Emotional Skin: Performance and Sensorial Environments — a VIDA 13.0 workshop with Sonia Cillari :: October 26-28, 2011 :: Matadero Madrid. Paseo de la Chopera 14, Madrid, Spain.

The Italian artist Sonia Cillari, honourable mention in VIDA 13.0, will share with participants her exploration of sensorial and perception mechanisms in immersed environments and the consciousness, perception and identity-related patterns arising from them.

The workshop is structured along three main lines: physical and phenomenological reality, the body as an interface (how do we experience space?) and the physical phenomena of the radiating body. The event is also conceived as an open debate during which attendees may propose new perceptive strategies and discuss the specific subjects proposed. Continue reading

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CELL by James Alliban & Keiichi Matsuda:

Commissioned by Alpha-ville for the 2011 festival this interactive installation plays with and proposes alternative landscapes in the technological ether surrounding our everyday movements. Personal identity is increasingly becoming a broadcasted commodity, as a result of this, our constructed personae enmesh and define us. CELL realises our virtual reflections, making digital projections into literal ones. This installation creates luminous clones, exposing these parallel realities as it replicates the body movement of visitors. As the visitor moves through the installation space, personal data mined from internet profiles is randomly tagged onto the alternate, technologically refracted form of the body, revealing the second self while simultaneously allowing us escape from it. Continue reading

Alone or Not: Perception, Body and Social Media is a choreographic frame for creating and exchanging bodily experiences. Participants send short SMS messages or tweets about their movement, actions and perceptions to each other. Together they create a social network of bodily movement that becomes a shared choreography that is documented in Twitter and the project’s website.

Owing to technical reasons the SMS message exchange works only through Finnish telephone operators and mobile phone numbers with the country code (+358) that are used in Finland. If you want to join the SMS group you should enroll by the 12th of September 2011 at info [at] aloneornot.org. You can also participate directly through Twitter.

“…send kinaesthetic tweets and improvise wherever you may be.” Susan Kozel

ISEA Istanbul presents Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place — Chair Per­son: Chris­tiane Paul; Pre­sen­ters: Tanya Toft, Jack Toolin, Teri Rueb :: Sep­tem­ber 19, 2011; 9:00 - 10:30 am :: Sa­banci Cen­ter Room 4, Sa­banci Cen­ter, Lev­ent.

The panel dis­cusses cat­e­gories of loca­tive, site-spe­cific media art and their im­pact on un­der­stand­ing the con­text of place. Mo­bile com­put­ing po­ten­tially en­ables var­i­ous forms of so­cial in­ter­ac­tion and has to be con­sid­ered in re­la­tion to con­cepts of em­bod­i­ment, the cre­ation of mean­ing, as well as in­di­vid­ual au­ton­omy and agency. Continue reading

Senses Places - Dance-Technology Workshop 3: organized by Pei-Jung Lee, Isabel Valverde, Todd Cochrane :: July 30, 2011; 1:00 - 5:00 pm :: Dance Studio, The Kenneth Myers Center, 74 Shortland Street, Auckland Central, New Zealand + in Second Life.

Senses Places is a dance-technology collaborative project creating a playful mixed reality performance environment for audience participation. The project stresses an integration of simultaneous local and remote connections, where participants and environments meet to generate a kinesthetic/ synesthetic engagement. Continue reading

Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age by Eve Shapiro, Routledge:

Gender Circuits explores the impact of new technologies on the gendered lives of individuals through substantive sociological analysis and in-depth case studies. Examining the complex intersections between gender ideologies, social scripts, information and biomedical technologies, and embodied identities, this book explores whether and how new technologies are reshaping what it means to be a gendered person in contemporary society.

Dr. Eve Shapiro is assistant professor of sociology at Westfield State College. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has published in a number of journals including Gender & Society, Sexualities, and the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services. Continue reading

Lab to test and explore the online venue TAP :: July 4-8 and 14-15, 2011 :: Call for Participation.

Networked/ telematic/ telepresence performance/ presentation & real time media mixing laboratory exploring & testing the online venue, TAP. Scores/ parameters/ mini-scripts on the theme of water, interaction between webcams & body movements/ voice & media, mixing & layering media (also with webcams), interaction text/ voice/ sound/ chat, interaction online/ onsite spaces with or without projections.

Documentation of previous laboratories on the blog. Continue reading

Virtual Body Language: The History and Future of Avatars: How Nonverbal Expression is Evolving on the Internet by Jeffrey Ventrella:

Why does the tail wag the brain? What is virtual autism? Why can’t our avatars walk hand-in-hand? Will a nonverbal Babel fish save the world? Jeffrey Ventrella, a seasoned virtual worlds programmer and visual language expert, reviews the history of avatars, smileys, and other expressive forms, and considers a future of spectacular creativity. This book combines thoughtful scholarship with amusing anecdotes from the trenches of Silicon Valley. Virtual Body Language presents a thorough analysis of the neurological, linguistic, aesthetic, and technical aspects of how nonverbal communication can be distributed over the internet. Based on nearly a decade of avatar development, Ventrella has the practical foundation on which to justify even the most outrageous claims, regarding what “avatar” might mean in the future.

Jeffrey Ventrella — in a post entitled Jaron Lanier Yanks my Homunculus — points us to this video in which Lanier discusses Kinect and Somatic Computing:

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