Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception :: April 17 - 19, 2009 :: Tate Modern.

Featuring lectures, discussions, performances, projections and installations, this major international conference presents a critical appraisal of an expanding field of film and video art from multi-screen, immersive, performance- based live-projections through to interactive, digital and virtual reality multi-media events.

Coined in the mid-1960s by Stan VanDerBeek, but with its origins in the experiments of early twentieth century avant-garde filmmaking, media-technologies and performance art, the term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema’s historical and cultural ‘architectures of reception’ into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined. Continue reading

Upgrade! Tijuana: Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, Aninna Rust, Moises Horta :: May 13, 2009; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Lui Velazquez, Jose Maria Larroque 271-2nd floor, Colonia Federal, Tijuana, Baja California, México.

Transborder Immigrant Tool: The border between the U.S. and Mexico has moved between the virtual and the all too real since before the birth of the two nation-states. This has allowed a deep archive of suspect movement across this border to be traced and tagged – specifically anchored to immigrants bodies moving north, while immigrant bodies moving south much less so. More >>

Biotech Art – Revisited :: Exhibition: April 9 - May 2, 2009 — Opening: April 8, 6:00 pm :: Symposium: Life, Death & Biotechnia — April 8; 10:00 am - 5:00 pm :: Workshop: Vital Micro-Ecologies: Splice, Dice, Duplicate — April 14-17 :: Experimental Art Foundation, Lion Arts Centre, North Terrace (West End) Adelaide, South Australia.

The Biotech Art – Revisited project plans to explore connections between art, culture, biotechnology & genomics, with leading Australian and international artists and theorists set to present their recent works. Biotech Art – Revisited includes an exhibition (of the same name), a workshop, and a free public symposium. Continue reading

[posted by Doug Fox on Great Dance] Tomorrow the web-based dance visualization project Synchronous Objects will launch. Synchronous Objects is a joint project of William Forsythe and Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Department of Dance. Tomorrow, April 1st at 3 PM Eastern Time, there will be live streaming of the “Forsythe Symposium: Choreographic Objects.” (The event details page and live-streaming page). Watch an introductory video on the OSU website about the Synchronous Objects project.

The main focus of Synchronous Objects is to develop a set of data visualization tools for capturing, analyzing and presenting the underlying choreographic structures and components of Forsythe’s “One Flat Thing, reproduced” (OFTr), which premiered in 2000. Continue reading

Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd. Call for Papers — Deadline for Abstracts: April 3, 2009.

This is a call for papers to appear in an edited volume with the provisional title of Performing Technology: User Content and the New Digital Media to be published at the end of 2009 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing Ltd. The call was developed for the TWO Thousand + NINE Symposium which will take place in Belfast at the Sonic Arts Research Center on May, 16th 2009 (Co-hosted by the European 2007 project CO-ME-DI-A - Cooperation and Mediation in Digital Arts) Continue reading

Over the course of several weeks, The Art Gallery’s website will reveal projects developed for the internet that employ a variety of forms: from digital narratives, online gaming, open source programming, and database art, to traditional methods of documentary filmmaking in virtual environments. This exhibition is not intended to survey Internet art in its entirety; it is meant, rather to demonstrate the variety of expression and experimentation taking place on-line since net.art was proclaimed dead by some of the early practitioners of Internet art in 1999.

Once the Internet emerged as a mass global communication network in the mid-1990s, artists quickly recognized the possibilities for creative innovation as well as the opportunity to question and redefine the conventions of art. Continue reading

WOW Pod, a collaboration between Cati Vaucelle, Steve Shada, and Marisa Jahn will be at the MIT Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from March-September 2009.

The WOW Pod is an immersive architectural solution for the advanced WOW (World of Warcraft) player that provides and anticipates all life needs. Inside, the gamer finds him/ herself comfortable seated in front of the computer screen with easy-to-reach water, pre-packaged food, and a toilet conveniently placed underneath his/ her custom-built throne.

When hungry, the gamer selects a food item (‘Crunchy Spider Surprise’, ‘Beer Basted Ribs’, etc.) and a seasoning pack. By scanning in the food items, the video game physically adjusts a hot plate to cook the item for the correct amount of time. Continue reading

Ludic Cartography. Mapping GameSpaces — Video Games, Cartography, Virtual Worlds, Game Studies, Sociology :: Call for Proposals — Deadline: April 25, 2009.

The How They Got Game Project at Stanford University is currently seeking papers that explore the connections between mapping, cartographic practices, and electronic gaming for an illustrated book that will be published in 2010. Specifically, we are interested in representations of spaces in video games through the aid of maps and mapping tools. Video games establish new topographies and new geographies that - while making obvious references to pre-existing models - create a new understanding of the world and its spaces. Our goal is to show and explain how digital spaces [i.e. video games and virtual worlds] are being mapped by a new generation of cartographers. Continue reading

“Among the groundswell of books investigating the link between aesthetics and politics, Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader is particularly ambitious. Published in 2007 as a companion volume to the historical survey exhibition Forms of Resistsance at the Vanabbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland, the book features a wide-ranging collection of texts and manifestos, divided into four sections corresponding to four major watersheds in contemporary social and political history: the Paris Commune of 1871, the Soviet Revolution of 1917, the social uprisings of 1968, and the 1989 revolutions in the former Eastern Bloc.

Editors Will Bradley and Charles Esche have completed the anthology by inviting six contemporary critics (Geeta Kapur, Lucy Lippard, John Milner, Gerald Raunig, Marina Vishmidt, and Tirdad Zolghadr) to provide both a historical context and an interpretation for some of the readings. Continue reading

“Having been asked to review these two books together forced the issue somewhat, but it would be difficult to review FLOSS+Art and Software Studies: A Lexicon in isolation. There are, as Ted Nelson put it, many ‘interwinglings’. Authors, academic institutions and shared lines of thought travel between both edited collections. Figuring out the significance of these manifold relations is perhaps as interesting a way as any other to tap into their joint subject matter: software. Indeed, both collections develop upon an important strand of the new media field with implications for understanding software as well as the working practices of authors, coders, designers, educators, artists, users, consumers, and activists. Above all, both books think through software not only in terms of what it does but what it is all about. Continue reading