This is an animation which presents key concepts of integrated systems. The first scene presents the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari. The second scene is terms that describe a diagram of nonlinear relationships by an engineer. The third involves the Pasifika understanding of ulu or breadfruit; ulu is seen as a multiplicity rather than a singularity. The fourth scene looks at components of chaotic systems leading to self organising systems and complexity.

Robert Lue, biologist and director of life sciences education at Harvard, will discuss the vital and transformative role that visualizations play in both science research and education. Lue is the founder of BioVisions, a collaborative initiative led by Harvard scientists to improve the beauty and precision of science visualization. Biovisions is responsible for animations such as The Inner Life of the Cell (2006) and Powering the Cell: Mitochondria (2010).

Robert A. Lue is a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the director of life sciences education at Harvard University. Lue received his PhD in biology from Harvard and has taught undergraduate courses there since 1988. He has a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary teaching and research, and chaired the faculty committee that developed the first integrated science foundation in the country to serve multiple science majors, as well as the needs of pre-medical students. He has also developed award-winning multimedia on several topics including Understanding HIV and AIDS (1999), Biochemistry: Interactive Learning (2000), The Inner Life of the Cell (2006), and Powering the Cell: Mitochondria (2010). His media publications have been praised for their scientific accuracy, educational utility, and vibrant 3-D reconstructions of the world within the cell. He has co-authored undergraduate biology textbooks, and has chaired educator conferences on college biology for the National Science Foundation, and on supporting diversity in science for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health. Lue also has a long history in pre-college education, and consequently founded and directs a Harvard life sciences outreach program that now serves over 50 high schools across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. As the faculty director of the Harvard-Allston Education Portal, he also oversees the integration of undergraduate education with community outreach on Harvard’s new Allston campus.

Curator: Emily Berçir Zimmerman

This work was generously supported by the department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, the LEF Foundation, Boston MA, the MacDowell Colony, and, of course, Emerson College.

Endgame: A Cold War Love Story — for the web and Flash enabled touch screen devices (DROID) — is a puzzle whose pieces are culled from an archive of long forgotten propaganda. In it a story about art, exile and history takes shape from the fragmentary remains of one woman’s life.

Endgame: A Cold War Love Story is a 2011 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Tal Halpern is a new media artist and electronic writer. His visual literary work includes Digital Nature the Case Collection, Le Nouveau Western, Archiving Nature: Preservation Practices for a Digital Age, and Chromosome 22. He has been a New York Foundation for the Arts Computer Arts fellow and been featured in numerous museums and festivals including Iowa Review Web, Turbulence.org, Sundance Film Festival Web 2006, File Electronic Language International Festival 2006, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), Karlsruhe Germany.

Nostalgia runs deep in the network. The clean lines and coded purity of interface culture and consumer electronics belies a deeper yearning for the origins of new media. 8 Bit games, glitch art, stop motion video, audio distortions and retro stylings are cropping up throughout the networked landscape as artists unpack, smudge, melt, data-mosh and retrace their steps back to the early halcyon days of digital media. Tactile, fluid, fuzzy analogue aesthetics are emerging in surprising places as the origins of our streamlined relationship with technology and the world around us is interrogated, encoded and telegraphed into our livings rooms, browsers and pockets.

Jaron Lanier in his text, You Are Not A Gadget, calls for a more humanist approach to the way we participate in network culture and insists we must seek always to preserve our individuality in such exchanges. Retro leanings and nostalgic turns speak to this desire. It reveals the human in the electronic interface. It celebrates the mistake, the error, the uniqueness and the beauty of the digital aesthetic at a critical time in the evolution of media arts practice.

The 2011 Screengrab New Media Arts Award and associated exhibition is looking for challenging creative works by media artists who have a yearning for the past and seek to examine the future. We invite these digital practitioners working in screen based media to submit works on the theme of the Nostalgia.

The Call Out

Screengrab is now entering its third year with an international call out for the AUS$2000 New Media Arts Prize and the companion exhibition in August for short listed applicants. We invite digital practitioners working in screen based media to submit works on the theme of Nostalgia.

All forms of screen based media are encouraged including multi-channel video, digital illustration, audio sculpture, photography, generative media, 2D & 3D animation.

Existing worx and those specifically designed for the award must address the theme of Nostalgia to be eligible for the New Media Arts award.

Prize Money: AUS $2000
Artefact Deadline: 22-07-11
Exhibition Opening & Award announcement: 12-08-11
Application Form : http://www.jcu.edu.au/soca/screengrab/

“Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.” - John Lithgow

This project is sponsored by James Cook University’s School of Creative Arts and the eMerge Media Space.

Posted on i like this art:

Rick Silva
Work from Antlers WiFi.

“Rick Silva’s ongoing project Antler’s Wifi depicts a series of animations that combine geometric glitch aesthetic with serene landscapes and natural iconography. The weekly updates to this blog project vary in complexity and density, but all the images share an acute aesthetic that Silva has been developing over the past several years. The visual elements that comprise the animations in Antler’s Wifi – a telling name – often juxtapose vistas of the icy surrounding of Silva’s current Calgary home with diagrams that appear to be algorithmic interpretations of geological structures found beneath the soil. These images not only appear to hold secret mathematical equations, but also appear to be pseudo-scientific data visualizations of some hidden incalculable source.

The crystalline patterns and undulating shapes that appear in the more recent iterations of this work – “an aesthetic that was rebooted” according to Silva at the beginning of 2011 – create a tranquil yet playful reinterpretation of the landscape image. It appears as though the line drawings and artificial peaks that mirror the mountain ranges and remote lakes hold resonant frequencies that generate their rhythms and patterns. The short gif cycles appear as though they contain sonic qualities that never actually manifest through playback. This lack of an aural link to the repetition and rhythm of the animations accentuates the remoteness of the imagery providing viewers with hypnotic and haunting micro-scenarios.

The directness of the pairings made by Silva throughout this work symbolize a need for understanding and contemplation of the visual world outside out windows and away from our screens. The meandering presence that dictates the visual paths and pace of the aesthetic that Silva captures within this work is akin to the wanderings of an amateur cartographer mapping the foothills of his backyard. In some images the false sense of simplicity that landscapes embody is paired with similar elementary geometric spaces for deviations and abnormalities to occur. Silva compares the hidden ecology of any environment to the abstract complexity of euclidian geometry throughout many iterations of the work. Observers of this project can see how the lo-fi superimposition of data-projection highlights the correlations that Silva wishes to explore in these diaristic and delicate renderings.” – Nicholas O’Brien

Babel Fiche is an imaginary media for future anthropologists. It asks which behaviours, objects, traditions and conflicts we want to communicate to a future world. Today’s human cultures, physique and technology will inevitably develop out of all recognition. So how might a future species translate our current times?

Babel Fiche will ponder the problem by animating and remixing the microfiche contents as a series of new short films. This production stage is driven through Wreckamovie, an online platform to help organise participatory movie projects. Babel Fiche wonders if it will be possible to resolve coherent films under these social conditions.

Watch the full episode. See more ART:21.

Noteboek (2008) consists of 4 short experimental films by Evelien Lohbeck.