TELE_TRUST by Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat: How do we trust each other as networking bodies? Do we need to look each other in the eyes? Or do we need to touch each other?

In TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat explore how in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency; while at the same time we increasingly cover our vulnerable bodies with personal communication-technology. For TELE_TRUST Lancel and Maat designed a hybrid play zone for a vulnerable process, of balancing between fear AND desire for the other. In a visual, poetic way they explore the emotional and social tension between visibility and invisibility; privacy and trust. Continue reading

The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be by M. Beatrice Fazi, Mute:

Tackling the conundrum of the future’s relationship to the present through the prism of digital culture, this year’s Transmediale festival strayed into some chaotic philosophical territory. In her review, M. Beatrice Fazi dismisses conceptions of the future as linear effect of the present, instead embracing models of ‘atemporality’ and untimeliness

From the main stage of Transmediale, Berlin’s annual international festival for art and digital culture, one of the keynote speakers, information technology businessman Conrad Wolfram, tells an anecdote: ‘My four-year old daughter enjoys making paper laptops by folding a sheet, drawing a screen on the top and a keyboard on the bottom. I asked her,’ he continues, ‘”When I was your age I didn’t make paper laptops. Why do you think that was?” After one or two minutes of reflection she said “No paper?”‘ The audience laugh. Continue reading

Zach Lieberman: Interactive Art from PopTech on Vimeo.

Posted by Corina MacDonald on Vague Terrain: The fifth and final DOCAM Summit took place two weeks ago in Montreal. Over five years the project, spearheaded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, brought together researchers and practitioners from a variety of disciplines to investigate the issues inherent to the documentation and conservation of media arts heritage. The project produced a great collection of tools and resources that are now freely available on the DOCAM website to artists, curators, conservators, archivists and anyone else concerned by the future of artworks with technological components.

Many themes and discussions emerged during the single day of the Summit that I was able to attend – we were exposed to a wide swath of interrelated issues and topics that are central to the research axes of DOCAM: conservation, documentation, cataloguing, terminology, pedagogy and the history of technology. Continue reading

Upgrade! Milwaukee: Zach Lieberman — Making the Invisible Visible :: March 10, 2010; 7:00 pm :: Arts Center Lecture Hall (ACL 120), University of Milwaukee, 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd., Milwaukee WI.

In this talk Lieberman will present his interactive works and collaborations, focusing on the artistic process as research. He will show works such as Manual Input Sessions, in which an old school overhead projector is transformed into a magical audio visual performance device, and Lights On, a performance of sound and light commissioned for the 2009 opening of the new Ars Electronica center in Linz. He will also talk about openFrameworks, a C++ toolkit for creative coding which is being used by developers worldwide to make compelling interactive installations and performances.

DRHA 2010 Conference - Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity :: September 5-8, 2010 :: Brunel University, West London, UK :: Call for Papers and Performances — Deadline: March 31, 2010.

The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/ sensing technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies.

At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. Specific examples of areas for discussion could include: Continue reading

Are You Conductive? - hands on, creative workshop & interactive installation with Stefanie Wuschitz (Vienna) :: March 17 - 20, 2010; 2:00 - 7:00 pm + March 20, 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Werkstatt, Brienner Straße 48, München.

Focusing on uniting sustainable low tech and untypical materials with high tech in a poetic and fluent way, we will be creating changeable patterns, forms and shapes within the electric circuit, experimenting with resistance and conductivity to create hand made switches and analogue sensors from magnetite stones, conductive thread/ fabric, graphite, organic and found materials to be joined to a spatial interactive and sensual circuit, consisting of movable parts, connected to the micro controller Arduino. Continue reading

Vague Terrain 16: Architecture/Action :: The latest of edition of Vague Terrain presents a timely and nuanced consideration of ubiquitous computing. Guest curated by the American artist/programmer Joshua Noble, the issue provides a window into the practices of several leading researchers. Given the arrival of gestural interfaces and preliminary deployments of augmented reality technology and “intelligent” architecture, it is an important moment for thinking about the relationship between technology and the body. Noble on this current milieu: “All technologies reshape the body and the space around the body, from the bow and arrow to the steam engine to the telephone. It may be that we are beginning to truly see how computing and ubiquitous devices will once again reshape our bodies and our conceptions of ourselves in space.” Continue reading

We Are Stardust — by George LeGrady — is a two-screen projection installation that uses infrared sensors to connect the real-time location of the audience in the exhibition gallery with the total vastness of space. It is part of CODE Live at the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad Festival.

Based on data and observations of the sky collected by the sun-orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope from 2003 to 2008, over 36,000 observations are represented and projected in a five-hour cycle. Simultaneously, a FLIR thermal sensing infrared surveillance camera repositions its gaze on the audience based on the positions of the Spitzer’s observations. Continue reading

Lovebytes - A Festival of Digital Creativity and Culture :: Opening: February 12, 2010; 6:30 - 10:00 pm @ Sheffield Winter Garden and Millennium Gallery :: Lovebytes, Workstation, Sheffield, S1 2BX, United Kingdom.

Lovebytes is a cultural festival for the digital age. A season of extraordinary events taking place at some of Sheffield’s landmark venues and public spaces, from February to June 2010. The festival opening night features a late night opening of the digital art exhibition Code:Craft along with with live performances by Francisco Lopez, Russell Haswell and Mark Fell. Continue reading