In On Gaps and Silent Documents international artists question the absence of documents and data in archives, data banks and memory. What is missing? Has it never been there or has it been removed? Does available information exist that is not looked at, read or used? Archives and data banks are primarily determined by these gaps and silent documents. As Sven Spieker notes, ‘Archives are less concerned with memory than with the necessity to discard, erase, eliminate.’ Creating archives is continual selection. As such, it reveals the priorities and blind spots of the keeper of the archives, his world and his time.

Since the beginning of time, ‘forgetting’ was always the norm. ‘Remembering’ was the exception. In this age of continuously transforming technology and worldwide networks, this balance seems to be shifting. Is it true that in our time, with its excessive storage capacity, everything is obsessively being saved? More and more, we face the question of whether we have the right to create our own gaps, to silence documents and erase our own traces. Privacy, intellectual property and censorship in our digital networked society require different and complex solutions.

On Gaps and Silent Documents uses ‘new’ and ‘old’ media and technologies, such as the Internet, websites, Google, newspapers, texts, books, film and video, photography, music scores, sound, telephones, Twitter, online newsgroups, printers, microfilm, light, computers, etc., to approach this theme from different (sometimes paradoxical) perspectives and question it in spatial installations, presentations and performances.

Artefact is initiated by provincie Vlaams-Brabant and STUK arts centre.

Special thanks to the participating artists, Wolfgang Ernst, Sven Spieker, Charles Merewether, Viktor Mayer-Schőnberger and Rony Vissers for their inspiring texts and ideas.

Australian artist and scholar Danielle Wilde will elaborate an emergent definition of poetic body-worn devices for performance and play, that encourage people to move in unusual ways; and a series of non-augmented devices that explore how we might conceive of and develop technologies that we can’t yet imagine. By extending the body, mechanically, gesturally and sensorially we can encourage people to move in extra-normal ways, so view and experience their bodies from perhaps hitherto unknown perspectives. This affords insight into how our bodies can move and what this feels like, and the idiosyncratic nature of personal, corporeal expressiveness… extends the body with soft prosthetics to remind us of an inner state and encourage magical thinking!

Danielle Wilde has an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London, and is completing a practice-based PhD at Monash University, Melbourne; at the CSIRO, Belmont; and from March 2010, at Tokyo University, Japan. Her investigation is concerned with how extending the body with technology might extend our poetic and expressive potential, and what this might mean. Outcomes include cultural artefacts, as well as tools for supporting an integration of the poetic in Rehabilitation and Disability – engaging the body through the imagination and the imagination through the body to form an emergent, embodied, creative feedback loop that can impact experiences in everyday life. Underlying these concerns is a pragmatic examination of the impact of different choices relevant to the development of physically engaging body-worn technologies, including interface; interaction; and where the attention of observer and participant might lie at any time.

The workshop hello wor(l)d! is an introduction to 3 different artistic approaches to programming, using three different programming styles: graphical, textual (code poetry) and live coding. The workshop gives a taste of all three flavours and is meant as inspiration and exploration for those artists curious about these forms of art. You cannot learn how to program in 3 days, especially not in 3 different ways, but it is well worth giving different languages and styles a try.

Day 1: Pure Data by IOhannes Zmölnig
Day 2: Microcodes by Pall Thayer
Day 3: Fluxus by Dave Griffiths and Gabor Papp

No previous programming experience required, as long as you’re not afraid to work in a terminal. Basic experience with any scripting or markup language (even if it is HTML/CSS) will make it easier to follow.

Entrance: free!, but please register (limited places available) — send name, phone, and CV to signnl [at] gmail.com. If you are bringing a laptop, please specify your operating system.

Hello wor(l)d! is part of make art, an international festival focused on Free/ Libre/ Open Source Software (FLOSS) and open content in digital arts. Make art offers performances, presentations, workshops and an exhibition, focused on the blurred line between art and software programming.

The fifth edition - chmod +x art - will take place in Groningen (NL), from the 2nd to the 7th of March 2010.

Organised by Sign and GOTO10

Parafacts and Parafictions: Helguera, and Blachly & Shaw is an evening of performance-presentations organized in conjunction with the exhibition Companion, curated by REV- and currently on view at EFA Project Space. Pablo Helguera and Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw will enact live components to their projects included in Companion, followed by a Q & A session moderated by Marisa Jahn, artist and exhibition curator.

Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty offers a definition of the term ‘parafiction’, a term used to describe an emergent genre of artwork that plays in the overlap between fact and fiction: “Like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real.” If a ‘parafiction’ operates in that space between fictional and real, alongside this term we might position a second: a ‘parafact ‘— an artwork that more stringently draws from the real — but a ‘real’ whose narrative is so curious, exquisite, or implausible so as to call into question its own veracity. Pablo Helguera, and Jimbo Blachly & Lytle Shaw’s performance-presentations engage both of these tacts. In so doing, the artists raise questions about the function of truth and fiction — its bearing on knowledge, ethics, or aesthetic transformation.

The Temporary Museum of Vaseline in Perth Amboy is the latest iteration of J. Blachly and Lytle Shaw’s ongoing research into the cast of characters known as the ‘Chadwick family.’ While following up leads about missing Chadwick family relics in the New Jersey city, the duo instead stumbled upon the possibility of naturally occurring Vaseline springs in the region.

Pablo Helguera’s What in the World replicates a popular television show from the 1950’s in which artifacts were presented to a team of archaeologists, artists, and aficionados to decipher. Adapting the show’s theatrical conventions for a YouTube generation, Helguera departs from the objects to focus on the eccentric museum staff, positioning the institution itself as the subject of the ethnographic inquiry.

Companion is an exhibition of artworks contextualized with the source that influenced their creation. Using the EFA Studios Program as a curatorial foundation, Companion culls together cultural projects that draw inspiration from references mined from history, culture, and science. With projects by: Tom Bogaert, Cui Fei, J. Blachly & Lytle Shaw, Pablo Helguera, Sarah Oppenheimer with Edward Stanley, Karina Skvirsky, Yuken Teruya, Saya Woolfalk with Rachel Lears, plus special screening of Margaret Mead & Gregory Bateson’s ‘Bathing Babies in Three Cultures’ (1951) :: Curated by: Marisa Jahn for REV- :: On view through March 13, 2010.

A program of The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, EFA Project Space is a multi-disciplinary arts venue that encourages creative expression and new interactions in the arts. By collaborating with organizations and individuals to present a variety of programs including exhibitions, performances, screenings, workshops, and conversations, EFA Project Space generates an ongoing dialogue about the creative process. EFA Project Space is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Private funding for the program has been received from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation Inc. and numerous individuals.

REV- Founded by Marisa Jahn, Stephanie Rothenberg, and Rachel McIntire, REV- is a non-profit organization that furthers socially-engaged art, design, and pedagogy. REV- produces projects that fuse disciplines, foster diversity, and vary in form (workshops, publications, exhibitions, design objects, etc.). Engaged with different communities and groups, REV-’s projects involve collaborative production, resource-sharing, and a commitment to the process as political gesture. The organization derives its name from both the colloquial expression “to rev” a vehicle and the prefix “rev-” which means to turn — as in, revolver, revolution, revolt, revere, irreverent, etc.

*Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” October Magazine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. p. 54.

The digital revolution is changing the nature of our perceptual processes, and this in turn is changing our conscious experience of the physical world, inducing changes in cognition on a scale that is still unknown. As inhabitants of the modern city we are in constant interaction, both active and passive, with digital technology. These facts concern all of us in different ways, but from my own perspective I want to ask: how does all this affect the artist? By looking at the evolution of ideas and research elements in my artistic practice, that now almost reads as a brief history of practices under the broad, quite unfortunate title of ‘New Media’ (mixed media, multimedia, computer art, computer animation, net.art, interactive art etc) I will talk about my quest to understanding the phenomena arising from the interaction with digital technologies. I will also tackle the theatrical and ritualistic elements of interactive art against the background of Artaud’s concept for the Theatre of Cruelty.

Gordana Novakovic belongs to the generation of artists who pioneered electronic art. Originally a painter, with 12 solo exhibitions to her credit, she now has more than 20 years of experience of developing and exhibiting large-scale time-based media projects. A constant characteristic of her work with new technologies has been her distinctive method of creating an effective cross-disciplinary framework for the emergence of synergy through collaboration. She has presented her work at major international festivals and venues, including ISEA, Ars Electronica, ICC (Inter Communication Center - Tokyo), and Tate Modern. Her most recent conference appearances were at Subtle Technologies ‘09, and as a keynote speaker at EVA London 2009. Her latest piece, Fugue, has been widely presented and exhibited, most recently at the ‘Infectious’ group show in the Science Gallery, Dublin, after which it was featured in the October issue of Nature Immunology. Since 2004, Gordana has been artist-in-residence at the Computer Science department, University College London, where in 2005 she founded the Tesla Art and Science Group with colleagues in the department. Tesla is an informal art and science discussion forum dealing with visionary ideas beyond the existing remits of art and science; it aims to form and nurture cross-disciplinary teams, projects, and networks. Gordana’s current work on neuroplastic art explores the possibilities lying at the intersection of art and brain science.

For further information on the Series, contact coordinator Gretchen Schiller or see our website.

The Center broadcast selected Performance Research Seminars live from our Drama Studio - making them available to anyone in the world interested in the subject. The one hour talks and 30 minute discussions are webcast live on dance tech net TV (then archived).

This co-production is part of a partnership between our Center and dance-techTV, and an experiment in collaborative live -streaming (the channel is dedicated to interdisciplinary explorations of the performance of movement. The channel allows worldwide 24/7 linear broadcasting of selected programs, LIVE streaming and Video On-demand.

This experiment differs from some of the more intensive previous Aion Experiments in which volunteers remained under close observation for prolonged periods. Throughout the duration of this exhibition several devices will be installed in the exhibition space, which will in turn become highly charged with energy that fosters cell regeneration and cerebral stimulation. The organisers request that all members of the public who plan to attend this experiment prepare physically and mentally in advance, as the Gallery will be charged with biofield energy. The organisers also wish to notify visitors that effects of this Aion Experiment may only become apparent in the weeks following the event.

To mark the closing of Aion Experiments an event will take place at 7:00 pm on April 9. Entitled The Luminiferous Aether, it comprises of documentation made by Robin Watkins of low frequency audio signals which originate from the streams of charged particles that reach the Earth’s atmosphere through the Solar Wind, giving rise to the Aurora Borealis and other magnetic storms. With temperatures dropping to minus 50° C, the field recordings of Solar radiation were made during three consecutive days and nights outside of a small village in the remote Yukon-Koyukuk region (the Arctic Circle, Alaska). For the Project Arts Centre sound screening, listeners will collectively experience the work through individual radio headphones and receivers, grouped in front of a central transmitter.

The first Aion Experiment took place in Northern Europe in the 1930s, instigated by a team of practitioners from diverse disciplines including physics, chemistry, psychology and sociology. Since its inception the Foundation has stated that one central aim unifying its diverse members and affiliates is the desire to develop a greater understanding of the phenomena of body-oriented energy. To this end, numerous experiments have been undertaken, involving countless participants. In an attempt to heighten the results of the experiments, they often take place in temporary laboratories, erected upon sites identified – at some point in history – as charged with naturally occurring biofield energy.

One of the many motives driving the ongoing work of the organisation is a conviction that the human species is unaware of its own true potential. Another unifying belief is that humans have, for the most part, become detached from certain fundamental truths and blind instinctive necessities. Statements issued by the Foundation propose that unless the current situation is rectified radically and promptly, the human species is headed inexorably toward untimely self-destruction.

Like the Aion Experiments themselves – which can assume limitless permutations – the international foundation is distinguished by its quiet public profile. Although numerous respected and admired scientists and practitioners – including Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Wilhem Reich and Alfred Kinsey – openly associated with Aion Experiments for a time all information pertaining to work carried out by, and individuals involved with, the Foundation, has become strictly confidential in the past decade. It is known that practitioners working in the realm of visual artists have, on several occasions, been invited to contribute in an advisory capacity to Aion investigation. This is perhaps an indication that the visual arts remain a potent source of untapped potential in terms of maximising human capabilities. The practitioner whose involvement with the Foundation is most renowned is the Swiss artist Emma Kunz (1892 - 1963) who collaborated with the foundation in the momentous discovery of Aion A, a rock crystal with potent healing potential.

Aion Experiments has been organised by Pádraic E. Moore, who wishes to acknowledge the research and production of Morris/Trasov Archive (Canada), Sam Keogh (Ireland), Takeshi Murata (U.S.A.), Ulf Rollof (Sweden) Ciarán Walsh (Ireland) and of course the Foundation for Aion Research, without whom this project could never have taken place

Project Arts Centre is a multidisciplinary arts centre, with a gallery and two theatre spaces, located at the heart of artistic activity in Dublin. For the archive of exhibition and events from the visual arts programme, go here.

Whether through motion capture, live processing, animation or other means of data visualization, the body is the referent and inspiration for many digital media artists working with interactive technologies. Digital Incarnate: The Body, Identity, and Interactive Media is an investigation into this confluence, gazing through multiple lenses to explore the body and identity as they are transformed and represented through technological evolution. As the body is digitally reflected and reborn, are we looking towards technology to experience ourselves in a redeemed form outside of human societal constructs? When technology captures kinetic energy, is our essence embodied in the pixilation, or is our “self” lost in the process?

Through dynamic works by Luftwerk, OpenEnded Group, and Troika Ranch, as well as the Synchronous Objects web kiosk created by William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi, and Norah Zuniga Shaw, we hope to bring forward exploratory ideas that push and pull our perceptions of the body and impulses to move beyond it into uncharted cyber territory. This exhibition is co-curated by Alycia Scott and Sara Slawnik.

Digital Incarnate is presented by Columbia College Chicago’s Department of Exhibition and Performance Spaces, The Dance Center, the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media and the Interactive Arts and Media Department.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: Gallery Talks with Exhibition Artists :: The Arcade, 618 S. Michigan, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60605 :: Free and open to the public.

•    OpenEnded Group, February 12, 12:15 pm
•    Synchronous Objects, March 2, 12:15 pm
•    Troika Ranch, March 4, 12:15 pm
•    Luftwerk, March 25, 12:15 pm

Panel Discussion: “Corporeality and the Digital Gaze” :: Monday, March 1, 2010 at 6:30 p.m. ::
Stage 2, 618 S Michigan Ave, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60605 :: Free and open to the public

This panel discussion will investigate “the body” when explored through collaborative possibilities of performance and technology. It will feature a conversation among pioneering artists whose work engages the body and digital media, specifically interrogating the ever-increasing digitized gaze, the transcription of the body through data visualization, and the impact it has on the body’s cultural contexts. Panelists will include:

•    Grisha Coleman: composer, performer and choreographer; Assistant Professor in Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University.
•    Marianne Kim: artist and educator working in dance, theatre and video art; Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies Department.
•    Maria Palazzi: co-creative director of Synchronous Objects; Director of the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, and Associate Professor of Design at The Ohio State University.
•    Dawn Stoppiello: choreographer and dancer; Executive Director and Artistic Co-Director of Troika Ranch.
•    Moderated by Raquel Monroe: Assistant Professor at The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
http://www.colum.edu/deps&lt
http://www.colum.edu/engage
http://www.colum.edu/institutewomengender

CONTACT:
Alycia Scott, Co-Curator, 312-369-8341, ascott [at] colum.edu
Sara Slawnik, Co-Curator, 312-369-8845, sslawnik [at] colum.edu

Recent exhibitions, festivals and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media, City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community will focus upon dynamics of the shifting, locative, cartographic and social space of the city. It is organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asks how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.

From within San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, this festival will celebrate the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focuses on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural workers — people, places, and devices — will meet for four days of street-side celebration, public exhibitions, a symposium, and workshops. The festival seeks new work aligned with the themes of creative mapping, urban storytelling, sentient space, body awareness, local history, contested spaces and gaming.

The festival’s main goals are:

• to promote creative public use of free wi fi and open networks in the city of San Francisco
• to encourage meaningful collaboration between artists and local organizations in connection with wireless networks
• to introduce site-specific locative media art to urban places

Logistics and creative goals

Proposals are invited around projects involving creative mapping, urban storytelling, body awareness, local history, contested spaces and gaming. We seek projects of the greatest interest and highest quality. That said, proposals should be created for or be highly relevant to urban communities such as those found in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Neighborhood, mapping or community-based projects adaptable to the district are desirable. All proposed projects should address the theme of ‘urban community’ and utilize wireless technologies in some relation to ‘location’ and ‘place.’ Imaginative responses to the district and critical interpretations of place are strongly desired. Proposals which include or seek to include collaboration with Tenderloin/Civic Center organizations will receive greater consideration than projects which do not.

Projects using locative media to explore unique histories in the Tenderloin and/or address the festival’s aims of fostering creative civic engagement are also sought. Members of local community-based organizations will review all submissions and identify proposals that they wish to support.

In addition, creative work is encouraged to engage with the following questions:

• What does neighborhood mean?
• How might urban communities speak effectively about their cities through use of wireless networks?
• Where do wireless creative practices intersect with and/or enhance citizen roles in civic engagement?

Themes

Creative mapping

Location based media has so far involved much discussion of the role of maps, both their local and geopolitical importance, their history within political structures and the potentials of self-made or self-informed maps in terms of the production of and shaping of urban space. GPS and other applications enable the making of highly personal and information laden online spaces. What is cartography? What is mapped identity? How can groups and populations better see themselves, their history and their futures in the realm of maps?

Urban storytelling

Stories of the distant past or recent memory help hold groups together. Community groups and cultural critiques often address whose stories are told, and how. In San Francisco, the mural is a traditional form of commemorative media, making communities’ histories and concerns visible on the walls of their buildings. What remains invisible? Can wireless technologies enable understandings of the past — both accepted and controversial?

Sentient space

Surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and electronic forms of payment have moved substantially into public space. Computational means of tracking and responding to human actions increasingly pervade the urban infrastructure. San Francisco has recently deployed a test run of networked, sensor-based parking meters. Other cities have introduced wireless, networked monitoring of water systems, electrical grids and so forth. Is this the emergence of new ’sentient cities’ or an extension of automated modernity started a century ago? How might we imagine and make debatable the ways in which networked information processing animates, invades, enables or undermines urban places?

Body awareness

Often seen as places of strangers and strangeness, modern cities are places where, unlike villages, one can find both welcome anonymity and undesirable alienation. Ambivalence about relations between self and others experience has been a feature of urban life since the 19th century: we want to fade into the crowd, but also feel connected. What kinds of awareness of other humans — or non-humans such as animals, plants and trees — remind us of liminal and subliminal arenas of urban growth and transformation?  How do embodied experiences — of crowds and solitude, of comfort and anxiety — relate to awareness of self and others?

Local history

Locative media can be used to express specific attributes of place through local history, connecting us to and with histories of architecture, urban space, the changing city and the combinations of news, folklore, and data flows which allow us to interpret and understand where we live. How can local history be mapped? Is it collaborative or authorial? What kinds of stories constitute the history of a place? What kinds of data are place-based?

Contested spaces

Art projects are never neutral. Even in evading explicit discussion of politics or controversies they take a stand with respect to a community of makers and audience of participants, listeners, or seers. In particular, projects of civic engagement rely upon (often unstated) aspirations about urban life. This is so especially when situated within specific communities and drawing upon their hopes, desires and dreams. We invite projects framed as interventions in contested spaces; that work with intervention as an art practice and that introduce new forms or contestation or expand upon the already established path of community-based art in San Francisco.

Gaming

Gaming takes on many unusual forms in today’s media-saturated culture. Moreover, young people constitute one of the most prolific and literate groups of wireless users—and many enjoy gaming. Implementing simple urban games can sometimes tell participants much about themselves and their awareness of and connection to fictional and emotional aspects of place. What kinds of narratives are appropriate in challenging neighborhoods? How can games be used to deal with social ills or help inhabitants navigate through periods of urban change?

Technical forms

Locative media involves an emerging cluster of technologies that include mobile phones, Global positioning satellite systems (GPS), geospatial databases and wireless networks. These technologies enable inter-connectivity between locations, determine locations and mapping and enable participation in storytelling and games. They have become increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives and public spaces, and are radically changing how people work and live. In addition, these technologies raise complex questions about public/private rights, laws and responsibilities. The festival encourages submissions in four areas of creative technical practice:

Data visualizations

What data is relevant to Tenderloin inhabitants? How can visualization expose previously unrecognized patterns of exchange and which change the experience of familiar locations?

Mapping and cartography

Maps produce and represent information about the meaning of place. Locative practices often engage the location-aware/context aware aspects of tools/networks, pinpointing and demarcating places according to creative interpretation.

Participatory media

How can projects weave diverse groups and foster conditions for increased civic engagement, learning, and questioning? What barriers to civic engagement and participation are there and how might they be overcome?

Location tracking

Tracking the movement of people and objects can also record and augment experiences often unrecognized or culturally invisible. What kinds of movements of people and goods combine to form the economies and exchanges of a neighborhood? What kinds of human movement alters the way we might think or conceive of a place and its changing milieus?

Games and playful interventions Introducing ideas of competition, speed, and fantasy into city streets may help engage local inhabitants, young people, kids and onlookers in experiences they see as new, surprising or special.

Project criteria

Proposed art must have some place-based and/or locative aspect such as utilizing GPS or GPS and the web; utilizing cellphones or other mobile media and address site specifics or place-making. Projects which address sites or cultures of the Tenderloin and/or collaborate with Tenderloin based constituents, populations or organizations are encouraged. The festival seeks project proposals which specifically contend with and/or engage with the multiple languages, communities, and interests of the Tenderloin, and which utilize the variety of public urban sites available in some meaningful and site specific form. Playgrounds, schools, public lobbies, gallery space, community centers, sidewalk areas, the street, parking lots, rooftops, and open plazas all provide excellent inspiration for wireless public projects and locative media works.

Other criteria and creative/artistic priorities:

Projects must be designed for or adapted to locations in or in close proximity to the Tenderloin. Existing projects that can be adapted to the Tenderloin are welcomed. Priority will be given to submissions by those who have community art experience or have worked with populations in urban neighborhoods.

About the Tenderloin and Civic Center

San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is a densely populated, rapidly changing, loosely defined district with apartment buildings, single- room occupancy hotels, nightclubs, bars, galleries and restaurants. Located near San Francisco’s cable car tourist attractions, downtown convention center hotel district and Union Square, it is a flourishing, multilingual and multiethnic neighborhood home to many artists and galleries. Yet the Tenderloin is also notorious as a concentrated site of misery, known for violent crime, prostitution, drug addiction, and homelessness. Recently, the city has devoted considerable attention and resources to redevelopment in the Tenderloin, making engagement with locally led organizations a priority. There are numerous multilingual, multicultural organizations with substantial art programs –Glide Memorial Church, Hospitality House, the YMCA and The Boys and Girls Club. It is also site of the Main Library, the center of San Francisco’s public library system. The festival’s close proximity to San Francisco’s administrative buildings and historic Market Street make it an especially intriguing arena for urban artmaking and location based creative practice.

Free wi fi exists in the library system and wireless is found throughout the Tenderloin. More specific technical questions can be addressed once proposals are selected.

The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts at 55 Taylor Street in the Tenderloin and will operate as base for the festival and will assist artists to work with the neighborhood in the installation of their projects. In addition Gray Area has a window installation venue Tendorama to which proposals can be specifically made, and will offer information about organizations with which to partner. The Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (http://www.gaffta.org/) is a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture. Guided by the principles of openness, collaboration, and resource sharing, our programs promote creativity at the intersection of art, design, sound, and technology. Its goal is to make digital culture accessible, substantive and inspiring from the physical neighborhood of the Tenderloin to extended digital communities. GAFFTA is committed to outreach both online and in the city.

Selection process

Proposals will be reviewed and selected by a panel of artists, curators, arts and community organizations.

Timeline
Proposals due: March 1, 2010
Participants notified: on or before April 1, 2010
June 11–12: Opening and art exhibition
June 13: Symposium
Community Workshops: June 19
Friday, June 11: Art opening and introduction to the symposium at GAFFTA
Saturday, June 12: All-day art festival of interactive, locative works in the Tenderloin sponsored by Gray Area.

Sunday, June 13: City-Centered Symposium at KQED, hosted by KQED and SFSU.

Saturday, June 20: Community education workshops at KQED in the Mission District

Please direct questions and other correspondence to citycentered [at] gaffta.org

Invitation to submit proposals : APPLICATION PDF
Submission deadline: March 1, 2010

Participating Organizations
KQED: http://www.kqed.org/
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts: http://www.gaffta.org/
Center for Locative Media: http://www.locative-media.org/
Conceptual Information Arts/Art Department/SFSU: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~infoarts/
The Berkeley Center for New Media: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/

This panel will discuss shared augmented realities, considering some of the essential possibilities and challenges inherent in this new class of social augmented experiences. The format is presentation of a small set of scenarios (defined in advance, with audience input) describing likely future forms of shared augmented realities at differing scales of social engagement for discussion by a panel of leading practitioners in technology, experience design, networked urbanism, interface design, game design, and augmented reality.

Current augmented reality experiences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at center stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of interactions assuming a single user seeing simple arrows and tags indicating POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) augmented realities.

These social augmented experiences will allow not only mashups, & multisource data flows, but dynamic overlays (not limited to 3d), created by distributed groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syndicated to people who wish to engage with the experience by viewing and co-creating elements for their own goals and benefit.

Some examples of scenarios could include:

- historical and environmental overlays showing how a city used to be/and how this vision may be constructed differently by different communities

- proposed buildings in communities showing future changes to a structure/neighborhood, and the negotiations of this future

- sensors, both mobile and static can contribute environmental data into city overlays making this kind of data “not back story but fore story,” right where we are, right where it happens, as well as having it available for analysis.

- skinning the world with interactive fantasies

- real time augmentation building

- geo-spatial real time news dissemination from points in a city with time demarcation for information and emergency services

Having invisible aspects of the world made visible will create ways to improve sustainability, social equity, urban management, energy efficiency, public health, and allow communities to understand and become active participants in the ecosystems and infrastructure of their neighborhoods.

A distributed, open framework for AR can enable these layers, datasets, and open interchanges via shared augmented realities to create an interconnected experience of AR that fuses augmentation, data overlays, and varied media with immediate geo-spatial access and, perhaps most importantly, social & collaborative capabilities. Looking ahead, an open framework would allow end users to extend the reach and increase the value of augmented social channels over time.

The challenge of shared augmented realities is not just a matter of shipping bits around, but also of how it we will understand and use these new channels and layers to create and negotiate different perspectives, understand a shared core, or express dissent, in order to build eventual consensus.

There are endless possibilities for distributed, open AR, and the connection of place into an active field of information with end user control…and open options for new layers will have impact across all social scales, from direct conversations, to small-scale collaboration (a product design & build team or a neighborhood fixing potholes), to global a community mobilizing for a cause.

While shared augmented realities in immersive 3D may still be a ways off, new webs of protocol for real time communication like Wave are demonstrating that we can use existing infrastructure and protocols for distributed augmented realities that can allow people to collaborate together on the same world overlay in real time – creating dynamic overlays, animated by time, conditions (see AR Wave ).

The integration of augmented reality with sensor networks, the internet, and the world wide web will create a new opportunities to for us to engage collectively with the complex and often invisible ecosystems that make up our world.

eg.

- interacting/responding/enhancing environmental data - new connections/understandings between humans that share our world – fish, plants, waterways - “reading” of places and their data otherwise unseen with shared data allowing greater analysis and awareness in real time and in data analysis

Perhaps one of the most interesting features in Wave is (and will be in AR Wave) the ability to playback overlay data from a previous time in context (for example, environmental data from a year ago) – see writing as real time performance

We will set up a participatory web site to accompany the panel called, “What would you add to the world?” Conference attendees will be asked to augment some real world photos and other media. People would have to send ideas as png images‬ with transparent backgrounds and the ‪website will be set up so everyone’s layer-submissions can be toggled on/off. ‬ We will also set up “How would you edit layers?” for people to participate collaboratively live in Google Wave.

Panel Members:

Jeremy Hight – modulated mapping – locative narratives-channels of augmentation-end user adjustable interface controls-communal AR development and social networking tools fused to AR and geo spatial augmentation- AI as interface and geo spatial news, user channels and back end AI

Joe Lamantia – UX: the experience of creating and interacting with social augmented experiences – concepts and models for understanding and contributing to shared augmented experiences, such as the social scales for interaction

Tish Shute – AR and networked urbanism, connecting people to environments through games and social interaction, making the invisible visible – AR and new public infrastrucures, AR & ubicomp – citi-sensing and citizen sensing

Thomas Wrobel – creating distributed multiuser AR using current infrastructures and protocols (Wave enabled AR)

Our course on Ambivalence will be meeting simultaneously in two places - the Municipal Art Gallery (the site of the Actions, Conversations, and Intersections exhibition until April 18, 2010) and Telic Arts Exchange (where The Public School regularly holds classes). Each group will be able to see and hear the other through a commonplace video conference call (Skype, iChat, etc.). Teachers, speakers, and other guest presenters will go to whichever location seems more appealing that day and no one will be informed of their decision until the last minute.

We often wonder what happens when participatory art projects are brought into the gallery, particularly when they already regularly function without an exhibition space. This question is amplified when the project and exhibition are in the same city. Does the project migrate to the exhibition, leaving its “normal” site closed? Does it announce itself as nomadic, settling temporarily in exhibition space after residency after biennial? Does it produce an exhibitable double of itself to accommodate the requirements of the gallery? Does it refuse any mutation or compromise in order to preserve its singular authenticity?

ambivalence:

This course will (maybe) explore different concepts and theories of ambivalence, typically defined as “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action;” “continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite);” and “uncertainty as to which approach to follow.”

In addition to researching and reading what various contemporary thinkers have to say about ambivalence, we will also attempt to debate the relative pros and cons of ambivalence as a state/ position/ strategy. What is dangerous, or, alternately, enchanting, about ambivalence? How might we theorize an ethics of uncertainty?

Readings will include excerpts from USC professor Karen Pinkus’ new book on alchemy and ambivalence, as well as selections from psychoanalytic, queer, trans and other works relevant to the topic. Suggestions encouraged!

This class will be led by Sarah Kessler and others.

the first class:

- How might we define ambivalence (what does ambivalence seem to signify)?
- Is ambivalence an affect? An intellectual state? An ambiance? A process?
- In what ways is ambivalence represented?

Reading: Karen Pinkus, “Excursus: Ambivalence,” from Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence. Possible second reading: Judith Butler, “Ethical Ambivalence,” in The Turn to Ethics.

Also: Please, if you like, bring various definitions/representations of ambivalence to class (textual excerpts, images, video clips, etc.) for group discussion.

http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1765
http://www.actionsconversationsintersections.com/
http://la.thepublicschool.org/node/1765/aaaarg

Telic Arts Exchange
951 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
http://telic.info
tel: 213.229.8907