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. The Critical Theorist (2003) is a fantastical contraption on a metal table, each element of which is a visual joke. Reliquary for a Critical Theorist (2005) parodies the tradition of containers for relics. Two Plexiglas “books,” C’est Nothing and Deux Nothing (2009), continue the notion of vacuity. And Critical Theory’s Secret (2010) imitates a safe. It’s empty, however, mocking the notion of an underlying meaning.

Some Thoughts Connecting Deterministic Chaos, Neuronal Dynamics and Aesthetic Experience by Andrea Ackerman: The apparent randomness of deterministic chaos is differentiated from stochastic randomness and linked to natural processes, time’s irreversibility and the creation of meaning. Current neuroscience research strongly suggests that chaotic dynamics govern the physiological functioning of the brain/mind. The brain/mind is conceived as a multi-attractor system functioning at a far from equilibrium state poised for instantaneous state changes and transitions. Chaotic itinerancy has been suggested as a process by which chaotic transitions among attractors may be made and dynamically integrated in a multi-attractor chaotic system such as the brain. The article outlines a theory suggesting that the general characteristics of aesthetic experience are determined by the chaotic dynamics of the brain/mind and by the dynamics of chaotic itinerancy. Two examples, a novel by W.G. Sebald and the installation art of Jenny Holzer are described in terms of this new aesthetic theory.

Hacking the Codes of Self-representation: An Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson by Tatiana Bazzichelli: This interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson reflects on the meaning and impact of her artistic activity since the Seventies, an important resource for understanding the socio-cultural transformation in the fields of art, technology and body-politics of our present. Today more then ever, we are experiencing the mixing and crossing of virtual and real worlds; dynamics of social networking and net-based participation are influencing not only a small group of experts, but everyone with access to technology. Through the art of Lynn Hershman Leeson, it becomes possible to access a critical space-in-between, a liminal state of performativity, in which to redefine powers and hierarchies, to question the meaning of identity, and to hack the codes of self-representation. As a “cultural infiltrator”, Lynn Hershman Leeson opens up a critical interstice in the everyday life to a constant redefinition of ourselves.

Electronic Literature as a Sword of Lightning by Davin Heckman: This essay analyzes the humanistic potential of digital poetry in the age of new media. By way of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” theories of the posthuman, and the tradition of Marxist critique, this essay aims to identify an occasion for hope within the new media arts. Reading electronic literature through Shelley’s metaphor of poetry as a “sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it,” Heckman analyzes the ethical dimensions of literature against the backdrop of technocapitalism and instrumental theories of the human. The essay concludes with a discussion of intersubjectivity, politics, and love.

Profile: Darko Fritz - An Interview with Darko Fritz by Lanfranco Aceti: Darko Fritz’s work through its personal and social aesthetics obliges us to analyze both the technological determinism of contemporary times as well as the contradictions of contemporary aesthetics trapped in the conflict of real versus virtual.

Profile: Darko Fritz - Reflections on Archives in Progress by Darko Fritz by Sasa Vojkovic: Without really dovetailing to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, in his Archives in Progress, Darko Fritz examines the technical mechanisms for archivization and for reproduction. Taking into account the multiplicity of regions in the psychic apparatus, this model also integrates the necessity, inside the psyche itself, of a certain outside, of certain borders between insides and outsides. This outside can also…

Profile: Darko Fritz - Error to Mistake > Notes on the Aesthetics of Failure by Vesna Madzoski: Two dominant scenarios of the future of humanity have marked the (post)modern century behind us. According to the first, optimistic one, we will reach unimaginable evolutionary peaks due to technological perfection; this disciplined and orderly functioning of machines will bring humans to the final state of evolution where the body never leaves the coziness of the pre-natal state of fullness and happiness. The other scenario gives a more concerned view on the technological advancement and supremacy, haunted with the images of Earth’s exhausted natural resources that will put humans a few evolutionary steps back – to their animal, ‘pre-civilized’ state.

Nexus of Art and Science: The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at University of Sussex by Christina Aicardi: The author explores the relationships between science and art that have developed at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) of the University of Sussex, which harbours an internationally renowned, leading research group in Artificial Life, Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Robotics. The aim is to establish whether and how interdisciplinary art-science practices at CCNR may lead to novel forms of knowledge production. Using fieldwork material as well as bibliographic and web resources, it showcases a number of initiatives and realizations. It also examines how individual researchers may understand, conceptualize, and justify, their experience and practice at the art-science junction in Artificial Life. This paper derives from the author’s PhD research project, of which a main focus has been to investigate interdisciplinary practices in the field of Artificial Life, which cross over the ‘two cultures’ divide. Artificial Life art is a predominant case of such interdisciplinarity crossover in the field of Artificial Life in general, and in the Sussex research group in particular.

Mish/Mash by Paul Catanese: There is a gulf between the implications of chaos and a haphazard undertaking; one implies cosmology, the other: untidiness. The complexity of mixing things together can be grand in scale, mesmerizing, protean – but also painful, rife with dead-ends, and uneven: wildly swinging between the startlingly rapid and agonizingly slow, a syncopated staccato so jarring, forwards and backwards are often indistinguishable without further examination or inquiry. Of mishmash, one can ascribe seemingly paradoxical traits: a mode of forming questions, a lens for meta-cognition, a gambler’s dilemma, a rehash of monkeys and typewriters, a ludic blossoming of multimodality, or perhaps the most devastating: an arbitrary wheel-spinning.

Sipping Espresso with Salmon by Carey Bagdassarian: Complex systems require, for their full description, a language commensurate in complexity. The application of mathematical language to systems such as ecosystems or ritual systems demands a psychological distancing in order to apply the math in the first place. The resulting sensorial disembodiment precipitates yet another flavor of the mind-body separation.

The Making of Empty Stages by Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning by Gabriella Giannachi: In this interview to acclaimed theatre photographer Hugo Glendinning, Gabriella Giannachi discusses with him the making of his latest work, Empty Stages (2003–11), a documentation about empty stages, touching on his collaboration with UK theatre company Forced Entertainment and Tim Etchells, who co-authored some of the images,as well as photographic methodologies and relfections about emptiness, absence, presence and performance.

Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, and Cultural History of Human/Machine Assemblages by Ayhan Aytes: In November 2005, Amazon Web Services started a web-based labor market where workers from across the world can choose and complete human intelligence tasks (HITS) designed by corporate developers. Labor required for fulfilling HITS varies: finding and matching information and images, translating text, transcribing audio, tagging images, answering surveys or visiting a blog. The amount of pay for each HIT ranges from one cent to several US dollars.

Inverse Embodiment: An Interview with Stelarc by Lanfranco Aceti: What is left of cyborgology today when we are actually looking at an artworld that is in total flux with bio-art, nano-art, data art and an infinite recombinatory matrix of disciplines in which art is the definition of human creativity?

Order in Complexity by Frieder Nake: Order in complexity. Yes, of course, when confronted with a complex situation, we usually search for order. Otherwise we have no chance to make sense out of the situation. We make sense, and it seems we always want to make it. Sense is not there to discover. It requires our activity. It is a construction.

Teaching Video Production in Virtual Reality by Joseph Farbrook: Teaching video production using video game technology and a method of live manipulation of digital puppets and props offers new possibilities for narrative, without shifting focus away from storyline and dramatic content, due to technical hurdles. This production technique known as Machinima has been steadily gaining in popularity and prominence due to the relative ease and speed in which small production teams can learn to use video game software in this new way and quickly create professional quality animated movies.

Atomism: Residual Images within Silver by Paul Thomas: In this short article I want to present the thinking, processes and references that I am currently researching in my practice. This research connects to my early work that stems from an interest in residual spaces, subconscious meanings and the objectification of the world via perspectival space.

Collaborating with the Enemy by Shane Mecklenburger: Cost of Opportunity is a project that creates a series of diamonds as artworks. The Gunpowder Diamond will be produced entirely from carbon found in .223 Caliber assault rile ammunition.The gunpowder is safely neutralized in a laboratory and the carbon it contains is isolated. Future proposed art-diamonds include the Road-kill Diamond from Nine-Banded Armadillos killed on Texas thoroughfares and the Superman Diamond from a 1983 cellulose acetate film print of Superman III (wherein Superman crushes a lump of coal into a diamond). A monetary value for each diamond is to be determined at a live auction, generating funds for future diamonds in an ongoing series of stones made from various culturally charged materials. The project explores personal and cultural valuation, materiality, and the way market pressures have altered the definition and function of art. Multiple attempts to secure research funding reveal the limits of interdisciplinarity and institutional aesthetics, inspiring the artist, Shane Mecklenburger, to steal the diamond once exhibited, a plan he has yet to reveal to his collaborator.

Notes on Demonstration Exhibition: The Ammonite Order, or, Objectiles for an (Un)Natural History by Vince Dziekan: The demonstration exhibition, The Ammonite Order, Or, Objectiles for an (Un) Natural History (2008–09) explores a non-deterministic relation between digital mediation and spatial practice that supplants the primacy of real objects present in gallery space. The outcome of a research residency in London, the theme for this work evolved out of imaginatively projecting a ictive ‘correspondence’ between two local personages: the architect George Dance (the Younger) and naturalist Charles Darwin. Drawing implicitly upon a creative curatorial impulse in order to pursue this narrative fabula, the exhibition space unfolds as a multidimensional installation that combines physical elements with an accompanying set of media content. The exhibition promotes a model for a different type of aesthetic experience through defamiliarising how the art object is modulated at the intersection of the exhibition.

The Contemporary Becomes Digital by Bruce Wands: In 2003, I wrote an essay that was published in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery catalog titled “The Digital Becomes Contemporary.” A lot has happened in the digital art Field in the past eight years, and this essay will examine some of those changes as they relate to the relationship between digital and contemporary art.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Historical Perspective by Craig Harris: As Leonardo Electronic Almanac “rekindles” I can’t help but be both nostalgic about the past and hopeful about the future. In looking back to when Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) was founded I think of the challenges that the ield faced in terms of communication, networking, and collaboration. So much was happening at the intersection of art, science and technology in the early 1990s, yet much of it was taking place in isolation, disconnected from other relevant and related activities. There was a clear need to raise the profile of work on a global scale, and to identify ways to improve interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. The leadership at Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) set on a path to play an important role in addressing these issues for its community.

Ars Electronica 2010: Sidetrack or Crossroads? by Erkki Huhtamo: After the Ars Electronica 2010 festival was over, the press office triumphantly touted in its communiqué: “90,227 visitors at the greatest Ars Electronica Festival since 1979.” For someone who has visited the festival every year since 1989 (with only two exceptions), it is easy to simply reverse the statement, and claim that this was the poorest – or to put it more nicely: the most mediocre – Ars Electronica of the past twenty years.

The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/ sensing technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies.

At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. Specific examples of areas for discussion could include:

• Delineation of new collaborative practices and the interchange of knowledge
• Collaborative interdisciplinary practices of embodiment and technology
• Integration/deployment of digital resources in new contexts
• Connections and tensions that exist between the Arts, Humanities and Science
• Notions of the ’solitary’ and the ‘collaborative’ across the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences
• eScience in the Arts and Humanities
• Use of digital resources in collaborative creative work, teaching, learning and scholarship
• Open source and second generation Web infrastructure
• Digital media in time and space
• Music and technology: composition and performance
• Dance and interactive technologies
• Taking inspiration from SET: imaging, GPS and mobile technologies
• Evaluating the experience among providers and users / performers and audiences
• Interface Design and HCI
• Performative Practices in Second Life or other virtual platforms
• New critical paradigms for the conference’s theme

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Coyne - Professor of Architectural Computing at the University of Edinburgh.
• Christopher Pressler: Director of Research and Learning Resources and Director of the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham.
• Thecla Schiphorst: Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
• STELARC, Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University and Senior Research, Fellow in the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney.

The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. This year’s conference is hosted by Brunel University, West London. It will take place from Sunday 5th September to Wednesday 8th September 2010. It will be held across various innovative spaces, including the newly expanded Boiler House laboratory facilities, housed in the Antonin Artaud Building, and state of the art conference facilities plus high standard accommodation.

SUBMISSIONS:

We invite original papers, panels, installations, performances, workshop sessions and other events that address the conference theme, with particular attention to the ‘Sensual Technologies’ focus. We encourage proposals for innovative and non-traditional session formats.

DRHA 2010 will include a Second Life roundtable/discussion event, led by performance artist Stelarc, which will enable international participants to present performative work via Second Life. For this event, we particular encourage submission of Machinima works that can be screened as part of this panel.

Short presentations, for example work-in-progress, are invited for poster presentations.

Anyone wishing to submit a performance or installation should visit http://www.drha2010.org.uk for information about the spaces and technical equipment and support available.

All proposals - whether papers, performance or other - should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA 2010.

The deadline for submissions will be 31 March 2010.

Abstracts should be between 600 - 1000 words.

Letters of acceptance will be sent by 15th of May 2010, when the conference registration will be opened.

Lily Xiying Yang and Honglei Li are new media artists from Beijing, currently based in New York City. Since 2005, they have been working under the collective name Lily & Honglei. They create new artistic expressions by integrating traditional and digital art forms. Utilizing online virtual world applications and digital animation, Lily & Honglei reinterpret Chinese folkloric traditions that metaphorically reflect current global cultures and societies.

Lily & Honglei have exhibited internationally, including: FILE (Brazil), SIGGRAPH, Jamaica Flux (New York), Museum of Art and Design (New York), Microwave New Media Fest (Hong Kong), Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (New York), Terna 02 Prize (Rome), and 404 international festival of electronic art (Argentina). Lily & Honglei both received their BFAs in Painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing) in 1997. In 2007, Honglei earned his MFA in painting from UMass Dartmouth, while Lily received her MFA in Digital Media in UMass Dartmouth in 2008. More here.

This event is sponsored by UMass Lowell Center for Arts and Ideas and UMass Lowell Art Department. Special Thanks to Jehanne-Marie Gavarini.

About Upgrade! Boston

Upgrade! Boston is curated by Jo-Anne Green for Turbulence.org. It is one of 34 nodes currently active in Upgrade! International, an emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. If you would like to present your work or get involved, please email jo at turbulence dot org.

Submissions are invited for an edited book with the working title Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds. Machinima - referring to “filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies” as well as works which use this animation technique, including videos recorded in computer games or virtual worlds - is challenging the notion of the moving image in numerous media contexts, such as video games, animation, digital cinema and virtual worlds.

Machinima’s increasingly dynamic use and construction of images from virtual worlds - appropriated, imported, worked over, re-negotiated, re-configured, re-composed - not only confronts the conception and ontology of the recorded moving image, but also blurs the boundaries between contemporary media forms, definitions and aesthetics, converging filmmaking, animation, virtual world and game development.

Even as it poses these theoretical challenges, machinima is expanding as a practice via internet networks and fan-based communities as well as in pedagogical and marketing contexts. In these ways, machinima is also transformative, presenting alternative ways and modes of teaching and commercial promotion, in-game events and, perhaps most significantly, networking cultures and community-building within game, virtual and filmmaking worlds, among others.

Divided into these two sections - machinima (i) in theoretical analysis; and (ii) as practice - this first collection of essays seeks to explore how we can understand machinima in terms of the theoretical challenges it poses as well as its manifestations as a practice. We are primarily concerned with offering critical discussions of its history, theory, aesthetics, media form and social implications, as well as insights into its development and the promise of what it can become. How does machinima fit in the spectrum of media forms? What are the ontological differences between images from machinima and photochemical/ digital filmmaking? How does machinima co-opt the affordances of the game engine to provide narrative? How may machinima, developed from the products of game and virtual world marketing, be used as an artistic tool? How is machinima self-reflexive, if at all, of the virtual environments from which they arise? What are the implications of re-deploying these media formats into alternative media forms? How does the open-source economy that currently defines much of global machinima relate it to broader cultural production generally?

In particular, we are looking for essays that address (but not limited to) the following ideas:

• History: context; definitions; culture; relationships to gaming and play; development of technology; hardware and games; archiving of play;
• Theory: image; ontology; time; space; narrative; realism; spectatorship; subjectivity; virtual camera; materiality;
• Aesthetics: poetics; play; visuality; detournement; remix; digital mashup; appropriation; recombinative narratives; audio and visual theory; spatiality; narrative architecture;
• Contemporary media contexts: comparative media; machinima vis-a-vis video games, (digital) cinema, animation, virtual worlds; the visual economy of machinima versus film;
• Communities: Machinima as community-based practice and performance; user created content; online publishing; fan (fiction) communities; open source; cultural reflection;
• Pedagogy: digital literacy; teaching models and practices; student-centered learning; critical making; collaborative authorship; rhetorics; problem based learning;
• Marketing: crowd sourcing; viral marketing; peer to peer sharing; commercials, trailer promotions; grass roots versus astro turf; serials and sequels.

Please submit a 400 word abstract and a short bio via e-mail to understandingmachinima [at] gmail.com (NOT the e-mail address of the sender above) by 30 August 2010. We expect that final essays should not exceed 7,000 words and be due on 30 December 2010.

Jenna P-S. Ng
James Barrett
HUMlab, Umea University
Sweden

ABSTRACT: Although machinima has grown exponentially, it remains a largely undefined digital artistic practice in-between existing traditions. Machinima makers freely sample/ combine/ and break elements of traditional media. They “play” their references. This essay does not attempt to fix machinima to any single definition but will identify the intermedia relations to better position machinima into the digital media landscape. The argument will target three main influences: film, television, and theatrical performance. To exemplify these points the essay will discuss exemplary and relevant machinima pieces. It puts emphasis on the real-time aspects in production and play back to highlight the key specifics of this relatively new format.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42jQgoTGEeI

For better quality, visit Trace by Lily & Honglei (machinima based on Land of Illusion, 5 minutes 30 seconds, with sound. 2009)

“The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace….In this was the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable, and remains read.” - Derrida

Virtual Environment Developed by Lily & Honglei
Machinima Director, Video Edit and Sound Effect by Lily & Honglei
“Underwater” Performance organized by Daniel Shanks, conducted by Jade Sharkfin, Jolene Sabetha, Kai Serapis.

Machinima is the appropriation of software-generated 3D virtual environments, typically video games, for filmmaking and dramatic productions. The creation and distribution technology of machinima tends to hide the nature of the performer, provoking consideration of a definition of ‘liveness’ that can accommodate the real-time rendering of screen content by game software in response to human input, or – at the extreme – as if there is human input in accordance with performance parameters coded by humans. This paper considers the continuum of creative modes that machinima makers work on, and the differing aesthetic/technical decisions affecting the level of liveness in the finished production. Machinima films derive from captured gameplay, puppet-like live improvisational work, cinematic or televisual on-camera performances, and totally scripted performances produced using coded commands. Often, the real-time rendering capability of the game software is only critical at the point of image capture, but once the footage has been saved as a video file it is editing and post-production that becomes the focus of much machinima production. Even live improvisational pieces – whether performed in a real or virtual venue - are generally better known via their capture and distribution as video clips to a wider post-performance audience. This paper also explores machinima making as a community of practice, that is a specific group with a local culture, operating through shared practices, linked to each other through a shared repertoire of resources. Digital performance communities of practice emerging from video games and machinima production can be seen as having levels of engagement with a range of other communities, most obviously the gameplaying, game modifying, CGI animation and filmmaking communities. Consideration is given to how, from a dramatic viewpoint, the performers within a machinima production are also operating in much the same way as in-role improvisation occurs within the community of practice associated with process drama - a strongly framed environment defined by a ‘digital pre-text’ - the common digital environment that provides the agreed fictional context for the dramatic action to unfold in.

Keywords: Machinima, performance, live, real-time, cinema, drama

WoW: Emergent Media Phenomenon explores various forms of cultural production based on World of Warcraft in particular and on gaming in general. While surveying Warcraft’s Fifteen-year history, the exhibition looks at artistic practices that have been influenced by game culture. Fourteen international artists were selected to consider this movement with the following themes in mind: elements of desire, the collapse of fantasy, medievalism, creative critiques, and public intervention. Artists in this exhibition take on the visual marker of World of Warcraft to consider, implications of gaming, and their greater impact on our culture. In addition to the works of these artists, fan art and the growing culture of machinima (computer animation that uses the graphic engines from video games) will be explored in this exhibition.

Gaming is a movement that encompasses a large population and holds the potential to greatly impact society. Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher, states, “This is a new generation of hard-core gamers, and what they’re doing is generating unprecedented participation bandwidth. They are donating more cognitive cycles, more heart share to game worlds and virtual worlds than we’ve seen dedicated to any project before.” The artists in this exhibition have extended these concerns.

The exhibition is curated by Grace Kook-Anderson and is accompanied by a booklet published by Laguna Art Museum. As part of the exhibition, you’ll receive a booklet featuring essays by the curator; participating artist, Eddo Stern; and the curator at Blizzard Entertainment, Tim Campbell. This booklet is published by Laguna Art Museum.

Participating artists: selected artists from Blizzard Entertainment, including Chris Metzen, Sam Didier (a.k.a., Samwise), Chris Robinson, Justin Thavirat, and Roman Kenney (all from Irvine); Aram Bartholl (Berlin); Jorg Dubin (Laguna Beach); Alexander Galloway (New York); Jacqueline Goss (New York); Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales (Ghent, Belgium); John Klima (Lisbon, Portugal); Cyril Kuhn (Los Angeles); Antoinette LaFarge (Irvine); Mashallah Design and Linda Kostowski (Berlin); Robert Nideffer and Alex Szeto (Irvine); Airyka Rockefeller (San Francisco); Eddo Stern (Los Angeles); The Third Faction (Azeroth); and Zeng Han (Guangzhou).