Alan Turing’s accomplishments made a fundamental impact on the development of the computer and to our contemporary networked digital culture, and we would like to invite your students and staff to collaborate, on this live global digital media performance.

The Media City foyer and its high definition video wall will act as the hub, receiving and sending content across the world to our international partners, using five high-resolution video wall displays each with their own input. There will be live interactive performance with sound, animation, interactive drawing, poetry, video, motion graphics, virtual environments such as Second Life, collaborative screen sharing, interactive interfaces and playful environments.

Themes may include biological systems, artificial life, coding, recoding decoding or Alan Turing’s life story.

During the day the international partners will broadcast content resulting in a live media jam.
The University of Salford at MediaCity will be the central node receiving ‘coded’ content from other partner nodes and decoding and recoding this content, passing it on to the network of partners, forwarding, sending it back or distributing it further.

Decode/Recode is an interactive media performance with interactive artworks, sound, lights, performers and VJs.

Please contact Charlotte Gould or Paul Sermon for more information and to register your participation.
c.e.gould at salford.ac.uk or p.Sermon at salford.ac.uk

The art of Sonya Rapoport has long operated as a bridge between the public sphere of intellectual curiosity and scholarship, and the domestic one of spiritual inquiry and nurturing. Spaces of Life presents a group of Rapoport’s interactive works, created between 1980-2010, that function in the intersection between questioning and inviting.

The installation will be structured so as to infuse the spaces of the museum with the energy of the artist’s Berkeley home and studio. A mixture of documentation of original interactive installations, domestic objects that provide a launching pad for interactions, and new interpretations of the works’ systems of interaction will be developed in conjunction with Mills students and departments. Visitors to the gallery will engage in ongoing, distributed performance actions that draw on imagery and ideas from a range of disciplines including biochemistry, anthropology, psychology, and feminist studies.

Central to this installation of Rapoport’s work at Mills is Objects on My Dresser (1979-1983), an 11 phase work intended as a kind of “conceptual visit” to the artist’s home and studio. The titular dresser, which has occupied Rapoport’s foyer for decades, will be installed along with the original objects that sparked her investigation of the connections between symbols, words and ideas. Documentation of “netweb plots” created by Rapoport and by visitors to installations of previous project phases will be included along with a new “netweb plot” created with Mills students. The “Mills plot” will include images, correlative images and words determined by Mills students in advance of the exhibition, and will be on display for visitors to the exhibition to manipulate and customize according to their own, personal correlations.

This exhibition is supported by the Agnes Cowles Bourne Fund for Special Exhibition and the Helzel Family Foundation.

Performing Data exhibition (April-June 2011) is a review of Fleischmann and Strauss´ body of work from Virtual Reality (Home of the Brain) up to Mixed Reality (Murmuring Fields or Energie-Passagen), from Fluid (Liquid Views) to Rigid (Rigid Waves) up to Floating Interface (Media Flow).

Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss from the Fraunhofer IAIS Research Institute show an intersection of the body and immaterial digital data. From Body Space (Virtual Striptease) to Knowledge Space (Semantic Map): Interactivity as an extension of touch is a central strategy of their work – interactivity with its complex relationship to reality, re-presentation and presence.

The body as interface and intersections to the disembodied digital information. Immersion in data flow causes productive moments of disturbance and suspension, and consequently – a feeling of real physical presence.

The exhibition Performing Data includes works from the early 1990s, when the artists/scientists were co-founders of the ART+COM collective in 1987 in Berlin. Since 1992 they developed their work as research artists at KHM and GMD – the German National Research Center for Information Technology, since 1997 as directors of the Media Art & Research Studies (MARS) department and since 2001 at Fraunhofer Society, in the Institute for Media Communication (IMK) and the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in Sankt Augustin, Germany.

The catalog with DVD and essays by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, Derrick de Kerckhove, Luca Farulli
Released in September 2011
Editor: Krzysztof Miekus
Co-editor: Karolina Koriat
Publisher: National Centre for Culture, Warszawa 2011 in collaboration with Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, 2011
ISBN 978-83-61587-55-2
114 pages

Short Big Drama highlights the theatricality of the artist’s practice. This comprehensive exhibition presents a wide selection of existing works together with specially commissioned new pieces. The spotlight falls on three types of works — monumental wall paintings, colorful Pixel Box installations and interactive Drawing Machines.

In the installation of the works, contradiction takes center-stage. Playing with the nature of drama — be this epic or mundane, short or big, or perhaps all of these at once — the project adapts exhibition space to draw out the tensions and attractions between the distinct impulses that animate Bulloch’s practice. For Witte de With, the artist interprets and manipulates earlier, potentially clashing installations into a seemingly harmonious whole, revealing a particular beauty which lies at the heart of complexity.

Bulloch’s approach is interdisciplinary, incorporating references from a wide array of sources, amongst them modern history, vanguard film, punk and electronic music. In her wall paintings, specific references to aesthetic, political or social developments are deconstructed and graphically re-assembled. Through this process of détournement, the artist questions the informational status of an artwork, as well as the possibility of narrating history. Bulloch’s Drawing Machines are interactive pieces, triggered or altered by the movements of visitors. In this way, her works explore the dialectic between technology and labor, making us conscious of our place, and that of others, within the gallery space. With her Pixel Boxes, Bulloch ‘programs’ our experience of art by encoding her signature modular light and sound installations with data from a vast array of cultural sources. Though these sources and the workings behind the installations remain invisible, a viewer may sense the imposition of a predefined code, even if unconsciously.

The manipulation of codes and a sense of control pervade Bulloch’s artistic practice. Whether that code is music- or text-based, the artist plays with and orchestrates our perception and experience of art. In proposing that this experience can be ’subliminal’ her work aims to stage that which is beyond our grasp.

Curated by Amira Gad & Nicolaus Schafhausen.

Angela Bulloch (b. 1966, Canada) is a Berlin-based sculptor, installation and sound artist. She is recognized as one of the Young British Artists and was included in the 1988 Freeze Exhibition. In 1997, she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Information, Manifesto, Rules and Other Leaks…, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2011); Discrete Manifold Whatsoever, Simon Lee Gallery, London; Redux, Esther Schipper, Berlin (both 2010); and The space that time forgot, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus & Kunstbau, Munich (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Art Parcours, Art Basel 41, Münster Cathedral, Basel; A Roll Of The Dice, Cristina Guerra, Lisbon; Drawing Time, Galeries Poirels, Frac Lorraine, Metz; High ideals and crazy dreams, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg; and Open light in private spaces, Biennale for international Light Art, Unna (all 2010); Universal Code, The Power Plant, Toronto; and Yellow and Green, MMK Frankfurt, Frankfurt (both 2009). Bulloch teaches at De Ateliers in Amsterdam.

PUBLICATION
Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch
ISBN: 978-94-91435-00-3

To accompany the exhibition, Witte de With Publishers will release Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch in March 2012. In addition to visual documentation of the exhibition, this publication will include critical texts by Nav Haq and John Miller as well as a script by Christine Lang and Christoph Dreher. It will also feature a special selection from Angela Bulloch’s Rules series under the title of “Rules of this Century.”

Source Book 10: Angela Bulloch is the 10th and final publication of Witte de With Publishers’ Source Book series, monographic publications providing an in-depth look into one artist’s practice.

Visit Witte de With’s online shop: www.wdw.nl/shop

Supported by: Goethe-Institut Niederlande, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Den Haag, and The Canada Council for the Arts.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with Watermans and Goldsmiths College in occasion of the Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012 announces a special issue titled: Touch and Go.

The Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012, will coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics in London, and Watermans is pleased to host a Festival of ground-breaking installations exploring interactivity and participation in New Media and Digital Art. This year long project is showcasing the work of six international artists and collectives and initiates discussions around the impact of technology in art as well as the meaning, possibilities and issues around human interaction and engagement inviting responses from artists, academics, students, art professionals and the public. The project will include a series of seminars in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London and a publication with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

This issue explores the role interactivity and participation, as well as light art and new media approaches to the public space as tool that may foster engagement and shared forms of participation.

We would like to welcome papers relevant to the following themes:

- Interactivity and audience engagement (art, technology and participation)
- New media geographies and technology
- New Media art and illusion: physical interaction & perception
- Sound and gesture in New Media Art
- Gender, sport and technology
- Art in Virtual Reality / virtual spaces and game-space as artistic medium

Contemporary art is pursuing technological modes of interaction and display that provide the audience with media rich experiences. But are these forms of interaction, interpassive pre-ordained engagements or new technologically based forms of entertainment? Or is art redefining further its relationship with the audience – following and pushing forward the experiential examples of Christo and Spencer Tunick through the aid of technology?

This special issue of LEA wishes to analyze the relationship between these different aspects that contribute to the complexity – conceptual, technological and aesthetic – of interactive installation in public space, creating the ground-breaking and complex phenomena that characterize the aesthetics and visuality of contemporary technocultures.

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals for an issue on these or related themes with Senior Editors Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and LEA Editor in Chief) and Janis Jefferies (Goldsmiths College). The issue guest editors are Irini Papadimitriou and Jonathan Munro.

New Media academics, theoreticians, curators, art historians and artists that are interested in any combination of the above themes are particularly welcome to submit proposals for consideration.

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) will produce an online and printed issue, as well as host curated images and videos online.
Proposals to: info@leoalmanac.org

a) Subject heading: Touch and Go
b) 500 hundred word abstract for articles – submission of full articles preferred for this special issue by proposal deadline February 12, 2012
c) Deadline for submission of full article: March 15, 2012
d) 2 images at 72 dpi resolution no larger than 700pixels width for artists
e) Links to previous work, videos or personal sites

Our publication formats allow for full-color throughout and we encourage rich pictorial content where relevant and possible. Note however that all material submitted must be copyright cleared (or due diligence must be evidenced). For online publication a wide variety of media content may be considered (animation, mp3, flash, java, etc…)

• For scholarly papers please submit the final paper ready for peer review. Your contribution will be reviewed by at least two members of the LEA board and revisions may be requested subject to review.
• For themed and pictorial essays please submit an abstract or outline for editorial consideration and further discussion.
• Please keep your news, announcements and hyperlinks brief and focused – include contact details and a link to an external site where relevant. We reserve the right to sub-edit your submissions in order to comply with LEA policies and formats. Where material is time-sensitive please include both embargo and expiry dates.
• In all cases specify special system considerations where these are necessary (platform, codecs, plug-ins, etc…)

People in audiences act: they talk, clap, heckle, sigh, inhale, exhale, rustle, twitch, tweet, dance, flirt, laugh, whisper, shuffle, cough… in doing so, they interact. There is a structure and dynamic to these responses which is central to the experience of being in a live audience. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and professionals with interests in performance, interaction and technology who are working on understanding, instrumenting or experimenting with these dynamics, and the shifting ends of audience that they reveal.

We invite proposals for oral presentations, live demonstrations, installations and performance experiments that explore the nature of interaction in audiences. We especially welcome interventions, participatory formats and creative approaches to convening workshop sessions. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- the dynamics of collective and individual experiences of performance,
- the communicative organisation of audience-audience interaction,
- non-verbal interaction and emotional contagion,
- remote and co-present audience interactions,
- the phenomenology of audience interaction,
- changing historical and cultural understanding of the audience,
- technologies and methods for sensing audience dynamics,
- technologies and methods for enhancing and manipulating audience engagement.

The workshop will take place in the new Arts 2 building at Queen Mary University of London. Spaces include black box theatre, lecture theatre, foyer and breakout rooms. Specifications are available on
request.

Submission Format: A two page summary including: a 300 word abstract, methods and rationale for your work, a specification of format and any technical requirements. Document in PDF format submitted via email to: audience [at] qmedia.qmul.ac.uk

“Introduction: As I write this, at the end of 2010, it is sobering to reflect on the fact that over a couple of decades of explosive development in new media art (or ‘digital multimedia’ as it used to be called), in screen based as well as ‘embodied’ and gesture based interaction, the aesthetics of interaction doesn’t seem to have advanced much. At the same time, interaction schemes and dynamics which were once only known in obscure corners of the world of media art research/creation have found their way into commodities from 3D TV and game platforms (Wii, Kinect) to sophisticated phones (iPhone, Android). While increasingly sophisticated theoretical analyses (from Manovich, 2002 to Chun, 2008 to Hansen, 2006, more recently Stern, 2011 and others) have brought diverse perspectives to bear, I am troubled by the fact that we appear to have advanced little in our ability to qualitatively discuss the characteristics of aesthetically rich interaction and interactivity and the complexities of designing interaction as artistic practice; in ways which can function as a guide to production as well as theoretical discourse. This essay is an attempt at such a conversation…”

The convergence of mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing is creating a world where information-rich environments may be mapped directly onto urban topologies. This book tracks the history and genesis of locative and wearable media and the ground-breaking work of pioneer artists in the field. It examines changing concepts of space and place for a wide range of traditional disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Sociology, Fine Art and Architecture to Cultural and Media Studies, Fashion and Graphic design.

Mobile and Pervasive media are beginning to proliferate in the landscape of computer mediated interaction in public space through the emergence of smartphone technologies such as the iPhone, cloud computing extended wifi services and the semantic web in cities. These dispersed forms of interaction raise a whole series of questions on the nature of narrative and communication, particularly in relation to an audience’s new modes of mobile participation and reception.

These issues are explored through a series of focused essays by leading theorists, seminal case studies and practitioner interviews with artists at the cutting edge of these technologies, who are extending the potential of the medium to enhance and critique technological culture.

By emphasizing the role of the audience in this nomadic environment, the collection traces the history and development of ‘ambulant’ artistic practice in this new domain, creating an essential handbook for those wishing to understand the dominant global technology of the 21st Century and its implications for Art, Culture and Audience.

Contents

Howard Rheingold: Introduction
Martin Rieser: Overview

Section 1: Towards Hybridity.
A History of Audience Mobility

Erkki Huhtamo: Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media

Susanne Jaschko: The Temporal and Spatial Design of Video and Film-based Installation Art in the 60s and 70s: Their Inherent Perception Processes and Effects on the Perceivers’ Actions

Martin Rieser: Forgotten Histories of Interactive Space

Adriana de Souza e Silva: Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces

Section 2: Critical Issues in Mobile Art
Critical Contexts and Definitions

Mary Griffiths and Sean Cubitt: Mobile/Audience: Thinking the Contradictions

Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot: Towards a Language of Mobile Media

Beryl Graham: Snapshots from Curating Mobility

Understanding Public Spatialisation

Martin Rieser: Beyond Mapping: New Strategies for Meaning in Locative Artworks

Anke Jacob: Digital Media and Architecture—An Observation

Mirjam Struppek: Urban Screens as the Visualization Zone of the City‘s Invisible Communication Sphere

The Creative User

Debbi Lander: Future Physical: The Creative User and theme of response-ABILITY

Andrea Zapp: ‘A Fracture in Reality’: Networked Narratives as Imaginary Fields of Action and Dislocation

Section 3: Case Studies
Locative Art

Josephine Reid and Richard Hull: What Makes Mediascapes Compelling?

Valentina Nisi, Glorianna Davenport/Valentina Nisi, Mads Haahr and Glorianna Davenport: Hopstory/Media Tales of the Liberties

Drew Hemment, John Evans, Mika Raento and Theo Humphries: Loca: ‘Location Oriented Critical Arts’

Usman Haque: Invisible Topographies

Jonah Brucker-Cohen: Wifi-Hog: The Battle for Ownership in Public Wireless Space

The Creative User: The User as Co-creator

Paul Sermon: Puppeteers, Performers or Avatars: A Perceptual Difference in Telematic Space

Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau: Mobile Feelings: Wireless Communication of Heartbeat and Breath for Mobile Art

Victoria Fang: The Living Room

Arianna Bassoli: tunA and the Power of Proximity

Margot Jacobs: Engagement with the Everyday

Cati Vaucelle: Between Improvisation and Publication: Supporting the Creative Metamorphosis with Technology

Anthony Rowe: Developing Creative Audience Interaction: Four Projects by Squidsoup

Wearable Computing

Lisa Stead, Petar Goulev, Caroline Evans and Ebrahim Mamdani: The Emotional Wardrobe

Katherine Moriwaki: Social Fashioning and Active Conduits

Laura Beloff: Wunderkammer: Wearables as an Artistic Strategy

Section 4: Artist Interviews
Locative

Fiona Raby: Flirt and Mset

Teri Rueb: Trace, The Choreography of Everyday Movement and Drift

Matt Adams: Blast Theory

Steve Benford: Mixed Reality Lab

Drew Hemment: The Politics of Mobility

Wearables

Joey Berzowska: Memory-Rich Garments and Social Interaction

Annie Lovejoy: Heart on Your Sleeve

Contributor Biographies

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY 2011. XV, 481 pp. (Architecture – Technology – Culture 5)
ISBN: 978-90-420-3127-2 Bound
ISBN: 978-90-420-3128-9 E-Book
Online info here.

Hypo Chrysos is the second piece of a series of bio-interactive works based on the Xth Sense (XS), an open, biophysical and wearable technology I’ve recently developed. The work was composed ad hoc for the Matadac Festival in Madrid, which this year explores the theme of Machines and Flesh. In conjunction with this premiere, I’m teaching a workshop on biophysical generation and control of music and video using the Xth Sense tech.

Related: Interaction and Agency in Real Time Systems by Jo-Anne Green (presented at Soft Borders, Sao Paulo, 2010).