CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Digital Art Weeks Festival 2007 (DAW07) :: CALL FOR PARTICIPATION :: July 9 - July 14, 2007 :: ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland :: daw-info[at]inf.ethz.ch

The Digital Art Weeks is concerned with the application of digital technology in the arts. It consists of a symposium, workshops, and performances. The program offers insight into current research and innovations in art and technology. Artists and researchers will examine the use of electronic media in articulating the performer’s presence through the possibilities of the multi-sensuality of electronic media. The possibility of blurring the divide between public and performer to bond them through the powers of dissemination and inclusion inherent within the technology used will also be considered. The organizers of the Digital Art Weeks at ETH Zurich seek papers, posters, and performances on themes specific to performance using electronic media. We seek proposals that explore a concept of the Performative Surround in terms of how computer-mediated communication and dialog takes place between performers and viewers and how it tends to aid in dissolving the divide between performer and viewer. Continue reading

Networks as Metaphors and Models

“Networks have become a powerful metaphor for explaining the social realities of our times. A network, defined minimally, is a system of interconnected elements or nodes, where each node represents an intersection of flows within the network. Everywhere we look there are attempts to explain all kinds of social formations in terms of networks: citizen networks, corporate networks, gamer networks, terrorist networks, learning networks, networks of production, networks of distribution… and so on. The metaphor of the network can be superimposed over just about any form of multiplicity, including non-social ones (for instance, cells in the brain can be described in terms of a network). For the purposes of this study, however, every reference to networks, unless otherwise specified, is meant to allude to technosocial assemblages in which ICTÂ’s facilitate social relations between humans unconstrained by the physical distance between them. If Cognitive Science attempted to explain individual consciousness by adopting the metaphor of the brain as a computer, with its inputs and outputs, Social Science is extending the metaphor a step further by attempting to explain the social in terms of networks—or, in this context, sets of interconnected computers/brains.” Continue reading Networked Proximity - Section 1 by Ulises Ali Mejias. Also see Networked Proximity - Introduction. Continue reading

The Walter Ong Collection

John Walter, a graduate student at St. Louis University wrote to the TechRet list the other day to announce the launch of the Walter Ong Collection, a digital archive based at the SLU. I went to the site and downloaded a PDF of an early version of one of Ong’s more famous essays, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” In this particular essay, Ong who made his name analyzing the difference between oral and written communication, explores how this shift changed the role of the reader. Ong makes the case that the role of the reader is quite different than the role of the “listener” in oral communication.

“The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity. ‘Audience” is a collective noun. There is no such collective noun for readers, nor so far as I am able to puzzle out, can there be. “Readers” is a plural. For readers do not form a collectivity acting here and now on one another, and on the one speaking to them, as members of an audience do.”

What’s so interesting here, is that it seems that the age of networked reading and writing promises to get us much closer to one of the crucial aspects of oral culture — the sense that the story teller/author and the audience/reader are joined together in a collective enterprise where the actions of each will have a direct and noticeable impact on the other. [posted by bob stein on Future of the Book] Continue reading

“Visiting the ‘Second Life’ World: Virtual Hype?”

I made a brief appearance on yesterday’s “All Things Considered” from National Public Radio, in a story appropriately titled: “Visiting the ‘Second Life’ World: Virtual Hype?” (Yes, NPR has joined that particular debate, following Clay Shirky in casting deep skepticism on the “two million Residents” meme that the media is usually complicit in. But not this time.) Nicely reported by Laura Sydell, the segment actually devotes most of its coverage to Judge Posner’s recent in-world appearance, and his Honor himself arrives to offer some trenchant thoughts on the importance of online worlds. Last year’s NWN book club guest Thomas P.M. Barnett also shows up to praise the longtail power of his own appearance in-world. (Forseti Svarog of The Electric Sheep is on hand, too.) Taken together, it almost plays like an audio version of my GigaGamez essay on the hype and hope around Second Life.

Also, the raccoon. Fittingly, the raccoon lawyer shows up first. Listen to it all here. [blogged by W. James Au on New World Notes]

“The Surveillance Camera Players are not watching you. They are watching the cameras, because we have forgotten to. The cameras can’t understand what the SCP are doing, but we can. The cameras don’t smile but you might.” — Greil Marcus, author of “Lipstick Traces.” Continue reading

Surrendering Control

A dress with animated flowers on its neckline, shirt sleeves that make sounds in tune with your body language, and a hemline with a mind of its own have been developed by a Canadian researcher. Professor Joanna Berzowska and international colleagues will discuss these and other examples of ‘wearable technology’ at a workshop in Australia next year called reSkin.

Berzowska’s flowery dress, named Kukkia, has a neckline with felt and silk flowers that open and close according to a special electronics embedded in the dress. “I really wanted to make these dresses that have personalities, that move and behave almost like animals,” says Berzowska, who teaches computation art at Concordia University in Montreal. Continue reading

Touching the Dexia Tower

LAb[au] is happy to announce you its new urban interactive installation Touch on the Dexia Tower and Place Rogier in Brussels, Belgium. The project takes as a starting point Brussels 145 m high Dexia Tower, from which 4200 windows can be individually colour-enlightened by RGB-led bars, turning the faade into an immense display.

Instead of considering this infrastructure as a flat screen (surface) displaying pre-rendered video loops, the project is working on the architectural characteristics of the tower and its urban context. The characteristics of the building; orientation, volume, scale… are used as parameters to set up a spatial, temporal and luminous concept, which moreover allows people to directly interact with the tower.

On Place Rogier, at the bottom of the tower, a station is mounted where people can interact either individually or collectively with the tower through a multi touch screen. Both static (touch) as dynamic input (gesture) is recognized to generate an elementary graphical language of points, lines and surfaces combined with physical behaviours (growth, weight, …) taking a monochromatic colour palette (background) combined with black and white (graphical elements). Continue reading

Internet-based exhibition is a virtual stunner

“Looking at art on the Internet can’t compare to seeing it in person, but what if the art is Internet-based? The Boston group Turbulence has been promoting Internet art for a decade; it sponsors New England Initiative, a competition that awards a commission and an exhibition in real space, as well as on the Web.

“New England Initiative II” can be seen live at Art Interactive, and that’s still the best way to view it. You can also check it out virtually at turbulence.org/ne2/awards.html.

The three works are bigger and more engrossing in the gallery than they are on a personal computer. This is particularly true of John Snavely’s “WhoWhatWhenAir,” a giant tangle of pneumatic valves that looks like a squid with 16 left feet; it can’t move without tripping over itself. Each of those long, black tubular valves, ordinarily used in industrial settings, can pull up to a ton. The viewer — either in the gallery or remotely from home — can control the way in which the valves expand and contract, and choreograph the sculpture’s movements…” Continue reading Rapt in a fine Web of interactive art: Internet-based exhibition is a virtual stunner by Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent, December 28, 2006. Continue reading

Paranoid dot-matrix printers

Little Feet Bureau LLC is a Kafkaesque corporation named after Mao-Zedong’s army of gossipy old ladies recruited to eavesdrop and rat on potential enemies of the state.

From the press release: Four paranoid dot-matrix printers output endless text on paper. The system combs internet traffic looking for people linked to “dangerous information”. Every time a machine finds keywords that seem to threaten the stability of a client government, it crafts an individualized letter addressed to the offender. Sometimes, the letter accuses and threatens legal action. At other times, it summons the offender “in for questioning.” All letters warn of the legal consequences of telling anyone the letter they are reading exists at all.

Each printer focuses on its own area of surveillance. By studying a given machine, a pattern emerges– a pattern of paranoia. In its obsession to uncover hidden meaning, it will, invariably, confirm its own fears. Continue reading

disturbing beauty

… ok, the threat by mobile phones (to which she refers) just recently has been dismissed as no longer relevant, but nevertheless there are interesting relations and a fantastic worldview to be discovered at Mary Mattingly’s project website. [link to Mary Mattingly: Second Nature – a text on M. Mattingly's photography.]

She develops a scenario which emerges around a ‘disastrous beauty’ according to an imagination where our actual and eventual technological developments are brought together with to-come-ecological changes. It all together impresses through the beautiful set-up and the quite carefully lay-out of a world to be – combined with changes already happening … Some of her most impressing images relate to the imagination of ‘wearable homes’. In her writings she describes quite clearly the process of thought and procedure of her project development: Continue reading