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.

We have always regaled ourselves with speculative stories of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined these narratives offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.

Wonder Stories chronicles such tales in a sci fi storytelling jam with musical interludes, live demonstrations and illustrious speakers from the fields of science, art and technology presenting their visions of the near future. Join our ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, design mystics, graphic cowboys, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries for an evening of wondrous possibilities and dark cautionary tales.

For the first time, Wonder Stories will be simultaneously hosted in London and New York and Popular Science will join the Architectural Association and Studio X NYC in coordinating the event this year. Join us for the third event in the series as we chart a course from science fiction to science fact with talks, a hands on taxidermy workshop, animatronic guests, swarm robotics demonstrations, datascapes walking tour and live movie soundscapes.

LONDON EVENT

Hosted by
LIAM YOUNG (‘Tomorrows Thoughts Today’ and the AA’s ‘Unknown Fields Division’)
MATT JONES (‘BERG London’, Design technologists)

VINCENZO NATALI
Director of Splice, Cube, and forthcoming films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson

BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author and futurist

KEVIN SLAVIN
Game designer and spatial theorist

ANDY LOCKLEY
Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor for Inception,compositing/2D supervisor for Batman Begins and Children of Men

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and illustrator for video games and films such as The Matrix, Dark City, The Fifth Element, and Superman Returns

JULIAN BLEECKER
Designer, technologist, and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor, to lead a live taxidermy workshop

DR RODERICH GROSS AND THE ‘NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB’
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield,to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Moon, directed by Duncan Jones

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics engineer for Hellboy, Clash of the Titans, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Prometheus

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons and Project Earth

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television

RADIOPHONIC
Throughout the day we will be accompanied by electronic tonalities from Radiophonic

NEW YORK EVENT

Hosted by
GEOFF MANAUGH (BLDGBLOG, STUDIO-X NYC)
NICOLA TWILLEY (EDIBLE GEOGRAPHY, STUDIO-X NYC)
POPULAR SCIENCE

BJARKE INGELS
Architect, WSJ Magazine 2011 architectural innovator of the year, and author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution

NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
Architect and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

HARI KUNZRU
Novelist and author of Gods Without Men and The Impressionist

JAMES FLEMING
Historian and author of Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

ANDREW BLUM
Journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

DAVID BENJAMIN
Architect and co-director of The Living

MARC KAUFMAN
Science writer and author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

DEBBIE CHACHRA
Researcher and educator in biological materials and engineering design

JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s latest album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai

CHRIS WOEBKEN
Interaction designer

SETH FLETCHER
Science writer and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

SIMONE FERRACINA
Architect and author of Organs Everywhere

DAVE GRACER
Insect agriculturalist at Small Stock Foods

HOD LIPSON
Researcher in evolutionary robotics and the future of 3D printing

ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics

CARLOS OLGUIN
Designer at Autodesk Research working on the intersection of bio-nanotechnology and 3D visualization

[Image credit 'Inception' dir. Christopher Nolan]

Mountain Ghosts is a site-specific sound art installation that infuses the entire University of Colorado / Colorado Springs campus with a location-based layer of audio created collectively by the artist and participants. Building on Burgund’s interest in systems, collected voices, and participation, Mountain Ghosts explores sound as fundamental to our experiences of space, place and history. Participants use a custom smartphone app to make audio recordings that the Mountain Ghosts system then codes by location and immediately assimilates into a collective databank for other visitors to access.

As participants walk through the UCCS campus listening to location-based music and participant commentary, they can respond to prompts on the Mountain Ghosts interface that invite them to reflect on their surroundings and contribute recordings of their thoughts and experiences. Participants are, in effect, creating “ghosts” from the past that are permanently attached to specific locations. For the duration of the project from September 8th to mid-November, 2011, Mountain Ghosts folds individual voices into a collective archive that creatively documents a unique sonic record of actions within the landscape.

Quem Conta Um Conto, II is a study in narrative, Pinheiro’s main subject of research. The individual sounds in the piece grow as characters, based on film theorist Chris Vogler’s twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey. Pinheiro juxtaposes sound spaces to join together disparate times and places; she ignores the physical impossibilities of their junction in order to potentiate the conflict that can emerge from their friction.

Sara Pinheiro (1985, Portugal) has a B.A. (2008) in film studies from the School for Theatre and Film (ESTC, Lisbon) with a specialization in sound design. She has also studied at the Czech schools FAMU and HAMU (2007), in Prague and at c.e.m. (centro em movimento) in Lisbon (2008). She worked as a teacher in CoMA/Musik i Syd, Sweden (2009) with a grant from the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. In 2010, she started her Masters in Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of Music - The Hague (The Netherlands).

Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform based in Chicago, IL, USA. The goal is to support work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Pera (also known as Galata) was a district in Constantinople (established circa 13th century as a Genoese trading colony) north of the Golden Horn, which now encompasses parts of Beyoğlu, Karaköy, Tophane, Tarlabaşı, Cihangir etc. Pera originates from Greek, meaning “beyond or across” and the district was particularly known for its presence of Greek, Armenian, Italian, and Jewish residents and businesses.

D|N|A was conceived in light of some emergent practices in the digital arts and humanities centering on interactivity, the web, documentary, and ‘new’ media. During what proved to be a highly successful gathering, almost forty of the participants gave lightning talks: highly condensed, 5-minute presentations focused on a ‘burning question’ they each wanted to open up for discussion.

As a way to further explore these questions, we invite expressions of interest for a post-Symposium, peer-reviewed web publication that will be produced in Scalar, a nonlinear experimental publishing platform. This open Call For Proposals is divided into seven separate calls, each one conceived and written by one of our contributing editors, drawing on some of the most pressing questions raised during D|N|A.

Responses can be in any medium suitable for publication on the web: linear scholarship; nonlinear creative writing; hypertext; photography; sound; video; film, or any combination of these media. The contributing editors will make their own editorial selections, which will be overseen by the project editors, Matt Soar and Monika Kin Gagnon.

Prospective contributors are asked to prepare an expression of interest (up to 300 words) responding to one of the seven questions, and send it in the body of an email to the respective contributing editor and cc the symposium organizers by September 15, 2011. Full details here.

Questions (and editors) in brief

1. What new ethical considerations arise for producers/directors of nonlinear digital storytelling? (Sheila Schroeder)

2. What new inventions, tools and methods can be used for digital and database narrative? (Kim Sawchuk)

3. What about the Plot? (David Clark)
4. How do we give shape to a user’s cognitive and emotional engagement with database narratives? (Will Luers)

5. How do we think about the lifespan of a web-based project? (Dayna McLeod)

6. How might scholars explore interactive and digital technologies as forms of ‘procedural scholarship’? (Chris Hanson)

7. How do directors, audiences, and texts change as a consequence of database narrative? (Adrian Miles)

For the detailed Call for Proposals (pdf), click here.

In conjunction with the exhibition The Talent Show (through August 21), The Henry Art Gallery invites you to join artist James Coupe for a screening and discussion of the artist’s recent work with ’surveillance cinema’ in (re)collector, Surveillance Suite, and the web-based work Today, too, I experienced something… I hope to understand in a few days.

James Coupe is an artist whose work focuses on emergent systems, aesthetic machines, autonomy, and networks. Educated in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and Creative Technology at the University of Salford (England), his recent projects have included appropriative powerline networks, parasitical cellular phone agents, autonomous robot systems, self-organizing telephone call centres, and installations in which computers use spam to search for the meaning of the Internet. His recent work with ’surveillance cinema’ explores the witting and un-witting relationship between the artist/participant and the viewer/ participant. This method of ‘surveillance cinema’ utilizes computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information from video footage from a variety of sources including YouTube clips, studio footage, and surveillance camera feeds. The footage is then algorithmically reorganized and recontextualized into narratives, often using cinematic ‘templates’ such as Antonioni’s classic film Blow-Up.

(re)collector (2007) from James Coupe on Vimeo.

Day 3 from James Coupe on Vimeo.

Coupe has exhibited both nationally and internationally, receiving awards from the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board Innovation Award, Creative Capital and Artist’s Trust.

Gabrielle de Vietri

Located on Skwxwú7mesh territory in the heart of the city, the digital signs, facing north and south, flash a static advertisement every ten seconds. Their scale, and their proximity to the bridge makes for an assertive relationship to the pedestrians, cyclists and motorists entering and departing downtown, and this occupation of visual space has been the subject of considerable controversy.

For Digital Natives — curated by Lorna Brown and Clint Burnham — the billboard becomes a space for exchange between native and non-native communities in an exploration of language in public space. Using the form of tweets, artists and writers from across North America have contributed text messages to be broadcast during the month of April, coinciding with the 125th Anniversary of the City of Vancouver. Interrupting the flow of advertisements, the brief messages respond to the location and history of the billboard; of digital language and translation, and of the city itself.

digitalnatives.co extends the conversation, featuring a blog that captures the exchange between contributors across the continent. The contested history of the site is chronicled in text and images, and a live Twitter feed tracks public responses to the project.

Digital Natives is public art that the public not only ‘receives’, but may also produce. Contributions from First Nations young people have been gathered through a series of workshops, and local and remote audiences are invited to tweet their messages to @ diginativ to be considered for broadcast.

Public Language Trouble

Sixty messages were composed for Digital Natives: two contributions, and one Skwxwú7mesh translation were omitted before broadcast by the corporation that is under contract to manage the billboard’s content, Astral Media Outdoor. We present them below in solidarity with these respected artists:

“IMPERIAL CANADA AWARDED SEX ABUSE TO NATIVE YOUTH BY THE BLACK ROBES NOW PROUDLY BESTOWS BRONZE SILVER GOLD MEDALS WITH INDIAN IMAGE”

Edgar Heap of Birds

“Your grandparents’ unacknowledged debts return to you as rage against the car in front”

Larissa Lai

Other Sights for Artists’ Projects is dismayed at the exclusion of their work.

Contributing Artists and Writers: Candice Hopkins, cheyanne turions, Chris Bose, Christian Bok, Daina Warren, Edgar Heap of Birds, Emily Fedoruk, Henry Tsang, Jeff Derksen, Larissa Lai, Lisa Robertson, Lori Emerson, Marianne Nicolson, Mercedes Eng, Michael Turner, Peter Morin, Phillip Djwa, Postcommodity, Rachel Zolf, Raymond Boisjoly, Rita Wong, Roger Farr, Sonny Assu, Tania Willard.

Digital Natives is commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program with the support of Vancouver 125 and the participation of the Government of Canada. We are grateful for the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Museum of Anthropology, at the University of British Columbia.

About Other Sights

Other Sights for Artists’ Projects Association operates as a collective of Vancouver-based individuals with expertise in curation, project management, presentation, delivery, and promotion of temporary art projects in public spaces. Other Sights is dedicated to challenging perceptions, encouraging discourse and promoting individual perspectives about shared social spaces. We seek to create a presence for art in spaces and sites that are accessible to a broad public, such as the built environment, communications technologies, the media, and the street, supporting critically rigorous work for highly visible locations. We collaborate and share resources with organizations and individuals to present projects that consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public places and public life, creating new platforms for temporary artist projects in the public realm.

Follow us on Twitter @diginativ

Image above: Barbara Cole.

George Bixby wrote: These Walls Could Talk is an attempt to reinterpret the historical narratives found in our history museums, through alternative audio-tours of the the American Museum of Natural History. These original audio-pieces are inspired by specific dioramas in the Culture Halls of the museum. These halls contain depictions of people throughout history and from around the world. However, as the “cultures” which they purport to represent continue to change, the dioramas remain static. These Walls Could Talk is a collaboration in which contributors from diverse backgrounds give new voices to these characters through approaches including fiction, auto-biography and archival sound.

While the project is meant to be an open platform for alternative interpretations, I’ve put together the following curatorial statement in an effort to give some cohesiveness to the pieces overall.

Nowhere/Now (on-going) is a group of original audio-pieces by diverse contributors, related in their aim to re-imagine how the Culture Halls of the American Museum of Natural History connect to the present day. Using the static representations of the dioramas as back drops for new interpretations, the contributors to Nowhere/Now offer us the opportunity to examine the multiplicity of meanings behind these exhibits.

The frozen representations of the dioramas, juxtaposed against the varied notions of history, serve as a reminder of how historical narratives are shaped–retrospectively by museums, and presently through mediated news sources and foreign intervention.

Currently I am working on a website for the project, which also functions as a mobile-friendly platform for sharing the audio. This can be found here. I hope to submit the overall body of work to some festivals once a representative sample of work has been contributed.

While I unfortunately can’t offer pay for this project, contributors retain rights to their work. For more information see the cc license associated with the site.

If you’d like to discuss further, please email me at gbixby21[at]yahoo.com