Toni Dove: Spectropia :: November 13, 2008; 8:00 pm :: EMPAC Theater, 110 8th street, EMPAC Building, Troy, New York.

Spectropia is a highly imaginative live-mix cinema event, a “scratchable” movie performed by video DJs playing a movie “instrument”. Toni Dove’s sci-fi hybrid, features time travel, telepathy, and elements of film noir in a drama set in England, 2099 and in New York City, 1931, following the Great Crash. Live performers orchestrate onscreen characters through an original mix of film, performance and a unique system of motion sensing that serves as a cinematic instrument, creating a narrative form that is part video game, part feature film, and part VJ mashing. The audience sees through characters’ eyes, hears their interior thoughts, and even talks with characters via Dove and her co-performer, R. Luke DuBois, in a post show Q&A.

An Interview with Paul D. Miller on his Antarctica film Terra Nova by Elena Glasberg, Adjunct Associate Professor, Princeton University [Terra Nova Sinfonia Antarctica trailer]

Elena Glasberg: When did Antarctica emerge into your world? Do you recall images? Was it fiction? Or, learning of historic exploration figures?

Paul D. Miller: I guess some of my most formative film experiences come from early cinema pieces like the two films Melies’s 1902 The Conquest of the North and the false history of Frederick A. Cook’s 1912 The Truth About the Pole I used to watch old films whenever I could, so I’d catch this kind of strange dualism. Like the Lumiere brothers, Cook’s film tried to portray itself as a realistic almost documentary kind of scenario. Continue reading

video_dumbo 2008 :: September 26-28, 2008; 12 pm - 12 am :: Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main Street D.U.M.B.O. Brooklyn NY.

OPENING: September 26, 7:30 pm screening of in complete by Shelly Silver followed by Hack the Debate and live audiovisuals by Zarah Cabanas (aka Lady Firefly).

Current TV’s Hack the Debate is an interactive broadcast of the first presidential debate. For visual enhancement, video_dumbo will transform the Broadcast into 3D! Hack the Debate will, for the very first time, integrate real-time Twitter messages (aka ‘tweets’) over major portions of a live television broadcast. Continue reading

It’s all in the game… Exhibition: October 3 - 26, 2008 :: Festival: October 3-5, 2008.

’Interactivity’ is a word that seems to gain more importance and magic everyday. In 2008 AveCom focusses on an audiovisual phenomenon that is indisputable connected to interactivity; AveCom and Square Eyes Festival are organizing an event based on the interactivity between art and games entitled It’s all in the game…. This 3-day festival will take place in early October and will consist of digital movies, installations, performances and live-cinema. This festival will kick off a 4-week exhibition in which all imaginable fields of art that were inspired by the game-world for the last 40 years and vice versa, will be shown. Continue reading

At last the book VJam Theory: Collective Writings on Realtime Visual Performance is ready and available for purchase. For those of you who don’t know, the book is the outcome of our third experiment in collective theoretical writing, VJam Theory. You will find on the website the necessary information to buy the book online. The original transcript will continue to be available at VJ Theory website for free.

UPCOMING PUBLICATIONS ON THE WEBSITE: VJ Theory will be publishing new texts online on a monthly basis, trough a period between October 2008 and March 2009. At the end of this period, realtime books will publish a print version of these texts (as many people have requested). Continue reading

Dream Amsterdam - Ryoji Ikeda :: June 6 - 21, 2008 :: Opening: June 6, 8:30 pm - live concert and performance by Ryoji Ikeda and an amazing line up of other international guest artists and DJ’s.

Renowned composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda (Japan 1966) will create art projects for Dream Amsterdam. Ikeda’s hypnotic work plays with human perception through installations, performances, live concerts, recordings and album releases. Ikeda will use pure light as the material for his interventions in various secret locations across Amsterdam. Continue reading

The International Dance Party, an installation by Niklas Roy and Adad Hannah, is a complete plug ‘n’ play party in a box. Equipped with radar sensing technology, the system can sense activity nearby and quickly transform from an idle box into a psychedelic light and laser dance machine with a 600W sound system that will make the room bounce with excitement. The machine even taunts its audience with ambience with a built-in smoke machine that spews fog onto the dance floor. When everyone has left the room, the machine quickly transforms back to its static state and waits quietly for the next party to start. Watch the video. [blogged by Jonah Brucker-Cohen on Coin-Operated]

SIMULTAN04 - Video and Media Arts Festival :: Timisoara, Romania :: May 22 - 24, 2008 :: Call for Entries :: Deadline: April 10, 2008 (postmark).

Under the theme Temporary Tactics, Simultan04 explores a conflict situation, a difficult cohabitation between the independent audio-visual works and the cultural, social and political context in which they are born. Temporary Tactics wishes to highlight time and space connected “speculative” situations, the practice of acting and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one’s immediate environment. Continue reading

Festival SOS 4.8, Murcia (Spain) :: Call for Artists - Visual Arts, Visual Jockeying (VJ), Net Art, and Performance :: Curators: Christiane Paul, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Paco Barragán :: Organized by Dept. of Culture Region Murcia and LegalMusic :: Deadline March 15, 2008.

Murcia launches the event SOS 4.8: 48 hours of non-stop artistic creation related to the concept of sustainability. Sustainability basically means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In words of the artistic director, Paco Barragán, SOS 4.8 understands sustainability not only in exclusively ecological terms  – Continue reading

Upgrade! Lisbon :: VJ Theory - Ana Carvalho and Brendan Byrne :: December 19, 2007; 7:00 pm :: Lisboa20 Arte Contemporânea, Rua Tenente Ferreira Durão 18B (Campo de Ourique).

VJ Theory project intends to develop a community actively discussing and reflecting on philosophy and theory related with VJing and realtime performative practices. It is apparent, during workshops and discussions at Festivals and symposia, that practitioners of both VJing and Interactive Installations are moving on from problems with the practicalities of production to more complex ideas of how and why the process has, for example, significance for the viewer. Continue reading