Turbulence Commission: Endgame: A Cold War Love Story by Tal Halpern [Needs Adobe Flash Player]:

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. Continue reading

Blowup: We Are All Crew :: November 3-5, 2011 :: V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, 3012 XL, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

To acknowledge the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth, this edition of Blowup will present the ‘Strategic Art Initiative 2.0’ exhibition of re-created early telematic artworks; the worldwide premiere of ‘Them F*ckin’ Robots’, a documentary on the work and influence of electronic art pioneer Norman White; a keynote lecture by Dutch thinker and author Arjen Mulder, examining the things we love and love to hate about McLuhan; and a closing party for the exhibition featuring a custom cocktail. Continue reading

On nettime, Timothy Druckrey wrote: No doubt lengthy paeans will be forthcoming from the Kittler scholars. They will be, of course, well deserved for a thinker whose work traversed so many spheres. For us in the media, Kittler’s work has been an indispensable source of rigor and insight. Back in 1987, I read the first chapter of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter in the journal October. After that, his name surfaced in many sources and I read everything I could find with voracious interest. He was regularly in the media festivals and his intense presence was a stark challenge to the kind of idiosyncratic history that was/is still so prevalent in the media sphere. Continue reading

Naked on Pluto — by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk — is the winner of VIDA 13.2, the prestigious international art and artificial life contest. Continue reading

Dreaming of a Butterfly by António Caramelo: “45 acrylic tubes are arranged within the display box. Each tube has a “mechanical” butterfly placed within and their movements are synchronised with the sound system — where microphones obtain real time sound of the surrounding area, and amplify the sounds to the internal subwoofers speakers to produce the necessary input to cause the aleatory movements of the butterflies. As the sound captured reach higher volume, the movement of the butterflies increase.

Each butterfly is attached inside to the acrylic tube by a filament that runs to the battery housing. There is a certain amount of realness to it, while it is understated up close (people can see the filament when the butterfly is at a standstill — or the sound volume is low), but from farther away the fleeting butterfly appears to be real and trying to find its escape! Continue reading

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP), Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Continue reading

“In a very short time since they appeared, digital photo frames have become so popular that they now regularly invite aesthetic experimentation. In his recent project Poser, Constant Dullaart has offered an ironic view of this media. Slipping inside the device, the artist has designed some chroma keys of himself and, using a cinematic technique, he has added himself into some group portraits found online (one of the distinguishing features of the Dutch artist is his reworking of material from the web). From Leon Battista Alberti onwards, art history is littered with attempts to overcome the physical limits of the frame – to enter into or move beyond it.

Therefore the originality of Poser is not to be found in this invasion, but rather in the artist’s intention to inhabit contemporary technological devices, to become part of them and to understand their specific natures. Continue reading

Place Making and The Art of Engagement by Linda Carroli, ArtsHub, October 10, 2011:

Urban innovation can mean or refer to many things and there’s no shortage of ideas about how to make cities better. As the theory and more deterministic ‘forecasting’ goes, cities must get better if they are to foster and sustain the types of globalised knowledge and creative economies that will underwrite the future. However, there can be both disagreement and diversity in how to understand what better and development actually mean in and for the urban environments.

Two recent Australian publications reveal some of that diversity by presenting a series of case studies in community engagement, site specificity and place. Continue reading

Ever wondered what solar cells do at night? Introducing Meet Discotrope: The Secret Nightlife of Solar Cells by Amy Alexander and Annina Rüst, with algorithmic sound design by Cristyn Magnus. Continue reading

Medium_Massage 2.0 :: an infinite inventory :: November 5 – December 3, 2011 :: Opening Reception: November 5; 2:00 – 5:00 pm :: Scotiabank, 80 Spadina Ave, Suite 310, Toronto, Canada.

“All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical” The Medium is The Massage, Marshall McLuhan p 26

Medium_Massage 2.0 :: an infinite inventory is a net-based exhibition inspired by Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore’s collaborative book The Medium is the Massage. Published in 1967 in an experimental format that fused Fiore’s engaging graphic style and visual language with McLuhan’s text, The Medium is the Massage introduced McLuhan’s theories of media and communications technology to a mass audience. Continue reading