[Indeterminate Hikes + (2012) Android App & Performance. Whitney Museum of American Art ISP Exhibition, The Kitchen, NYC] Interview with Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint of Ecoarttech by Sophia Kosmaoglou, Furtherfield.org:

Refusing to regard technology merely as a tool, Ecoarttech expand the uses of mobile technology and digital networks revealing them to be fundamental components of the way we experience our environment. Their most recent work Indeterminate Hikes + (IH +) is a phone app that maps a series of trails through the city. IH + can be accessed globally, or wherever users have access to Google Maps on their mobile phones. After identifying the users’ location, IH + generates a route along random “Scenic Vistas” within urban spaces. Users are directed to perform a series of tasks along the trail and provide feedback in the form of snapshots generating an ongoing, open-ended dialogue. Continue reading

Woman, Art & Technology: Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson by Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Furtherfield.org.

Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen by Julian Stallabrass :: OCTOBER 138, Fall 2011, pp. 3–14.

In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. Continue reading

How Can We Understand Code as a “Critical Artifact”?: USC’s Mark Marino on Critical Code Studies (Part One), by Henry Jenkins:

The Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab opened this summer at the University of Southern California with the specific goal of developing the field and fostering discussion between the Humanities and Computer Science. Current members include USC faculty and students and a host of affiliated scholars from other institutions, including and international advisory board. The HaCCS Lab sponsored its first conference this summer and will be sponsoring other get togethers both on campus and online. Central to its mission is to develop common vocabularies, methodologies, and case-studies of CCS, while promoting publications in the field. Continue reading

Origination and Metacreation: A Conversation with Ben Bogart, Vague Terrain:

Ben Bogart is a Canadian artist whose works encompass science, machine creativity and open source ethics. His innovative and fascinating investigations on artificial imagination and machine learning are effectively demonstrated through his body of work, which is neatly underpinned and strongly characterized by a critical analysis of the paradigm of creativity.

Marco Donnarumma: Ben, to what extent can creativity be investigated through algorithmic means and which of your works best embodies such a practice? In which ways can the development of creative machines foster a better understanding of individuals as makers? Continue reading

Scanner, The News Of The World & The Art Of Listening In by Luke Turner, The Quietus:

Robin Rimbaud – AKA Scanner – once trawled the airwaves recording ‘found’ telephone conversations. He discusses his controversial work, and remembers when the News Of The World tried to buy his archive of recordings.

“Back in the days before digital mobile technology, landline phonecalls could be surprising affairs. You’d pick up the receiver and be able to hear, faint and distant, the sound of someone else’s telephone call. As voyeur, you were presented with the moral question of whether to hang up, or else keep listening in to this unexpurgated, uncensored confessional. Generally, most of the conversations would be mundane, but the very act of listening in felt uncomfortable, with a strange and dark allure. Continue reading

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 17 Issue 1: MISH MASH, August 2011.

Transmediation as Betrayal: The Case of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Editorial by Lanfranco Aceti: When inheriting the history of a publication like the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) it is difficult to stay faithful to historical traditions and at the same time catch up with the evolution of contemporary online media and social networks.

Academic Vanitas: Michael Aurbach and Critical Theory by Dorothy Joiner: In a satiric series of sculptures, Michael Aurbach uses laughter to lampoon the excesses of the contemporary scholarship known as critical theory. Spun from psychology, linguistic hermeneutics, and philosophy, critical theory, in Aurbach’s view, tends to deemphasize art objects, substituting fatuous speculations for straightforward analysis. Continue reading

From Video Cache – Activating the Archive: An interview with Mél Hogan: “…In archives (traditionally) the emphasis has been on long-term preservation, which more often than not has meant rendering ‘originals’ inaccessible in the present as a means to protect or safeguard them for the future. Because archival discourse and practice have come a long way in the last decade to adapt to the continually changing technoscape, I don’t want to make it sound like the tension is between the traditional, as material/offline, and the new, as digital/online. I concentrate on the digital online as a complex realm when I study the archive, but obviously the discourses and ideas are shared with, if not borrowed from, years of traditional archival theory. Continue reading

MADE REAL by Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern from Furtherfield on Vimeo.