Please support this inspiring and important project! Local Autonomy Networks (Autonets) is a line of mesh networked electronic clothing with the goal of building autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructure to function, inspired by community based, anti-racist, prison abolitionist responses to gendered violence. The project is focused on creating networks of communication to increase community autonomy and reduce violence against women, LGBTQI people, people of color and other groups who continue to survive violence on a daily basis. The Autonets garments, when activated, will alert everyone in range of the the local mesh network who is wearing another autonet garment that someone needs help and will indicate that person’s direction and distance. More here.

Listen to KPFK’s interview with Micha Cárdenas:

[A network of nodes (29)] Emergence in the Social Web by Liat Berdugo:

Abstract: Complex systems sometimes exhibit what’s known as emergence — the phenomenon wherein the whole is more than the sum of its parts. For instance, ants acting individually are mindless, but collectively they self-organize to form intelligent colonies with intricate behavior patterns. I explore whether something similar can be said of the way that a collective consciousness seems to emerge from the nodes in a social web. I begin by showing why emergence is a compelling way to understand what happens on the social web, and examine meme generation and social movement formation, specifically, as resultant emergent phenomena. The emergence of social phenomena is nothing new — it happens in offline communities like family units, corporations, and cities. Continue reading

CODE - A Media, Games & Art Conference :: November 21-23, 2012 :: Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia :: Call for Papers and Creative Works — Deadline: May 31. Continue reading

[Image: Teddy Cruz’s graphic analysis of the San Diego-Tijuana border (Estudio Teddy Cruz).] Teddy Cruz wrote: [...]

- We are all aware of how the institutionalization of greedy capitalism in the last decades not only widened the gap between wealth and poverty so dramatically, but also defined a radically conservative socio-economic agenda, impacting urban planning policy and legislation.

- We are all aware of how this situation ultimately has incrementally yielded the erosion of public culture, infrastructure and education, polarizing communities and jurisdictions everywhere. Continue reading

[BADco. "Responsibility for Things Seen", 2011, photo: Dinko Rupčić] Symposium: Actionable Image: Agency of Image, Performance of Body, Apparatus of Spectating :: March 16-17, 2012 ::  Zagreb, Croatia :: Call for Participation - Deadline: February 10, 2012.

This symposium and its topic are a continuation of BADco.’s artistic interest to relate performance and image. More concretely, it was motivated by our most recent work Responsibility for Things Seen that was presented in 2011 within the Croatian participation at the Biennale di Venezia. The work required us, in the absence of performers in the six-months exhibition, to pursue the idea of ‘theater by other means’ and to custom develop a database video system that unfolds a particular nexus of body, image and technology. Continue reading

Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science, and New Media, Rolf Hughes, Jenny Sundén (eds.), Axl Books:

With the practices of art, science and technology increasingly converging, the concepts of origins and originality raise some of the most pressing questions in contemporary research, including issues of agency and accountability, hybridity and identity, intellectual property and oeuvre, intention and authority. These, and a constellation of related philosophical, economic, aesthetic, legislative and political concerns, are today subject to rapid reconfiguration due to the current pace of technological and theoretical change. Second Nature accordingly brings into a productive, interdisciplinary dialogue scholars working at the intersections of art, science and technology. Continue reading

Giselle Beiguelman, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil from The Politics of Digital Culture on Vimeo.

Related: Interaction and Agency in Real Time Systems by Jo-Anne Green (presented at Soft Borders, Sao Paulo, 2010).

#TrainingYRHuman by ecoarttech: A participatory Twitter-based artwork about the agency of animals who live with human-animals. While new scientific research has illuminated animals’ behaviors, their ethical attitudes, modes of cognition, and psychological awareness, our everyday experiences can also tell us a lot about our companion species if we listen carefully — about their diverse personalities and creative problem-solving and the ways they invent to express themselves and meet their needs in desires in a human-dominated world.

The #TrainingYRHuman participatory physical installation will début in beta form at the Animal Influence media art exhibition at Emily Carr University of Art + Design’s Intersections Digital Studios, November 2011. Thank you to University of Rochester for support of this project. More info >>

The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies :: May 3-5, 2012 :: Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee :: Call for Papers - Deadline: December 19, 2011.

Invited speakers include Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Bill Brown, Wendy Chun, Mark Hansen, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, and Tim Morton.

This conference takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has been emerging in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past few decades. Intensifying in the 21st century, this nonhuman turn can be traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the 20th century: Continue reading

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