[Image: The Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos by John Craig Freeman and Mark Skwarek] Mobile Art: The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Place Making :: February 22-25, 2012 :: College Art Association Conference, Los Angeles, California :: Call for Papers — Deadline: May 1.

The integration of mobile and locational technology into physical place has broadened the possibilities for the creation of new spaces of interaction and opened the disciplinary boundaries used to define and
understand the public arena. When real places are merged with virtual worlds, or augmented with interactive digital media, the result is a completely new “hybrid” environment where physical and digital objects coexist in real time. We seek proposals from artists, scholars, or interdisciplinary collaborative teams that engage art that incorporates cell phones, GPS, and other mobile technologies. Continue reading

The Border Crossed Us — A temporary public art installation by the Institute for Infinitely Small Things :: April 20 - May 1, 2011 :: Opening Ceremony: April 20; 3:30 pm :: UMass Amherst Campus.

The Border Crossed Us transplants the US-Mexico border fence in southern Arizona to the UMass Amherst campus in the form of a 400-foot-long photographic mural and sound installation emanating from a vent in the ground. The campus will be divided along its North-South boundary by a to-scale photographic replica of the vehicle fence that runs along the international boundary in southern Arizona/Northern Sonora. The particular stretch of fence being represented was erected in 2007 by Homeland Security and now divides the Tohono O’odham Nation – the second largest Native American reservation in the country – into two parts. Continue reading

Robert Whitman, Passport :: April 16-17, 2011; 8:00 pm :: Simultaneous performances at Riverfront Park, Beacon, New York (near Dia:Beacon) and Alexander Kasser Theater, Montclair, New Jersey.

Passport is a new theater piece by artist Robert Whitman (American, b. 1935), a pioneer of multimedia installation and performances. Passport — which imagines the possibility of being in two places at one time — continues Whitman’s long history of collaborating with engineers and scientists, using technology to create images that incorporate live action, specially built props, sound, video, and other visual media. Continue reading

Stealing the Senses :: March 12 – June 6, 2011 :: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Cnr Queen and King Sts, New Plymouth 4342, Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Inhabiting their own potential moment of encounter, certain artworks have the capacity to create heterotopias of the senses. Remembering Foucault’s concept in human geography, heterotopia describes place and spaces of otherness. This exhibition offers an accumulation of work by international and Aotearoa New Zealand artists whose practices offer sensory and immersive encounters and thus propose new avenues to our phenomenological experience of the world.

Included are Brook Andrew’s room-sized participatory inflatable The Cell; a participatory accumulative project, Passage, by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan; Continue reading

[Image: Runo Lagomarsino, "We support," 2007-2011. Slide projection installation, dimensions variable] Stories, in Between with Loulou Cherinet, Patricia Esquivias, Brendan Fernandes, Tamar Guimarães, Will Kwan, Runo Lagomarsino, and Maya Økland; Guest curated by Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh :: January 22 – March 6, 2011 :: Opening: January 21; 6:00 pm :: Stiftelsen 3,14, Vågsallmenningen 12, 5014 Bergen, Norway.

Discussions around identity in our supposedly post-colonial world have been in the forefront of intellectual and artistic activities for nearly four decades. From Edward Said onwards, thinkers like Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Frantz Fanon have transformed the way that we understand and discuss colonialism and globalization. Continue reading

Read | Write Re-Locating by Yasmine Abbas — in Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art):

ABSTRACT: Stress is an undesirable offshoot of any kind of travel, forced or voluntary. To soothe the stress of travel, today’s mobile individuals — neo-nomads — engage in tactics of re:location, the practice of re-assembling a familiar and cushioned personal space, an image of home. The spaces and objects we design with mobility in mind should focus on bringing comfort to these mobile individuals. We learn however that in today’s consumerist, “liquid” and hypermobile world, linkages between PIGS — People, Information, Goods and Spaces — matter more than PIGS themselves. The territories of neo-nomads relate to linkages and are dynamic as a result.

Hans Ulrich Obrist In Conversation with Hakim Bey, e-flux Journal #21:

[...] “HUO: I also wanted to ask you about the origins of T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is a book that changed the way I approached exhibitions … Most of my exhibitions in the ‘90s, and … Utopia Station in the 2000s, relinquished the curatorial master plan in favor of being temporary autonomous zones in which we would basically invite collectives and artists to curate shows within the show. So for me it was a toolbox for curating, and I always wondered how you came to write that book, how its genesis came about?

HB: Well, the real genesis was my connection to the communal movement in America, my experiences in the 1960s in places like Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook. And of course the main criticism of this activity is that it didn’t last. But these things tend to be very ephemeral — if a secular commune lasts in America for ten years, it’s a miracle. Usually only the religious ones last longer than a generation — and usually at the expense of becoming quite authoritarian, and probably dismal and boring as well. Continue reading

Reading the Digital City: New Political Technologies in the Network Society (revised version) by Clemens Apprich, The Next Layer: Art, Technology and Social Change:

This article examines the ‘digital city’ debate of the mid 1990s as a point of departure for a media-historical questioning of how technology and the discourse about technology were used as an experimental playground for new forms of knowledge that are fundamental for the understanding of today’s network society. This text has been presented as a conference paper at the ‘networks and sustainability‘ track of the ‘textiles’ conference in Riga in June 2010. The paper will also appear in a special edition of the Arts and Communications Journal edited by RIXC at the end of 2010.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the proclaimed crisis of the city marked a general crisis of governance: the discussion about the supposed “decline of cities” was characterized by a controversial debate about a possible loss of control.1 Continue reading

[Image: Navroze Contractor, "Street sweeper in Jodhpur," 2009. Photograph, dimensions variable] Raising Dust: Encounters in Relational Geography :: December 8, 2010 – February 20, 2011 :: Calvert 22, 22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP.

Curated by Richard Appignanesi, writer, theorist and editor Raising Dust is a provocative multimedia exhibition which explores contemporary notions of identity and relativity by inviting a group of predominantly Eastern European artists to respond to the poetry and politics of place.

Arguably, the very idea of Europe is in itself a dislocation, a ‘nomadic horizon’ which responds differently to the shifting perspectives and desires of its inhabitants. Each artist in Raising Dust has contributed work which addresses this proposition and foregrounds the urgency of creating an autonomous ’space for life’ that overrides dominant mainstream distinctions. Continue reading

SIGGRAPH 2011 Juried Art Exhibition: Tracing Home :: August 7-11, 2011 :: Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada :: Call to Artists — Submission Deadline: January 14, 2011.

In the era of networked technology, we appear to live in an integrated global community where human relations and perceptions are conceived through various manifestations of a non-physical world of connections. We collectively build and spontaneously find refuge in virtual communities whose inhabitants experience incongruity and fragmentation, along with conformity and wholeness. The interplay of physical and virtual within our lived experience opens up portals and wormholes enabling simultaneous and discontinuous realities at the touch of a button, echo of a voice, or nudge of a sensor. The new dynamics not only reconfigures our relations with ourselves and with one another, but most importantly, it reshapes our sense of identity, belonging, and place. Continue reading