Programmed Visions: Software and Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, MIT Press:

New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things - mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict - even embody - a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.

Chun approaches the concept of programmability through the surprising materialization of software as a “thing” in its own right, tracing the hardening of programming into software and of memory into storage. Continue reading

On nettime olia lialina wrote: Dear nettimers,

I thought I should post the intro to my Still There research here. There must be still people on the list who remember what I remember, or remember it differently.

In September 1996, I came to Rotterdam to participate in the Dutch Electronic Art Festival – not as an artist yet but as a film curator, or, to say it better, as a film curator from Moscow who made a website for a film club. For many people, the mid-90s were all about going online, making websites, travelling to the East and to the West.[1]

It was my very first media art event. Continue reading

Touch and Go, Leonardo Electronic Almanac :: Call for Papers - Deadline: February 12, 2012.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with Watermans and Goldsmiths College in occasion of the Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012 announces a special issue titled: Touch and Go.

The Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012, will coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics in London, and Watermans is pleased to host a Festival of ground-breaking installations exploring interactivity and participation in New Media and Digital Art. Continue reading

The Medium is Not the Message: On the Future of New Media Studies by Florian Kramer [to Graduates of The Media Department of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, September 2011]:

Dear graduates,

Let me make a wild guess: Perhaps it has become more difficult for you to say what media are - and what media studies are - than a few years ago when you began to study them. A paradox of “media” is that, in our time, they seem to be everywhere at first glance yet nowhere when it comes to critical study. Every person on the street would agree that our everyday life is permeated by electronic media, the Internet, mobile phones, electronic gadgets. Everyone is aware of their economic impact. Even the link between these communication technologies to cultural and social movements is not esoteric anymore, in the year after WikiLeaks and two days after the Pirate Party won nine percent at the state elections in Berlin. Continue reading

Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science, and New Media, Rolf Hughes, Jenny Sundén (eds.), Axl Books:

With the practices of art, science and technology increasingly converging, the concepts of origins and originality raise some of the most pressing questions in contemporary research, including issues of agency and accountability, hybridity and identity, intellectual property and oeuvre, intention and authority. These, and a constellation of related philosophical, economic, aesthetic, legislative and political concerns, are today subject to rapid reconfiguration due to the current pace of technological and theoretical change. Second Nature accordingly brings into a productive, interdisciplinary dialogue scholars working at the intersections of art, science and technology. Continue reading

The Mobile Audience: Media Art And Mobile Technologies, edited by Martin Rieser, with an Introduction by Howard Rheingold:

The convergence of mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing is creating a world where information-rich environments may be mapped directly onto urban topologies. This book tracks the history and genesis of locative and wearable media and the ground-breaking work of pioneer artists in the field. It examines changing concepts of space and place for a wide range of traditional disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Sociology, Fine Art and Architecture to Cultural and Media Studies, Fashion and Graphic design. Continue reading

Bivouac Projects: New Media, Film, And Video :: January 19, 2011 :: 701 Center for Contemporary Art, 701 Whaley Street, Columbia, South Carolina :: Call for Artists Working at the Intersection of Art and Technology - Deadline: December 30, 2011. Continue reading

Transmittance #2 - Telepresence Performance :: December 13, 2011; 8:00 pm (CET) :: http://transmittance.si ( Online audience can watch and interact with the performance live using a recent version of popular browser like Firefox or Chrome) & Tobacco 001 Cultural Centre, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Transmittance explores collaboration which is local, global, networked and broadcasted. It involves an artistic group of performers, visual artists, musicians and computer programmers to research performative possibilities of streaming, broadcasting and telepresence forging new types of performance and audience. With focus on critical and socially-aware artistic languages this work is based on asking questions about body, self and society - opening non-dualistic perspectives. Continue reading

New Collaborative Research Projects In Digital Media Arts - An Integral Component Of UCSC’s Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program :: Deadline: January 3, 2012.

The Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz is initiating new collaborative research projects in the context of the program’s ongoing research. Collaborating with faculty and contributing to digital media arts research is a critical component of each student’s experience in the DANM MFA program. MFA students entering in Fall 2012 will have the opportunity to collaborate on the following projects: Continue reading

Webcasts of Media Squares - International Public Seminar on the New Forms of Protest and their Media (hosted by De Balie, Amsterdam, September 30, 2011).

Social protest has become almost inseparably linked to a plethora of media images and messages distributed via internet, mobile phones, social media, internet video platforms and of course traditional media outlets such as newspapers, radio and television. A popular category to have emerged recently is the ‘twitter-revolution’. In almost all cases (Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, London) the role of the platform turned out to be less than essential in retrospect. Protests mostly manifested on the streets and particularly the public squares (’Take the Square’). Continue reading