Urban Research 2012 :: February 9–19, 2012 :: Directors Lounge, Naherholung Sternchen, Berolinastraße 7 Berlin / Mitte, Germany :: Open Call For Film And Video Works - Deadline: Dec 20, 2011.

The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre “city films”. Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Continue reading

LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) presents Nothing Beside Remains Weekend :: December 9-11, 2011 :: Marfa, Texas.

Nothing Beside Remains is a suite of commissioned public projects, presented by LAND, opening in September 2011 and continuing into 2012. This LAND 1.0 exhibition is sited in Marfa, Texas — rural town of 1,800 residents and a site of seminal art historical import — and features new commissions ranging from large-scale installations to discreet interventions. Continue reading

City Within the City @ Artsonje Center, Seoul :: November 12, 2011 - January 15, 2012 :: Opening: November 11; 6:00 pm :: 144-2 Sokeuk-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 110-200 Republic of Korea.

City Within the City — presented in Seoul, South Korea, and Melbourne, Australia, two of the world’s most urbanized centres — seeks to uncover and interweave fictional, composite, fabricated and re-purposed narratives where human subjectivity encounters the built environment.

City Within the City acknowledges cities and urban areas as a prevalent way of life for a large portion of the world’s population today. Approaching cities not as mere statistical entities, this exhibition examines the issues that arise from regarding them as agglomerations of people established over time. Continue reading

Place Making and The Art of Engagement by Linda Carroli, ArtsHub, October 10, 2011:

Urban innovation can mean or refer to many things and there’s no shortage of ideas about how to make cities better. As the theory and more deterministic ‘forecasting’ goes, cities must get better if they are to foster and sustain the types of globalised knowledge and creative economies that will underwrite the future. However, there can be both disagreement and diversity in how to understand what better and development actually mean in and for the urban environments.

Two recent Australian publications reveal some of that diversity by presenting a series of case studies in community engagement, site specificity and place. Continue reading

Arcipelago Balkani, Public Dialogues, Open City :: September 29 - October 15, 2011 :: Symposium and Presentation of Arcipelago Balkani: An Alternative Map: September 29; 5:00 - 7:00 pm :: Opening: 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Kriterion Art House, Obala Kulina Bana 2, 71000 Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina.

Arcipelago Balkani: An Alternative Map, published by Silvana Editoriale and curated by Claudia Zanfi, offers an alternative journey through the ‘New Balkans’, featuring an analysis of the city’s contemporary cultural life and that of the people in this youthful melting pot, through the eyes of both artists and writers.

Public Dialogues Conference: A dialogue with and mapping of the independent cultural scene in Bosnia: Continue reading

Magnetic Cities – Tallinn by Christina Kubisch Commissioned for gateways. Art and Networked Culture, 2011 (also see Electrical Walk):

Magnetic Cities – Tallinn is part of a new group of works by German sound artist Christina Kubisch in which she creates portraits of cities using photographs and electromagnetic sounds. Visitors to the photographic installation receive an audio guide, with which they can select and listen to the sound landscape for any given image. The images are not chosen for their touristic attraction but, rather, for their acoustic qualities. We hear the normally inaudible electromagnetic fields of a particular place; Kubisch causes these fields to resonate using specially developed headphones with a built-in induction coil. Continue reading

Tallinn Wall by Thomson & Craighead @ gateways. Art and Networked Culture, 2011:

Tallinn Wall is a physical manifestation of the invisible city all around us, a poetic snapshot of social networking traffic from within a ten kilometer radius of the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. The artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead manually manufacture a collision between electronic public space and the physical public space of the museum.

In a performance that will last a couple of days, the artists collect and select publicly available status updates from popular websites like Twitter and Facebook. These will then be published as a vast array of standard sized posters and pasted onto a wall in the museum’s foyer, revealing the idle mutterings of ourselves to ourselves as a form of concrete poetry. Continue reading

PLAND, Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation, is an off-the-grid residency program that supports the development of experimental and research-based projects in the context of the Taos mesa.

PLAND finds its inspiration in a legacy of pioneers, entrepreneurs, homesteaders, artists, and other counterculturalists who – through both radical and mundane activities – reclaim and reframe a land-based notion of the American Dream. While producing open-ended experimental projects that facilitate sustainability, collaboration, and hyper-local engagement, PLAND is a constantly evolving artists outpost in the New Mexican high desert. Continue reading

Olafur Eliasson: Your body of work :: September 30, 2011 - January 31, 2012 :: Part of SESC_Videobrasil: 17th International Contemporary Art Festival, :: São Paulo, Brazil.

Your body of work is Olafur Eliasson’s first solo exhibition in South America. Conceived by the Danish/Icelandic artist especially for, and in response to, the Brazilian city, the exhibition features ten site-specific installations that invite the public to experience the perception of colour, spatial orientation and other forms of engagement with reality.

Eliasson’s work will fill three venues in São Paulo: the SESC cultural centers in Pompeia and Belenzinho, in the west and east of the city, and the Pinacoteca do Estado, a hundred year old state-run museum downtown. Continue reading

net.walkingtools. Transformer.shift() by Micha Cárdenas, UC San Diego: The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a polyvalent, polygendered, collectively created project, a multiplicity. On one level, it is a J2ME java based application that allows users to access the GPS receiver function of a cheap cell phone without having service. On another level, it is an attempt to create an augmented geography, placing a transreal layer of information over the treacherous desert terrain of the US/ Mexico border. Our collective imagines the phone as a biopolitical gesture, an experiment in Science of the Oppressed, a form of poetic sustenance and a media virus. In this lecture/ performance I will discuss how the TBT conjures spirits of mayan and queer technologies, as well as fears and realities of technology’s ability to disturb borders: national, gender, genre, disciplinary, fiction/non.