Dear Friends,

Now celebrating its 30th year of service to artists, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) has a distinguished history in two experimental fields, radio art and net art; it has commissioned, distributed and archived hundreds of works, thereby supporting and advancing many artists’ careers, and establishing itself as a vital resource for arts and educational institutions, and the general public. NRPA is the only organization in the United States that has as its core mission the commissioning of networked art by both emerging and established artists.

Although times are tough for many of you, we’re asking you to dig deep and make a contribution (tax-deductible for US Residents) that will enable NRPA to continue providing you with free access to our extraordinary projects: Turbulence.org, Networked_Performance, Networked_Music_Review, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art), Upgrade! Boston, and New American Radio.

Please go to the Turbulence homepage to contribute via PayPal or check.

With Thanks and Sincere Good Wishes for 2011,

Helen Thorington and Jo-Anne Green
Co-Directors

PS: Connect with us on Facebook (turbulence.org; nrpa.org) and on Twitter.

The Smart Frrridge by Nicolas Ceccaldi, Simon Denny, Yngve Holen, Ilja Karilampi, Morag Keil, AIDS-3D (Keller / Kosmas), Marlie Mul :: Curators: Sandro Droschl, Yngve Holen :: until February 19, 2011 :: Kunstverein Medienturm, Josefigasse 1, 8020 Graz, Austria.

The current fridge interface contains many flaws that could be improved and expanded. For example you can’t see everything in your fridge at a glance. You thought you’d bought hot sauce, but you don’t see it anywhere. Or imagine it’s dark, it’s the middle of the night, you turn to your fridge and when staring into the light you can’t remember when you bought something. When exactly did you put those leftover fish-sticks in there? How old is that Bircher-muesli? What’s up with that asparagus? Continue reading

East of Borneo: A Collaborative Art Journal and Multimedia Archive edited by Thomas Lawson:

The launch of East of Borneo marks the convergence of two very distinct lines of thought. What is the nature, and the future, of art magazines? And how might we give form to the sprawling history of art in Los Angeles, a form that can be generative and productive, not merely descriptive or fancifully speculative?

Launched in October 2010, East of Borneo is a collaborative online art journal and multimedia archive that offers a new way to research and present the various histories of contemporary art. Its hybrid form — which publishes newly commissioned art writing within a larger context of user generated material — reflects an editorial process of thinking through the delights and constraints of printed magazines, and fully considering the transcendent possibilities of online publishing today. Continue reading

[Image by Brad Farwell] Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal’s latest work, The 3rdi Project, began capturing images on December 15 from the “third eye” in the back of Bilal’s head — a surgically-implanted camera. The 3rdi Project will be unveiled in Doha, Qatar as part of the Told/Untold/Retold exhibition that inaugurates the new Arab Museum of Modern Art near Education City, Doha’s intellectual hub.

The camera spontaneously transmits one image per minute to a website, with the inaugural images to be displayed in a custom-designed room in the Doha gallery. Bilal’s piece will be part of the museum’s new permanent collection, 20 years in the making, including more than 6,000 works by Arab artists from North Africa to the Gulf, from the 1920s to the present day. Continue reading

Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure on Facebook. When you enter the game, you find yourself on Pluto, in a city under the rule of Elastic Versailles revision 14 (EVr14), an Artificial Intelligence functioning as an entertainment colony. It is the Las Vegas of the Solar System, a true paradise for consumers and corporations alike.

Versailles is a capital of convenience, a non stop 24hr zone of endless pleasure, provided by Pluto’s huge entertainment corporations. Amuse yourself and your friends for hours on end collecting meaningless tokens, talking to our bland robots, or you could always just relax and take in the staggering conformity of your new home. Continue reading

Joseph Beuys – We Are the Revolution :: until February 13, 2011 :: Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.

The largest retrospective ever dedicated to the work of German artist Joseph Beuys in Brazil arrives at the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, in Salvador, after being seen by 40,000 people at SESC Pompeia, in São Paulo. Joseph Beuys – We Are the Revolution features over 250 works, including posters, multiples, actions and documentaries produced in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

Organized by curator Antonio d’Avossa and general curator Solange Farkas, president of Associação Cultural Videobrasil and director of the Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, the exhibition reveals the diversity of strategies used by the artist to spread political and philosophical propositions, laying bare the communication project behind one of the 20th century’s most influential bodies of work. Continue reading

Hans Ulrich Obrist In Conversation with Hakim Bey, e-flux Journal #21:

[…] “HUO: I also wanted to ask you about the origins of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is a book that changed the way I approached exhibitions … Most of my exhibitions in the ‘90s, and … Utopia Station in the 2000s, relinquished the curatorial master plan in favor of being temporary autonomous zones in which we would basically invite collectives and artists to curate shows within the show. So for me it was a toolbox for curating, and I always wondered how you came to write that book, how its genesis came about?

HB: Well, the real genesis was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook. And of course the main criticism of this activity is that it didn’t last. But these things tend to be very ephemeral — if a secular commune lasts in America for ten years, it’s a miracle. Usually only the religious ones last longer than a generation — and usually at the expense of becoming quite authoritarian, and probably dismal and boring as well. Continue reading

Art: What’s the Use? :: January 14, 2011; 11:00 am – 6:00 pm :: Zilkha Auditorium, Whitechapel Gallery :: Tickets are available here.

This symposium aims to ask: What is the use-value of art today, how is it useful, and for whom? What are the particular imaginative and cognitive skills, competences and approaches that could take effect as part of the general symbolic economy beyond the artworld? What are the lessons and influences of movements which sought an unambiguously social and political function for their experiments? And finally, what are the conditions that enable artists not simply to reflect upon the world, but to act within and change it?

The increasing visibility of contemporary art, together with the shift in art discourse towards the social dimension, not to mention the sheer number of people now practicing as artists, all make the use value of art a vital issue. Continue reading

Interview with Michel Bauwens, founder of Foundation for P2P Alternatives by Lawrence Bird, on Furtherfield.org:

Michel Bauwens is one of the foremost thinkers on the peer-to-peer phenomenon. Belgian-born and currently resident in Chiang-Mai, Thailand, he is founder of the Foundation for P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Alternatives, and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property.

Lawrence Bird is a designer, instructor and writer with an interest in cities and their image. He has been trained in social science-based urban design (MSc), and in the phenomenology of cinematic architecture (PhD). He’s currently working on the postdoctoral project Beyond the Desert of the Real, based in Winnipeg, Canada. He also makes films, and is currently developing a hybrid film and animation project WPG_POV.

The Widget Art Gallery is little virtual gallery-room inside a widget. Download the zip file, double click on it and it will install itself directly into your dashboard (OSX only). Every two months, The Widget Art Gallery hosts a solo digital art exhibition related to the site-specific contest; directly at your house, comfortably on your PC at your leisure. Artworks proposals are welcome to chiarapassa [at] gmail.com.