ReLocate: Community Engagement and Solidarity :: Kivalina and Shishmaref, Alaska - Call For Civic Media Artist — Deadline: May 28, 2012. Continue reading

Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction with João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Luis Dourado, Mark Aerial Waller, Neïl Beloufa, Neill Blomkamp, Omer Fast, Paweł Althamer, The ARPANET Dialogues, Wanuri Kahiu :: until July 1, 2012 :: Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, BS1 4QA, UK.

Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction surveys the recent tendency for artists and filmmakers to apply the forms and concerns of science fiction to narratives situated in the African continent. It considers the complex undercurrents for this occurrence in art today, and posits other and possible realities existing simultaneously, via careful re-orientations of tense; elevating the need for vigilance towards the present and future over a concern for the past. Continue reading

Social Media For Urban Research :: March 27, 2012; 6:30 - 8:30 pm :: Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick St., Suite 1610, New York City.

Social media are increasingly becoming part of our everyday lives, from connecting with friends and sharing images to exploring cities through location-based applications. These new services have given us a different vantage point from which to understand, explore, navigate, and geographically record the places we live.

This panel discussion brings together academics, professionals, and journalists who are researching, building, and using social media data to better understand our urban environment. Continue reading

Messages for our Future - Collaborative Digital Art: Japanese Tsunami:

It’s been year since a tsunami devastated the northeast coast of Japan. And to honor those who are bravely rebuilding their communities, Jason Nelson recently collaborated with a group of students and residents from Tohoku, Japan to create an interactive artwork. Armed with donated cameras, they took hundreds of photos of both the disaster’s aftermath and, more importantly, their hopeful recovery. They then responded to these visions with poetic message. Nelson then compiled these photographs and texts and using an infinitely recombining/ zooming engine, created an interactive mosaic digital artwork.

La Re.Play: An Exhibition of Mobile Media Art:: February 22-26, 2012 :: Los Angeles, California.

Mobilizing Los Angeles as a place to play and a place in play, LA Re.Play presents leading international artists working with mobile and geolocated media. The exhibit accompanies the double session presentation on Mobile Art: The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Placemaking, co-organized by Hana Iverson and Mimi Sheller for the College Arts Association 2012 conference, as well as an off-conference roundtable City/Space and Creative Measure, moderated by Jeremy Hight at the Art Center. Playing upon the dynamic relations between physical place, digital space, and mobile access via smartphone, we explore art that incorporates cell phones, GPS and other mobile technology, revealing the complex social, political, technological and physiological effects of new mixed reality interactions. Continue reading

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