|
|
New Media and the Digital Arts
-
 "Under the theme Conspire... transmediale.08 aims to hear from a broad range of artists, media activists and academics working within the realms of digital art and culture in ways which may be read as elaborating upon and challenging our understanding of collaborative and network practice. As such transmediale.08 looks to the cross-disciplinary tinkerers, utopian spelunkers, conspiratorial hoaxsters and stealth tacticians who question, subvert, undermine and bypass the unspoken rules, hidden codes of conduct and assumed truths entrenched within our information driven communication cultures and ideological belief structures.
By exploring subversive artistic methodologies and developing (counter-) conspiratorial strategies to uncover new forms of expression and digital discourse Conspire... will attempt to enter the increasingly prevalent yet ambiguous worlds of network induced narratives, cryptic environments and speculative inquiry ..."
transmediale.08 – Conspire ...
festival for art and digital culture
berlin 29 January - 3 February 2008
festival for adventurous music and related visual arts
25 January - 2 February 2008
_Call for Entries_
:: Deadline: 7 September 2007 ::
Award Ceremony: 2 February 2008
Find the complete call and submission form for download at:
http://transmediale.de/08/pdf/tmctm08_call
*transmediale.08 - Conspire ... & club transmediale.08 - Unpredictable*
Together, transmediale and club transmediale invite the submission of works and projects for the festival 2008. Submissions for both festivals participate in the transmediale Award 2008, for which an international jury will award prizes totalling ca. 10 000 EUR. Abstracts and papers for a proposed Vilém Flusser Theory Award are also being invited.
As one of the leading international festivals for art and digital culture, transmediale presents and pursues the advancement of artistic positions reflecting on the socio-cultural, political and economic impact of new technologies. It seeks out artistic practices that not only respond to scientific or technical developments, but that try to shape the way in which we think about and experience the technologies which impact virtually all aspects of our daily lives. As such, transmediale understands media technologies as cultural techniques that need to be embraced in order to comprehend, critique, and shape global societies.
club transmediale (CTM) is a prominent international festival dedicated to contemporary electronic, digital and experimental music, as well as the diverse range of artistic activities in the context of sound and club culture. CTM presents projects that experiment with new aesthetic parameters and new forms of cooperation, develop possibilities for informational and economic self-determination, and reflect on the role of contemporary music against the backdrop of technological and social transformations. Now more than ever, music emerges as a laboratory for multiform experiments and as an active agent that allows for new cultural techniques to be tested and proffered to the wider world. CTM puts the focus on direct experience, risk-taking and personal interaction, and thereby emphasises the situational potential of live performance, the interplay of various media – sound and image, in particular – and candid exchange between sub-cultural and academic initiatives.
transmediale is a project of the Kulturprojekte Berlin in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt. transmediale is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. club transmediale is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds. ;
|
-
 A wonderful viral marketing site, Will It Blend? hosts a series of videos showing Blendtec's blenders grinding various household items into dust. This week on Will It Blend? Tom Dickson makes an iPhone Smoothie!
Other crazy links to iPhone hysteria on Boing Boing.
|
-
ACM
Multimedia 2007 Interactive Art Program
23-29 September, Augsburg, Germany
In collaboration with
Leonardo
http://iap07.multimedia.fh-augsburg.de/
*** DEADLINE
EXTENDED TO MAY 22 ***
CALL FOR
EXHIBITION ENTRIES AND PAPERS
ACM
Multimedia 2007 is the premier annual multimedia conference, covering
all
aspects of multimedia computing. The ACM MM Interactive Art Program seeks
to
bring together the arts and multimedia communities to create the stage
to
explore, discuss, and push the limits for the advancement of both
multimedia
technology through the arts, and the arts through multimedia
technology.
This fourth
version of the Interactive Art Program will consist of a conference
track and
an art exhibition. We invite artists working with digital media
and
researchers in technical areas to submit their original contributions to
the
following tracks:
-
Conference track: we solicit papers describing interactive
multimedia
artworks, tools, applications, and technical approaches for
creative uses of
multimedia content and technology as well as technical
approaches for the
management of art-related media collections. Emphasis will
be given to novel
works that use a rich variety of media and those that are
interactive,
particularly works that exploit non-conventional human-computer
interfaces or
sensors in new and emerging areas. We strongly encourage papers
with a strong
technical content written by artists. Papers may be long (10
pages) or short (2
to 4 pages). Long papers are presented in front of an
audience and short papers
are presented in poster format. New Deadline for
full papers to the Arts
Program Conference Track May 22, 2007
Deadline for
short papers to the Arts Program Conference Track June 1,
2007
-
Multimedia art exhibition: "I / You / Other". We seek artworks that
use
multimedia to explore issues of self-exploration, self-presentation
towards
another, the self in a group or the group as a self. We particularly
seek
interactive multimedia works that by combining multiple media,
technologies,
and novel technical ideas, realize strong artistic concepts
that give a new
perspective on the topic of the exhibition. New Deadline for
submission to the
Art Exhibition: May 22, 2007
For further
submission details please see
http://iap07.multimedia.fh-augsburg.de/
Accepted
papers and art works will be published in the ACM Multimedia
Conference
proceedings.
Important Dates
May 22, 2007 Long papers and art exhibitions
submission deadline.
June 1, 2007 Short papers submission deadline.
June
20, 2007 Authors notification.
July 20, 2007 Camera-ready papers
due.
Program
Chairs
Alejandro
Jaimes, IDIAP Research Institute , Switzerland
(Alex.Jaimes@idiap.ch)
Frank Nack, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France
(frank.nack@liris.cnrs.fr)
Thomas Rist, FH Augsburg, Germany
(tr@rz.fh-augsburg.de)
Curatorial
Committee
Annet
Decker, Montevideo, Amsterdam
Anne Nigten,
V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam
Prof. Robert Rose, time based
media, Faculty of Design, Augsburg University of
Applied Sciences,
Augsburg
Alejandro Jaimes, IDIAP Research
Institute , Switzerland
(Alex.Jaimes@idiap.ch)
Frank Nack, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France
(frank.nack@liris.cnrs.fr)
Thomas Rist, FH Augsburg, Germany
(tr@rz.fh-augsburg.de)
|
-
sCrAmBlEd? HaCkZ! analyzes samples from recorded video which it then maps to live audio. The result is an audio / video cut-up playback of what you speak or sing into a microphone.
Some fun performance at about 5 minutes into the video.
|
-
The Net Squared conference will bring a dynamic mix of international leaders in emerging technology, politics and philanthropy together to discuss the future of tech enabled social change work. Tickets to attend the conference physically have sold out - but there will be a number of different ways you can enjoy the events online and the conversation won't stop on the 31st of May. We hope you will explore the resources, news and views throughout the Net Squared site. Please see Netsquared.org/remote to learn more about online participation during the conference.
Call it Web 2.0, call it the Social Web or call it Information and Communication Technologies for Development; one way or the other - these are exciting times to prepare for and move into the future. Please join us for an ongoing conversation about collaboration, empowerment, inclusion and sustainability here at Net Squared - remixing the web for social change!
|
-
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. NMC member institutions are found in almost every state in the US, across Canada, and in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Among the membership are an elite list of the most highly regarded colleges and universities in the world, as well as a growing list of innovative museums, research centers, foundations, and forward-thinking companies.
2006 NMC Summer Conference
Cleveland, Ohio
June 7 - 10, 2006 
The consortium serves as a catalyst for the development of new applications of technology to support learning and creative expression, and sponsors programs and activities designed to stimulate innovation, encourage collaboration, and recognize excellence among its member institutions. Through its many projects, its comprehensive web site, and its series of international conferences, the NMC stimulates dialog and understanding through the exploration of promising ideas, technologies, and applications.
Projects & Initiatives
The Emerging Technologies Initiative focuses on expanding the boundaries of teaching, learning and creative expression by creatively applying new tools in new contexts. The Horizon Project, the centerpiece of this initiative, charts the landscape of emerging technologies and produces the NMC’s annual Horizon Report. The 21st Century Literacy Initiative, the NMC’s newest, is a multi-year effort to explore and expand the potential of new developments in visual and digital literacy. In 2005, this initiative replaced the longstanding and very successful Learning Object Initiative.
The remaining two initiatives provide the foundation for the work of the consortium. The Dynamic Knowledge Initiative provides a mechanism for the NMC to generate, distribute, and share knowledge on topics of interest to the organization. The NMC’s Series of Online Conferences, through which the NMC is building a web of knowledge and online resources, is the most visible expression of this initiative. The New Collaborations Initiative encourages collaboration, knowledge exchange, and joint projects between colleges and universities, museums, libraries, research centers, and other learning-focused organizations. The Pachyderm Project is its centerpiece and experimental test bed.
As a central part of its mission, the NMC encourages and supports innovation in the pursuit of effective collaboration, especially in the activities and projects in which it plays a leadership role.
|
-
 "Pecha Kucha is a Japanese term that roughly translates as chit-chat, or perhaps as irritating chatter." Originally created by Klein Dytham architecture in Tokyo, where this idea has already gained a lot of success, Pecha Kucha is an image sharing, design event that has been happening in San Francisco for the last three months. The venue for this event was 330 Ritch, a hip but gritty club tucked in an alley down near Pac Bell park.
I went in with some preconceived notions that didn't line up with the events that actually transpired. I supposed that there would be a lot of high-end graphic design and architecture projects with folks showing the latest and greatest of what they'd been working on. Instead the evening played out much more like a comfortable salon.
Presenters dropped their images onto a central computer which projected slideshows as the rules of Pecha Kucha define: 20 people showing 20 images for 20 seconds each. The presentations ranged from elevations and satellite photos of the greatest architectural environments created by humans to photos of album covers from late 60s to early 80s jazz and rock bands. Some presentations were very personal such as a slideshow of work done by one presenter's students and associates and another set of photographs of a rural mining ghost town in [West Virginia, Pensylvania].
The salon environment led to an easy atmosphere for conversation with the wall-to-wall crowd (I didn't get a seat the whole night). There was almost an air of this event being "Flickr Live". One bit of bashing I would like to do is to condemn the group that ordered pizza into 330 Ritch for their small table while the rest of us had to stand there and smell it - selfish and way out of line.
All-in-all this event was the kind of community building that continues to fight the anonymity of city living and I'm excited to see what develops. In looking over past Pecha Kucha events in SF, it appears that a lot of the presenters have been the same over the last three months. There were no shortage of folks in the room so hopefully some unique members of the audience will step up for future events.
Subscribe to the mailing list at the San Francisco Pecha Kucha site for info on upcoming events.
|
-
Works by David Hatcher, Mitzi Pederson, Wayne Smith
Essay by Kevin Killian
Curated by Margaret Tedesco
March 31–April 29, 2006
Opening reception, Friday March 31, 7–10 pm
Queen's Nails Annex is pleased to present overundersidewaysdown the third in a series of guest curated exhibitions. This current project is curated by Margaret Tedesco and presents the latest work by San Francisco artists Mitzi Pederson , Wayne Smith, and David Hatcher from Los Angeles. Parallel to the exhibition an essay written by noted San Francisco poet, novelist, critic and playwright Kevin Killian.
over, under, sideways, down
backwards, forwards, square, and round
when will it end, will it
when will it end
hey
—From the song by The Yardbirds, 1966
The framework for the exhibition overundersidewaysdown is motivated by the notion of
“surround sound”—that which conveys an experience where one is surrounded 360 degrees
by sound. The works of the three artists included paraphrase in their articulation and use of materials from drawing, sculpture, sound (i.e., sampling, field recordings, and live performance) to appropriated images and collaboration with formal histories and/or pop signifiers. The elements of origin figure prominently in front and behind encountering an enveloped fuzzy dissonance that tracks and overlaps a heightened sense of time and space.
About the Artists:
David Hatcher is an artist and nutritional psychiatrist based in Los Angeles and Berlin, Germany. Hatcher’s work investigates social, political, economic, philosophical and aesthetic discourse at the level of its material and optical artifacts. His ongoing project Oedipal Manoeuvres in the Dark, examines the visual forms and aesthetics of critical discourse in the West and has been exhibited and acquired in Europe, the US and Australasia in a variety of print and installation formats. His forthcoming book I Don’t Must (Revolver Verlag, Frankfurt, 2006) attempts to facilitate and record dialogue between aesthetic practitioners and protagonists from a range of interdependent fields, including activism around indigenous sovereignty in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the standardization industry in the European Union, the pitfalls of political asylum for citizens of Belarus wishing to leave their culture of origin, identity politics in East Africa and their relationship to the question of militancy and the history of blotter art in San Francisco and beyond. He is currently working as an independent analyst for Los Angeles based non-profit arts organization Art2102, and occasionally lectures and publishes on contemporary art and culture with a particular focus on the Asia Pacific Region.
San Francisco-based artist Mitzi Pederson’s practice revolves around aspects of reconsideration highlighting mistakes or amendments, and bringing attention to that which goes unnoticed. Pederson plays with visual and spatial conditions to confuse perception. Accumulation of elements, use of specific materials, light, and movement creates subtle and constant change. These arrangements explore how accumulated parts exist as distinct entities and simultaneously function as a whole and define tangibility. Pederson utilizes found objects and pre-fabricated materials, such as plywood or cinderblock. The result provides remnants that then manipulate and create a new object. This new altered object maintains a sense of history and former identity, while contradicting the previous perception of that object. The transformation involves meticulous reconfiguration and organization of the materials.
Pederson received her MFA in painting and drawing from California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2004, and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. Her work has been shown both locally and internationally with a scheduled solo exhibition at White Columns, New York this year. Pederson is represented by Ratio 3, San Francisco.
Wayne Smith is a San Francisco-based artist who works in a variety of media including drawing, scanner-based photography, video and sound. His work has been shown locally and nationally. Smith’s sound work employs a combination of sampling, field recordings and live performance. Recording as Aero-Mic’d, he has released two CDs: Aero-Mic’d and Under A Sun. A new disc, titled I Think You’re Great, to be released in conjunction with the upcoming show overundersidewaysdown. Smith has co-written several plays with local author Kevin Killian as part of SF Poet’s Theatre, currently his play Manual for a Block has been performed as part of Small Press Traffic’s Poet’s Theatre Festival, and at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. He is currently collaborating with Berlin-based artist D-L Alvarez on a new sound/video installation about late-sixties California culture. Smith is an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA.
Kevin Killian is a US poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written a book of poetry, Argento Series (2001), two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer (1997), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), and a book of stories, Little Men (1996) that won the PEN Oakland award for fiction. A second collection I Cry Like a Baby was published by Painted Leaf Books in 2001. With Lew Ellingham, Killian has written many essays and articles on the life and work of the American poet Jack Spicer [1925-65] and co-edited Spicer's posthumous books The Train of Thought and The Tower of Babel (both 1994). Their biography of Spicer, Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1998. He and Peter Gizzi are currently (2006) editing Spicer's complete poems. For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (1996, with Leslie Scalapino) and Often (2001, with the late Barbara Guest). He is the film columnist for the new online journal Fanzine. His next book-in fact, his next two books—will be all about Kylie Minogue.
Queen's Nails Annex is located in the Mission district of San Francisco and serves as a project space dedicated to presenting collaborative, site-specific and experimental works by artists. QNA hopes to challenge both emerging and established artists to work outside their 'normal' practice in order to produce unique projects. Queen's Nails Annex is co-directed and curated by Bay Area visual artists Bob Linder and Julio Morales.
QUEEN'S NAILS ANNEX
3191 MISSION STREET
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94110
415.706.1786 / 415.992.2041
www.queensnailsannex.com
THURSDAY-SATURDAY 12-6 PM
|
-
New Langton Arts has a 30 year history of presenting some of the most cutting edge arts in the bay area. A few short blocks and only a short step down the contemporary arts food chain from Yerba Buena Center, New Langton in their building at 1246 Folsom have continuously presented some of the highest quality gallery exhibits, performances, lectures and even web media. The current show, Elusive Materials, which runs from March 16-April 22, 2006, exhibits the work of ten artists who have shown at Langton over the past three decades.
This show takes over the entire facility at New Langton. The downstairs venue has been transformed into viewing chambers for a work by Antonio Muntadas entitled "Between the Frames: The Forum". The content of this work is a spectacular, close-up look at the 1980s art system. This work consists of 160 interviews that the artist conducted between 1983 and 1992 that have been edited into eight chapters: the dealers, the collectors, the galleries, the museums, the docents, the critics, the media, and epilogue. As difficult as any gallery presentation of video is for the casual visitor, this presentation in particular suffers from a an inattention to audio. The rooms are arranged in a sort of semi-circle with each room's open door facing an empty wall - perfect for bouncing the sound into every adjacent room. Even more distressing is that the televisions are mounted into the walls with their speakers completely covered. The result is a cacophony of chatter that is nearly indiscernible from noise unless you are impossibly close to the TVs, in fact, too close to even see the screen. I hope that this work will be presented in a web media outlet. New Langton vodcast anyone?
The works upstairs completely refreshed any distress I picked up in the noisy, dark exhibit below. Upon entering the gallery the first exhibit presented is Nina Katchadourian's Surface Spoils: Concrete Music from Europe. This is a beautiful presentation of found object art in the form of audio tape which is both visually appealing as well as conceptually interesting. The artist has not only restored the found 1/4" tapes and burnt them to a CD which one can listen to at an audio stand by the exhibit, but she has also created a gallery trace which shows the locations the tapes were found and even the actual tapes themselves in capsules containing maps on the wall.
On the backside of the sparse, clean audio tape exhibit is Colter Jacobsen's recreation of his studio. On the road well traveled of found object art, it is fairly difficult to stand out, and this exhibit is no exception. The presentation is fun to look at and well laid out but yet another collection of discarded cardboard signs and photos.
Douglas Huebler’s Variable Piece #70 is a photo project to document the existence of every person alive. This presentation at New Langton was sadly only represented by a handful of pictures but raised a lot of provocative questions. Is the project a solo endeavor or something that will be maintained by a foundation as an attempt to complete the project like John Cage’s “As Slow as Possible” which was picked up in 2003 by a group of folks who propose 639 years to complete playing the song. Is it even theoretically possible to photograph everyone or what would be the required number of photo teams to keep up with the current birth rate? The project rings of a jovial lunacy. 
Last but not least I’d like to comment on the lunacy of Lynn Hershman Leeson and the presentation at New Langton in this show of some of her Roberta Breitmore artifacts. Hershman Leeson donned an unfamiliar outfit and an unfamiliar persona to become a completely different person. During this experiment, her theater in real life began to merge with reality and become a bit of a personal threat to the well being of the artist. This project in some ways represents in extreme what most people experience in the process of working for art. The impracticality of artistic thinking and the necessity to strive for non-normal and hyper-normal experience causes most people to walk the border of what would normally be call sane. Thankfully New Langton has offered an anchor to keep experimental arts experience firmly grounded in San Francisco for thirty years. This artist hopes the doors stay open and the lights stay on to gather the community of the arts at New Langton for thirty more!
|
-
Amazon.com's Web Services group has released a strange new tool for interactive web collaboration, the Mechanical Turk. This device is named after a 17th century 'chess computer' which was actually a wooden dummy operated by a chess master in a box out-of-view. The notion is that there are things that computers do well yet there are areas where humans still significantly outperform computers, like identifying specific images in photographs “- something children can do even before they learn to speak.”
“Amazon Mechanical Turk provides a web services API for computers to integrate "artificial, artificial intelligence" directly into their processing by making requests of humans. Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web services API to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. In reality, a network of humans fuels this artificial, artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work.”
In the fanciful world in which Amazon has created for their 'Mechanical Turk', this tool is challenging notions of who controls whom; computers asking humans for help. However, the real world application is less involved with computers 'shelling out' to the real world for answers as it is a means to create a micro-task project assignment system, or Collaborative Human Interpreter.
In the daily business life, there are many occasions to request help, from proofreading to research to tasks which require a network of skilled individuals. There aren't always the resources handy to accomplish these goals. With a micro-project system which evaluates the performance of its humanodes and can require members of a qualified skill level to accomplish its tasks these needs can be pushed out to a disperate group of individuals anywhere in the world.
This presents some significant potential efficiencies in assigning projects and tasks and accomplishing goals. It will be interesting to see the questions raised by this near anonymous contract work.
|
-
Finally the overuse of the term 'Beta' is getting some attention. The Wall Street Journal ran a story today calling major players in the software industry on their use of 'the Beta excuse'. What was once a term used in computer development, where alpha meant a period of internal testing and beta meant a brief test by a handpicked selection of the public, has become a widespread marketing tool to release half-baked software onto the masses.
I suspect that our era of Open Source and the success of the perpetual development model has allowed greater public acceptance of incomplete product. Tech savvy consumers eager to get their hands on new technology are willing to work with deficient or downright buggy tools. Software from Microsoft Windows to Mac OSX now offer daily downloads indicating that these programs are never quite 'finished' so jumping into a 'beta' software such as Google's GMail or Yahoo's Flickr isn't a giant step for most users.
The unfortunate side effect is that we have lost the original meaning of the term 'beta'. This bastardization of the term has fooled even the new media pundits. JD Lasica, co-founder and executive director of Ourmedia.org, recently posted a dismissive blog entry on the new beta video tool in Six Apart's TypePad product. The tool is in a real 'beta' period and is only offering upload of 2 minute videos - this doesn't satisfy the consumer who wants a beta to be functional rather than a test environment.
It would seem that we need a new term to define the period between alpha and the marketing term beta - something that accurately describes the test period and can work outside the heightened expectations of the new vernacular.
|
-
New media pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson presents work on both coasts this December. The University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery in Seattle is exhibiting a show titled 'Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson' from November 5, 2005 - January 29, 2006 and Bitforms Gallery in New York is showing new and retrospective works from December 10, 2005 to January 14, 2006 including DiNA, a telepresent chat-bot (pictured) conversant in current affairs.
I had the opportunity to have lunch with Hershman at Ars Electronica in 2004. At the time she was developing a political platform for DiNA with the Vote for DiNA project. DiNA was running as a counter candidate to the presidency but was not running for the presidency itself. In fact, DiNA had her sights set on a larger vision: DiNA for Telepathic Telepresent Oracle!
A New York Times article this weekend entilted 'Pardon Me, but the Art Is Mouthing Off' (free subscription) presents an excellent history of Hershman Leeson's over thirty years creating electronic and communications art.
|
-
PodcasterCon 2006 is a free one day conference open to all participants to discuss and learn about podcasting. It’s being held from 11am to 4pm, Saturday, January 7, 2006 in 116 Murphey Hall at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Its primary focus is on learning. The not for profit event is being organized by a group of volunteers from around the world.
The event will not have traditional speakers, commercial product pitches, or bags full of conference swag. The event will have free food and drink, a pre-organized session on podcasting basics, and will be conducted in an unconference style. This primarily involves creating the specific discussion topics the day of by the people who attend. Please goto this page on their blog to learn more about this style of event.
|
-
-
 The independent, online publishing extravaganza Webzine 2005 is coming up this weekend in San Francisco. This is a cauldron of new ideas for the web with panel discussions, workshops, and audience presentation sessions by over 50 speakers and online luminaries. You can get a full two-day pass for $20 advance or $30 at the door. The event is at the Swedish American Hall which appears to be the same building as Cafe du Nord.
See ya there!
|
|
|
|