PUBLIC 44: Experimental Media, edited by Peggy Gale:

In “Cultural Engineering 1982–2010″ Tom Sherman challenges the institutionalizing and mythologizing of experimental media through economic support and academic research. Konrad Becker uses slogan, picture and text from his “Strategic Reality Dictionary” to reveal power mechanisms and newspeak from the past half-century. The irreplaceable nature of individual media is a recurring theme, as Michael Snow and Nicky Hamlyn consider works created necessarily in a chosen medium. Christopher Eamon considers media installations new prominence in the museum. Teacher and curator Peter Ride investigates the place of the viewer and systems to evaluate audience response. Continue reading

Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life by Graham Meikle and Sherman Young:

This book is about how networked digital media are being used to bring together people and ideas, images and texts, industries and technologies in new ways — media convergence. The book explores the development of the Internet, the rise of social media, the global expansion and consolidation of the major media corporations, and the new opportunities for audiences to create, remix, collaborate upon and share their own media. The book focuses on how everyday media — such as Facebook, iTunes, Google and the BBC iPlayer — can be understood in new ways for the twenty-first century through ideas of convergence. Continue reading

Mobile Media Lab Residency (Brazil and The Netherlands) :: Call for Applications — Deadline: November 14, 2011. Continue reading

On nettime, Timothy Druckrey wrote: No doubt lengthy paeans will be forthcoming from the Kittler scholars. They will be, of course, well deserved for a thinker whose work traversed so many spheres. For us in the media, Kittler’s work has been an indispensable source of rigor and insight. Back in 1987, I read the first chapter of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter in the journal October. After that, his name surfaced in many sources and I read everything I could find with voracious interest. He was regularly in the media festivals and his intense presence was a stark challenge to the kind of idiosyncratic history that was/is still so prevalent in the media sphere. Continue reading

Fibreculture Journal 18, Trans:

It is now perhaps a commonplace that digital, networked and informational media are extremely transient. They diversify in form and function at a dizzying rate. At the same time, they transit and fuse “social” and “natural” differences in a manner which reconfigures all the worlds involved. It is also perhaps a commonplace to suggest that some established powers have found it difficult to come to grips with this (although this is perhaps beginning to change). For many, from seriously challenged newspaper proprietors to established media disciplines, it might be time to pause for breath, if only for a moment — to regroup and adapt established practices and ideas, to count the survivors from among the old media worlds of just a few years ago. Continue reading

CONT3XT.NET presents: Well, Being In The Loop Gets You Ahead. (Iteration III, Progress) with Michael Kargl, Birgit Knoechl, Annja Krautgasser, Wolfgang Lehrner, Les Liens Invisibles, Lisa Rastl :: October 8-21, 2011 :: Opening: October 7; 7:00 pm :: Glockengasse No9, Vienna, Austria.

Progressive thinking and the human striving for something better, truer and more beautiful are directly coupled with the newness and uniqueness of products, services and ideas. Against this is the recognition of previous decades of unredeemed social utopias. 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

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

[I Love Your Work by Jonathan Harris] Social Media :: September 16 - October 15, 2011 :: Opening: September 15; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: The Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY.

The exhibition focuses on contemporary artists exploring public platforms for communication and social networks through an aesthetic and conceptual lens. In an era of increasingly omnipresent new technologies, Social Media examines the impact of these systems as they transform human expression, interaction, and perception. The exhibition will feature works by Christopher Baker, Aram Bartholl, David Byrne, Jonathan Harris, Robert Heinecken, Miranda July & Harrell Fletcher, Sep Kamvar and Penelope Umbrico. Continue reading

Blowup: Every Artist, A Journalist: Examining the tension between documentary methods and artistic expression, and address where notions of truth and beauty fit in this mix — with Lino Hellings (NL), Alfredo Cramerotti (UK), Gair Dunlop (UK) :: August 25, 2011; 8:00 - 11:00 pm :: V2_, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam.

Documentary images are a common method to measure and reflect on the monumental scale of change occurring in contemporary society. These images are also highly aestheticised, making beauty even of images of the most desolate slum or industrialised landscape. As a crossover point between art and journalism, the documentary image also allows us to question the veracity of world events from multiple viewpoints, often offering multiple uncomfortable realities instead of a single, easily-digestible worldview. Continue reading