Artefact Festival for Art and Media: The Social Contract :: February 14-23, 2012 :: STUK arts centre, Naamsestraat 96, Leuven, 3000, Belgium. Continue reading

The Oil Show :: November 12, 2011 – February 19, 2012 :: Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) at Dortmunder U (3rd floor), Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse, 44137 Dortmund, Germany.

We have reached Peak Oil – the maximum capacity of global crude oil extraction and production. After Peak Oil, the total global oil production cannot be increased. In the future, demand will always exceed supply. The global struggle for resources will intensify. Despite this our dependency on oil is growing further. We cannot, or do not seem to want to do without oil. We are seriously dependent.

The works in the exhibition deal with our dependency on oil and the economic, political, and social entanglements and consequences of this growing dependency. Continue reading

Digital Crossroads: Media, Migration and Diaspora in a Transnational Perspective :: June 28-30, 2012 :: Utrecht University, the Netherlands :: Call for Papers and Panel Proposals — Deadline: January 10, 2012. Continue reading

Social Text: Call for Visual Works — Deadline: October 15, 2011.

Debt is arguably the central economic and political issue of our times. Since the recession triggered by the crisis subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, political economists have spent much time bringing to light the arcane financial instruments (e.g. Collateralized Debt Obligations) that have driven the crisis. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the questions which debt and credit raise for culture and everyday life. To address these key issues of our time, Social Text is publishing a dossier of essays on debt that builds on recent work by Michael Denning and the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture. Continue reading

The Politics of Visibility: Mediating the Global, Local and the In-between :: November 4, 2011 :: Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

A collaboration between Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art and City University London, The Politics of Visibility: Mediating the Global, Local and the In-between is a one-day conference that brings artists and academics together to examine the relationship between art, media, transnationalism and power. Continue reading

Archis/Volume and VURB present the Internet of Things Workshop II: Builders at Play :: September 2-4, 2011 :: Waag Society, Amsterdam.

Calling on architects, coders, urban geographers, sociologists, and urban explorers interested in bettering the city through digital means. Following the May 7th Internet of Things Workshop at the Staalvilla, Archis/Volume, VURB, Caro van Dijk and Alexander Zeh will organize the second iteration with the explicit goal of creating prototypes observably eliminating the division of virtual/real. Join us for a three-day hands-on workshop where we will create viable and functional prototypes for the city.

The results of this workshop will then be presented at PICNIC 2011, which will take place between September 14-16 at the NDSM-werf in Amsterdam with the theme of Urban Futures. Continue reading

The Commons by Linda Carroli:

Taking cues from the examples and critics cited here, the idea of the commons has emerged as a networked space of creative and generative possibility and risk. To recover is to reclaim. In shaping the commons, Jay Walljasper states that we “recognise some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good of all. The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come. The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, oceans and wildlife as well as shared social creations such as libraries, public spaces, scientific research and creative works.” However, there’s never just one commons – the commons itself is multiple and complex, in process and becoming. Artists actively keep the commons alive in the face of all kinds of opposition, censorship and antagonism. Continue reading

Archive Books announces No Order: Art in a Post-Fordist Society :: This editorial research and investigation project focuses on the relationships between contemporary art systems and capitalism’s production processes.

By means of an investigation into current creative industries — and their social, economic and semiotic assemblages — the magazine contributions (essays, articles, interviews and dialogues as well as artists’ projects) aim to deconstruct, analyse and intervene within the ambit of the procedures and forms of cognitive capitalism. It will concentrate, in particular, on the phenomena of the ‘biennalisation’, ‘financialisation’ and ’spectacularisation’ of the political, beginning with the control and distribution of forms of artistic education, production and display on a global scale. Continue reading

The Workers: Precarity, Invisibility, Mobility :: May 29, 2011 - March 15, 2012 :: MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA WAY, North Adams, Massachusetts.

We all know what Rosie the Riveter looked like, and what she stood for. Ford-era production line labor — and the rise of powerful unions — left us indelible portraits of work in mid 20th century America. Before that, Dickens created searing portraits of labor in the proto-industrial era, as Millet and his followers recorded a vivid picture of agrarian labor in mid 19th century Europe. But what does work look like today in a global economy marked by outsourcing, rapid migration, disruptive economies, and a state of labor that seems fractured, precarious, and almost invisible? Continue reading

Younes Baba-Ali: No Signal Found :: until May 21, 2011 :: ArteContemporanea, 22, rue des Chevaliers, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.

A parabolic antenna installed within the gallery bumps in vain into the wall. Switching on/off unpredictably, seven hairdryers panic: the air released by one makes the next swinging. The leads of three ball pens appear and disappear, as they are compulsively pressed by tireless, clenched hands. At regular intervals, a megaphone broadcasts a mysterious code, while a TV screen turned towards the wall stubbornly releases the blurred sound of a missing channel. Here and there, tools of our technological, networked and overconnected everyday life cacophonously switch on and off and answer to each other. Continue reading