Deep Thought V.2 is an artificial intelligence machine, a futuristic fortune teller who uses Twitter as its memory center, from which extracted phrases to communicate in random and poetic way with its environment. Deep Thought analyzes brain signals with galvanic sensors, understanding moods from the variation of current in the skin. It then uses this information to generate searches inside its Twitter memory to find and select phrases to communicate.

Wanted tweets #dtv2: We seek people who share their deep thoughts, micro-poems, micro-philosophy and derivatives. This will help us to extend the memory of our fortune teller, poet, thinker, futurist, machine. Just add hashtag #dtv2 in your tweets.

Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science, and New Media, Rolf Hughes, Jenny Sundén (eds.), Axl Books:

With the practices of art, science and technology increasingly converging, the concepts of origins and originality raise some of the most pressing questions in contemporary research, including issues of agency and accountability, hybridity and identity, intellectual property and oeuvre, intention and authority. These, and a constellation of related philosophical, economic, aesthetic, legislative and political concerns, are today subject to rapid reconfiguration due to the current pace of technological and theoretical change. Second Nature accordingly brings into a productive, interdisciplinary dialogue scholars working at the intersections of art, science and technology. Continue reading

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 17 Issue 1: MISH MASH, August 2011.

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. Continue reading

Scott Draves: Pioneer of Generative Art :: May 13 – June, 2011 :: Opening: May 13; 7:00 – 10:00 pm :: Devotion Gallery, 54 Maujer Street, Brooklyn, NY.

What is the relationship between man and machine? Is open source a sustainable way to run a creative society? Can digital creations have the subtlety we know in the natural world? These are the issues addressed by Scott Draves’s work; he creates art by writing software that runs an internet distributed supercomputer consisting of 450,000 computers and people, creating images as a form of artificial life, each with its own genome, generated by thousands of numbers that define how it looks and moves. The first versions of this algorithm date from 1992. Continue reading

Vida 13.2 Art & Artificial Life International Competition:: Call for Submissions — Deadline: July 27, 20011 Continue reading

Fundación Telefónica announces the VIDA 13.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition :: Call for Entries — Deadline: November 7, 2010.

At a time when the notion of life is once again located in an uncertain domain, a wide range of artistic initiatives come together to illustrate and investigate this phenomenon; they examine the impact on the collective conscience and the way it is manifested in cultural, technological and social thought.

Over the last decade, in the same formal space, VIDA has been bringing together inter-disciplinary projects that respond to this situation. By means of formal strategies that defy the boundaries between existing practices, these projects offer new ways of reflecting on what we understand by life and artificial life. Continue reading

The Emergence of Consciousness Project: Investigating Machine Consciousness Through Performance Art — Event with performance/installation, talks and robot-building ‘drop-in’ workshop takes place :: July 25, 2010: Installation + Workshop (Steve Carpenter, robot building): 12:00 – 5:00 pm; Talks: 2:00 – 5:00 pm (Harry Witchell, Inman Harvey, Anna Dumitiru); Performance: 3:30 pm :: Lighthouse, Brighton, UK (part of the London 2012 Open Weekend) .

The Emergence of Consciousness by Anna Dumitriu: By taking on the role of a robotic agent the artist will try to begin to understand her own mind in new ways and by working with a scientist and a philosopher meaningful interactions can develop with the potential to produce innovative outcomes. Continue reading

ARTS SANTA MONICA- Laboratori: Cultures of change. Social Atoms and Electronic Lives :: December 11 , 2009 – February 28, 2010 :: Opening and Lecture (Luc Steels. “Can robots create their own language?”): December 10, 8:00 pm :: Departament de Cultura i Mitjans de Comunicació- Generalitat de Catalunya, La Rambla, 7, 08002 Barcelona, Spain.

Cultures of change. Social Atoms and Electronic Lives examines the social and cultural dynamics from a highly multidisciplinary perspective, from the hand of the complexity sciences and digital technologies. Information and communication technologies have made possible to quantify and monitor, process and display aspects of our society and our culture unthinkable until recently. Continue reading

[Image from Volume Magazine (Hight/Wehby)] Modulated Mapping: Talking with Jeremy Hight about Layers, Channels and  Social Augmented Experience originally posted on UgoTrade:

Tish Shute: I know you have been involved in locative media from its early days. Perhaps we can talk about how AR continues the locative media journey?

Blair MacIntyre gave me this distinction, recently: “AR is about systems that put media out in the world, and immerse you in a mixed space. Even the current “not really registered” mobile phone AR systems are still “sort of” AR (e.g., Layar, etc).

Locative media/ubicomp/etc are very different, in that they tend to display media on a device (phone screen) that is relevant to your context, but does not attempt to merge it with the world. The difference is significant, and making it clear helps people think about what they do and what they want to do, with their work. The locative media space though points toward future AR systems (when the technology catches up!).” Continue reading

Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press (download the Introduction)

What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential.

Wardrip-Fruin suggests that it is the authors and artists with knowledge of these processes who will use the expressive potential of computation to define the future of fiction and games. Continue reading