[Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG Reenactment of Valie Export and Peter Weibel's Tapp und Tastkino, (2007)] From Plaintext Players to Avatar Actors: A Short Survey of Online Gaming Performance by Mathias Jansson:

Performance art emerged in the mid-1960s into the 1970s and was a way to push the boundaries between art and everyday life. Many artists saw performance as an opportunity to bring art directly to the audience without having to detour through the galleries, curators or agents. Performance therefore often occurs outside the institutions on streets, squares or other public places. It was defined as an antithesis to theatre and the ideal was to “create an ephemeral and authentic experience for performer and audience in an event that could not be repeated, captured or purchased.”(1) Famous performance artists from this time are Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden and Marina Abramović. Continue reading

CODE - A Media, Games & Art Conference :: November 21-23, 2012 :: Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia :: Call for Papers and Creative Works — Deadline: May 31. Continue reading

Rememori is a degenerative memory game and playable poem that grapples with the effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters. Play-read or read-play, however you approach it and whoever you identify with, you’ll become entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, attention and the search for meaning. Inevitably, it’s a contrary game – there can be no winners.

Although drawn from personal research and experience, Rememori is not factual nor biographical – it’s a playable poem or poetic game created in Flash. For facts that speak of a wider context, here’s a quote from the Alzheimer’s Disease International’s World Alzheimer Report 2009: Continue reading

[Image: Bionet :: Recombinant by Eugene Thacker] Fever — an online multiplayer game about contemporary systems of medicine and health — by Spyros Nakas, Marountas John, Nektarios Nasser, Manos Loukopoulos.

Gameifying Medical Normativity by Daphne Dragona: What is the value of life today and how is it estimated? How does it relate to the dubious health and medical system of contemporary states and how do these elements affect the image of “life itself”?

Since the emergence of biopolitics back in the 18th century, when the body became the very center of interest and object of government, different standards and norms were established that could progressively control the entirety of human bios. With the help of demographics and statistics, life started being quantified and articulated and a multiplicity of men, a global mass became affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on… (i) Continue reading

[The Path - Tale of Tales 2009] The Garden of Forking Paths: An Exhibition of Historic and Contemporary Artists’ Computer Games including Laurie Anderson with Hsin-Chien Huang, Tale of Tales, Jaron Lanier, Michael Nyman, Nina Pope & Karen Guthrie, Andy Deck, Anita Fontaine & Mike Pelletier. Continue reading

Naked on Pluto — by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk — is the winner of VIDA 13.2, the prestigious international art and artificial life contest. Continue reading

games++ — organized by Alex Myers and Jeff Thompson :: November 4, 2011; 9:00 am - 9:00 pm (make games); 9:00 - 11:00 pm (play games) :: Drift Station Gallery, 1746 “N” Street (at 18th), Lincoln, Nebraska. Continue reading

Fall 2011 Purple Blurb @ MIT, Cambridge, MA:

Seeing and Writing: Russian Multimedia Poetry by Natalia Fedorova :: October 24, 2011; 5:30 pm :: 14E-310 — Natalia Fedorova’s work includes an interactive novel, Madame Ebaressa and a Butterfly, co-written with Sergeij Kitov; 7, a  hyper fiction piece with three possible endings; Dialogue Between a Policeman and a Ballerina, a video installation with the Factory of Found Clothes; and two poetry films, Snow Queen and Just do not not do it. She is also the founder and curator of VIDE0.txt, a poetry film festival in St-Petersburg, Russia and the co-curator of SELF-ID.com, a digital publishing portal. Continue reading

Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture screening + panel discussion with Fred Ritchin (moderator), Roger Stahl, Wafaa Bilal, Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner :: October 21, 2011; (screening) 6:00 pm (panel) 8:00 pm :: Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, Room 006 :: Free but RSVP required.

Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture (Media Education Foundation, 2011, 45 min.), written and directed by Roger Stahl, examines the culture of war-themed video games through work of three pioneering artists and activists: Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner, and Wafaa Bilal. Continue reading

[HIV-1, coloured green, budding from a cultured lymphocyte. Photo: HIV-1, coloured green, budding from a cultured lymphocyte. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.] Online gamers crack enzyme riddle, from ABC News:

“Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or World of Warcraft: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.

The exploit was detailed on Sunday in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, where — exceptionally in scientific publishing — both gamers and researchers are honoured as co-authors.” More >>