“I am Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria and Regional Secretary of the Ba’ath Party. The circumstances of my current employment may soon be coming to an end, therefore I am looking for a new job! I will consider all offers of temporary and/or long-term employment. I am especially interested in working abroad. I am expert in all aspects of despotic rule, including torture, general corruption and fixed elections (in the 2007 referendum I received 97.2% of the vote!). While my experience has been resoundingly in the nepotistic dictatorial sector, I would also consider accepting work as a babysitter, dog-walker, prison guard or stand-up comedian. Anything really. My hobbies include crochet, charades and angry birds. References available on request!”

Please re-post this ad to your local Craigslist by March 11 and email the url to Delappe: delappe [at] unr.edu

During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software and computers. This is now changing as the figure of the hacker, together with the ideas and practices associated with this figure, are spreading to new walks of life. Thus we are reminded of the origin of hacking in hardware development.

Some notable examples of how hacking is spreading to new areas include open hardware projects, the flourishing of garage biology, and the creation of hacker/ maker-spaces in many cities around the world. The wider importance of this development is suggested by the role played by Japanese hackerspaces in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident. The hackerspaces were instrumental in informing the public, campaigning the government for access to data about contaminated areas, and building easy-to-use equipment for measuring radiation.

These activities bring to mind one of the classic case studies in the STS canon - the Cumbrian farmers herding sheep in the shadow of the Sellafield nuclear power plant. Some of the themes discussed in the Sellafield case and in the STS field as a whole, such as lay expertise and radical openness in information management, are actualised anew with the expansion of hacker practices. Still, until now, the figure of the hackers has rarely been made into an object of sustained interest in fields outside software and new media studies.

In this panel we would like to gather papers with empirical studies of biohacking, hardware hacking and related practices. We also encourage theoretical pieces discussing what the social sciences might contribute to the study of hacking, and what theoretical challenges the figure of the hacker might pose to the study of scientific and technological innovation. Some questions which might be asked in the light of this development include, but are not restricted to, the politics of hacking, the creation of the collective identity of the hacker, how development projects are managed, how the line between the community and firms is negotiated, the diffusion of hacker practices in corporate innovation models, and the legal implications of these practices.

Practical information

All submissions must pass through the official submission system at the 4S site. (see http://4sonline.org/meeting for all details on submitting your paper). Deadline for submissions is 18th of March. Session proposals should be limited to 250 words total, and should contain a theme and a rationale for the session, and a brief discussion of its contribution to the STS community. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organisers of this panel: Johan Soderberg (johan.soderberg at sts.gu.se), Alessandro Delfanti (delfanti at sissa.it), Eric Deibel (ericdeibel at yahoo.com).

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 combined media art and conference event is a critical and inclusive project that addresses the use of interactive media in art and everyday use. It combines a reflective attitude with an active approach and it is transversal in that it goes across institution profiles, production formats and consumption segments. The scope includes conferences, workshops, featured keynotes, video programs, installations and performative works. re-new / IMAC is always looking for persons and projects that help steer and scrutinize the vast and ever-expanding realm of contemporary culture.

The overall theme for re-new / IMAC 2012 will frame cybernetics in the un-controlled/-controllable organizations that penetrate and immerse contemporary mankind and society. Interaction, autonomy, innateness, emergence, meta materials, self-construction and -organization are among the factors that contribute to the field.

Proposals

Proposals of maximum 2 pages can be made for full papers, posters and demos in these categories:

• (Norbert) Wiener Classic
• Cybernetics and (urban) politics
• Bio-cybernetics
• Interactive media art – towards a ‘third order’?
• Artworks

Artistic submission are accepted in all categories relevant to the event theme, with special emphasis on interactive media art forms - performative, installation, participative, collaborative, distributed in sound/ music, visual, haptic and cross-media.

re-new / IMAC 2012 is organized by re-new digital arts forum in collaboration with Aalborg University.

This symposium and performance laboratory will bring together an invited group of international theatre, performance and sound artists, musicians, digital artists, art theorists and researchers engaged in creative practices that reflect on major innovative performance traditions of the past century and their impact on current performance knowledge and physical (or physical-digital) techniques.

The Artaud Forum promotes opening up the concept of performance research, and continuing last year’s intertwined approach to physical and conceptual exploration of practice, it emphasizes the relevance of experimental treatments of actuality — of forms of collaborative creation — that may take us beyond the perspectives and protocols of established academic or artistic inquiry. Even as we turn to technologies of performances this year, artistic and conceptual criteria will be significant, and we have chosen expressive inter/ relations — “konnecting gestures” as the focus of the 2012 workshop — gestures as practice that is at once aesthetic, corporeal, technical and political.

The lab will offer a series of parallel modules investigating the relations between choreography and software, sound and motion-design, movement capture and 3d digital/virtual environment navigation, light and projection architecture, dirty electronics, hacking and interactive programming.

The symposium and workshop are composed of dialogue and performance practice, intermixed with film screenings and a hands-on electronics and wearable design workshop as well as live coding sessions in the digital performance studio.

Featured participants include: Arthur Elsenaar, Thomas Köner, Claudia Robles, John Collingswood, Julie Wilson-Bokowiec, Mark Bokowiec, Jennifer Walshe, Camilla Barratt-Due, Kate Geneviève, Jörg Brinkmann, Simon Katan, Frieder Weiss, Ian Winters, Pieter Verstraete, David Roesner, Andrew Murphy, Nick Collins, Eirini Nedelkopoulou, Darren Vincent Tunstall ,and BADco (Ivana Ivkovic & Zrinka Uzbinec).

Coordinated by Johannes Birringer, Carl Faia and Daniel Ploeger

The “Workshop Words,” as the late Kazuo Ohno called reflections on practice, are published online on our ArtaudForum website and links to performance films/documents will be made. The full program of workshops, roundtables, keynotes, exhibitions and concerts will be published soon.

This event is programmed by the Centre for Contemporary and Digital Performance and supported by the Brunel School of Arts and Brunel University Graduate School.

BADco.’s workshop is a part of LABO21 - European Platform for Interdisciplinary Research on Artistic Methodologies, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

The Center for Contemporary and Digital Performance has its own TV CHANNEL on dance-tech.net, and will broadcast selected events/performances live from the Artaud Performance Centre.

The partnership between the Center and dancetechTV is an experiment in collaborative video broadcasting. The channel allows worldwide 24/7 linear broadcasting of selected programs, LIVE streaming and Video On-demand, and is enveloped within dance-tech.net, a donation based platform.
For a parallel research context of our explorations of gesture, see the extra-institutional “Performance Academy” formed jointly between Interaktionslabor and XMLab.

This symposium and its topic are a continuation of BADco.’s artistic interest to relate performance and image. More concretely, it was motivated by our most recent work Responsibility for Things Seen that was presented in 2011 within the Croatian participation at the Biennale di Venezia. The work required us, in the absence of performers in the six-months exhibition, to pursue the idea of ‘theater by other means’ and to custom develop a database video system that unfolds a particular nexus of body, image and technology.

Who can apply: If you are a scholar or practitioner working on the nexus of performance, image and technology, if you are working in or between any number of fields such as, but not exclusively: performing arts, visual arts, cinema and expanded cinema, human-machine interaction, technological performance, architecture, neuroscience, we are inviting you to present your research interests in form of a presentation and/or participate in the debates at our symposium Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating.

When and where: The symposium will take place on 16-17 March 2011 in Zagreb, Croatia. The artistic programme will start on the 15th.

What is the topic: With “Actionable Image” we propose to explore the experimental encounters between the image and the body — two modalities of organized materiality, agency and receptivity affecting each other, two modes of expression whose encounters in our age are predominantly arranged, composed and mediated by means of visual technologies.

We tend to subscribe to the critique of the domination of image and the scopic regime: the unebbing repetition of hegemonic representations, the homogenization of mediatized social experience, the habituation of sensory apparatus to technological artifice. However, understanding the encounter of image and body as a field of performance allows us to explore this encounter beyond the adequation of sensory perception to technological apparatus, of social behaviors to reproduced images. A mis-encounter where incompatibilites between technology and habit, excess of agency on the side of image or on the side of spectators, interventions in the transmission process, strange situations of viewing emerge, that encounter becomes an indeterminate field of negotiation, slippage, misperformance, deterritorialization and reterritorialization… In short, a field of divergences that are themselves frequent subject to experimentation in art.

With this other scene of image in mind, we calls for contributions that will bring their analysis to bear on situations of problematic spectating, strange apparatuses and dispositifs of viewing, agency of images, strategies of performing images and other issues relevant to the nexus of body, image and technology.

The symposium and attendant artistic programme will include a.o., contributions by artists and scholars such as Jonathan Beller, Maaike Bleeker, Vlatka Horvat, Stephen Zepke and BADco.

What are the keywords: performance and image, performed image, image in performance, image and corporeality, agency of image, actionable image, algorithmic cinema, image and interface, iconicity of image, apparatuses and dispositifs of viewing, cinematic viewing vs theatrical viewing, image and presence/ absence…

How to apply and when is the deadline: We are looking for contributions of various formats, including but not limited to papers, short presentations, demonstrations and participation in the debate, up to 30 minutes in length. If you want to participate in the symposium, please send us a short note stating your topical interests, discussion points, format, etc. and a short description of your background. While we cannot cover your expenses, we can help you find convenient travel arrangement and affordable accommodation, and we will do our best to address your interests and provide an insightful debate.

All proposals should be sent in by 10 February 2012 to: tom at badco.hr.
You’ll be notified of our decision shortly thereafter.

Publication: A special issue of Frakcija Performing Arts Journal will accompany the symposium. We are looking for contributions of those taking part in the symposium, but also others who cannot join us in Zagreb but are researching the topic in academic or artistic formats. Articles, essays and artist’s page(s) proposals will be considered. The submission deadline is March 2, publication June 2012. All proposals (and any questions on submission) should be sent to: ivana at badco.hr

The symposium and attendant artistic program are organized in collaboration with Multimedia Institute/MAMA and the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom/WHW.

The symposium Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating is part of LABO21 – European Platform for Interdisciplinary Research on Artistic Methodologies, a partner project of BADco. (Zagreb), BUDA Arts Center (Kortrijk), Laboratorium (Antwerp) and University of Circus and Dance (Stockholm). With the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

In the coming issue we wish to focus on political geographies, as well as artistic interventions in, and reimaginations of, such geographies. The distinction between “place” and “space” is of particular interest, as it is fundamental not only to much art, but also to our global situation within neoliberal political geography. If time has come for us to reimagine this geography, as well as the interrelationships between, and definitions of “space” and “place”, is it thinkable that art could be an ideal site for such reimagination?

The construction and exploitation of a particularism of the local also seems indigenous to the logic of neoliberalism, in the sense that it relies on the opposition between place and space to be able to expand in the first place. Among other things, the space-place dichotomy facilitates the reduction of developmental issues, political unrest or violence to irrational expressions of local misguidance, backward culture or belief systems. When the evolution of neoliberal space is merged with democratic and civilizing pretentions, the otherness and fixed specificity of places appears to be a legitimate pretext to expand into always new (potentially profitable) areas in and beyond the periphery.

The self-fulfilling prophesy of neoliberal geography also constitutes an effective impasse in alternative visions of political geography –- on the one hand, by making the critical reconstruction of place and its interconnectedness with a larger picture, beyond the dichotomies of space/place and local/global, superfluous -– on the other, by dissimulating any locally based meaning of universality that cannot be reduced to the civilizing prospects and ideals of neoliberal universalist geography. In this sense, the self-upholding myth of the local which neoliberal geography feeds on seems to express another form of orientalism, convincingly presenting itself and its worldview as the necessary cure to global and local problems, and reversely; presenting political issues in localities beyond its borders as a temporary void in its over-arching, inescapable logic.

Contributors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds are invited to submit articles, exhibition reviews or interviews that address the theme “Reimagining the political geography of place and space”, through a high variety of possible angles.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

• Artistic approaches to political geography, artistic intervention in geopolitical discourses and decolonization strategies.
• The concepts of space and place in art, and their renegotiation through art.
• The role of art and artists in the rewriting of history and political geography in post-colonial situations.
• The relationship between neoliberal political geography and orientalism.
• The art biennial as a global phenomenon, and its role in the (re)negotiation of political geography.
• The relationship between the global art scene and neoliberal political geography.
• The relationship between art and geography.

For guidelines and payment rates, please contact Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics at info [at] seismopolite.com

We accept submissions continuously, but to make sure you are considered for the upcoming issue, please send your proposal, CV and samples of earlier work to us within February 10, 2012.

Completed work will be due March 5, 2012. Commissioned works will be translated into Norwegian and published in a bilingual version.

Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics is a bilingual English and Norwegian quarterly, which investigates the possibilities of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation.

The journal editorial board does not privilege any particular theoretical tradition or approach and there are no word or page limits for its articles. TIA publishes papers that connect academic scholarship with activism, what R.K. Merton calls ‘theories of the middle range.’ TIA values radical and unconventional ideas, expressed in different styles, whether academic or journalistic.
TIA is interested in how theory can inform activism to promote economic equality and create democratic political structures. TIA seeks to promote racial, ethnic, and gender equality as well as resistance to all forms of injustice. TIA will only consider manuscripts that are well-written, innovative, and fit the Institute’s mission. Drafts and poorly written or formatted manuscripts will not be considered.

What we Accept

• Submissions of original manuscripts
• Qualitative, Quantitative, Theoretical, or Applied Research
• Book reviews
• Art and Poetry that reflects our mission

Guidelines for Authors here.

Manuscript Submissions here.

Subscriptions & Orders here.

404 International Festival of Art & Technology has been awarded by “Fondo Nacional de las Artes” (National Arts Founding) for the production of the ninth season, which will be organized in different phases throughout 2012.

404 Festival launches an open call destined to artists and researchers from all over the world with the aim of spread and stimulate new media creations.

Authors can submit their works in the following areas:

• Installation
• Net.Art
• Still Image
• Animation
• Video
• Music
• Audiovisual Set
• Theory
• Performance

Submission is free. Please follow the instructions published here.

The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference seeks papers that explore the theme of ‘Interference’ within practices of contemporary image making. Today we’re saturated with images from all disciplines, whether it’s the creation of ‘beautiful visualisations’ for science, the torrent of images uploaded to social media services like Flickr, or the billions of queries made to vast visual data archives such as Google Images. These machinic interpretations of the visual and sensorial experience of the world are producing a new spectacle of media pollution. Machines are in many ways the new artists.

The notion of ‘Interference’ is posed here as an antagonism between production and seduction, as a redirection of affect, or as an untapped potential for repositioning artistic critique. Maybe art doesn’t have to work as a wave that displaces or reinforces the standardized protocols of data/messages, but can instead function as a kind of signal that disrupts and challenges perceptions. ‘Interference’ can stand as a mediating incantation that might create a layer between the constructed image of the ‘everyday’ given to us by science, technological social networks and the means of its construction.

The Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference wants papers that ask:

• Can art interfere with the chaotic storms of data visualization and information processing, or is it merely eulogizing contemporary media?
• Can we think of ‘interference’ as a key tactic for the contemporary image in disrupting and critiquing the continual flood of constructed imagery?
• Are contemporary forms and strategies of interference the same as historical ones? What kinds of similarities and differences exist?

The conference will explore areas related to: Painting, Drawing, Media Art, Film, Video, Photography, Computer visualization, Real-time imaging, Intelligent systems, Image Science.

Participants are asked to address at least one the following areas in their abstract:

• Expanded image
• Remediated image
• Hypermediacy
• Expanded film
• Imaging science
• Computer Vision
• Networked Image
• Immersion
• Proposals

You are invited to submit an abstract for an individual paper relevant to the conference theme as described above. The deadline for abstracts is March, 2012. Abstracts for individual papers should be no longer than 250 words. Please provide full contact details with your abstract.

Refereeing of papers will be done by members of an expert review panel (to Australian DEST refereed conference paper standards). All selected peer reviewed papers will be published in the online conference proceedings.

Please submit by email to conference organizer Andrew Varano transimageconf [at] gmail.com

Conference chairs: Professor Su BAKER Associate Professor Paul THOMAS

Conference Committee: Brad BUCKLEY :: Brogan BUNT :: Ted COLLESS :: Vince DZIEKAN :: Donal FITZPATRICK :: Petra GEMEINBOECK:: Julian GODDARD :: Ross HARLEY :: Martyn JOLLY :: Leon MARVELL :: Daniel MAFE :: Darren TOFTS ::

Timeline

March 30th deadline call for abstracts; April 30th delegates peer reviewed abstracts notified; June 22- 23 Final papers for conference 3000 words.

Conference Partners

National Institute of Experimental Art, College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales; Victorian College of Art, University of Melbourne,.

Conference Sponsors

Australian National University, Curtin University, Deakin University; Monash University; Queensland College of Art, Gold Coast Griffith University; Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, Swinburne University; University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Technology Sydney, University of Wollongong.