the Urban
Screens website:

Contact: Mirjam Struppek
urbanscreens[at] networkcultures.org

Institute of Network Cultures
Urban||Research

Posted by jo at 08:06 AM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

Machinima:

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Digital Performance and Emergent Authorship

"Abstract: This workshop investigates the emergent online dramatic form of "machinima", the co-option of video game engines or off-the-shelf software for dramatic production in a rapidly developing digital performance form. Workshop participants will engage with short examples of popular machinima productions. There will be discussion and demonstration of the machinima production process. The nexus between dramatic conventions, gameplay and traditional video production techniques will be explored. Participants will work with a short piece of a machinima, in the form of a scene created using the Sims 2 game. Participants will improvise, script and perform dialogue to provide meaning for the action. This workshop applies the insights of process drama, a field well developed in educational settings, to the development of machinima. It includes demonstration and participation in dramatic role, focusing on how the conventions of Role Distance and Role Protection apply to this developing field of digital game-based performance." From Machinima: Digital Performance and Emergent Authorship (.doc) by John Carroll and David Cameron, DiGRA Conference proceedings.

Posted by jo at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

June 13, 2005

Social Tapestries

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Public Forum, 1st July 2005

Proboscis will be holding a half-day public forum on the Social Tapestries research programme hosted at the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research on Friday July 1st 2005 1-6pm. The event will bring together practitioners from the arts, industry, government, civil society organisations and academia to review the work underway for Social Tapestries and stimulate public debate on the issues.

This event is a pre-competitive forum for the free exchange and flow of ideas intended to generate opportunities for dynamic partnerships that find common ground between artists, culture organisations, civil society organisations, academia, government and public agencies, business and industry. To book a place please complete the online form. Places are limited to maximum of 70. [blogged by on giles on urban tapestries]

Posted by jo at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2005

Allan Kaprow: FLUIDS, 1967/2005

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Happening Again

Allan Kaprow: FLUIDS, 1967/2005: International workshop of the Applied Arts Universities at Art Unlimited Basel; June 13, 2005, from 2 pm--To mark the opening of Art Unlimited in Basle, Allan Kaprow's Happening FLUIDS will be reinvented for the first time since 1967 by an international workshop, in co-operation with the Department of Art and Design at Basle's University of Applied Sciences and the University Basle.

'Father of Happenings' Allan Kaprow was born in 1927. Nearly 40 years later, the art form he created continues to provoke questions about time, community and collective structures. His Happening FLUIDS involved constructing enclosures with ice blocks at various locations in Pasadena and Los Angeles. Kaprow recruited participants using billboards that displayed the FLUIDS score: "During three days, about twenty rectangular enclosures of ice blocks (measuring about 30 feet long, 10 wide and 8 high) are built throughout the city. Their walls are unbroken. They are left to melt".

Groups of young people made his work a reality. They stacked blocks of ice, delivered by the Union Ice Company, into rectangular structures. Over the ensuing days, the ice structures melted. Photographs, film, the billboard score, the artist's notes and drawings, letters and press clippings document the ephemeral event. Now FLUIDS will occur for the second time. Ice structures will be built at three different sites across Basle, including Art Basel's headquarters building and the roof of the adjacent parking structure. Co-operating in the Happening are the Department of Art and Design at Basle University of Applied Science (Creative Art - Media Art Department), the art history seminars of Basle University, Basle and Lucerne University Departments of Art and Design, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the University of Weimar and Vienna. At the artist's request, students will spend two days in a workshop, devising strategies to realize the work. They will determine such particulars as how to co-ordinate delivery of the ice blocks, secure the necessary equipment and design of the structures. Thus they will create a Basle-specific, contemporary variant of the Happening, this time without the artist's direct involvement.

For further information, please contact Laura Bechter at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich.

HAUSER & WIRTH ZURICH
Limmatstrasse 270
CH - 8005 Zurich
Switzerland
Phone +41 (0)44 446 80 50
http://www.hauserwirth.com

Posted by jo at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 03, 2005

ACM MM Interactive Art Program

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Singapore, November 2005

ACM Multimedia 2005 is the premier annual multimedia conference, covering all aspects of multimedia computing. The ACM MM Interactive Art Program seeks to bring together the arts and multimedia communities to create the stage to explore, discuss, and push the limits for the advancement of both multimedia technology through the arts, and the arts through multimedia technology.

The Interactive Art Program will consist of a conference track and an art exhibition. We invite artists working with digital media and researchers in technical areas to submit their original contributions to the following tracks:

Conference track: we solicit papers describing interactive multimedia art works, tools, applications, and technical approaches for creative uses of multimedia content and technology. Emphasis will be given to novel works that use a rich variety of media and those that are interactive, particularly works that exploit non-conventional human-computer interfaces or sensors in new and emerging areas. We strongly encourage papers with a strong technical content written by artists.

Multimedia art exhibition: "Presence/Absence." We seek art works that use multimedia to explore issues of location, relocation and dislocation, particularly where multimedia technology overcomes or reinforces physical presence or separation. The emphasis for the exhibition is on interactive art works that realize powerful artistic concepts using multimedia content and technologies. See the exhibition statement.

Important Dates:
June 20, 2005 Long papers and art exhibition submission deadline.
June 20, 2005 Short papers submission deadline.
July 29, 2005 Notification of Acceptance of Full and Short papers.
August 22, 2005 Notification of Acceptance of Interactive Arts Exhibition.
August 29, 2005 Camera-ready papers due.

Posted by jo at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

Open Nature

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Panel Discussion Live on the Internet

Open Nature: Kingdom of Piracy--KOP--presents ideas and examples from their Commons R&D project. KOP were asking: how do communities self-organize to define the rules of usage of the commons? and could this process of rule making and self-organisation be modelled as a game? The work of two guest speakers gives some possible answers to these questions. Simon Yuill presents spring alpha, a networked gaming platform which 'serves as a "sketch pad" for testing out ideas for alternative forms of social practice'. Ken Suzuki presents the new electronic currency PICSY which dynamically evolves in accordance with the users' value. After the presentations, KOP moderators and the audience will join the discussion about rule making in the commons.

Date: June 4, 2005 2:00pm-(JST) + 8 hours(GST); Venue: ICC 5F Lobby; Admission: free. With: Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch, Simon Yuill, Ken Suzuki, and Yukiko Shikata

Posted by jo at 08:05 AM | Comments (0)

May 31, 2005

Videotage FLOSS in Media Workshop

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FLOSS Away Technical Constraints

Videotage FLOSS in Media Workshop--Speakers: Kam Wong (Assistant Professor of School of Creative Media, City University) and Annie Wan (Instructor of FLOSS in Media Work Shop); Date: 5 June 2005 (Sunday), 2pm; Venue: Videotage, Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon.

The limits of media art should not be the software license or functionalities created by software designers. Pure Data, free libre and open source software allow you to tailor your own software to match the requirements of your own art piece. FLOSS stands for free libre and open source software. Pure data, an excellent example of the FLOSS idea, is a programming language that can be used in a wide variety of multimedia creation. Annie Wan will touch on interactive installation, VJ performance, audio synthesis & analysis, motion detection and tangible media. You will be working on your own creative project, and you will have a chance to present your work at the party on 27 August.

Annie Wan is a young international artist specializes in audiovisual art and interactive art development, Her recent works have been shown in Sweden, Latvia, Germany, France, Norway, Singapore and Iceland. She will be a PhD candidate with scholarship and Top Scholar Award in DXARTS, University of Washington, Seattle. Check out www.slimboyfatboyslim.org for more information about Annie.

fuse_banner_bubble.jpgVideotage (literally merging the two concepts of "Video" and "Montage") is a non-profit interdisciplinary artist collective, which focuses on the development of video and new media art in Hong Kong. Founded in 1985, Videotage began as a facilitator for collaborative time-based projects. In a small shared office with two chairs and table, Videotage's support to artists came in the form of labour and equipment for production and post-production, and the exchange of ideas. Videotage has since expanded to include publications, education, exhibitions and screenings.

Posted by jo at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2005

re:mote

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How remote am I?

"What does it mean to be remote in an electronic art world? This was one of the questions posed by re:mote, a gathering of digital artists and theorists in Auckland, Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) on 19 March 2005. Held in a geographically remote country, the event was an opportunity for local wired artists to meet face-to-face as well as an invitation to ponder the meaning of "remote" in the 21st century.

Re:mote was an event by and for artists, organised by r a d i o q u a l i a and ((ethermap. The first in a series of one-day experimental festivals, it was run "on the smell of an oily rag" (as we say here) and made possible in part by Adam Hyde's residency at the University of Waikato. Questions posed by the organisers included: are there 'centres' and 'peripheries' within a world increasingly bridged, criss-crossed and mapped by digital technologies? Can technologically mediated communication ever be a substitute for face-to-face dialogue? Is geographical isolation a factor in contemporary art production? Is remote a relative concept?

Fourteen presentations from new media art practitioners and theorists in Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand were squeezed into eight hours and ranged from a cosy midnight feast in Finland to a glimpse of the expansive Antarctic wilderness, and from musings on information from outer space to the virtual escape of a row prisoner. Various methods were employed to connect remote (as opposed to re:mote) participants with those at the Auckland venue - the Elam School of Fine Arts lecture theatre. A live MP3 audio stream enabled the off-site audience to hear everything from the venue, and they could communicate through a text chat which was also used to convey an impression of what they couldn't see. QuickTime, Skype, IRC, iChatAV, iVisit and the Palace were among the applications used in different presentations.

The international speakers were scheduled first to accommodate their time zones, with Steve Kovats and Graham Smith from Rotterdam kicking things off. Visible via web cam, their presentation nicely illustrated their discussion on how telecommunication transforms the concept of distance from space to time. They were in the dark of Friday night, while we in Auckland were well into a sunny Saturday. Also still in Friday night and dressed in her best pyjamas, Sophea Lerner (an Australian new media theorist and artist currently studying in Helsinki) tucked into a midnight feast while elaborating on the promises and assumptions of remote communication. She proposed that the most interesting thing about a remote location is not the remoteness, but the location. This contrasted with the previous presentation's focus on time as the distancing element rather than space or location. Any location, whether it's the heart of a teeming metropolis or an empty beach in southern Aotearoa, can be remote when you're outside it, rendering it exotic, intriguing and desirable. It's the differences, rather than distances, that make a "remote" location interesting - and the unexpected similarities.

Lerner also addressed the concept of peripherality and how one can experience being peripheral in many different places, depending on one's perspective of the "centre". Finland may appear peripheral to Europe, but from the New Zealand perspective it's almost in the middle of that centre. Contemporary politics place Europe and North America in the centre, but as the power balance shifts that centre may relocate to Asia or even cyberspace. Today's technologies release us from the geographical definition of centre, creating globally dispersed "peripheral centres" and "central peripheries". Technology has penetrated even the periphery of Antarctica, as shown by Phil Dadson's presentation about his recent artist's residency there. A looping video of his shadow crunching across the endless white landscape, broken only by the bones of some unfortunate beast, removed not only all sense of place but also time. The simple act of filming his shadow on the ice placed Dadson at the centre of a peripheral environment.

Japanese radio pioneer and artist Tetsuo Kogawa spoke about technology and the body and gave a history of Mini FM, a project which aimed to tactically deregulate the Japanese airwaves by teaching people how to create and broadcast from their own free radio stations. During the 1970s and 80s, Kogawa held radio parties in Tokyo apartments where he taught people to build transmitters, broadcasting from the domestic periphery to the centre of the airwaves. Footage from these events reveal the political act of taking ones own space on the airwaves as also entertaining and community-building. His goal was to use radio technology not as a substitute for face-to-face communication but as a means to bring people together and to propose political and social alternatives. During re:mote, Kogawa also gave an audio performance and the following day led a mini FM transmitter building workshop.

Pre-recorded appearances were made by New Zealander Sally Jane Norman, who has lived in Europe since the 1970s, and Zina Kaye from Australia, who discussed her project "The Line Ahead", which gathers data from airports to create LED signs in a . Sally Jane Norman began with pre-internet architectures of performance, asking how physical gesture can invest digital space, and described the remote manipulation of space probes as "advanced puppeteering". Achieving physicality within digital spaces alters the concept of remoteness; how remote am I if, from Aotearoa/New Zealand, I can physically move an object on the moon? Both air and space travel create bridges between centres and peripheries, destroying the relative remoteness of New Zealand in the space of a few hours and offering instead the greater remoteness of outer space.

The trials and tribulations of remote collaboration were addressed by a number of presenters including myself, Zina Kaye and Trudy Lane. Zina had encountered some difficulties in working with technicians located elsewhere, while Trudy's ongoing collaboration with mi2 in Zagreb (on the online magazine ART-e-FACT) works smoothly. Physically meeting your remote collaborators may make some things easier, but it's also possible to work successfully without meeting, as demonstrated by Avatar Body Collision. This work was presented by Leena Saarinen (in Finland), Vicki Smith (in NZ's South Island) and myself at the venue. Our greatest difficulty is in finding times when the four of us can be online together for rehearsals, but the advantages are many. We taste each others' geographical and social locations and are telematically transported from our peripheral homes to the centres of arts festivals and conferences. Returning to one of the questions posed by re:mote - Can technologically mediated communication ever be a substitute for face-to-face dialogue? - during four years of artistic collaboration, Leena Saarinen and I have never met, so technologically mediated communication is an excellent and necessary substitute for face-to-face. Our "remote" relationship is as real and valuable as if we had met, so how remote are we?

The variety of local presentations given during the afternoon illustrated the diversity of concepts of "remote": a web site about a fictional nation state; universal nomadism and the generic city; "glocalisation"; and a multi-locational artistic picnic were among the projects discussed (for more information on all presentations see www.remote.org.nz). While these presenters were all New Zealanders living in New Zealand, their presentations had connections all over the globe - Lithuania, Croatia, Amsterdam, the USA. As an artist in the electronic world, living in an isolated location doesn't mean that your work must be of that location. There will always be some degree of local perspective, but sources and context are often global; this combination of local and global is "glocalisation".

Live improvised audio performances were given by Tennis (London) in the morning, and at the end of the day by Tetsuo Kogawa, Adam Hyde and Adam Willetts. Tennis (Ben Edwards and Doug Benford) performed with a web cam showing them seated at their computers. As our off-site audience could only hear the audio stream, I provided them with a commentary of what we could see on the screen in the IRC chat. This created another level to the performance, and an extrapolation of remoteness: I was interpreting and relaying my visual observation of an audio performance back to a twice-removed audience, some of whom were in the same country as the performers and on the other side of the world from me. For the Auckland audience in the same room as me, I and my commentary became a part of the performance as well - yet the performers themselves were not aware of this. Thus at least three different performances were taking place: the audio performance given by Tennis; the sound, text and images experienced in the venue in Auckland; and the online version, consisting of sound and text. Reading the chat log several weeks after the event, the remoteness doubles again - comments on now unheard sounds and descriptions of vanished images are like shadows cast by an invisible body. This fascinating unplanned metamorphosis was a result of the event and our various layers of remotenesses. A briefer but related "performance" had occurred earlier in the day when Adam Hyde and James Stevens were speaking over Skype, but James had left his computer speakers on, generating an echo loop that took on an unstoppable life of its own.

My personal experience of re:mote was bound up with the technologies, both in my presentation (using the Palace and iVisit) and in my role at the keyboard as a "chat wrangler", delivering commentary to the off-site audience. The off-site audience's responses to my descriptions of the visuals and the audio stream they were hearing are preserved in the chat log and offer a surreal perspective on the day. Once again, re:mote was answering its own questions, as the chat substituted face-to-face communication reasonably effectively and rolled our individual peripheries into the centre.

As someone who communicates and collaborates remotely on a daily basis, I always value the opportunity to work and collaborate in the same physical space with others. Creating such gatherings in far off places like Aotearoa/New Zealand is especially important, as sometimes we're so busy worrying about what's going on in the rest of the world that we overlook the wealth of activity happening locally. How remote are we when we know what our colleagues in New York, Amsterdam or Belgrade are doing but we don't know what's going on in Dunedin or Wanganui? Our perceived remoteness is embedded in the identity of the people of this small, distant and relatively insignificant country, and fuels a need to be a part of the wider world to counter this feeling of isolation. Yet one of the ideas that came through strongly during re:mote was the possibility to feel peripheral in any situation, and the individual relativity of a myriad of centres and peripheries which are now becoming bridged, mapped and interconnected by digital technologies.

Congratulations and thanks to Adam Hyde, Honor Harger, Adam Willetts and Zita Joyce for making re:mote happen; it was an intense, enjoyable and thought-provoking day. The second re:mote has just taken place, in Regina, Canada - unfortunately I was "remote" in the sense of being offline while on holiday so I was unable to attend, but I'm told it went well. Documentation of both events should soon be online at www.remote.org.nz, and I'm looking forward to re:mote 3."

--Helen Varley Jamieson for Rhizome

http://www.remote.org.nz
http://www.soilmedia.org/remote/
http://www.radioqualia.va.com.au/
http://www.ethermap.org/

helen varley jamieson: creative catalyst
helen[at]creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.avatarbodycollision.org
http://www.writerfind.com/hjamieson.htm

Posted by jo at 08:09 AM | Comments (0)

May 27, 2005

Next OPEN PLAN event:

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PLAN TECHNOLOGY CAMP

OPEN PLAN: Venue: Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham; Date: October 2-8, 2005; Deadline for Expressions of Interest: July 4, 2005

Cross-disciplinary teams will be formed to work on seed project ideas and develop methodologies, encouraging cross disciplinaryexperimentation. Proposals may develop into real projects or may be entirely hypothetical. There will be opportunities to take the projects further, in particular as part of the PLAN final exhibition at Futuresonic 2006 in Manchester UK during July 2006.

Please send a 2-page expression of interest, including details of your areas of interest, experience and expertise to the address below by Monday 4 July 2005. Suggestions for seed ideas in the area of locative-based media are also welcomed. Places at the workshop are limited and the steering committee reserves the right to seed ideas and put together diverse teams from the best submissions, based on the expressions of interest together with views generated at the ICA Event.

Posted by jo at 07:25 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

SPACE AND PERCEPTION

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LIVE STREAM OF MIXED REALITY SYMPOSIUM

MAY 20th - 21st, RIXC MEDIA SPACE
LIVE stream: http://ozone.re-lab.net/live.pls or http://ozone.re-lab.net/live.ram

SPACE AND PERCEPTION will focus on new phenomenon of Mixed Reality --the environment generated by new technologies that contain significant interaction possibilities in both virtual and physical spaces. Identifying the common in these different views on realities and perception of space, the aim of the symposium discussions is to contextualise and to set up the conceptual background for the development of emerging field of Mixed Reality. It also intends to activate the collaborative potential of the sciences, art, technology and other creative fields of contemporary society.

Posted by jo at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

May 17, 2005

UbiComp 2005 Workshops

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Call for Papers

UbiComp 2005 Workshops: September 11, 2005, Tokyo, Japan--workshops to be held in conjunction with the Seventh International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, September 11-14) are now accepting submissions. All workshops will be held on Sunday, 11th September at the conference hotel. Unless otherwise noted, submissions will be accepted until June 17, and notifications of accepted submissions will be sent by July 25. The deadline for early advance registration will be July 28 (more information on the conference hotel and conference registration will be posted on the web site soon).

Please note that prospective workshop attendees require an invitation from the workshop organisers based on acceptance of submitted position papers or explicit request. Upon acceptance, attendees will need to explicitly register for the workshop, which will include a separate workshop fee, in addition to registering for the main conference.

Workshop titles are listed below.

W1: Ubiquitous Computing in Next Generation Conference Rooms: Interweaving Rich Media, Mobile Devices and Smart Environments
W2: Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing: New Social Practices and Implications for Technology
W3: Smart Object Systems
W4: Privacy in Context
W5: Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment, and Games
W6: The Spaces in-between: Seamful vs. Seamless Interactions
W7: Situating Ubiquitous Computing in Everyday Life: Bridging the Social and Technical Divide
W8: UbiPhysics: Designing for Physically Integrated Interaction
W9: Smart Environments and Their Applications to Cultural Heritage
W10: Monitoring, Measuring, and Motivating Exercise: Ubiquitous Computing to Support Physical Fitness
W11: Metapolis and Urban Life
W12: ubiPCMM: Personalized Context Modeling and Management for Ubicomp Applications
W13: Ubiquitous Wireless Communications

Prospective authors are encouraged to visit the updated Workshop Call for Participation at the UbiComp 2005 web site (www.ubicomp.org), and/or visit individual workshop homepages (listed at http://www.ubicomp.org/ubicomp2005/calls/callworkshops.shtml).

General questions about the workshops can be addressed to the Workshop Co-Chairs (Yoshito Tobe and Khai N. Truong, workshops-2005[at]ubicomp.org); specific questions about any individual workshop should be directed to the organizer(s) of the workshop.

Posted by jo at 12:28 PM | Comments (0)

Performance Studies International #12

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Call for Proposals and Ideas

PSi #12: Performing Rights--June 15-18, 2006--will be a gathering of artists, activists and academics who are making and researching performance that declares its interest and intent within the field of Human Rights. PSi #12 is being approached as a festival of creative dialogues investigating the boundaries and relationships between Human Rights and performance and will present an integrated schedule of conference and contextualising events.

Queen Mary, University of London, East End Collaborations and the Live Art Development Agency are seeking proposals for all aspects of PSi #12: Performing Rights.

Contextualising Events

PSi #12: Performing Rights will attempt to create a context for exploring the role of performance and the responsibilities of artists in effecting political, social and cultural change through a series of contextualising events including performances, interventions, new media presentations, installations, screenings, displays, artists led laboratories, spontaneous interactions and a library of research and resource materials.

PSi #12 Performing Rights are inviting proposals and recommendations from artists, activists, curators and commentators about performances, new media projects, publications, videos, websites, events, networks, organisations that are concerned with issues of Human Rights for all aspects of the contextualising programme. Proposals are welcome at any time from May 2005.

For more detailed information about the Call for Proposals for PSi #12: Performing Rights Contextualising Events:
email psi12[at]qmul.ac.uk or info[at]thisisLiveArt.co.uk
or visit www.psi12.qmul.ac.uk or www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk

The Conference

The PSi #12 conference will comprise plenary sessions, curated panels, papers and presentations, in which contributors will engage with the political, aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of the relationship between performance and human rights, on topics ranging from public and collective acts of insurrection to the intimacies and fragility of individual freedom and subjectivity.

PSi #12: Performing Rights are seeking paper, presentation and panel proposals for the conference. All submissions are due by 12 September 2005.

For more detailed information about the Call for Proposals for PSi #12: Performing Rights Conference:
email psi12[at]qmul.ac.uk
or visit www.psi12.qmul.ac.uk

PSi #12: Performing Rights Organisations:

Queen Mary, University of London, is a campus university in London's East End, only twenty minutes by tube from the city centre. Arts and Humanities research at Queen Mary is regarded as some of the very best in the UK. Drama at Queen Mary has a particular emphasis on live art, contemporary performance and theatre for social change.

The Live Art Development Agency is the leading development organisation for Live Art in the UK and works in partnership with practitioners, venues and institutions on artist and programme initiatives; develops strategies for increasing popular and critical awareness; provides practical information and advice; and offers opportunities for dialogue, debate, research and training.

East End Collaborations (EEC) responds to the professional development needs of graduates and emerging artists working with Live Art and based in London by offering information, advice and expertise and the opportunity to showcase work in an annual open submissions platform. East End Collaborations is collaboration between Queen between Queen Mary, University of London and the Live Art Development Agency.

Performance Studies International (PSi) is an international organisation founded in 1997 to promote communication and exchange among scholars and practitioners working in the field of performance.
Live Art Development Agency
Rochelle School
Arnold Circus
London E2 7ES
United Kingdom
t: +44 (0)20 7033 0275
f: +44 (0)20 7033 0276
lois[at]thisisLiveArt.co.uk
daniel[at]thisisLiveArt.co.uk
hannah[at]thisisLiveArt.co.uk
info[at]thisisLiveArt.co.uk
http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk

Posted by jo at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2005

Sonic Interventions Conference Report

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The Sounds/Noise of Silence

Conference Report: Sonic Interventions: Pushing the Boundaries of Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit von Amsterdam, by Marisa S. Olson

The Sonic Interventions Conference was described by its organizers, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, as an interdisciplinary conference "dedicated to exploring the cultural practices, aesthetics, technologies, and ways of conceptualizing sound, noise, and silence." One might imagine that this is an enormous topic, just as enormous as attempting to categorize something as pervasive as light, with which sound is frequently lumped. Taking the example of a panel discussionon the radio, consider the differences between discussing the radio in domestic life in the 1920s and the entire cultural history of the police radio. Interesting connections emerged and, yet, there was not enough time to address them in a single panel. And, of course, theseare just fractional aspects of radio history, and of sound, writ large.

The conference was driven by a large number of such concurrent panel sessions, which tended to foreclose the possibility of any two conference-goers having a "common experience," or of a consistent discourse emerging. The organizers also asked speakers to limit their presentations to ten minutes, rather than the standard twenty, in order to be more conducive to conversation among the thinly-spread audience.

Despite the structural obstacles and the broad topic, Sonic Interventions managed to play host to a number of interestingpresentations. Though a wide net was cast in the call for proposals, inviting artists and engineers to contribute, in addition to thetypical range of academic papers, the program ultimately skewed in thedirection of the academy. Sonic Interventions, then, became an opportunity to survey some of the more interesting contemporary humanities research related to sound.

Keynote speaker Douglas Kahn was among the better-known sound theorists present and his opening talk provided an art historical backdrop for the next four days of discussion. In lieu of discussing sound art, proper, Kahn actually discussed artistic research into states of soundlessness. In a reprise of his catalogue essay for theSon et Lumiere show at the Pompidou, Kahn discussed John Cage's and James Turrell's notions of "silence," and perception in general. Discussing the former's visit to an anechoic chamber and the latter's emulation of such a space, Kahn began to outline a phenomenology of corporeal sound; one concerned with the difference between perceiving the sounds of the body (of the blood flow, or even of thought) as interior or exterior events that is, whether the sounds of the body's systems or the retinal changes experienced in a transition to darkness, would be read as coming from the self or as environmentally specific to the anechoic chamber.

Kahn's arguments find extension into the realms of site-specificity and composition, of course, but also 1960s military research and counter-cultural resistance, or the ever-slippery relationship between light and sound, as manifest through shades of withdrawal and hallucination. This approach echoed the ethos of the overall conference, made evident in ASCA's CFP, which stated, "Sound is a mental impression, a penetrating sensation, a transmitted disturbance that may be structured or chaotic, narrative or non-narrative, organic or technologically produced, communicative, and even politicallycharged."

Despite the vagaries of the call (which were, admittedly, posited in a gesture towards inclusion and diversity), Kahn's specific approach became an apt backdrop for the ensuing days of Sonic Interventions. The overall intent of the conference was to not only define what constitutes sound or silence, but what historic discourses and ideological models of value have been associated with thosedefinitions.

A glance at the conference program reveals that all of the following stood as specimens in the study of sound: music (of many genres, eras, and areas), the spoken word (also of many genres, eras, and areas), radio, noise (political, mental, static, dynamic), the sound of writing, silence (as in "the silent arts," anechoism, "queer silence,"and beyond), orality, the voice, what the dead would say if they could, what the subaltern would say if they could, the soundscape, instruments, recording and playback technology, the broadcast and its political economy, field recordings, sound memories, sound trauma, and the ecology of sonic waste, among others.

Punctuated by performances by Mary Flanagan and Jay Needham were presentations under the heading of four continuous themes: Sound and the Moving Image & Sound Technologies and Cultural Change; The Sonic in the 'Silent' Arts and Bring in the Noise; Silences/Orality; and Soundscapes: Sound, Space, and the Body & Sound Practices and Events. In the interest of time and space, I will present the best or most interesting panels from each heading.

Under the first category, which considered sound in relationship to the moving image, technology, and cultural change, there was an interesting meeting of Cageian theory and pop aestheticism, brought about by Seda Ergul, Jal Kraut, and Luke Stickels. Kraut's approach to reading Cage's notion of silence, and the means of "defeating" it, sounded almost staid in comparison with Ergul's paper on "Cageian Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or Stickels's, on "Violence versus Silence: exploding binaries in Hana Bi." The three bounced nicely off each other, while proving that a seemingly-flimsy definition of silence could be profitable in its potential for widespread application.

The second category, "The Sonic in the 'Silent' Arts and Bring in the Noise" seemed to yield some of the most interesting, if diverse presentations. The title of the category sounds like a collision between ancient philosophy and a contemporary Broadway musical. Nonetheless, conference attendees with an openness to such "accidents"could find themselves presently surprised, as I was in attending a panel of a literary bent. Hannah Bosma, Alix Mazuet, and John M.Picker did an excellent job in excavating the polyvalent "sounds" with which literature is infused, ranging from rattling in one's head space to the scratchy scrawling of ecriture, to the narrative representation of aurality. Where Bosma opened with an elucidation on "Different Noises," Mazuet and Picker looked at Victorian-era instanciations of them. Picker compared the latter to contemporary urban noise problems.

Pulling at a similarly literary thread, under the heading of "Silences/Orality," Greg Esplin, Maria Boletsi, David Copenhafer, and Zachary Sifuentes plunged into canonical texts by Melville, Conrad, Kafka, and Eliot. Each presented studies of characters and contexts in which the cacophony of an encroaching modernity is "heard." The panel was interesting in that each presenter took a very specifically-angled approach to looking at issues with which many media theorists are currently concerned. These include the notions of private/public, orprivacy/publicity; the relationship of the part to the whole (be it a character in a book, an individual in a society, or a cog in a wheel); and modes of distribution and broadcast. Discourses of power, be it individual agency or the apprehensively aligned electrical power, were understatedly present, and the entire conversation was "enlightening."

Finally, under the fourth broad category, "Soundscapes: Sound, Space, and the Body & Sound Practices and Events," Ros Bandt, Ching Fang Chiang, and Pieter Verstraete comprised the panel most oriented toward contemporary art. This very international group looked at variations on installation art ranging from large museum works to smaller-scale immersive works, to Janet Cardiff's "audio walks." The panelists performed close-readings of sonic aspects of the works, which could also have been inspected under the lens of the previous topics. In particular, the thread of modernity (surprisingly more so than postmodernity) permeated the majority of the conference presentations and the aforementioned tenets of this discourse particularly the distinction between the personal and the public were uniquely embodied by the art works discussed here.

Elsewhere under the "Soundscape" category, Julian Henriques presented a paper, entitled "The Reggae Sound System: Music, Culture and Technology," which in a certain sense represented the best synthesis of all of the conference themes: comparing sensorial and political notions of sound and silence, tracing diasporic and ideological roots and metaphorically equating them with root objects in an evolving musicology, and tracing the simultaneous evolution of recording technology and its relationships to the sound it plays and the people who hear it.

In the end, were one to draw any one conclusion about the Sonic Interventions conference, it might be that "sound theory" is currently finding room to "intervene" in other humanistic studies. For better or for worse, this all-encompassing conference worked less to establish sound as a category in its own right (as one will recall was once done for film studies and new media, in the conferences of yore) than to posit is as a useful, if intricate, gloss upon other areas of enquiry. [via Rhizome]

Posted by jo at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2005

Locative Media in the Wild

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Human Interaction with Space

An invitation to researchers, faculty, staff, and graduate and PhD students to submit a letter of interest for a 4-day interdisciplinary workshop--Locative Media in the Wild--to be held July 20th- July 23rd*, 2005 at the Crooked Creek Research Facility in the White Mountains of Inyo County, California. Convened by Brett Stalbaum and Naomi Spellman, Interdisciplinary Computing Arts, University of California San Diego. Funded by the UCSD Center for the Humanities and the UC Humanities Research Institute the goal of this workshop is to share knowledge, methods, and tools between various research disciplines that have a focus on human interaction with space. Our hope is to identify common interests as well as blind spots among a range of disciplines, in order to enrich the various practices represented, and to inspire new areas of research. Four individuals will be chosen to participate. Each will be provided with overnight accommodations, all meals, travel expenses ($300 cap), and $500 compensation.

BACKGROUND The fields of cognitive science, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, dance, art, computer science, the earth sciences, and geography are concerned with the negotiation of space. Recent advances in wireless telecommunications, sensor technology, and Geographic Information System tools have inspired a tide of experimental creative projects. These tools are being used to address how communication, navigation, and big data are played out in space. As the landscape and urban streets become the canvas for ubiquitous computing applications, what kinds of possibilities emerge? How can research across multiple disciplines enrich the various practices?

WORKSHOP GOALS AND ACTIVITY While the workshop is intended to yield useful tools and problem-solving methods for all workshop participants, we are most concerned with fostering an interaction among disciplines, and examining and expanding upon how researchers approach spatial problems. Discussion and facilitated activity will set up a framework for activity over the 3-day workshop. Participants will be asked to present and demonstrate their own approach to spatial problems, and to collaboratively address problems outside their discipline.

The problem(s) addressed will be culled from workshop participants. Possible approaches include but are not limited to: Geographic Information System software, GPS-enabled mobile phones, narrative strategies, social navigation, performance (performative engagement of surrounding), data visualization, and data mining. Mediated or unmediated, digital or analogue a variety of means to communicate with and through space will be explored. A people-centered approachwill be emphasized in a supportive and flexible environment. Results of the workshop will be made publicly available online. Results will serve as a basis for ongoing multi-disciplinary research in this area.

WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS Participants may be at any stage in their career, and do not need tobe affiliated with an institution, academic or otherwise.

WORKSHOP LOCATION The physical location should inspire activities with a range of possible scales, problems, methods, and outcomes. By placing the research group outside of a familiar context, participants will be encouraged to rely on each other to address problems that engage the surrounding. The Crooked Creek facility is located at 10,000 feet in the White Mountains in Central California. Facilities and labs include dormitory-style rooms, a weather station, a Geographic Information System lab, and high-speed telecommunications.

TO SUBMIT A LETTER OF INTEREST Please email a short letter of interest to naomi.spellman@gmail.com with "Locative Workshop" in the subject line. Attach your CV. Explain how your research activity or practice relates to this general theme. Include any specific information you deem relevant. Letters of Interest should be received by June 10, 2005. Questions should be directed to naomi.spellman[at]gmail.com or stalbaum[at]ucsd.edu.

*Date of workshop to be confirmed

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION An online discussion and bibliography hosted by Brett Stalbaum and Naomi Spellman, November 2004: Exploring and defining the social and cultural implications of Geographic Information System tools and computerized mapping in a multidisciplinary setting: http://34n118w.net/UCHRI/

Posted by jo at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)

prog:ME (programa de mída eletronica)

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Programa de Mída Eletronica

prog:ME (programa de mída eletronica) is the 1st Festival of Electronic Media of Rio de Janeiro which will be an annual event in the city. Organized by Carlo Sansolo and Érika Fraenkel, the festival will take place on the 19th July until the 18th September 2005 in the Centro Cultural Telemar, in Rio de Janeiro-RJ, with 30.000 reais in prizes (approximately $11,000 US). The deadline for application is 15th of June of 2005. To apply please go to www.progme.org.

The event hopes to contribute to the stimulation of national production by highlighting new and established artists who develop works of art and technology, domestically and internationally. Running parallel to this is a program of invited foreign curators who will introduce artists of video-art from around the globe.

In this festival we’ll be inviting submissions for net-art, interactive cd-roms and dvds, and video-art works; we’ll also exhibit performance and urban intervention pieces using electronic media. There will be talks with theorists in electronic arts; workshops; electronic music shows with DJs/VJs and talks with selected artists who will be presenting their works.

There will be 10 prizes of 3000 reais each, five destined for national artists and five for international artists, distributed in the categories of net-art, interactive cd-rom/dvd and video-art.

All the participants will receive a catalogue, the catalogue will register all the activities developed on the event, all this information will be also at this web site, and it will feature more Data regarding every work and every artist. All the net art works will be also available from the web site through links and we intend to keep all this info and the works as an on-line catalogue.

All the activities, and the programme will be published on this site so you can have follow what is going on.

Any queries about the event please send an email to info[at]progme.org

Posted by jo at 07:11 AM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2005

MDCN Symposium

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Art on the Move in Montreal

The MDCN Symposium featured presentations on the following MDCN projects:

Global Heart Rate: Project Lead/Chef de projet : Sara Diamond; Project Participants/Participants au projet : Tom Donaldson, David Gauthier, Anita Johnston, Geoff Lillemon--Global Heart Rate is a large-scale game experience for players and learners in specific urban and natural outdoor environments. It will eventually be networked over distance and amongst time zones. The current version takes place in Banff National Park. These participant-driven mobile experiences are both fun and informative, utilizing the structure of a game todisseminate interactive knowledge about a particular topic, such as Banff's wealth of natural history. Technically, these experiences include real-time synchronous and asynchronous processes, allowing immediate and/or thoughtful response.

Players use mobile telephones and a wearabletechnology component that enters information from sensor data. A rich, information-sharing experience for participants is enhanced by Global Heart Rate's use of micro movies, blue tooth networking, GPS mapping and data caching. Other research outcomes include a mobile gaming authoring system and iterative engineering/content methodology. Mimichi and the Flower Throw games are developed using participatory design methods.

Digital Cities: Project Lead/Chef de projet : Michael Longford & Kajin Goh; Project Participants/Participants au projet : Amitava Biswas, Daniel Lemay, Bita Mahdaviani, Antoine Morris, Rongxin Zhang

Digital Cities presents a locative media project designed for Parc Émilie-Gamelin using sound, image and GPS (Global Positioning System) sensors. An exploration of the urban environment as a wireless ecology, the project looks at the ways in which memory is inscribed in space, drawing on field recordings, oral history, and archival material to form a deeply-layered spatio-temporal mediascape. The viewer's orientation in space shapes the nature of their audio-visual experience. As they move through the site, different media events attached to GPS coordinates are triggered, ranging from sound (heard through headsets) to images and micro-movies (displayed on a handheld PDA). This project repositions our relationship within space and information flows somewhere between the public and the private, the material and the immaterial, and the virtual and the real.

CitySpeak: Project Lead/Chef de projet : Jason Lewis; Project Participants/Participants au projet : David Bouchard, Zehuan Liu, Bruno Nadeau, Alexander Taler, Frank Tsonis

CitySpeak is an investigation of how data acquired from an urban environment’s virtual networks can be used to investigate the same urban space’s physical environment. Using the Île sans fil hotspots in Montréal, CitySpeak selects several locations in the city that are rich nodes of both virtual and real-world traffic, and samples the geo-encoded data related to these particular locations. The dynamic qualities of the data are processed using a database called Next Text to construct ‘texts’ that interpret the data and determine how the texts will be represented visually. The resulting stream of text is layered back onto the locations using both very intimate (PDAs) and very public (large-scale projections) technology.

Mobile Cartographic Command Centre (MC3): Project Lead/Chef de projet : Marc Tuters & Karlis Otto Kalnins; Project Participants/Participants au projet : Jesse Cizauskas, Luke Moloney, Jaanis Garancs, Adrian Sinclair, Gabe Sawhney

Advances in peer-to-peer technology are changing how we connect to the internet as well as to each other, bringing about the idea of a niche-driven Commons. This installation presents the research of the MC3 mobile media lab, an art-led technology development project that explores concepts around unlicensed wireless communication, and civic engagement in the Canadian context. Housed within a modular field-research unit, the installation functions as a forward command post for map interpretation, digital piracy, and civic surveillance via an airborne remote visualization system.

Policy Report: Project Lead/Chef de projet: Barbara Crow; Project Participants/Participants au projet : Candice D'Souza, Ganaele Langlois, Samantha Moonsammy

The policy component of the MDCN project is reviewing and assessing the current status of national and international, industry, and social movement regulations of wireless communications in several countries. [blogged by tobias van veen on MDCN]

Posted by jo at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

Liquid Space

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3D Navigable Platform Exhibition and Workshops

LAb[au] is happy to invite you to Liquid Space 01+02 exhibition + lqs03 workshop taking place at Brakke Grond, Amsterdam_ the Netherlands. Liquid Space is a series of artistic workshops LAb[au] is setting up with different cultural institutions to design spatial audiovisuals with a specific focus on collaborative and shared processes resulting in installations, exhibitions and performances.

Here, the space navigable music platform--a 3D engine developed by LAb[au]--is proposed as the starting-point for development and exchange to the invited artists. The engine is based on the principle of integrating different media in a structural, programmed manner, inside and through electronic space navigation. An environment where the performer navigates his created 3D space to compose music in real time, displayed in a 360° projection space and a quadra-phonic sound system.

..lqs01: deSIGNforms _ Nabi Art Center,Seoul
..lqs02: deSIGNing by numbers MediaRuimte, Brussels
..lqs03: deSIGNing feedback loop systems _ Brakke Grond, Amsterdam

..04.05 - 14.05.05: liquid space 03 - workshop
..10.05 _ 20.00 h: liquid space 01+02 exhibition opening + presentation
..11.05 - 14.05 _ 10.00 - 24.00 h: exhibition *
..14.05 _ 20.00 h: liquid space 03 closing event, performance

LAb[au] + Eavesdropper, Els Viaene, Petersonic invited by Brakke Grond to perform Exploring the Room in the context of the Liquid Space 03 deSIGNing feedback.loop systems workshop theme and as an opening-event of the Liquid Space 01+02 - exhibition.

Exploring the Room is a performance where music, best defined by the practice of soundscaping, and real time generated computer graphics stand on the same level. Establishing a constant dialog through its particular stage-design, sound and visuals are building the room, a 3.00 x 3.00 x 2.25 meters "cube" made out of projection screens and quadraphonic speaker setting, giving the minimal footprint able to host 3 musicians during 1.00 hour.

Performers and the audience are projecting shadows on the screen-walls, the system is capturing this image and reintroduce it as an overlaid projected image, closing the loop. All acting then is a matter of balance in between black and white, light and shadow, sound and silence, one and zero.

Posted by jo at 07:19 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2005

FIELDWORKS

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Art-Geography

FIELDWORKS: Art-Geography Symposium at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, May 5-6, 2005--The 'field' is a shared and privileged space for both art and science. While geographical information gathered in the field is conventionally recorded and translated into graphic form, artists often engage landscape or the city for raw materials. New technologies and critical frameworks are currently transforming the nature and meaning of the field, the practices that take place there, and the ways both artists and geographers identify, secure and circulate field-founded knowledge. This symposium includes an evening of performance and a day of discussion to bring together practitioners from art, architecture, and geography to present original (field)works and address emerging relations between geographical science and artistic production.

Of Note: Thursday May 5, 2005 8:00 pm
Performance and open discussion (45 min): Ultra-red: In the world of modern electronic music and sound art, Ultra-red distinguish themselves for their intrepid blend of political commitment and innovative sound. This event, an original piece commissioned for Fieldworks, is a rare opportunity to see Ultra-red perform live in Los Angeles.

Posted by jo at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2005

SPACE AND PERCEPTION

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International Symposium on Mixed Reality

SPACE AND PERCEPTION: International Symposium on Mixed Reality May 20-21, 2005, Riga, Latvia. The symposium will focus on new phenomenon of Mixed Reality--the environment generated by new technologies that contain significant interaction possibilities in both virtual and physical spaces.

As we still have a limited number (of 3-5 spots) for artists and researchers (working in field related to Mixed Reality issues) to participate in symposium - we ask for an informal application -- please enclose short statement describing your field of research or project you would like to present. Deadline: May 9, 2005. Please send your submissions to rixc[at]rixc.lv (applications from Nordic-Baltic region, West-Russia/Belarus are particularly welcome).

The symposium will focus on the following themes:

MR + digital physics (computable space)
MR + navigation (transformation between real and virtual space maps)
MR + social interaction (public space in physical and virtual environments)
MR + sonification (sound architecture in interactive environments)
MR + game studies (industry vs. gamers)
MR + mobile media (role of users in future applications)

* Background

Throughout the existence of the humankind the understanding of space, its frontiers and dimensions has changed a number of times. During the last century the newest scientific theories and the researches in the structures of micro (atom and quantum) and macro (the universe) seek to expand the boundaries of the visible space. As the result of the development of information and communication technologies the new frontier-free space is opened up -- the virtual space of the electronic media.

At the beginning of the 21st century, when mobile media and wireless networks come into dominance - after surfing in the virtual world the navigation in physical space acquired importance. However nowadays in present reality we unavoidably interfere with pervasive media, daily dividing the attention between the events in virtual (media) and physical (real) space. The merger of the digital and physical space alters not only our perception of space but also the sense of the reality...

Artists, scientists, media researchers and technology experts will present their creative discoveries, newest ideas, theories and researches that have taken place in the fields related to space and perception.

Identifying the common in these different views on realities and perception of space, the aim of the symposium discussions is to contextualise and to set up the conceptual background for the development of emerging field of Mixed Reality. It also intends to activate the collaborative potential of the sciences, art, technology and other creative fields of contemporary society.

* Preliminary list of participants:

Maja Kuzmanovic / TRG project / FoAM/Belgium // Robert van Kranenburg / Amsterdam / Virtual Platform // Yon Visell / Croatia - (physicist) / Zero-Th Studio // Karmen Franinovic / Croatia - (architect/designer) / Zero-Th Studio // Alkan Chipperfield / Australia (anthropologist) // Geska Helena Andersson - The Trans-Reality Game Lab (studio director) / Interactive Institute / Gotland University // Sha Xin Wei / Canada - (media researcher and techno-scientist) // Juris Zhagars / Latvia - (scientist, radioastronomer) / VIRAC institute - tbc. // Nicholas Gaffney / FoAM/Belgium // Steven Pickles / FoAM/Belgium // Evelina Kusaite / FoAM/Belgium // Tim Boykett (artist) (Austria) / Time's Up // Andreas Mayrhof (artist) (Austria), Time's Up // Brigitta Zics (artist) / Germany // Perttu Hämäläinen (research scientist) / Finland / Telecommunications software and multimedia laboratory / Helsinki University of Technology // Normunds Kozlovs (sociologist) / Latvia and others...

* Context:

The conceptual background for the symposium is developed in collaboration with EU Culture 2000 supported project "TRG - Trans Reality Generator" project team: FOAM (Belgium), TIMES UP (Austria), and KIBLA (Slovenia).

Developing the framework for this event are also previous RIXC research projects and networked activities on exploring fields of media architecture, acoustic space and locative media.

* Organisers and support:

The symposium is organised by the RIXC Center for New Media Culture (Latvia). Supported by the Latvian Ministry of Culture, Nordic Cultural Fund and Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation.

* Contact: rixc[at]rixc.lv or rasa[at]rixc.lv (Rasa Smite)

Posted by jo at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2005

Provflux 2005

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Implementation to be Featured

"Nick and I recently got word that Implementation has been accepted by Provflux 2005, both as an Intervention (live event) as an exhibition. Implementation’s second gallery exhibition will take the form of mounted photos from the project, a DVD of distance shots, and take-home sticker sheets on display at CUBE2 Gallery in downtown Providence, Rhode Island from May 19th until the end of the month, and we’ll be in Providence May 27th-29th for the event itself, with a goal of distributing, placing, and documenting the entire novel in one weekend in one location. Bring your digital camera and camping gear if you want to join us. Implementation joins about 50 other public interventions, games, urban exploration, lost space recovery, and tech mapping projects for this fluxist/situationist/public art happening." [blogged by Scott on grandtextauto]

Posted by jo at 09:10 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2005

ISEA2006/ZeroOne

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Call for Proposals for The C4F3

Deadline: June 1, 2005: This is an invitation by the ISEA2006 Symposium and ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge to groups and individuals to submit proposals for an installation of augmented furniture, audio/video/software installations and interactive artwork for The C4F3 (The Cafe) during the ISEA2006/ZeroOne from August 5-13, 2006.

The goal of The C4F3 is to create an active ambient space of augmented everyday objects that is not just an art gallery, a restaurant, or a chill space, but a new kind of project space where the whole environment has been rethought in terms of the capabilities of current technology. This Call for Proposals is an invitation to artists, designers and technologists to propose existing work for exhibition and/or use within the café and new projects that support this goal.

The Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies. ZeroOne San Jose is a milestone festival to be held biennially that makes accessible the work of the most innovative contemporary artists in the world. In 2006 it will be held in conjunction with the ISEA2006 Symposium.

Posted by jo at 07:22 AM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2005

Ancient Technologies, Dramaturgy, and Game

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Deadline: EXTENDED to April 25

How can traditional performance strategies blend with cutting-edge new media to create artistic forms reflecting today’s dynamic global culture? Join The Kitchen and the Summer Institute’s first invited international Artistic Director, Ong Keng Sen, for a multidisciplinary program exploring the relationships between ancient technologies, dramaturgy and game. Fully accredited by Sarah Lawrence College, this intensive three-week laboratory offers emerging artists the unique opportunity to develop work integrating video, theatre, performance, dance, sound, and text.

Through daily interaction with a select group of professional artists from Asia and the U.S., participants explore ritualistic techniques from ancient cultures within the rich landscape of interactive systems, game design and rules of play. Artist talks and mentoring sessions with industry professionals as well as access to The Kitchen’s extraordinary video archive of performance documentation enrich the curriculum.

Ancient Technologies, Dramaturgy, and Game

July 11 - 29, 2005
Application Deadline: EXTENDED to April 25

Artistic Director: Ong Keng Sen, THEATREWORKS AND
THE FLYING CIRCUS PROJECT, SINGAPORE

Fully accredited by Sarah Lawrence College.

Tuition: $2,800 (includes meal plan and laptop computer)
Partial scholarships available.
For more information please visit our website: www.thekitchen.org

Posted by jo at 01:00 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2005

d>Art.O5

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Distributed Art

d>Art.O5 is the eighth edition of dLux media arts acclaimed annual showcase of recent Australian and International single channel, short experimental digital film and video, web and sound art. Under the sub-title "Distributed Art" d>Art.O5 will both focus on art forms that have an inherently distributed nature (web art, mobile phone art) and investigate new methods for distribution of digital art. (podcasting, BitTorrent, Bluetooth etc.).

d>Art.O5 will consist of an exhibition of sound, web, and mobile phone art and a screening program of experimental film and video art. The exhibition will take place at the Sydney Opera House Exhibition Hall in August/September 2005. The screening program will be presented during this same period.

dLux media arts is now calling for works for the following categories of d>Art.O5:

- d>Art.O5 Screen: Open to Australian citizens or permanent residents only
- d>Art.O5 Sound: Open to Australian and International artists
- d>Art.O5 Web: Open to Australian and International artists

During the exhibition the sound and mobile phone art will be available for distribution to the private devices (mp3 players, mobile phones) of the visitors. After the exhibition period, the sound and screen works will be distributed online through podcasting and BitTorrent, respectively. The web works will be presented in an online gallery on the dLux media arts website. All distribution will be under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.

The call for entries closes on June 15th. Any entries not completed by this date will not be accepted. Entrants will be notified of the selection results by July 1st.

For more information and to make a submission to d>Art.O5, please visit http://www.dlux.org.au/dart05

Posted by jo at 09:38 AM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2005

Emergences

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CALL FOR PROPOSALS

A festival dedicated to new artistic forms and new media, Emergences--organzed by Dedale.info--gathers French and international artists of the digital creation scene around a deeply transdisciplinary and original programming. For this third edition, we are looking for projects in all disciplines, especially, performances, circus, street theatre, puppetry, visual arts, architecture, game art, biotech art, artistic intervention in public space, networked performances (in the framework of collaborations with festivals in France and abroad). Main artistic themes:

Mobility, network and ubiquity | Intimacy, oddness and strangeness | Urbanity and nature | Art in urban space. A special attention will be carried to projects using the following technologies: * wireless and mobile technologies (cellphones, vocal servers, MMS, SMS, videophony, GPS, WiFi...), * sensors and remote interaction systems, * robotics and artificial intelligence, * biotechnologies.

Projects bringing in the audience or/and taking into account the venue will be welcomed as well.

These projects can, if necessary, be the object of an accompaniement in the realization within the framework of D-lab (production department of Dedale).

Deadline for submissions : 06/01/05

Information:

contact @ dedale.info | www.dedale.info

Posted by jo at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

April 08, 2005

Mobile Digital Commons Network Symposium

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Sampling the Spectrum: The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Technologies

Hosted by the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN), this symposium--May 5th-8th, 2005, Montréal, Canada--examines the impact of mobile culture and the evolving idea of a wireless commons. Over the course of four days, we will investigate how wireless technologies enrich and modify public life in Canada, challenge our notions of space and place, and shape our day-to-day experiences.

Leading researchers, scholars and artists from around the world have been invited to present their cutting edge work in these fields and contribute to an ongoing discussion on these subjects. This event will also serve as a public unveiling of the projects that constitute the launch of the MDCN.

The MDCN connects those members of the academy, the arts and industry whose work revolves around mobile, wireless, and digital technologies in Canada. Funded by Canadian Heritage, our goals are threefold: to facilitate interdisciplinary research; to foster cultural production and public participation; and to develop forward-thinking policy on wireless technologies.

Posted by jo at 02:26 PM | Comments (0)

MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES

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OPEN TO ALL ARTISTS WORLDWIDE

MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES is Cardiff’s inaugural festival of creative technology - a three-day programme of events being held across the capital. The festival is being developed between bloc and Chapter. The residency programme for the festival is supported and managed by Cywaith Cymru/Artworks Wales), the national organisation for public art in Wales. The festival residencies are supported through the National Lottery celebration of Cardiff 2005.

ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCY OPPORTUNITIES: The BBC Wales New Media’s mobile studio is a touring bus which has onboard a broadcast production studio with wireless broadband internet access, a network of six PCs, a large TV/plasma screen, a Sony HDV broadcast TV camera, digital cameras and scanners. Travelling with the bus is a driver, a producer, a community researcher, and a Lifelong Learning advisor. All the staff are bilingual (Welsh/English). The bus is a partnership between BBC Wales, The Welsh Language Board and University of Wales, Bangor.

Through this residency the artist/s will address the festival’s theme of investigating the ‘places’ where digital technologies become grounded in a geographical and social context. Through the project the artist/s will realise a work that encourages and extends the public’s initial or early contact with digital technology. The project will focus on community participation and exchange and will need to be structured to manage both Welsh and English language content.

It is anticipated that the artist will fully utilise the technology available in the mobile studio, the expertise of the crew, and the studio’s portability. It is anticipated that the work will have a strong visual/audio presence in Cardiff during the festival. The work will also have dual visibility at Oriel Mostyn gallery, Llandudno, North Wales during the three-days of the Cardiff-based festival (www.mostyn.org).

During the residency the artist will be based in North Wales at the BBC’s mobile studio. The bus has a schedule which takes it throughout North Wales and the appointed artist/s will work with the bus team to schedule stops.

The artist will also have access to support from the BBC’s main office in Cardiff. BBC Wales New Media is the cross-media, online, interactive and mobile department within BBC Wales. For further information on the host visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales.

Festival Theme: Artists are increasingly engaged with or inspired by digital technology - exploring consumer and communication technologies such as the worldwide web, mobile networks, file sharing, and computer gaming. Because digital technology is a participatory medium with global reach, artists tend to explore digital technology in the context of public and shared spheres. Often digital art is situated somewhere between public art - albeit in a dematerialised form - and street culture where the technology itself is used as a ‘site’ for the production and presentation of art works. Although digital technology is often claimed to go beyond physical limitations, engagement with technology is always embedded in, or grounded in, real spaces and places whether this is explored from a user or network perspective.

The Residencies: The residencies form part of the festival’s core programme where artists are being invited to investigate the ‘places’ where digital technologies become grounded in a geographical and social context. It is anticipated that the work from the residencies will have a strong presence in Cardiff during the festival period - 28th to 30th October 2005. All commissioned works shown at the festival will negotiate with the specifics of the location at various ‘sites’ in order to bring about activity and exchange beyond the gallery.

The residencies are open to an artist or group of artists and cover a period spent with the residency host between June and November this year (the timing of the residencies is negotiable although the work must be made evident during the festival period).

Fee: There is a fee of £3,600 (30 days), material budget of £750, and outreach travel of £250.

Deadline: Posted applications should be received by FRIDAY 29th APRIL 2005. Shortlisted artists will be notified on 6th May, interviews are to be held in Welshpool, Mid-Wales on the 1st June.

Selection Panel: Hannah Firth (Curator, Chapter/ Festival Director), Emma Posey (Director, Bloc/Festival Director), Iain Tweedale (Editor, BBC Wales New Media), and Walt Warrilow (Project Manager, Cywaith Cymru/Artworks Wales).

If you have any questions or would like to have an informal discussion about this residency please email Walt Warrilow: walt @ cywaithcymru.org.

Applicants should post their CV, a proposal of no more than 1 side of A4 stating ref: May you participate in a digital world, and supporting visual material in slide or CD format to:
May you participate in a digital world
Cywaith Cymru . Artworks Wales
Crichton House
11-12 Mount Stuart Square
Cardiff
CF10 5EE
UK

T: +44 (0)29 2048 9543
F: +44 (0)29 2046 5458
www.cywaithcymru.org
e: walt @ cywaithcymru.org

Posted by jo at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

Pervasive Connections

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Lets Do Lunch

PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS/LETS DO LUNCH A one day event and exhibition focusing on opportunities for artists and local communities to work with new social technologies.

TAKE2030 takes its richair wireless lunchboxes out to lunch in Hackney and brings the conversations back to Space. Let's Do Lunch tracks Hackney's public access wireless connection points along bus route 26. Lunch dates will be set up with community members to exchange practical skills and visions for a wireless Hackney. The exhibition at SPACE will include a map of Hackney's wireless outposts along bus route 26, documentation of 7 lunch dates and auto transmitting wireless lunch boxes. Pump the signals, realise a wireless Hackney.

Pervasive Connections/Lets Do Lunch
Wireless Networks - Mobile Technologies – Locative Media Event
Saturday 16th April 10.30 – 5pm
Exhibition 6th – 16th April (Weds – Sat 1 TO 6pm)
SPACE, The Triangle, 129–131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH
£5 (includes lunch) booking required

Talks:
Introduction to Wifi - Saul Albert from Wireless London
Artist talk by TAKE 2030 linking to the exhibition Lets Do Lunch.

Workshops:
Network self provision– James Stevens Making flowers with palm top devices – Peter Chauncy Film for mobile phones – Melissa Bliss and Jes Benstock Public authoring and sharing local knowledge – Giles Lane

Panel discussion:
Featuring artists, activists and media practitioners, including James Stevens, Peter Chauncy, Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji, Rokeby, TAKE 2030, Indri Tulusun. Chaired by Pete Gomes – Wireless London

Let’s Do Lunch - 6 April – 16 April 2005. (Wed – Sat, 1-6pm)

Pervasive Connections/Lets Do Lunch is organised by Space and inIVA as part of Discover Hackney.

Booking To book a place on the one day event ‘Pervasive Connections’, please contact SPACE Media Arts on 020 8525 4344 or spacemedia@spacestudios.org.uk

Further information
http://www.spacemedia.org.uk
http://www.spacestudios.org.uk
http://www.iniva.org /

Directions
Bus: 26 & 48 from Liverpool Street, 106 & 254 from Bethnal Green, 55 from Old Street.
Tube: Bethnal Green.
Train: Hackney Central Silverlink.

Posted by jo at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2005

Walking as Knowing as Making

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A PERIPATETIC INVESTIGATION OF PLACE

Based in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois, Walking as Knowing as Making is a multifaceted effort that seeks to nurture both a theoretical and applied approach to knowing and interpreting place as we experience and construct it through walking. Using the walk as a guiding metaphor the format of this symposium has been designed to encourage a sustained, rigorous, and layered yet experimental, diffuse, and meandering consideration of walking and its associated activities, systems, and values. Between February and May 2005 we will bring to campus a diverse group of scholars, activists, and pedestrians to present ideas, engage in conversation, generate questions, tell stories, and, of course, walk.

Supplementing and also weaving together this series of convergences will be a new interdisciplinary course about walking, an informal film series about place, a reading group, a series of informational and experimental walks and tours, production of a monthly sound collage for broadcast on local community radio stations, a museum exhibition, and a digital and print archive of all the events and activities.

Posted by jo at 08:24 AM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2005

Games and Education

Technology and Games at the AERA Conference


The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference will take place in Montréal from April 11-15. Three symposiums will be dealing directly with issues on Games and Education:
- Games and Learning: Theory, New Technology, and Assessment
- Video Games and Digital Literacies
- Advanced Technology for Learning in School, Games, and Informal Settings.
Professors and scholars such as Kurt Squire, Katie Salen, and James Paul Gee will be presenting. For the symposium online program, go to the AERA website..

Here's the abstract of Games and Learning:"The shift toward situating learning and assessment in real-life situations has prompted the investigation of the potential of games in education. By bringing together scholars and game developers from backgrounds as distinct as education, design, and communication, this symposium will promote an interdisciplinary discussion on how games and simulations might be used to improve learning and assessment. In this symposium, presenters address games in the context of three interrelated issues: the role of games within the educational movement to provide more relevant experiences for students, the ways games can be used to promote learning and to assess knowledge, and finally, the implications of understanding the social aspects of games on game design."

Posted by adriana at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2005

URBAN SCREENS 2005

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Discovering the Potential of Outdoor Screens for Urban Society

URBAN SCREENS 2005 is an international conference ranging from critical theory to project experiences by researchers and practitioners in the field of Art, Architecture, Urban Studies and Digital Culture. The focus is on understanding how the growing infrastructure of large digital displays influences the visual sphere of our public spaces. How can the commercial use of these screens be broadened and culturally curated to contribute to a lively urban society?

The conference will feature three main topics: 1) Shaping the urban media-scapes; 2) Addressing the social value and civic culture; and 3) Experiences from practical case studies. SUMISSION DEADLINE: 1 May 2005

Public space has always been a place for human interaction, a unique arena for exchange of rituals and communication in a constant process of renewal, challenging the development of society. Its architectural dimension, being a storytelling medium itself, has played a changing role of importance in providing a stage for this interaction. The way the space is inhabited can be read as a participatory process of its audience. The (vanishing) role as space for social and symbolic discourse has been often discussed in urban sociology. Modernization, the growing independence from place and time and the individualization seem to destroy the city rhythm and its social systems. New virtual spaces have been populated instead. Starting with the development of virtual cities within chat rooms and spaces for production of identity, we now face community experiments like collaborative wikis, blogs or mobile phone networks in the growing field of social computing. Parallel to this development an "event culture" has evolved in the real urban space of internationally competing cities, focusing on tourism and consumption. In the context of this rapidly evolving commercial information sphere, developers are bringing new digital display technology into the urban landscape.

Considering the social sustainability of our cities it is necessary to look closer at the liveability and openness of public spaces. The experience, made in the new digital communication spheres, might serve as an inspiration for the social enhancement of our urban surroundings. Instead of just showing commercials, could the large outdoor displays function as experimental "visualization zone" of the fusing of the virtual public spaces and our real world? Can screens function as a new mirror reflecting the public sphere, a medium of communication of the city with itself?

The conference wants to launch a discussion about how digital culture can make use of the existing and future screening infrastructure, in terms of art and social or political practices, generating a higher value for its operators and "users". We want to address the existing commercial predetermination and explore the nuance between art, interventions and entertainment to stimulate a lively culture. Other key issues are: mediated interaction, content, participation of the local community, restrictions due to technical limits, and the incorporation of the screens in the architecture of our urban landscape. We are happy to announce our special guest speakers Lev Manovich, Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego and Mike Gibbons, Chief Project Manager, Live Events, BBC.

CONFERENCE:

TIME: Friday, 23 Sept. 2005 (extended to 24th according to feedback)
LOCATION: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
ORGANIZATION:
- Geert Lovink, Sabine Niederer, Institute of Network Cultures, Interactive Media, Hoogeschool van Amsterdam
- Jeroen Boomgaard, Department of Art and Public Space, Gerrit Rietveld Academy / University of Amsterdam
- Mirjam Struppek, Urban//ReseARTch, Berlin
CALL FOR PAPERS AND PROJECT PRESENTATIONS
SUMISSION DEADLINE: 1 May 2005

Researchers and practitioners in the field of Art, Architecture, Urban Studies and Digital Culture are invited to submit proposals for papers and presentations on key issues and implemented cutting-edge projects.

The following aspects might serve as guideline for content, addressed in submissions:

Topic 1 "Shaping the urban media-scapes"

- The historical overview of the development an urban media-sphere.
- Future technologies and visions shaping the media-scape
- Critical review of visual and sonic noise versus liveability
- Peoples predetermined media perception in public space
- Melting layers of technology and the cityscape creating a new dimension
- Investigating the aesthetics of design in the context of the urban landscape

Topic 2 "Addressing the social value and civic culture"

- From consumer entertainment to participation of a wide range users
- Limits and challenges of new responsible public-private partnerships
- Mediated interactions as new forms of civic culture and use of public space
- Issues of censorship in content management
- Possible social applications for the community addressing local events, social integration, education
- Long-term value of local identity and cultural diversity through open access?
- Urban branding changing the perception of locations

Topic 3 "Experiences from practical case studies"

- Experiences with production of new and old cultural content for screens
- Technological limits and challenges in content creation and enhancement
- Evaluation studies, responses from participants and interactions
- Case studies of cultural screenings
- The role of government involvement, policy, planning and management
- Experiences with public and private cooperation
- Cooperation with other art forms and creative industries

______________________________________________________________
APPLICATION FORMAT

1. Name of the project/paper
2. Author(s)
3. Contact person (e-mail/phone/fax/postal address)
4. Short 350-word abstract of the paper/presentation
5. Short biography of the author(s)
6. Related web-links
7. Description of the type of media needed for the presentation

______________________________________________________________
ADDITIONAL CALL FOR SUBMISSION OF DIGITAL IMAGES

For a visual screening we are collecting various pictures of urban screens. Please submit high-resolution images in digitalized format, together with the date, the name of the location and photographer.

For your inspiration look at the Russian Internet Journal about large
electronic LED screens: http://www.screens.ru/
______________________________________________________________
FURTHER INFORMATION - MAILINGLIST

Preparations of the event will include an online discussion via a special mailinglist. During and after the conference live web-casting and other online documentations will present the content to a wider audience.

To subscribe and participate in the urbanscreens-l mailinglist register at:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/urbanscreens-l_listcultures.org

If you would like to know more, have a look at the background text:
http://culturebase.org/home/struppek/Homepage/urbanscreens_background.html

_____________________________________________________________
CONTACT FOR SUBMISSIONS:

Mirjam Struppek
urbanscreens (at) networkcultures.org

Institute of Network Cultures
t: +31 (0)20 5951866
f: +31 (0)20 5951840
www.networkcultures.org

Posted by jo at 09:14 AM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2005

Wearable Futures:

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Hybrid Culture in the Design and Development of Soft Technology

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS: Deadline for Abstracts: 14th March 2005

An event organised by Smart Clothes Wearable Technology Research Group, University of Wales, Newport and PDR, University of Wales Institute Cardiff in association with SCAN (Southern Collaborative Arts Network); 14 - 16 September 2005, University of Wales, Newport, WALES, UK.

Keynotes: Suzanne Lee, Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins, Fashion, Consultant and author of Fashioning the Future pub Thames and Hudson Sept 2005; Joanna Berzowska, Artist and Assistant Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal; Sarah E. Braddock Clarke, Lecturer, Curator and Writer. Co Author of Techno Textiles, SportsTech and Techno Textiles2 pub 2005; Chris Baber University of Birmingham, Reader in Interactive Systems.

This two day International conference will aim to contextualise the future potential of Wearable Technologies in a variety of fields ranging from military application to fine art.

Wearable Futures is an interdisciplinary conference, which aims to bring together practitioners, inventors, and theorists in the field of soft technology and wearables including those concerned with fashion, textiles, sportswear, interaction design, media and live arts, medical textiles, wellness, perception and psychology, IPR, polymer science, nanotechnology, military, and other relevant research strands.

We will be examining how some broad generic questions will be explored in relation to wearable technology including but not restricted to: aesthetics and design, function and durability versus market forces; the desires, needs and realities of wearable technologies; technology and culture; simplicity and sustainability; design for wearability; wearables as theatre and wearables as emotional 'tools'.

Key fundamental questions across the conference in relation to wearables are:

What is out there?
Who wants it?
What do they want?
How is it achieved?

Please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words in a Word document format by: 14th March 2005 to: hannah.topping @ newport.ac.uk

For further information please refer to the conference website.

Abstracts and full papers will be peer reviewed and if accepted published in the Conference Proceedings. A selection from the full papers will also be considered for publication in a themed addition of the international journal 'A.I. & Society' (SPRINGER).

Abstracts may be offered as long papers (30 minutes includes questions), short papers (20 minutes includes questions) or for poster presentations. Poster presentations are particularly welcomed from postgraduate students.

NB: Please note final submission for full papers has been changed to 6th June 2005.

Committee currently includes:

Chris Baber, Reader, University of Birmingham
Joanna Berzowska, Assistant Professor, University in Montreal
Sarah E. Braddock Clarke, Author & Lecturer
Julia Cassim, Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, Royal College of Art
Andrew Chetty, Arts Consultant
Carole Collet, Director Textile Futures, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Joan Farrer, Reader, Royal college of Art
Frances Geesin, Research Fellow, London College of Fashion
Rory Hamilton, Interactive Design, Royal college of Art
Jane Harris, Senior Research Fellow, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Ros Hibbert, Textile Consultant
Suzanne Lee, Senior Research Fellow, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Alan Lewis, Director of Research, University of Wales Institute Cardiff
Jane McCann, Researcher, University of Wales, Newport
Stephen Scrivener, Research Professor, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Mick Siddons, Consultant, CR8ive Solutions Ltd
Helen Sloan, Director, SCAN
David Smith, Reader, University of Wales, Newport

Posted by jo at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

DIGITAL CULTURES

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International Dance Technology-Lab 2005

The International Dance Technology-Lab 2005 will take place from 28 November - 4 December; it will be hosted by Nottingham Trent University's Future Factory in cooperation with Radiator Festival for New Technology Art, essexdance and other UK partners. The weekend conference and exhibition events are open to all.

Digital technologies challenge our techniques of dance and performance, customary perceptions of culturally embodied knowledge and sensory processing, and assumptions about choreography, composition, and the relations between maker, performer, and audience.

The central aim of this international lab meeting in November-December 2005 is to take stock of the evolution of contemporary dance (technology), and develop a new understanding of interaction design and physical computing in the dance and performance field through critical engagement with the consequences of interactivity on contemporary digital cultures.

We shall ask: whether interactive performance has become an instance of collaborative culture, beyond aesthetic conventions of concert dance, and how interactive media blur distinctions between performer and audience/user, between performance, play, ritual, game and utility.

Western knowledge of digital interactivity is examined through non-Western concepts of interaction. Non-western articulations of the digital provide a framework for fresh interpretations of participatory design. The cultural questions in this research lab derive from observations of multi-level collaborations between artistic, theatrical, technological, and research partners from different cultural backgrounds and locations, as well as from lab experiments with divergent perceptions of the sensory processing of the digital.

The theoretical scope of the project encompasses an analysis of "digital cultures" in interactive dance based on the findings of an international and cross-cultural lab with the participation of 20 or 25 distinguished choreographers, composers, performance and media artists, programmers, and designers. The lab workshop takes place at Nottingham Trent University over a period of one week and is closed to the general public.

The weekend conference and exhibition events are open to all.

Cross-cultural perspectives and digital art are the focus of the concluding Public Roundtables and Colloquium to be held at this confernece (Friday through Sunday, December 2-4, 2005).

Commissions for new work will be announced, and these will be on display throughout the week. The colloquium is organized in collaboration with the Radiator Festival for New Technology Art. If you wish to make a presentation on the subject of the Lab during the conference, please send us a proposal.

johannes.birringer @ ntu.ac.uk
Live Art - Digital Research
Nottingham Trent University
Victoria Studios - Shakespeare Street
Nottingham NG1 4FQ UK
http://art.ntu.ac.uk/performance_research/birringer/idat.htm

Posted by jo at 07:25 AM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2005

Version>05>Invincible Desire

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CALL FOR PROPOSALS AND WORK

Version is an international festival about art, media, technology and politics. Our fourth annual convergence, Version>05> Invincible Desire, will examine the activities of local configurations and external networks that use visual art, innovative social practices, artist initiatives, creative uses of new technologies, organizing strategies and public interventions in order to engage in cultural reclamation. Through a diverse program featuring an experimental art expo, artistic disturbances, networked urban events, screenings, interactive applications, performances, workshops, art rendez-vous, parties, and action, Version>05 will investigate the urgency for interventions in everyday life, the organization of our shared interests, and the distribution of our ideas.

We will convene in Chicago for a ten day open laboratory to explore a diversity of tactics and strategies to activate our communities and amplify our ideas. The city of Chicago will be used as a map to examine microactions. Blueprints will be unveiled to strengthen emerging alliances and counter institutions. Alternative spaces will be open for staging actions. Public spaces and corporate places will be terrains of intervention.

We seek to explore methods to enjoin the public in a dialogue about pressing issues and ideas of our age. We want to share your actions as well as projects and activities that can help us to transform personal and shared environments. It is our hope that the issue will offer ways to engage in meme warfare, practice social engagement and produce instruments of transformation during these dark ages.

Posted by jo at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2005

Interactive Panoramic Cinema

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Embodied Spectatorship

Paper abstract: For most of the past 100 years, cinema has been the premier medium for defining and expressing relations to the visible world. However, cinematic spectacles delivered in darkened theaters are predicated on a denial of both the body and the physical surroundings of the spectators who are watching it. To overcome these deficiencies, filmmakers have historically turned to narrative, seducing audiences with compelling stories and providing realistic characters with whom to identify. This paper describes several research projects in interactive panoramic cinema that attempt to sidestep the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema and instead are based on notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship rather than just storytelling. Example projects include interactive works developed with the use of a unique 360 degree camera and editing system, and also development of panoramic imagery for a large projection environment with 14 screens on 3 adjacent walls in a 5-4-5 configuration with observations and findings from an experiment projecting panoramic video on 12 of the 14, in a 4-4-4 270 degree configuration. [via USC Interactive Media Division]

Title: "Experiments in Interactive Panoramic Cinema"
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 1/19/2005

Steve Anderson, Susana Ruiz, and Scott Fisher will give a summary of the work done over the past year with Sony's Fourth View panoramic video camera system. This will be a runthrough of a paper to be given by Steve tomorrow in the annual SPIE conference in San Jose on "The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2005" chaired by Mark Bolas.

Posted by jo at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)

January 15, 2005

PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network

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Two Day Workshop

The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network (PLAN) is a new international and interdisciplinary research network in pervasive media and locative media funded as part of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Culture & Creativity programme. The network will bring together practising artists, technology developers and ethnographers with the aim of advancing interdisciplinary understanding and building consortia for future collaborative projects. It will be of relevance to people working in the arts, games, education, tourism, heritage, science and engineering.

You are invited to attend an initial two day workshop that will launch the network, review the state of the art, bring key players together, and make initial contacts. The event will also aim to identify a range of specific interests that can lead to the formation of sub-groups within the network.

Speakers include: Duncan Campbell, Anne Galloway, Matthew Chalmers, Matt Adams, Bill Gaver, Eyal Weizman, Katherine Moriwaki, Sally Jane Norman, Giles Lane, Usman Haque, Franz Wunschel and the Exyzt collective, Richard Hull, Jo Walsh, Schuyler Erle, Teri Rueb, Minna Tarkka, Tapio Makela, RIXC, Pete Gomes, Saul Albert, Susan Kennard, Michael Longford, Steve Benford, Drew Hemment, Ben Russell. [Full list of speakers below]

ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) London UK; Tues 1st and Wed 2nd February 2005, 10am-6pm (music 8pm-1am Tuesday).

Music in the bar from Xela (City Centre Offices, Type Records), XFM Flo-Motion DJ Nick Luscombe and Apachi61.

PLAN is supported by EPSRC and led by Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab, with partners including Futuresonic (UK), Banff (Canada) and M-cult (Finland).

The event is open to the public. Event tickets are priced at £1.50 per day or £3 for two days to cover the ICA daily membership. Please book early to avoid disappointment. [See below for registration process.]

EVENT PROGRAMME - SPEAKERS

DAY ONE: February 1st 2005; ICA London; 9:30am registration 10am start

Matthew Chalmers - Glasgow University
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~matthew/

Bill Gaver - RCA
http://www.rca.ac.uk/pages/research/dr_william_gaver_609.html

Eyal Weizman - Architect
www.cabinetmagazine.org/events/weizman.php

Sally Jane Norman - Culture Lab, University of Newcastle
http://kvc.minbuza.nl/uk/archive/commentary/norman.html

Cliff Randell - Computer Science Department, University of Bristol
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~cliff

Wilfried Hou Je Bek - Socialfiction
http://socialfiction.org

Giles Lane - Proboscis
http://proboscis.org.uk

Matt Adams - Blast Theory
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/

Usman Haque - Bartlett School of architecture
http://www.haque.co.uk

Franz Wunschel - Exyzt Collective
http://www.exyzt.org

Richard Hull - Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
http://www.mobilebristol.com

Constance Fleuriot - Bristol University
http://mobilebristol.com

Jon Dovey - Bristol University
http://www.republicof.net

Debbi Lander - Futurephysical
http://futurephysical.org

Giulio Jacucci - Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT)
Advanced Research Unit (ARU)
http://www.hiit.fi

Annika Waern - Swedish Institute of Computer Science
http://www.sics.se/~annika/

RIXC
http://rixc.lv/

Pete Gomes - Architectural Association
http://www.mutantfilm.com

Saul Albert - Twenteenthcentury, Limehouse Townhall
http://twenteenthcentury.com/cv.php?mem_id=1

Susan Kennard - Banff
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/

Michael Longford - Mobile Digital Commons Network

Tobias C. Van Veen - Mobile Digital Commons Network

Naomi Spellman - UC San Diego
http://34n118w.net/

Brett Stalbaum - UC San Diego
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/bstalbau.htm

Minna Tarkka - M-cult
http://www.m-cult.org/

Tapio Makela - M-cult
http://www.m-cult.org/

MUSIC PROGRAMME: February 1st 2005; ICA London; 8pm-1am

Xela (City Centre Offices, Type Records)

XFM Flo-Motion DJ Nick Luscombe

Apachi61

In association with Baked Goods and Futuresonic
http://www.baked-goods.com
http://www.futuresonic.com


DAY TWO: February 2nd 2005; ICA London; 9:30am registration 10am start

Duncan Campbell - IPTV, The Guardian
http://duncan.gn.apc.org

Anne Galloway - Carleton University
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org

Katherine Moriwaki - Trinity College Dublin
http://www.kakirine.com

Jo Walsh - Co-author 'Mapping Hacks'
http://space.frot.org/

Schuyler Erle - Nocat, Co-author 'Mapping Hacks'
http://nocat.net/

Teri Rueb - RISD
http://www.terirueb.net

Erich Charles Harris - Interact Lab, Informatics, University of Sussex
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/interact/

Lalya Gaye - Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute
http://www.viktoria.se/lalya

Martin Rieser - Bath, BFI
http://mobileaudience.blogspot.com

Ewen Chardonnet - Ellipse
http://e-ngo.org

Sarah Kettley - Napier University
http://www.eca.ac.uk/tacitus/SarahKettley.htm

Andrew Wilson - Blink Media
http://fisharepeopletoo.blogs.com/1/2004/09/city_chromosome.html

Karl-Petter Akesson - SICS
http://www.sics.se

Jen Southern - University of Huddersfield
http://www.theportable.tv

Russell Beale - Advanced Interaction Group, School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~rxb/

Steve Benford - MRL Mixed Reality Lab
http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk

Drew Hemment - Futuresonic, University of Salford
http://www.futuresonic.com/

Ben Russell - Headmap / Locative
http://headmap.org

Full details of the PLAN ICA workshop, and updates to the programme can be found on the PLAN website.

REGISTRATION

Registration is a two-step process:

1]. Book tickets via ICA
Tickets, priced at 1.50 (GBP) per day, are available from:
the ICA Box Office: 12 Midday - 9:30 pm
Email: tickets@ica.org.uk
Tel: +44 (0)207 930 3647
ICA Address - ICA. The Mall. London SW1Y 5AH
ICA Website - http://www.ica.org.uk

2]. Provide contact details to lra@cs.nott.ac.uk as below
If you would like to be included in the PLAN networking activities
and delegate list, please send the following contact details to
Linda Andrews, lra@cs.nott.ac.uk
Name:
Organisation:
URL:
Address:
Email Address:
Tel No:
Areas of Interest:

Posted by jo at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)

December 28, 2004

Towards Tomorrow?

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Fundamental(ist)s of Performance

Towards Tomorrow?; 7-10 April 2005; Centre for Performance Research University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales, UK; theatre X performance.

As The Centre for Performance Research (CPR) celebrates thirty years of work, this conference will build upon and extend the dialogues and debates that CPR has forged over its long journey from research laboratory to research centre.' Towards Tomorrow?' will examine the complex relation between performance and theatre: the past, present and future of 'performance' and 'theatre' and their aesthetic practices.

CPR's anniversary publication Testimony from the Future, Evidence of the Past will be launched at this gathering and a complementary publication is planned to emerge from Towards Tomorrow? with a range of international contributions that seek to reorient the discipline of performance and to demonstrate its increasing relevance in many areas of cultural studies, philosophy and the arts.

Call for x,y and z: (where z = Discussions, Provocations, Polemics, Experiments, Manifestos, Papers, Confessions, Screenings and Demonstrations)

As part of the programme of this event there will be panels addressing aspects of performance and theatre that relate to broad themes of risk and failure, the future and generations, events and institutions and practice as research.

There will be a 'platform, soapbox, and propaganda' station 'In Extremis: Fundamental(ist)s of Performance', for the promulgation and dissemination of extreme enthusiasms, radical obsessions, pristine lies and rotten truth. It will be a space to present ideas contemporary, anachronistic, contentious and conformist.

A programme of 'talk back' sessions are planned where artists and performers address scholars who have explored their work; reversing the direction of enquiry and facilitating dialogue between practice and criticism.

We encourage proposals to lead enquiries relating to the concerns of this event, either following the themes suggested below, or generating different areas of enquiry. Also proposals for individual presentations or papers within these panels are invited, each should include a 300 word abstract for a presentation of 20 minutes duration.

Possible themes may include:

'Before the age of Performance'
'Transformation/Transmission/Transmutation'
'The Weave of Performance'
'Staging Play: The Future of the Field'
'And where were you on the evening of...?: Artists and Practitioners
interrogate Theorists'
'The Dangers of Failure: risking performance'
'Disturbing Performance'
'The Doing, Re-Doing and Undoing of Performance'

Please send proposals and/or abstracts, or register interest in 'talk back' or 'fundamental(ist)s' sessions by 10th January 2005, (we will respond by 24th January) to Dr Daniel Watt ,The Centre for Performance Research, Unit 6, Science Park, Aberystwyth, SY23 3AH, Tel: + 44 (0)1970 622133, Fax: +44 (0)1970 622132 dpw@aber.ac.uk

At this major gathering of key practitioners and scholars from around the world the conference programme will comprise:

Performances - from Wales, Europe and beyond
Expositions - understanding the state of play
Workshops - drawing from the crucible of cutting-edge practice
Panels and Debates - to challenge and cultivate new directions
Interrogations and Enthusiasms - Strategic 'open' sessions
Feasts - where food becomes event
Excursions - taking advantage of our local landscape

Towards Tomorrow?
Temporalities: Then, Now, To Come

Then: Theoretical discourse has structured and transformed the environments of theatre and performance. Towards Tomorrow? provides a FORUM for both a critical reflection on performance and the nature of cultural theory and to assess its future both beyond and within the academy.

Now: The event of performance, its practice and presence will be explored. There will be OPPORTUNITIES for practitioners to interrogate theorists and for the statement of radical agendas and manifestos.

To Come: The development of the future of the field belongs to another GENERATION. This gathering will not determine such a future, but it will be determined to keep open all possible transformations, evolutions and revolutions that may be on their way.

Trajectory
Towards Tomorrow? will explore the relation between theatre and performance, risk and failure, events and institutions to understand how the possibilities of performance, and the history of organisations such as CPR, might be considered?

Is there a fractal structure (a finite area bounded by an infinite distance) to the discipline, its manifestation as practice and its future, as yet unknown, transformations? What are the issues of survival: of a discipline and its practice, its organisations, and the relationship with the academy?

How does the spiritual aspect of performance - space, body, time and imagination - integrate and challenge both the formal and the theoretical articulations of work? Does such a consideration generate its own eschatology; if so, what is the apocalypse of performance?

Some Operations.....
Towards Tomorrow? includes In Extremis: Fundamental(ist)s of Performance a 'platform, soapbox, and propaganda' station, for the promulgation and dissemination of extreme enthusiasms, radical obsessions, pristine lies and rotten truth. A space to present ideas: contemporary, anachronistic, contentious and conformist.

Towards Tomorrow? will offer a programme of performances and workshops alongside numerous presentations of archive photographic and video material from theatre companies and performers from across the world.

The schedule for each day will include KEYNOTES (confirmed contributors include: Philip Auslander, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jane Goodall, Dragan Klaic, Michal Kobialka, Jon McKenzie, Susan Melrose, Marion Pastor Roces, Freddie Rokem, Rebecca Schneider and Stelarc), PANEL SESSIONS, a PRACTICAL or RESEARCH ENQUIRY element and the opportunity for artists and performers, from key phases of experiment over the past 40 years, to 'talk back' to theorists and commentators who have addressed their work.

Questions of tomorrow must also be concerned with generations, the potential of youth and the energy and vitality it will provide performance in the future. Towards Tomorrow? will include Generation24. Our panel of young practitioners of the future, from schools and colleges in Wales and internationally, who will observe and intervene in the proceedings with the interruptive urgency of the future's call.

Continuing the CPR tradition for high quality events staged in an individual way

Throughout the event care is taken to forge links between people and ideas and to create formal and informal opportunities for people to exchange information about current and future projects. CPR's long history of bringing together international performance practitioners and scholars in a potent spirit of debate/friendship, argument/opposition also serves as the occasion to highlight and focus work at the forefront of future developments in the field.

30 + 10: Throughout 2004/5 CPR will be celebrating 30 years of work and 10 years in Aberystwyth.

Antony Pickthall
Marketing & Development Director
Centre for Performance Research (CPR)
6, Science Park, Aberystwyth, SY23 3AH
Tel: +44 (0) 1970 621571
Fax: +44 (0) 1970 622132
E-mail: aop@aber.ac.uk
www.thecpr.org.uk

For the curious...opening up worlds of performance

Posted by jo at 07:18 AM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2004

netzwissenschaft

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Emerging Infrastructures of All (Inter)net Research

Dr. Reinhold Grether's network research | netzwissenschaft site maps the "emerging infrastructures of all (inter)net research endeavours. net.science as an anthropology of connectivity is trying to overcome the constraints of specialist method transfers on net matters. the protuberance of technical networks necessitates a professionalization of human net knowledge. neither the isolation of concepts as in basic research nor the encapsulation of processes as in applied sciences will ever be able to adequately describe the complex autopoiesis of networks. net.science is undoubtedly developing into a scienza nuova of its own right."

Check out his Mobile Art and Virtual Performance research areas.

Posted by jo at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

Performing Art Performing Science:

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Transdisciplinary Approaches to Performance

The Performing Art Performing Science: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Performance conference will take place at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 16-18, 2005; DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: March 1, 2005.

The conference seeks to redefine performance according to some of its earlier disciplinary roots in the arts and sciences. In the arts, performance has traditionally implied a staged activity or presentation using a specific disciplinary form like dance, music, and theatre. In the sciences, it has often meant the efficient operation of mechanical and/or technological systems and prototypes in specific goal-oriented tasks. How can a transdisciplinary perspective communicate new knowledges emerging at the intersection between disciplines and how can this alter our approaches to performance as a unique phenomenon?

We are seeking proposals that formulate key questions about transdisciplinarity and performance. Some possible topics might include: contemporary trends in dance, new media and performance; new visualization technologies; competing and complementary notions of performance; emergence and artificial life science; performance of self-organizing systems; genetic engineering; embodied knowledge; computing machines and the evolution of culture; new epistemologies emerging at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and humanities; disciplinary encroachment; new transdisciplinary curricula; the impact of infrastructure and resources on research directions; the survival of performance disciplines in contemporary hypermedia and mass media contexts.

Contributions may take a variety of forms: academic papers, artistic performances, scientific demonstrations, short workshops, installations, combinations and transformations of traditional conference formats, or new models for transdisciplinary dialogue.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: March 1, 2005. Early applications are encouraged.

Proposals should include the title of your contribution, the type of contribution (paper, performance, etc.),a 200-300 word abstract describing the project, estimated running time, and a list of any specific space or technical needs. For contributions involving more than one presenter, please include a list of collaborators and their affiliations. Please note that conference funds are limited, at best, so let us know what you need to bring your work to the conference.

Proposals can be submitted online through the TransNet website or sent to:

christine stoddard
Research Assistant, TransNet
School for the Contemporary Arts
Simon Fraser University Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6
Canada
tel: 604.291.3896
fax: 604.291.5907
email: cpstodda@sfu.ca
Transnet website: www.sfu.ca/transnet

Posted by jo at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2004

Digital Communities 2005

Urban Conference: Digital Communities 2005

Papers due Feb 2005

Digital Communities is an international network of scholars, policy makers, and urban analysts who share an interest in the relationship between information technologies and urban life.

The Digital Communities conference in 2005 is in Benevento and Napoli, Italy.  The conference will explore a wide range of themes associated with information technology, the knowledge economy, technology policy, and the significance of place in cyberspace.  Of special interest is the experience of locations within the Mediterranean region.  If you would like to participate by presenting a paper or organizing a session, please read the conference details listed in the call for papers. 

Digital Communities 2005 is led by Maria Paradiso (Università degli Studi del Sannio) and organized in collaboration with Michigan State University   (Mark Wilson, Kenneth E Corey), the IGU Commission on the Geography of Information Society (Aharon Kellerman, University of Haifa ; Henry Bakis, University of Montpellier III ) and the Journal of Urban Technology (Richard Hanley).  

Digital Communities 2005 is supported by RCOST-Research Centre on Software Technology, Centro di Competenza ICT, MARS-Mediterranean Agency for Remote Sensing and Università degli Studi del Sannio. (Posted by Michelle Kasprzak)

Posted by at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)

December 13, 2004

e-Performance and Plug-ins

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A Mediatised Performance Conference

e-Performance and Plug-ins: A Mediatised Performance Conference; December 1 and 2, 2005; The School of Media, Film & Theatre, University of New South Wales, Australia.

Introduction: The hybrid phenomena created by new media performance-makers traverse a range of academic disciplines and approaches from philosophical enquiry into the ontology of liveness to the very technical and logistical questions of performance in a mediatised environment under diverse conditions of actualisation.

Some performance theorists have questioned the notion of liveness by asking 'How is the liveness of the performance changed when it occurs within the spaces of technology?' Others have discussed the phenomenon of Internet use as 'performance on-line' and have used terms commonly found in new media discourses, such as 'posthuman', 'virtual bodies', 'embodiment' and 'telepresence'. Yet others draw upon Lacanian film theory in their analysis.

This symposium will address the range of these extant approaches and seek new discourses with which to talk about this emergent area of study. It is intended as a forum for cross- and multi-disciplinary investigations of issues around media/technology-based performance. Paralleling the diversity and range of artistic and theoretical approaches to media-based performance, conference contributors will present multi-modally, including live video interventions by speakers outside Australia, live performances, as well as presentations of scholarly papers and practice-led research.

Areas of enquiry: In developing their submissions, delegates are asked to address one or more of the following areas of enquiry:

» What terminology is appropriate to the discussion of mediatised performance? Is the traditional language of performance studies, terms such as 'dramaturgy' or 'ritual', helpful in discussing media/technology-based performance? Or are information-technology terms such as 'interface' and 'interactivity' more useful?
» What are the key challenges arising in collaborations between theorists from different disciplines when discussing live performance in a mediated matrix?
» What issues, for both critic and practitioner, lie at the nexus of theory and practice in digital performance?
» What are the epistemological differences between a virtual performance in a virtual venue (on the Internet and/or computer) and a new media 'live' performance in a theatre?
» Where exactly would a history of mediatised performance begin? What would that history cover, and what would it privilege? What is the future for mediatised performance?

Abstracts and proposals are invited in the following forms:
1. Scholarly Paper: A paper of 20 minutes duration, with time then allocated for questions and discussions (10 minutes). Papers should address an aspect of the conference's areas of enquiry as described above. Abstracts to be sent by 01 June 2005. (Response by 15 July 2005)
2. Presentation of Practice-Led Research: Artist/scholars are invited to submit proposals for a 20-minute theoretical discussion of their own art/performance works through documentation in relation to any of the conference's areas of enquiry. Abstracts to be sent by 01 June 2005. (Response by 15 July 2005)
3. Panel: Design, curate, and organise a panel which addresses any of the conference's areas of enquiry. Panel sessions will be two hours in duration and should include no more than four speakers in order to set a framework for discussion. Proposals including brief details of panel framework and speakers' contributions to be sent by 01 April 2005. (Response by 01 May 2005)
4. 'Live' performance: Proposals for a short 'live' media-based/intermedia performance (max. 20 minutes duration) may be submitted. Artists will be responsible for providing for the particular technical needs of their performances, while the conference organisers will provide a theatre venue with basic audio and visual equipment and Mac computers. The selected works will be showcased as an evening performance event. Proposals including technical requirements to be sent by 01 May 2005. (Response by 01 June 2005)

Please submit the following:

» An abstract (approx. 300 words) for Categories 1 and 2
» A proposal (approx. 800 words) for Categories 3 and 4 ß Your name, title, and professional affiliation
» A one-paragraph biography (no more than 100 words) for publication in the conference program
» An email contact address
» Technical requirements for your presentation (software/hardware)

Conference organisers:
Executive committee: George Kouvaros, Andrew Murphie, Ed Scheer
Advisory committee: John Golder, Su Goldfish, Clare Grant, Ross Harley, Moe Meyer

Enquires: Yuji Sone (Conference Coordinator) at y.sone @ unsw.edu.au

Dr Yuji Sone
Vice-Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
School of Media, Film and Theatre
The University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052 Australia
Ph: +61 2 9385 4862
Fax: +61 2 9662 2335

Posted by jo at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)

December 06, 2004

navigating the narrative in space

Mary Flanagan will give the keynote at "Playing the Past: Nostalgia in Video Games and Electronic Literature" conference, to be held on March 18-19, 2005 at the University of Florida.

Flanagan's navigating the narrative in space: gender and spatiality in virtual worlds" is an important complement to Turkle's, Bruckman's, and Donath's writings on gender and technology...Flanagan is co-editing--with Austin Booth--the much expected "reskin" (Cambridge: MIT Press), which is forthcoming in 2005. Reskin follows the 2002 piece by the same editors "reload: rethinking women + cyberculture" (also MIT Press). The 2005 book focuses on how technology is being used to alter the physical body."

Posted by ana boa-ventura on net art review

Posted by jo at 03:45 PM

November 09, 2004

performing art performing science

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Call to Performance

TRANSNET Conference [Transdisciplinary Network for Performance and Technology] asks:

"How can a transdisciplinary perspective communicate new knowledge emerging at the intersection between disciplines?"

"How can this alter approaches to performance?"

Call for Proposals to the conference, June 16-18, 2005 at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.

Posted by michelle at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

INTERACTIVE FUTURES

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Technology in the Life World

CALL FOR PAPERS, PERFORMANCES, & INSTALLATIONS

INTERACTIVE FUTURES is a forum for showing recent tendencies in new media art as well as a conference for exploring issues related to technology. The theme of this year's event is Technology in the Life World. With digital media becoming more mobile, many artists and theorists are exploring ideas of nomadism and telepresence. Nomadic computing, mobile devices used to augment reality, and more publicly distributed technologies, are being considered by artists and theorists for their ethical and social impact.

Technology in the Life World will be presented in two streams: Digital Nomadism and Technology and Ethics. Artists working in new media are encouraged to submit proposals for installations, performances, and screenings. In their proposals, artists should relate their work to one of the above themes. All art work will be presented at Open Space artist-run centre. Installations should be compact and self-contained. Please see the list of technologies available toward the end of this document before applying.

Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival
Co-sponsored by Open Space Artist-Run Centre
Conference hotel - Laurel Point Inn
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
February 4-6, 2005.

Scholars and artists working in new media arts, theory, and criticism are encouraged to submit proposals for presentations at the conference. Presentations should be, in part, demonstrative, incorporating digital technologies, interactive or digital video, sound, or network-based elements. In their proposals, presenters should relate their work to one of the above themes. We encourage proposals that push the boundaries of the traditional conference paper. Most presentations will take place at the Laurel Point Inn.

INTERACTIVE FUTURES is part of the Independent Film and Video Festival and applicants are encouraged to check the Festival website for more information on the broader program.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS / ARTISTS

• Arthur and Marilouise Kroker are internationally known writers and lecturers on the future of technology. Arthur Kroker, Canada Research Chair at the University of Victoria, is the author of numerous book on technology and postmodernism as well as Director of UVic's Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture. Marilouise Kroker is Senior Research Scholar at the University of Victoria as well as co-editor of a trilogy of books on feminism and technology. Together, the Krokers edit the electronic journal, CTheory (www.ctheory.net) and co-curate CTheory Multimedia.

• Char Davies has achieved international recognition for her work in virtual reality. Integrating real-time stereoscopic 3-D computer graphics, 3-D localized sound and user interaction based on breath & balance, the immersive environments Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998) are world-renowned for their artistic sensibility, technical innovation, and powerful effect on participants. Davies has dealt with the themes of nature, psyche, and perception in her work for more than 25 years. Davies was a founding director of Softimage, building it into the world's leading developer of 3-D animation software, used for special effects in many Hollywood films including Jurassic Park and The Matrix. She left Softimage at the end of 1997 to found her own art & technology research company, Immersence Inc.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

INTERACTIVE FUTURES is interested in artistic and theoretical work that relates to role of new media technologies in the life world.

• Areas of exploration include: nomadism, mobility, augmented reality, telepresence, bio-technology, ecology, and ethics.

• Presentations can be in the form of DVDs, video tapes, games, web-sites, etc.. and should be 45-minutes in length.

• Proposed artwork for exhibition may take the form of installations, performances, or screenings.

• Applications should not exceed 500 words and should indicate whether a presentation or an art piece is being proposed. Please include a 200 max. word bio.

• If your presentation requires specific technologies please describe your needs in detail.

Proposals should be submitted electronically to:

Digital Nomadism
Julie Andreyev

Technology and Ethics
Steve Gibson

All proposals *must* be submitted in text only format either as an attachment or within the body of the email message. Please present examples of your work as a URL to a web-site.

FUNDING

INTERACTIVE FUTURES does not have funding for travel or accommodation. Presenters and artists are expected to apply for travel funding from their home institutions and/or granting bodies. Presenters and artists will be given a pass to all INTERACTIVE FUTURES events and will have access to the “Hospitality Suite” at the Festival hotel (food and drinks). All presenters and artists will be eligible for the conference rate at Festival Hotels (between $40-90 Canadian per night).

DEADLINE FOR ALL PROPOSALS: Friday, December 3, 2004.

Notification of acceptance of proposals will be sent out by December 17, 2004.

EQUIPMENT ACCESS

Laurel Point Inn – Presentations

The following equipment will be made available for all presenters:

• Mac computer with Monitor, keyboard, DVD/CD-ROM drive.
• Data/Video Projector.
• VHS Player.
• Sound system with amp and two speakers.
• Wireless high-speed internet access with DHCP.

Open Space – Art pieces

The following equipment is available for artists at Open Space. Artists should be aware that equipment will have to shared and therefore should not propose to use all of the below devices simultaneously. Art pieces should be easy to set-up and take down. Wherever possible artists should apply their own technology.

• 2 Data/Video Projectors.
• VHS Player.
• DVD Player.
• 3-4 Macintosh computers.
• Sound system with amp, 16-channel mixing board, mics, and four speakers. Eight speakers may be possible by special arrangement.
• Internet connection (shaw.ca).

INTERACTIVE FUTURES Co-Curators:
Steve Gibson sgibson @ finearts.uvic.ca
Julie Andreyev lic @ telus.net

festival @ vifvf.com

Posted by jo at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2004

DTPA 2005

Digital Technologies and Performance Arts (DTPA 2005)

Second International Conference for Digital Technologies and Performance Arts (DTPA 2005); SCHOOL OF INTERMEDIA AND PERFORMANCE ARTS, Doncaster College, Doncaster, England; July 5-6, 2005. CALL FOR PROPOSALS; Deadline: January 5, 2005.

This interdisciplinary conference provides a forum for those in the fields of theatre, dance, music and performance (researchers, practitioners, educators, systems developers) for a dynamic and exciting exchange of approaches surrounding the use of new media technologies in live performance. Proposals are invited for papers, performances, presentations, workshops and poster presentations on the following topics:

• Live performance and interactive systems
• Motion capture/motion-sensing technologies
• Performance pedagogy, education and new media
• HCI and live performance
• Web-based performance and virtual performance spaces
• Realtime music control
• Gesture and interactive multimedia
• Interdisciplinarity and new media
• Performance software/hardware development

All proposals should be approximately 200-300 words. Proposals for performances and installations should be submitted with an outline, CD or DVD support, as well as full details of technical and spatial requirements. Workshop proposals should also include information on technical and spatial requirements.

All expressions of interest should be forwarded by January 5, 2005 to:

Dr. Dave Collins
Reader
School of Intermedia and Performance Arts
Doncaster College
High Melton
Doncaster
DN5 7SZ
Email: david.collins @ don.ac.uk

Notification of acceptance will be sent out by the end of March 2005.

Performing arts companies and independent artists may have conference fees waived but will be responsible for travel and accommodation fees.

Presenters may also wish to submit written papers for publication prior to or following the conference to the new International Journal of Digital Media and Performance Arts. http://www.intellectbooks.com/journals/padm.htm

Full registration information will be available shortly on the School for Intermedia and Performance Arts web-site.

david.collins @ don.ac.uk

Posted by jo at 02:16 PM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2004

Mobile Technologies and Wireless Networks

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WORKSHOPS at SPACE

Workshops will be run by SPACE's Media Technologies Specialist Peter Chauncy in partnership with practitioners working in related areas. Workshops will cover the following:

Thursday 18th November: Wireless Free Networks - desktop 2 rooftop Omni Directional Antenna Building; with James Stevens from Consume.net
Tuesday 23rd November: An Introduction to Wireless Networking-A Wireless Rig; with Psand
Thursday 25th November: Portable Devices - iPAQs, mobile phones and GPRS; with Giles Lane from Proboscis
Monday 29th November: Locative Media - Global Position System (GPS) devices; with Ambient TV

Each workshop will include:
*An introduction to the technology
*Examples of practice
*Discussion around related concepts and critiques
*Instruction in using equipment and an opportunity to test it

All workshops cost 25UKP and places are limited.

To apply please contact Marina or Paul on 020 8986 5998 or email
spaceplace @ pacestudios.org.uk
Places will be allocated on a first come first serve basis

All workshops will be held at SPACE Triangle, 129 - 131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH Workshops will all run from 10:30 - 17:00. Please advise us where possible, if you're going to be late. SPACE Triangle is fully wheelchair accessible.
Please let us know if you have any other access requirements.

For more info check out:
Bow Wireless http://www.bowfestival.org.uk/Bow_wireless.htm
The State of Wireless London by Julian Priest
http://www.ambienttv.net
http://www.proboscis.org.uk
http://psand.net/
http://www.consume.net

Marina Vishmidt/Paul Gardiner
Media Arts Administrators
Space Place
43-45 Dace Road
Fish Island
London E3 2NG
Tel: 020 8986 5998
Fax: 020 8986 6887
email:spaceplace @ spacestudios.org.uk
http://www.spacestudios.org.uk

Posted by jo at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2004

Public Displays of Affection

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Affect and its Exhibition in Public

Public Displays of Affection
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Visual and Cultural Studies Program
University of Rochester
Friday, April 8 & Saturday, April 9, 2005
CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Civility can be viewed as a series of performances that generate a range of emotions, including the patriotism of war, the joys of shopping, and the fear of urban crime. The public display of affection constitutes a contest of meaning in which various appeals are made to organize the emotional life of the individual and the rules of decorum. To be convinced of this idea one only has to turn on the television. From the not-so carefully scripted emotions of the recent Presidential debates, to the ongoing pageantry of heteronormative romance, to the proscribed images of mourning for war casualties, it appears that the politics of putting your heart into the public sphere are by no means certain, but certainly meaningful.

PUBLIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION aims to explore the value of affect and its exhibition in public. Disturbed by formations of the public sphere as a wholly rational space for the exchange of collective ideas and actions, we turn instead towards the multiple meanings or uses of public feelings. We are interested in the specificity or uniqueness of emotions and how they shape historical moments and geographic sites.

We invite proposals from across disciplines, research interests and theoretical persuasions that engage with P.D.A. through specific forms of display: museums, galleries, mass media, film, theatres, festivals, etc. Possible areas of inquiry might include, but are not limited to:

Nationalism and/or spectacular nations
Political protest
Public/private space
Public sex
Marriage
Family
Feminism
Queer history and theory
Empathy, sentiment, depression, rage and other kinds of affect

***DEADLINE for submissions: December 15, 2004***

Submissions for 20-minute papers should be in abstract form (250-500 words). A self-addressed stamped envelope must accompany all submissions requiring return. Please include e-mail addresses with all submissions whenever possible.
Abstracts and inquiries may be sent via e-mail to: vcsconf @ mail.rochester.edu

Printed submissions should be sent to:

Organizing Committee for "Public Displays of Affection"
c/o Program in Visual and Cultural Studies
424 Morey Hall
University of Rochester
Box 270456
Rochester, NY 14627-0456

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

The Program in Visual and Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Rochester. Its focus is visual culture and critical theory; the Departments and Programs of Art and Art History, English, Film Studies, Anthropology, History, and Modern Languages and Cultures, as well as the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Women and Gender Studies, constitute its academic base. Web site: http://www.rochester.edu/college/AAH/

Posted by jo at 02:39 PM

October 04, 2004

Distributed Form: Network Practice

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Dominant Spatial Paradigm

Distributed Form: Network Practice, University of California, Berkeley, October 22-24, 2004

"Recent developments in information technology have resulted in the entrenchment of networks and distributed systems as the dominant spatial paradigm, effectively challenging fundamental design issues of autonomy, originality, place, practice and form, which reconfigure disciplines through the implementation of distributed logics and collaborative 'open' practices. As a benchmark, this conference will analyze how the disciplines of art, science and architecture are responding to rapidly changing mobile, wireless, and information-embedded environments.

The conference will be organized around a multidisciplinary framework operating at three different scalar levels: At the Meta level, the conference will first address Form and the Network, raising issues of architectural morphology of and within networked society, by building a provisional history of networked design processes and production.

The second session, Form and Technology, will consider current research on the relationship between experimental digital technologies and emergent form.

The third panel, Micro: Form and Operation, will address theories of operative design strategies, social relationships and bodiless form.

The fourth panel, Mega: Form and Presence, will investigate how larger scale networks and their reconfiguration of time and space are altering professional design practices, while critically considering a logic of connection as the primary site of design."

Posted by jo at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2004

PERVASIVE AND LOCATIVE ARTS NETWORK (PLAN)

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THIS IS THE (PLAN)

A new international and interdisciplinary research network in pervasive media and locative media has been funded as part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Culture & Creativity programme. The network will bring together practicing artists, technology developers and ethnographers with the aim of advancing interdisciplinary understanding and building consortia for future collaborative projects.

The network will stage three major gatherings. Each gathering will have a distinct form and focus: an initial workshop to launch the network and assess the state of the art; a technology summer camp for artists and technologists, including hands-on prototyping sessions using the facilities at Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory; and a major public conference and participatory exhibition as a central component of the Futuresonic 2006 festival in Manchester; as well as a supporting web site and other resources.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS - PLAN Workshop

Submissions are invited to the first of these events, a two day public workshop with papers, demos and discussion sessions. The aim of the event is to launch the network, review the state of the art, bring key players in the field together, and make initial contacts. The event will also aim to identify a range of specific interests that can lead to the formation of sub-groups within the network. Position papers and a summary report will subsequently be published on the network web site.

The workshop will take place in London over two days in the week beginning 24th January 2005. Venue and final dates announced soon.

Please send submissions to ben@open-plan.org by Monday 8th November.

We request that participants seek support for travel and subsistence from their institutions. For participants without institutional affiliation the network shall support applications to funding councils and foundations, please contact us for further details.

THE NETWORK

Pervasive and Locative Arts Network (PLAN) - Enhancing Mobile and Wireless Technologies for Culture and Creativity

This network will draw together computer scientists and engineers who are leading the field in developing pervasive and locative technologies; artists who are using these technologies to create and publicly deploy innovative and provocative experiences; social scientists with a proven track record of studying interactive installations and performances; industrial partners from the creative industries, spanning the arts, television, games, education, heritage, mobile computing and telecommunications sectors; and international partners who are coordinating parallel networks around the world.

NETWORK OBJECTIVES

The network aims to support the formation of a new interdisciplinary research community to investigate how the convergent fields of pervasive media and locative media need to evolve in order to support future cultural and creative activities. Specific network objectives are:

-To review the scope of the research that is currently being carried out in
these fields through a focused workshop, leading to an integrated state-of-the art survey paper.
-To identify the key research issues that need to be addressed in order to further develop pervasive and locative media to support culture and creativity, leading to a series of discussion white papers.
-To seed future projects by bringing artists, scientists and industry together in a creative environment so that they can generate and practically explore new ideas, and also to provide a forum for publicly demonstrating some of these.
-To produce online and offline resources to support researchers, artists, industry and to promote public understanding of this emerging field, including a public website, an online document repository for members and a newsletter and DVD.

NETWORK ACTIVITIES

The network will organise and support a range of activities aimed at growing a research community and generating new collaborative projects between artists and technologists. These will include staging three major research gatherings, producing online and offline resources for fellow researchers and PhD students, and outreach activities targeted at industry.

Gatherings

We will stage three major gatherings. Each gathering will have a distinct form and focus: an initial workshop to launch the network and assess the state of the art; a technology summer camp for artists and technologist, especially PhD students, including hands-on prototyping sessions using the facilities at Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory; and a major public conference and participatory exhibition as a central component of the Futuresonic 2006 festival in Manchester. These major gatherings will be interspersed with more ad-hoc steering and reflection meetings as required by the network participants.

Producing resources

We will produce resources to publicise the network, encourage the exchange of perspectives and discussion, and to provide tutorial support for PhD students, artists and other researchers who wish to break into this area. These will include:

-Online resources: a public website providing access to network information including project deliverables as well as news of forthcoming calls for proposals and conferences, supported by a online document repository where members can upload documents and take part in discussion. The latter will be realised using BSCW or Project Place software.
-Offline resources: a six monthly printed newsletter and a DVD of video

Outreach

The network will reach out to other researchers beyond the initial partners and also to the creative industries. This will include distribution of the newsletter and also staging a series of industry seminars, for example as part of the TI/EPSRC Outreach programme. The network research associate will also carry out a series of site visits to different partners and potential partners in order to learn more about and report on ongoing activities.

BACKGROUND IN SCIENCE AND CULTURE

A new generation of pervasive technologies is enabling people to break away from traditional desktop PCs and games consoles and experience interactive media that are directly embedded into the world around them. And locative media, the combination of mobile devices with locative technologies, supports experiences and social interaction that respond to a participant's physical location and context. Together these convergent fields raise possibilities for new cultural experiences in areas as diverse as performance, installations, games, tourism, heritage, marketing and education.

A community of researchers working in pervasive media, also known as ubiquitous computing, are exploring location awareness as a requirement for the delivery of accurate contextual information. Another community, primarily consisting of informal networks of technical innovators and cultural producers, which identifies its field as Locative Media, is exploring developments in and applications of locative technologies within social and creative contexts. One of the aims of this network is to bring these two communities together, linking academic research initiatives and agendas to key figures and ground breaking developments that are currently taking place outside mainstream academia.

The creative industries are also beginning to take up these opportunities, led by artists who are actively charting out the potentials and boundaries of the new pervasive and locative media. Other cultural sectors have also been exploring the potential of pervasive and locative media including the games industry through commercial examples of locative games played on mobile phones such as Bot Fighters and Battle Machine and also research projects such as ARQuake, Mindwarping, Pirates! and Border Guards. Researchers have also demonstrated applications in heritage and tourism, for example personal tourist guides and outdoors augmented reality displays and as well as in mobile learning experiences and participatory local history mapping projects.

A key characteristic of this research is its interdisciplinary nature, with many of these projects combining practicing artists, technology developers and also ethnographers, whose studies of early experiences that are actually delivered as public artworks have yielded new insights into the ways in which participants experience pervasive media, for example how they (and performers and technical crew) deal with uncertainty of location and connection, and, conversely, new metaphors for engaging in locative media.

However, realising the full potential of pervasive and locative media requires several further developments. First, it is necessary to expand the research community, drawing in new academic partners and also a greater range of partners from the creative industries. Second, it is important to deepen the interdisciplinary relationships between artists, technology developers and social scientists working within and between these two convergent fields. This is not only a matter of reflecting on this relationship, it is also necessary to pursue it in practice, which means forming new collaborations leading to practical projects. Third, we need to clarify and deepen the research agenda for this area, by opening up a variety of research questions, including:

-To what extent does the convergence of pervasive media and locative media signify a commonality of views, definitions and issues in each field?
-What new kinds of cultural applications will become possible through pervasive and locative media? Can we envisage new installations, performances, games and other public experiences?
-Can common design frameworks and tactics help create powerful user experiences? Can we identify and share design guidelines and generate useful abstractions, for example building on recent proposals for deliberately exploiting uncertainty and ambiguity
-What tools are required by creative users, for example that enable them to easily (re)configure an experience to work in different locations or to orchestrate it from behind the scenes. What new research challenges do these embody, for example, how do we visualise the state of the technical infrastructure-networks and sensors-96 or intervene in participants' experiences?
-What methods do researchers use to design and evaluate their experiences? We already see the use of ethnographic studies, audience discussions and even analysis of system logs; how should these be extended and can we share approaches, tools and even datasets to enhance our understanding of experience and design?

These questions, combined with the need to build a broader inter-disciplinary research community, provide the underlying motivations for this network.

INITIAL NETWORK

Project investigators:
Steve Benford, Nottingham (Principle Investigator)
Drew Hemment, Salford
Henk Muller, Bristol
Matthew Chalmers, Glasgow
Michael Sharples, Birmingham
Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Sussex
Christian Heath, Kings College
Jon Hindmarsh, Kings College

Network co-ordinator:
Ben Russell, Headmap/Locative Media Lab

Initial partners:
Marc Tuters, Locative Media Lab
Dennis Del Favero, NSW iCinema
Steve Sayers, NESTA
Toby Barnes, EM Media
Richard Hull, HP Labs
Denny Plowman, City of Nottingham Council
Sara Diamond, Banff Centre
Andrew Caleya Chetty, Metapod
Amanda Oldroyd, BT Exact
Matt Adams, Blast Theory
Nick Southgate, Ricochet TV
Annika Waern, iPerG
Giles Lane, Proboscis
Minna Tarkka, m-cult
Carsten Sorensen, LSE
Angharad Thomas, Salford
Chris Byrne, New Media Scotland
Paul Sermon, Salford
Nina Wakeford, INCITE, Surrey

Posted by jo at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

Global Interface

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Interface at Critical

Mark Marino (of the Barthian and bachelor bots) sends word of Global Interface, a yearlong, interdisciplinary workshop on cyberculture that is just starting up with a talk from Kate Hayles on Monday, Oct 4. Meatspace meetings will happen monthly at UC Riverside, as is explained in the proposal. The diverse set of participants includes faculty from music, dance, and computer science. “The interface serves as the nexus between artist, viewer, programmer, technology, and industry,” the blog for the workshop declares. Mark and the other organizers hope that this blog will foster intersections and conversation online, too, and there’s a plan to post extensive notes on all the talks.

posted by nick on grand text auto, 09.29.04

Posted by jo at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2004

Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City

New Urban Experience

Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City is a three-day event that highlights the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists are using communication technologies to generate new urban experience and public voice. The event explores what is possible when wireless communications (both new and old), mobile devices and media converge in public space. The increasing presence of mobile communication technologies is transforming the ways we live, construct and move through our built environment. The participants of the Spectropolis exhibition make obvious or play with this shift, creating new urban perceptions and social interactions with cell phones, laptops, wireless internet, PDAs and radio. In addition to the projects presented in the park, there will be several hands-on workshops and two panels free to the public. Find out more

Posted by jo at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)