The Birdwatchers: Gabriela Albergaria, Jeffrey Blondes, Adriana Salazar, Marina Zurkow, curated by Laura Bardier :: until January 21, 2012 :: bitforms gallery, 529 West 20th Street, New York City.

The Birdwatchers is a group exhibition featuring work of four contemporary artists that observe nature and repurpose it within altered landscapes, as part of their interdisciplinary practice. The exhibited works include physically animated plants and animals, video, animation, letterpress prints, and drawing on paper.

What is it about bird watching? Is it related to the urgency to comprehend, forecast and, later, control our immediate environment? Continue reading

Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. Continue reading

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After a 10 month hiatus the SoundTransit project is back, hosted by Turbulence.org.

SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. Phonography is the art of recording sounds from the environment around us, with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives. An international community of phonographers collect and share their recordings, with interests ranging from recordings of natural or urban environments to improvised situations or soundwalks, to the resonance of solid objects or the Earth’s atmosphere. 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

“Boskoi is an application for Android mobiles that allows people to create a checklist of geo-localized spontaneous food in urban areas. Continue reading

October/November @ 319 Scholes: Ecologías Correlativas, Notes on a New Nature, Monthly Music Series: Leisure :: 319 Scholes Street, Brooklyn NY.

How has the (contested) term ‘ecology’ mutated over past decades? If we cannot separate nature from culture, what is the role of subjectivity in the ‘ecological’? Where are opportunities to reconfigure social models with technology? How does one reconcile the space between a screen and a landscape? What can the natural world tell us about the online environments that we’re building everyday?

Over the course of the next few months, 319 Scholes will be exploring two schools of thought related to technology and ecology. Next week, chimera+ will introduce Ecologías Correlativas, an exhibition of projects by artists, architects and scientists who are creating DIY, largely open source, technologies to navigate environmental and socio-political ecologies. Continue reading

Field_Notes – Cultivating Ground :: September 26 - October 2, 2011 :: Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, Kilpisjärvi, Lapland, Finland.

Field_Notes – Cultivating Grounds is a week long field laboratory for theory and practice on art&science work. Five expert groups (Arctic Waters, Biological Milieu, Body Nature, Environmental Computing, Second Order) will develop, test and evaluate specific artistic approaches based on the interplay of art&science.

With: Anu Osva, Andrew Paterson, Anne Lehtelä, Antti Tenetz, Beatrize da Costa, Benjamin Pothier, Continue reading

ISEA2011 presents Southern Ocean Studies :: Pro­jec­tion on the Cupola: September 14 - 21, 2011; 9:00 am - 11:00 pm :: Discussion: September 16; 8:00 - 10:30 pm :: Çem­ber­l­i­tas Hamam (built by Mimar Sinan in 1584).

Lan­franco Aceti, ISEA2011 Is­tan­bul Artis­tic Di­rec­tor and Con­fer­ence Chair, in­vites you to dis­cuss is­sues of con­tem­po­rary ecol­ogy, melt­ing of the poles and the im­por­tance of water in world cul­ture while bathing in the sur­round­ings of this his­tor­i­cal build­ing adorned with the art­work of Gavin Baily, Tom Corby and Jonathan Macken­zie.

The art­work you will see here shows the South­ern Ocean cir­cu­lat­ing the Antarc­tic land mass (cen­tral). The pro­ject soft­ware runs in real-time gen­er­at­ing the ocean cur­rents on the fly, to which are mapped var­i­ous other eco­log­i­cal data sets. Continue reading

ISEA Istanbul presents Leaf++ by FakePress Publishing, part of Digitization of Biological Data :: Sep­tem­ber 20, 2011; 2:45 - 4:25 pm :: Sa­banci Cen­ter Room 2, Sa­banci Cen­ter, Lev­ent.

Natural interfaces and cross-medial technologies allow for the creation of new publishing paradigms in which the term book can be disarticulated and rearranged into unexpected forms, fostering new ways of interacting with data and information.

Leaf++ is the product of a research project that goes in this direction in which a prototypal interactive system involving computer vision, gestural interfaces, augmented reality technologies and cross medial systems to create a novel tool to experience botanical information about plants and their leaves. Continue reading