Upgrade! Boston: ecoarttech :: November 16, 2010; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: MIT Media Lab (E14), 6th Floor, Room 633, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts (map).

Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir cofounded ecoarttech in 2005 to explore convergent media, technology, and environments. Cary and Leila work interdisciplinarily, drawing on ideas and methodologies from digital studies, philosophy, literature, ecological science, critical/cultural studies, and art. For ecoarttech, the term “environment” does not refer only to nature or geographic spaces but rather to interwoven networks of biological, cultural, mental, and digital spaces. Continue reading

The Digital Oblivion. Substance and Ethics in the Conservation of Computer-Based Art — 
International symposium :: November 4-5, 2010; 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
 :: ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Lorenzstrasse 19, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany.

As part of the three-year EU-funded research project digital art conservation, this international symposium aims to investigate the future of our digital cultural memory, focusing in particular on the preservation of computer-based art.

For a couple of decades now, digitalisation has allowed the content of cultural memory to be more easily processed and circulated. However, the preservation of digitalised contents is fundamentally conditioned by the need to adapt to an ever more rapid sequence of new technical systems. Continue reading

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly:

This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not just a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover “what it wants.” Kelly uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology’s long course, and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed.

This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come. By adopting the principles of pro-action and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles. And by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts.

[Microphone in Boston harbour, New England Fish Exchange, 1973. Courtesy of Amacher archive, Kingston, NY] Maryanne Amacher: City-Links :: until November 28, 2010 :: Ludlow 38, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart Goethe-Institut New York, 38 Ludlow Street, New York.

Between 1967 and 1981 the pioneering sound artist produced 22 City-Links projects in total, connecting distant microphones to installations and performances using dedicated FM-quality analog phone lines. Areas of downtown Buffalo, MIT, Boston Harbor, the Mississippi River, the New York harbor, studios in various locations, and other sites in the USA and abroad were transported, sometimes integrating performers near the microphones (such as John Cage and George Lewis for City-Links #18 performed at The Kitchen in 1979). Continue reading

Simulation is not the Opposite of the Real – Jean Baudrillard on Simulation and Illusion by Gerry Coulter, NOEMA.

The whole world is merely an illusion of the senses and the sensory trace of that disappearance (Baudrillard, 1997b:116)

I. Simulation as an Integral Part of Life: In his article for Noema (Volume 57, 2010) Pier Luigi Capucci draws attention to many of the complexities of simulation. He points to the very intimate nature of simulation for humans because even our oral and written languages are simulations with which we attempt to give the world meaning. Language, as Barthes acknowledged, is the very site of the institutionalization of subjectivity (1972:150). Continue reading

China – living in between Real and Unreal by Xiaoying (Juliette) YUAN — Presentation for “Making the Reality Really Real,” the 11th Consciousness Reframed International Research Conference, November 4-6, 2010, Trondheim, Norway.

Introduction: The current presentation, as part of author’s PhD research on the topic of “Media Arts and Human Ecosphere”, focuses on Chinese artists’ research on the theme of “Reality”. Continue reading

[Audience as Subject, Part 1-"Turn On," 2004] Audience as Subject, Part 1: Medium + Yoshua Okón: 2007-2010 :: until February 6, 2011 :: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco CA.

Audience as Subject, Part 1: Medium is presented as part of YBCA’s Big Idea DARE: Innovations in art, action, audience. Organized by Betti-Sue Hertz, YBCA Director of Visual Arts, Audience as Subject is a two-part exhibition that reverses the role of the audience from that of spectator to subject, exposing the dramatic mechanisms underlying public gatherings of people. By focusing the viewer’s attention on the characteristics and behaviors of individuals in a group environment — body language, facial expressions, attitudes, gestures and actions — the artists challenge our perceptions about participation in civic life. Continue reading

Waveforms by Carrie Bodle :: October 28 - November 28, 2010 :: Harborview Eye Institute, 7th Floor, Ninth & Jefferson Building, 908 Jefferson St., Seattle, WA.

Part of her Sewing Sonifications series, Waveforms originated from a collaboration with UW Oceanographic Scientist Dr. Neil Banas and is an exploration into using data from ecosystem models along the Washington coast to create tangible experiences of research through art. Sound is translated from data, then visualized and made tactile by the artist embroidering the combined waveform into a continuous sound wave.

Waveforms was made with the support of Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, 4Culture, and Harborview Medical Center.

Sternberg Press and Archive Books are pleased to announce The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality) by Markus Miessen.

Welcome to Harmonistan! Over the last decade, the term “participation” has become increasingly overused. When everyone has been turned into a participant, the often uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term has become frightening. Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility. Similar to the notion of an independent politician dissociated from a specific party, this third part of Miessen’s Participation trilogy encourages the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change. Continue reading

e-flux announces Boris Groys’ “Going Public” — Book launch and Conversation with Saul Anton and Boris Groys :: November 7, 2010; 12:00 pm :: @ NY Art Book Fair, PS1/MoMA (conference room), NYC.

If all things in the world can be considered as sources of aesthetic experience, then art no longer holds a privileged position. Rather, art comes between the subject and the world, and any aesthetic discourse used to legitimize art must also necessarily serve to undermine it. Following his recent books Art Power and The Communist Postscript, in Going Public Boris Groys looks to escape entrenched aesthetic and sociological understandings of art — which always assume the position of the spectator, of the consumer. Let us instead consider art from the position of the producer, who does not ask what it looks like or where it comes from, but why it exists in the first place. Continue reading