Walking Walden with Wen Stephenson and Jane D. Marsching :: June 20, 2013; 1:00pm :: Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts (Meet at Thoreau’s House Replica near the Walden Pond parking kiosk).

A walking event that reconsiders the radical politics of Thoreau in our time. Connect observation, environmental awareness, aesthetic action, and social change to the climate crisis now. We will walk from Walden Pond to Brister’s Hill, home of one of the first freed slaves in Concord and symbol of Concord’s engagement with the abolitionist movement. As we walk we will consider what is nature, what is changing, and what is radicalism today? Continue reading

[Image: Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments by Carmin Karasic, 2007] Digital Art and the Urban Environment: Symposium, Art Exhibition, and Scholarly Volume :: October 4, 2013 :: Pace University, Downtown Manhattan, New York City :: Call for Participation — Deadline: July 13, 2013.

Digital and new media artists utilize innovations in locative media, tracking technologies, telecommunication networks, and novel computer interfaces to craft artworks that create new ways to connect with the city. Just as their predecessors transformed urban neighborhoods, such as New York’s SoHo and Chelsea, through their energy and imagination, today’s artists are altering our perceptions of, and relationships with, urban space though their digital inventions and interventions. Continue reading

Media Archaeology & Technological Debris Conference :: June 21, 2013; 10:00 am - 5:30 pm :: NAB LG01 (New Academic Building), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London (map) :: Free, open to the public, no reservations necessary.

Conference speakers: Sean Cubitt (Media & Comms, Goldsmiths); Graham Harwood (Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths); Jennifer Gabrys (Sociology, Goldsmiths); Gabriel Menotti (Audiovisual, UFES); Jussi Parikka (University of Southampton); and James Wallbank (Access Space, Sheffield).

This workshop means to combine the thriving approach of media archaeology with the growing environmental concerns about technological debris, emphasizing the complementary character of these topics in the construction of a material understanding of media practices’ past, present and future. Continue reading

[...] “In much of her work, writer/artist J. R. Carpenter fabricates hybrid places that are both “virtual” and attached to real world locales. Like Ernst’s bedroom, these online spaces contain objects whose appearance together makes sense only in the context of the artwork, in Carpenter’s case, multimedia stories. Combining intimate details, both autobiographical and appropriated, of characters’ lives with real-world maps and photo and video “documentation,” Carpenter’s works are narrative landscapes through which the reader meanders.” From Reorienting Narrative: E-lit as Psychogeography by Illya Szilak, Huffington Post. Also see Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams curated by Kate Armstrong.

HTML Instrument by Ursula Endlicher @ instrument :: July 6 - August 10, 2013 :: Kulturmöllan, Lövestad, Sweden.

HTML Instrument is an Internet art piece that uses the HTML code of the Triennial’s Website as score, implementing the exhibition’s representation on the Web into the physical context of the mill itself.

Contemplative, playful, and slightly absurd, HTML Instrument invites the audience to pluck a virtual wooden string instrument, which changes shape for different HTML tags that appear in the source code of the exhibit’s Website. Continue reading

The Sixth Room at the Venice Biennial:

The Sixth Room is a digital tool that visually represents the network of virtual and physical audiences visiting Sarah Sze’s Triple Point, both in Venice at the United States Pavilion and online over the course of la Biennale di Venezia. Constantly updated, The Sixth Room data represents an ever-changing visual record of public engagement with Triple Point.

Coordinated by Nell Breyer, previously a research affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and designed by Catherine D’Ignazio from MIT’s Media Lab, The Sixth Room is accessible online and on mobile devices. Continue reading

[...] “Such incomparable success is unexpected. Minecraft embodies few of the video-game fashions that were current when it appeared. Coded in Java, a general-­purpose programming language that emphasizes speed and lightness over the grand capabilities of more powerful tools, it features pixelated scenery that has nothing in common with the lifelike, polygon-stuffed characters and objects furnishing the blockbuster video games of the day. There is a certain Lego-like charm and blunt handsomeness to the rectangular clouds that throw shadows on the game’s pea-green hills and the dumpy sheep that roam them. But in an industry traditionally obsessed with chasing realism and authenticity, its kindergarten aesthetic at first appears anachronistic.” From The Secret to a Video-Game Phenomenon by Simon Parkin, Technology Review.

Moving Without A Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts by Stamatia Portanova, MIT Press:

Digital technologies offer the possibility of capturing, storing, and manipulating movement, abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information. In Moving without a Body, Stamatia Portanova considers what really happens when the physicality of movement is translated into a numerical code by a technological system. Drawing on the radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, she argues that this does not amount to a technical assessment of software’s capacity to record motion but requires a philosophical rethinking of what movement itself is, or can become. Continue reading

[Image: HeHe, Fracking Futures, 2013. Installation. Image courtesy of the artists.] Turning FACT Inside Out :: June 13 - September 15, 2013 :: FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ, UK.

A selection of provocative international artists tackle some of the most pressing, controversial and literally ground-breaking political issues of today. Exploring aspects of environment, architecture, capitalism and augmented reality, Turning FACT Inside Out is an exhibition that will take over the entire building and beyond, including recreating an indoor fracking site complete with earth tremors and flames. Continue reading

Googleheim :: June 7 – July 13, 2013 :: InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre,9 Ossington Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M6J 2Y8, Canada.

Googleheim proposes five projects that critically explore the tensions between transiency and permanence of the image in the context of contemporary art and media technology: Continue reading