Screengrab: New Media Arts Award :: Call For Artists — Deadline: July 2, 2012.

The 2012 Screengrab New Media Arts Award and associated exhibition is looking for challenging creative works by media arts practitioners working in screen based media to submit works on the theme of Control.

The contemporary media milieu would suggest an evolving devolution of the traditional notion of the “society of control”. The boundaries of enclosures and spaces are no longer the rigid and defined perimeters they once were. The browser, the mobile camera/ screen are new enabling simulations the user can exploit to navigate alternative pathways, to experience new modes of expression and to participate in global cultural exchange. Continue reading

Video Vortex #8: The Politics, Cultures and Art of Online Video :: May 17-19, 2012 :: The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Croatia.

Video Vortex has taken place twice in Brussels and Amsterdam and once in Ankara, Split and Yogyakarta. The Video Vortex network was founded in in 2007 and deals with the cultural, political and artistics aspects of online video. Video Vortex 8 is organized by the Kazimir Association in Split and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. Continue reading

Flashfl00d is a semi-secretive mass public exhibition of rapidly-distributed hidden flash drives containing downloadable exhibitions. Continue reading

The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Continue reading

Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen by Julian Stallabrass :: OCTOBER 138, Fall 2011, pp. 3–14.

In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. Continue reading

Beyond Blind Mist: A Conversation with Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano by Nicholas O’Brien, Bad At Sports:

“Over the past year Brad Troemel and Jonathan Vingiano have been steadily collaborating together to create platforms of digital exchange and dialog through their development of various browser-exclusive projects… Continue reading

Radius 18: Imaginary Forces’ CT Room (43:01) :: Continuously looped for a three hour period on December 20, 21, 27 and 28 at 4:00 pm CST.

CT Room is a collage of field recordings taken from various online video chat rooms and instant messenger services. In many of the recordings, the subjects that chose to type responses instead of speak, were unaware that they had left their computer microphones on. In some of these cases, the computer was left on even after the person had stopped chatting. Hart was able to record the sounds of these seemingly empty spaces and the personal conversations that would take place outside the designated chat space. Continue reading

Naked on Pluto — by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk — is the winner of VIDA 13.2, the prestigious international art and artificial life contest. Continue reading

“In a very short time since they appeared, digital photo frames have become so popular that they now regularly invite aesthetic experimentation. In his recent project Poser, Constant Dullaart has offered an ironic view of this media. Slipping inside the device, the artist has designed some chroma keys of himself and, using a cinematic technique, he has added himself into some group portraits found online (one of the distinguishing features of the Dutch artist is his reworking of material from the web). From Leon Battista Alberti onwards, art history is littered with attempts to overcome the physical limits of the frame - to enter into or move beyond it.

Therefore the originality of Poser is not to be found in this invasion, but rather in the artist’s intention to inhabit contemporary technological devices, to become part of them and to understand their specific natures. Continue reading

Gretta Louw - Controlling Connectivity :: Online Performances: November 2-12, 2011 (see times below) :: Exhibition: November 26, 2011 - January 15, 2012 :: Art Laboratory Berlin.

With the opportunity for connectivity and limitless access to information comes the obligation to be increasingly available to receive and transmit; to be perpetually connected. The consequent erosion of true leisure time, the blurring of the traditional professional / personal, public / private dichotomies, and an information overload are creating hitherto unknown levels of psychological pressure. Continue reading