Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality :: March 13 -April 6, 2010 :: Opening: March 20; 7:00 - 10:00 pm :: Open Source Gallery, 255 17th Street, Brooklyn, NY.

Ondrej Brody (CZ) & Kristofer Paetau’s (FIN) work, Painting China Now (2007), is the starting point for their new work on display at Open Source Gallery. Painting China Now is a collection of 30 oil paintings depicting violence inflicted by the Chinese government on Falun Dafa members. The paintings were rendered with varying degrees of realism by Chinese craftsmen* specializing in copying pictures sent via e-mail. These pictures, censored and forbidden in China, were painted with oil on canvas in China and then exported to Europe for exhibition display. Continue reading

The School of Art at The Cooper Union and Danspace Project present Deborah Hay: A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty :: March 24, 2010; 7:00 pm :: The Great Hall, The Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, NYC :: Free admission.

A Lecture on the Performance of Beauty is a performative talk framed around the question “can a formal and stimulating adherence to a prescribed set of hypothetical conditions be seen as choreography even if there is no learned movement?” Hay was a member of a group of experimental artists that was deeply influenced by Merce Cunningham and John Cage. The group, later known as the Judson Dance Theater, became one of the most radical and explosive 20th century art movements. Her ground breaking research and performances continue to influence new generations of artists throughout the world today. Continue reading

Posted by Corina MacDonald on Vague Terrain: The fifth and final DOCAM Summit took place two weeks ago in Montreal. Over five years the project, spearheaded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, brought together researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to investigate the issues inherent to the documentation and conservation of media arts heritage. The project produced a great collection of tools and resources that are now freely available on the DOCAM website to artists, curators, conservators, archivists and anyone else concerned by the future of artworks with technological components.

Many themes and discussions emerged during the single day of the Summit that I was able to attend – we were exposed to a wide swath of interrelated issues and topics that are central to the research axes of DOCAM: conservation, documentation, cataloguing, terminology, pedagogy and the history of technology. Continue reading

Upgrade! Joburg has organized and will host a new art and technology group primarily based in Johannesburg but with members from across South Africa.

The Hacksaws group had its first meeting today in the Seminar Room of the Digital Arts Division. The group has 16 members to date and anyone with an interest in art and technology is welcome to join. This group is made up of professionals (not necessarily artists) who have an interest in Art and Technology. We hope that the group will be a place to form collaborations for new projects and exhibitions; work towards the generally uplifting and furthering the practice of art and technology in South Africa.

Situated Technologies Pamphlets 6 — MicroPublicPlaces by Hans Frei and Marc Böhlen :: Available from lulu.com or as a free download.

The Situated Technologies Pamphlets series, published by the Architectural League, explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How are our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other “situated” technologies?

In response to the rise of pervasive information technologies and the privatization of the public sphere, Situated Technologies Pamphlets 6 proposes hybrid architectural programs called MicroPublicPlaces (MPPs). MPPs combine insights from ambient intelligence, human computing, architecture, social engineering, and urbanism to initiate ways to reanimate public life in contemporary societies.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

“Art is a tool of empowerment and social change, and I consider myself blessed to be able to create and use my work to promote health reform, bring awareness about ALS and help others.” – Tony Quan, aka Tempt One

Networked Derive :: March 17, 2010; 12:30 - 1:30 pm :: University at Buffalo | Bauhaus–Universität, Weimar | Online.

Networked Derive is a collaborative performance that takes place simultaneously between two geographically-separate locations. Using mobile phones, twitter feeds and a simple mapping system, performers in both locations engage in a series of geographical occupations that coincide with the movements through the other city.

Participants follow a shared map that has one city per side. While the maps will be printed on the same scale, they will be placed slightly askew. The derive starts when one team reports its location to the other. Continue reading

Performing Public Space :: until March 21, 2010 :: Closing Party and Performances: March 20; 2:00 - 11:00 pm :: La Casa del Tunél, Calle Chapo Márquez 133, Colonia Federal, Tijuana BC, Mexico.

As towns and cities are increasingly overwritten by the needs and desires of globalized capital, so public spaces and the behaviors they support are becoming evermore shrunken and controlled. At the same time however, everyday examples of common usage – a skate boarder curving past a crowd, a girl chopping and bagging melon on the sidewalk, a child dancing up a mountain of steps – counterpoint homogenization and regulation. Continue reading

The Poetics of Code – HD Traffic by John F. Simon, Jr. and Lagoglyphs by Eduardo Kac. March 15 – May 15, 2010 :: Streaming Museum.

Code lies at the core of both works as method and meaning. In HD Traffic, Simon built with software code an architectural Mondrian-inspired work designed to integrate real-time traffic data flow. Kac’s series of Lagoglyphs artworks, reference and expand upon his controversial genetically altered Alba the GFP Bunny 2000. The real-time animations, continuously flowing and reconfiguring themselves, place emphasis on the generative mutability of writing and the encoded nature of life. Continue reading

Augmented Systems: Explorations in Complex, Emergent, and Generative Systems Workshop with Alexander Jones Gross (University of Main) :: March 25-26, 2010; 6:30 - 9:30 pm + March 27; 10:00 am - 6:00 pm :: CIANT - Art laboratory, Kubelíkova 27, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic :: Zdarma / V angličtině / For free / In English — Please register at ivan.nemeth [at] ciant.cz.

Complex, indeterminate, and chaotic systems exist everywhere we look from the flight paths of birds to the growth patterns of plants to the formation of clouds. These systems are not simply random, they are complex systems bounded by discrete natural laws. Through study and investigation much can be learned about how these systems work. Continue reading