Trampoline: Territorial Play (Part of the Tracing Mobility Programme) :: May 14, 2010 :: Nottingham, UK :: Call for Artists - Deadline: April 12, 2010.

Trampoline is inviting submissions for the platform event, Territorial Play, part of Radiator Festival’s forthcoming project Tracing Mobility, a pan-European programme launching in Nottingham mid May 2010 and travelling to Warsaw (June/July 2010), Amsterdam (2011) and Berlin (2011).

Territorial Play aims to illustrate, annotate and animate discourse around the current trend towards a ‘mobilised city’. With the emergence of location aware mobile devices and near ubiquitous access to electronic networks in urban and rural areas, a new city is emerging beneath our feet. This dynamic ‘hybrid-city’ is a city in flux, where ideas of authorship and ownership are left at the door. Continue reading

City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community :: June 11–13 & 19, 2010 :: Invitation to Submit Proposals — Deadline: March 1, 2010 [Application Form]

Recent exhibitions, festivals and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media, City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community will focus upon dynamics of the shifting, locative, cartographic and social space of the city. It is organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asks how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression. Continue reading

Francesco Gagliardi wrote:

I’ve been on the list for a while, but I don’t think I ever introduced myself. I work in performance and occasionally film and video, and write about performance history. Trebor asked me to introduce to the list the work I will be presenting at the Digital Labor conference in November. I can’t say too much about it yet since it is still developing, but here are the basics.

The piece will be based on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I was struck in learning – through this list I believe – that, according to a recent survey, a good number of (western) MTurk workers engage with the tasks crowdsourced through the service in order to kill time and have fun, rather than simply to earn money. Continue reading

Call for (Non)Papers :: Culture Machine vol. 11: Creative Media; edited by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (both at Goldsmiths, University of London) :: Deadline: October 15, 2009.

This is a call for papers and non-papers alike. It is open to artists, intellectuals, writers, philosophers, analysts, scientists, journalists and media professionals who have something to say about the media that extends beyond the conventional forms of media analysis. It is also a call for enacting a different, creative mode of doing “media studies’. Taking seriously both the philosophical legacy of what the Kantian and Foucauldian tradition calls “critique”, and the transformative and interventionist energy of the creative arts, we are looking for playful, experimental yet rigorous cross-disciplinary interventions and inventions that are equally at home with critical theory and media practice, and that can make a difference — academically, institutionally, politically, ethically and aesthetically. Continue reading

[Image: Superstruct video] Resetting Theory — Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, C-THEORY.NET:

Our argument, need we say, is not that “games make you kill,” in the sense asserted in moral panics about the play of “Doom” or “Grand Theft Auto”. It is that digital games are systemically incorporated in the war-fighting apparatus of Empire, in ways that render developers and players material partners in military technoculture, and Defense Departments’ systemic cullers of gamer subjectivities: this is what makes virtual play integral to “banal war,” the normalized state of perpetual conflict Empire’s global control demands.

Amidst the current convulsions, global capitalism has one consolation left for its increasingly desperate subjects: you may have lost your job (or will never be able to retire from it), you can’t afford to go out, but you can always stay home (if you still have one) and play a video game. Continue reading

Dorkbot Vienna: nOtbOt - Walter Langelaar (NL) :: May 3, 2009; 7:00 - 10:00 pm :: Metalab Vienna, Rathausstraße 6, 1010 Wien, Vienna, Austria.

nOtbOt is an automated game-player which is controlled and deranged by reactions to it’s own virtual environment, caught in a vicious force-feedback loop… The installation consists of a hacked up human-computer interface in which the feedback system, originally intended to provide tangible interaction for a human player, is now used as input data to control a ‘first-person’ videogame. Human interaction with the game/controller becomes obsolete, resulting in a completely erratic form of [art]ificial intelligence. The observer of the installation, however, can literally try to ‘get a grip’ on taking control of the system… Continue reading

Floating Points 6: Games of Culture | Art of Games — A Film Screening, Symposium and Workshops with Asi Burak, Anita Fontaine, Jesper Juul, Friedrich Kirschner, Marcin Ramocki, Jason Rohrer, Adriana de Souza Silva, Mushon Zer-Aviv :: March 20-21, 2009 :: Emerson College, Boston + streamed live on the web and in Second Life.

Video games extend beyond the gaming console into nearly every aspect of contemporary life. They are fun. They drive innovation, consumer engagement and employee productivity. Is our culture turning everything into a game? Continue reading

Cyberculture and New Media, edited by Francisco J. Ricardo, Amsterdam/ New York, NY 2009.

In the extension of digital media from optional means to central site of activity, the domains of language, art, learning, play, film, and politics have been subject to radical reconfigurations as mediating structures. This book examines how this changed relationship has in each case shaped a new form of discourse between self and culture and illustrates explicitly the character of mediated agency beyond the formal separateness from lived experience that was once conveniently termed the virtual and which has come to influence common assumptions about creative expression itself. Continue reading

Playable Media: A New Research Focus at UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program; under the direction of Noah Wardrip-Fruin :: Applications Due February 15 for Fall 2009 Admission.

UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an MFA for artists working with computer games, software toys, interactive fictions, rhetorical simulations, and related playable forms. The university’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program has added Playable Media as a research focus for its collaborative faculty-student projects. Applications to the DANM MFA program for Fall 2009 are being accepted through February 15, and are encouraged from the broad diversity of artists who create work that invites and structures play. Continue reading

Pervasive Games: Interfaces, Strategies and Moves by Thomas Dreher :: English :: German:

Pervasive Games: Interfaces, Strategies and Moves reviews the actual state of the discourse about the fundamentals of this kind of games. Terms like the “immersion“ and “magic circle“ are transferred from theories on computer games in nearly all articles on the subject. The transferences lead to contradictory arguments in the authors’ efforts to explain the relations between the play actions and the playing field. An ‘interface-model’ is proposed as an alternative to these contradictions. The ‘world-interface’ constitutes the bodily and cognitive access of the gamers to the world. The ‘game-interface’ constitute the participants’ ways to comprehend and to use the elements creating the game´s requirements: the rules and the technical equipment. Continue reading