TEH Plot by Phillip Andrew Lewis, Adam Trowbridge, and Jessica Westbrook :: until January 22, 2010 :: FPAC Gallery, 300 Summer Street M1, Boston, MA.

TEH is a common typographical error and refers to a collaborative art and technology group with interests in research, displaced communication, simulation, nature/culture, and geography. TEH is currently examining weather as a shared experience/vocabulary, and presents this research through installation and technologically mediated experience.

TEH plot is a Summer Scene in Boston and includes: generated cicadas, liquid fresh cut grass, Meatballs glitch, and responsive cluster lighting… amongst other Summery components.

Ephemeral City: Speakers: Kora Van den Bulcke and Thomas Soetens (Workspace Unlimited), Jason Crow, M.Arch Ph.D. candidate, Department of Architecture, McGill University; Direction: Chris Salter :: December 3, 2009; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: CCA/Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Maison Shaughnessy. 1920, rue Baile, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

What can games and gaming experience reveal about the city? How does play in public spaces differ from solitary play. What new aesthetic social practices might arise as a result of the mixing between the physical urban space and the digital realm. This forum will feature research and artistic projects that take gaming beyond the single computer screen and into the urban realm, both real and imaginary. Continue reading

Ambient.TV’s Mapping CCTV around Whitehall, Review by Rob Myers, furtherfield.org.

Two-part exercise to map CCTV cameras around Whitehall, London, within a zone covered by SOCPA (Serious and Organized Crime and Police Act 2005). A map of the hundreds of cameras in the zone was made over two days of observation. The second part involved mapping the range of one of these cameras, no. 40 in Villiers street, by intercepting its signal as it was transmitted wirelessly without encryption. As passers-by entered the marked area covered by the camera, they were alerted to the its presence and handed a copy of the map of CCTV cameras in Whitehall. Continue reading

Define Your Terms (or Kanye West Fucked Up My Show): Paul B. Davis (Beige) :: May 27 - July 4, 2009 :: Seventeen Gallery, 17 Kingsland Road, London.

Paul B. Davis’ probing, contemplative second solo show at Seventeen represents a bold step forward for the artist… though not necessarily one he expected to take. It was instigated by a semi-voluntary rejection of a practice that, until very recently, was central to his creative output and figured prominently in his debut exhibition at the gallery - Intentional Computing (2007). A curious turn of events led to this unforeseen repudiation and redefinition of practice:

“I woke up one morning in March to a flood of emails telling me to look at some video on YouTube. Seconds later saw I Kanye West strutting around in a field of digital glitches that looked exactly like my work. It fucked my show up… the very language I was using to critique pop content from the outside was now itself a mainstream cultural reference.” Continue reading

Abstract: The concept of a ‘strange ontology’ is articulated via the intersection of philosophical and computational definitions of ontology. Within digital media, each simulated world requires both; an ontology, to define its existence as data; and a subject, the player or user, who engages with the simulation. Glitches or interventions in these simulations create ontologies that are inconsistent with our lived experience, rendering them ‘strange’. We draw upon a range of works to illustrate this concept including game art, social networking software, Guglielmetti’s ‘Laboratories of thought’ and generative art. The paper aims to define this concept and outlines a terrain for further investigation. From Strange Ontologies in Digital Culture by Mitchell Whitelaw, Mark Guglielmetti, and Troy Innocent.

Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller - Some years ago, Lev Manovich called for “software studies” to be established as an interdisciplinary field capable of re-thinking programmable media at the interface of cultural theory and computer science. Conceived partly against so-called speculative accounts of virtual reality and cyber-identities, this suggested re-orientation aimed for a denser materiality by foregrounding the technical composition of digital systems. Here, engineering documents were as likely a source of inspiration as Gilles Deleuze or Marshall McLuhan, resulting in a ‘material turn’ constituted by highly engaging work such as Alex Galloway’s protocological network theory or the more recent forensic hard drive analysis of Matthew Kirschenbaum. Continue reading

Conversations At The Edge: GLITCH: Creative Problem Creating curated by Jon Satrom :: September 18, 2008; 6:00 pm :: The Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Chicago, IL.

What happens when the creative roadblocks — errors, glitches, accidents — become the building blocks in the art-making process? This program highlights artists who intentionally create problems by corrupting data, hacking signals, and manipulating the medium, often to the point of challenging its own display. Curated by new media artist and SAIC faculty member Jon Satrom, tonight’s problem-ridden program gathers together films, videos, corrupted data, hacked TV broadcasts, interactive DVDs, and modified GameBoy tools that revel in failure, rejoice in errors, and celebrate the happy accident. Continue reading

“…the error condemned today will sooner or later find itself in the treasure houses of discovery. - Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time

It is fairly agreed in the field of media arts that the aesthetics of interactive media are articulated to the event. But just what do we mean by the term event? And how do we come to understand the error that is emergent within this event? In this paper I attempt to provide some possible answers to these questions by investigating the manner in which interactive media art systems may become errant. When the productive interrelationships formed between human and machine systems seek the unforeseen and the emergent there is also a possibility for the unforeseen error to slip into existence. Continue reading

ANEMICodeCINEMA by Andy Deck - Media Player Haters Unite :: ANEMICodeCINEMA is a free interpretation of privatized data streams, digital encryption and encoding mired in secrecy and exclusivity. It’s a premonition of future histories lost in translation. Already video and audio are often unusable and scrambled for people who do not use the dominant operating system. As time passes and data encryption secrets are forgotten, this fractured experience of today’s audio and video may become the norm rather than the exception. Continue reading

HARDcoded :: Digital Punk Magicians :: w/ Workshops, Screenings, and Performances by: Alex Ignlizian, Mark Beasley, Sandra Rosas Ridolfi, Jake Elliot, Marisa Plumb, Temporary Services, criticalartware, Paul Hertz, Valerie Brewer, Professor Pangaea, CHHO, Morgan Higby Flowers, I <3 Presets and more… :: December 8, 2007; 1 - 9 pm :: EN3MY, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave 3rd Fl. Chicago, IL + simultaneously streaming @ CentroMultiMedia + BORDER, Mexico City DF, Mexico.

HARDcoded is an ongoing collaboration between newMedia artists in Chicago + Mexico City, that explore the cross-over between digital noise, punk, + magic. Continue reading