Trebor Scholz wrote:
Dear all,

What follows is my introduction to the conference The Internet as Playground and Factory, which will take place November 12-14 at the New School University in NYC.

Over the next few months this list will serve as one of the places for discussion in preparation for the event and some of the exchanges that we had on the iDC over the past few years are highly relevant to this debate.

These include: Social information overload/time :: User labor :: “Creative labor” :: Labor and value :: Fan labor :: Immaterial labor :: Enculturation :: Virtual worlds, education, and labor

I hope that you’ll join this discussion. Continue reading

DaNCING IN SECOND LIFE: a Roundtable — Envisioning Virtual Cartographies for Corporeal Interaction: Dance and Performance Convergent Applications of the Second Life 3D Metaverse Social Environment :: at Society of Dance History Scholars Conference :: June 20, 2009; 5:30 - 7:00 pm (SLT) :: Room 2 - History Corner and Weltec, Koru (203, 224, 3093).

Moderator/Discussant: Sarah Rubidge, Chichester University, UK :: Facilitator: Mike Baker, School of Arts and Media, NMIT, New Zealand :: Panelists: Yukihiko Yoshida, Keio Research Institute, Keio University, Japan; and Isabel Maria de Cavadas Valverde, Institute of Humane Studies and Intelligent Sciences, Center for Art and Technology, Portugal. Continue reading

[Image: Superstruct video] Resetting Theory — Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, C-THEORY.NET:

Our argument, need we say, is not that “games make you kill,” in the sense asserted in moral panics about the play of “Doom” or “Grand Theft Auto”. It is that digital games are systemically incorporated in the war-fighting apparatus of Empire, in ways that render developers and players material partners in military technoculture, and Defense Departments’ systemic cullers of gamer subjectivities: this is what makes virtual play integral to “banal war,” the normalized state of perpetual conflict Empire’s global control demands.

Amidst the current convulsions, global capitalism has one consolation left for its increasingly desperate subjects: you may have lost your job (or will never be able to retire from it), you can’t afford to go out, but you can always stay home (if you still have one) and play a video game. Continue reading

9th Annual EFF-Austin SXSWi Party — Plutopia: Living Systems Theory :: March 16, 2009 :: Austin, Texas :: Call for Artists — Deadline for Intent to Submit: January 15, 2009.

This year at SXSW Interactive the Plutopia Party will focus on Living Systems Theory. We are looking for art in all media that underscores the Integrated and Interconnected nature of all Living Systems from Biological and Cybernetic Organisms to Socio-cultural Networks and International Organizations.

We seek to explore: The Biological Substrata of Technology :: Human Machine Interfaces :: Biological and Self-Perpetuating Living Art Continue reading

Kinetica Museum at Bishopsgate Institute: A Cultural Institute for London presents Man & Machine: The Convergence :: November 11, 2008; 7:30 pm :: Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London.

This visionary panel will discuss the advancing potential of the human body and explore how science fiction has lead the way forward in creating today’s robotic and technologically integrated society.

Ghislaine Boddington (Director, Body>Data>Space); Rich Walker (Director, Shadow Robot Company); Dianne Harris (artist); Brian R Duffy (Senior Researcher, Anthropos Project, Media Lab Europe & Smartlab Digital Media Institute); Stelarc (performance artist).

(curating) interference (annette finnsdottir, carlos katastrofsky) :: Exhibition Announcement & Call for Participation :: October - December, 2008 :: Spanien 19C, Aarhus; Mikrogalleriet, Copenhagen; and netfilmmakers (online).

The aim of the project is to discuss the working methods and the task of a curator within a networked environment. Curating on the internet is a working process that wants to be visible in the same way as the processes frequently hidden behind internet-based art. The curator acts not only as an intermediary in the presentation of art but also according to his own filtering processes, choices and decisions. Continue reading

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media.

After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives? Continue reading

Fibreculture Journal Issue 13: After convergence: what connects? :: Edited by Caroline Bassett (University of Sussex, UK), Maren Hartmann (University of the Arts Berlin, Germany), Kate O’Riordan (University of Sussex, UK)

After convergence: what connects? Making this question the subject of this special issue we set out to address two questions at once. The first was: ‘Are we after convergence?’ and by this we meant to invite explorations of the exhaustion of the original convergence model. The second was: ‘What kind of convergence are we after?’ Which is to say what kind of convergence do we want? These were at heart of our concerns in developing this issue, and, in posing them we also asked a series of subsidiary questions: Continue reading

Lately, a number of institutions, based on more or less conventional models, seem to be focusing on fomenting art and culture created with digital, networked and portable devices. This is not a new phenomenon, but there seem to be different approaches, and a variety of unfoldings that shift away from the classic MediaLAB models, as the convergence of art, science and technology no longer seems to be dominant on a field nowadays diverse enough to range from social and educational perspectives to artistic experimentation of all kinds.

There are mixed scenarios, on this context, in which digital culture reaches places such as China and India, while mobile and wireless networks adds layers of complexity to our connected society. Continue reading

[ ... ] New Media - New Networks [1]

If you mention the term new media in the presence of one of the most prominent artists of the extremely popular virtual world of Second Life, Gazira Barbelli, you will automatically activate a programme script, which will blow away your avatar to a completely different, unwanted location. The script entitled Don’t Say Tornado is her artwork, created to draw attention to inappropriate use of some terms of traditional new media theory in the context of a completely artificial world in which the artist herself (avatar) is nothing but a set of binary data.

Although the Croatian new media art is far from being thoroughly virtual, the example of Second Life indicates the current process of redefining the new media culture in relation to the increase in the number of the Internet users, changes in the ways it is used, faster introduction of new media theory in traditional scientific fields etc. Continue reading