[Image: The Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos by John Craig Freeman and Mark Skwarek] Mobile Art: The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Place Making :: February 22-25, 2012 :: College Art Association Conference, Los Angeles, California :: Call for Papers — Deadline: May 1.

The integration of mobile and locational technology into physical place has broadened the possibilities for the creation of new spaces of interaction and opened the disciplinary boundaries used to define and
understand the public arena. When real places are merged with virtual worlds, or augmented with interactive digital media, the result is a completely new “hybrid” environment where physical and digital objects coexist in real time. We seek proposals from artists, scholars, or interdisciplinary collaborative teams that engage art that incorporates cell phones, GPS, and other mobile technologies. Continue reading

gradually melt the sky: “augmented reality” as overlay, intervention and challenge to the material world — a curatorial project by Mark Skwarek + Will Pappenheimer :: April 8 – May 1, 2011 :: Opening: April 8; 7:00 - 10:00 pm (Opening night live performances by Jeremy Bailey and Mark Skwarek at approximately 8:00 pm) :: Devotion Gallery, 54 Maujer St., Brooklyn NY.

“The title of this exhibition takes its cue from the 1964 artwork-poem “Tunafish Sandwich” by Yoko Ono. The text imagines a performance event which is at once cosmic and mundane, an action painting and a protest. The artworks in this exhibition employ a recent developing technology dubbed “augmented reality” to overlay, intervene and challenge the physical world in much the same conjectural spirit as preceding Fluxus and Conceptual works. Continue reading

Rivane Neuenschwander’s film in high-speed motion shows ants devouring a map of the world rendered in honey. On view at the Whitechapel Gallery now.

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

Frakcija Magazine for Performing Arts, Issue No. 55: Curating Performing Arts:

The concept of the curator has become more and more influential in the performing arts in recent years. But while it has been heavily discussed and theorized within the visual arts, the function of the programmer, producer, curator in the performing arts remains strangely un-debated. Even though programming in dance, theatre and performance has undergone fundamental changes over the last decades there are barely any texts that reflect on its specific role in art production and reception.

This edition of the performing art magazine Frakcija is the first publication fully dedicated to investigating the concept of the curator in performing arts, from its pragmatic limitations, its relations to art and artists up to its conditions within the field of immaterial labour and its role within the system of the art market. Continue reading

In the Mud and Blood of Networks: An Interview with Graham Harwood by Anthony Iles, Mute Magazine:

“Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji (YoHA) build contraptions that expose and collapse down the productive chains linking telecommunications media to some of the raw materials that constitute them. In this interview with Anthony Iles however, Harwood rejects theoretical discourses of resistance in favour of a more direct and technical method of ‘action research’ which skirts art and politics.

In the 1990s Graham Harwood’s work with the media arts and education group Mongrel plotted a characteristically antagonistic approach to cultural hybridity and the social uses of technology. Continue reading

Radars & Fences III: Borders, Affect, Space — A symposium with Ricardo Dominguez & Amy Carroll, Teddy Cruz, Helga Tawil Souri, Laila el Haddad & Mushon Zer-Aviv :: March 12, 2010; 9:30 am - 5:00 pm :: Hemispheric Institute, 20 Cooper Square - 5th Floor, New York, NY :: Please RSVP.

Radars and Fences 2010 will explore the production of the Israel/ Palestine and Mexico/ US borders, examining how they engage affects, bodies, and spatial scales. Despite their seemingly confounding specificities, it is our intention to open up a dialogue between these borders in order to enable new terms of practical and political engagement. By bringing this plurality of perspectives into dialogue around the themes of affect and space, we hope to reinvigorate critical analysis of the border in all of its (im)materialities and locations.

I. From the Dematerialized Object to Immaterial Labor

Anglo-American Conceptual art, which emerged in the mid to late 1960s, displayed a new interest in linguistics and information theory that clearly distinguished it from the industrially coded production aesthetics of Pop art and Minimalism. The thesis that went along with this was that replacing author-centered object production with linguistic or information-based propositions represented a challenge not only to any traditional “material-object paradigm” (Art & Language) but also to those aspects of craftsmanship within “production values” that are crucial to any claims to authorship and the “work,” and this perhaps helps to explain how and why the history of Conceptual art has mistakenly been written as a history of “dematerialization of the object.”(1) Continue reading

The 25th Annual CHArt Conference: Object and Identity in the Digital Age :: November 12-13, 2009 :: Birkbeck, University of London, Clore Lecture Theatre, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London, WC1 7HX.

This year’s CHArt conference engages with the idea of object and identity in relation to art practice, production, consumption, representation and display. The conference will explore new notions of the identity of the artist, including those involving collaboration and anonymity; new conceptions and ontologies of the art object, as processual, virtual, or hybrid; new means of consumption and reception, whether in galleries and museums, in public spaces, or over networks of broadcast and narrowcast; and the challenges these transformations bring to the display of art and to its curation and access. Continue reading

Scott Kildall wrote: [...] On the topic of immaterial labor, Trebor has prodded me to discuss a specific work called No Matter, which is a collaboration between myself and Victoria Scott and was part of the Mixed Realities commission by Turbulence.org in 2007.

The No Matter project looks at the concept of the “imaginary object” — these are shared objects of the mind, which appear in myth, fiction, impossible objects, thought experiments and more. Popular examples include the Trojan Horse, the Holy Grail, Schrodinger’s Cat, the Yellow Submarine, the Time Machine and many more.

We constructed these in Second Life, a space of pure imagination, and extracted these as “digital plunder” (Second Life being a proprietary environment) and then reconstructed them as high-quality paper sculptures. Continue reading