I Spy: Surveillance and Security with Deborah Aschheim, Hasan Elahi, Trevor Paglen, Paul Shambroom :: until April 30, 2010 :: Sun Valley Center for the Arts, 191 5th Street East, Ketchum, Idaho.

I Spy: Surveillance and Security examines the relationship between surveillance, security and privacy in the early 21st century.

The attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound flight reopened the urgent national conversation about security and surveillance that has been going on since September 11, 2001. Government today has unprecedented access into our lives. 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

[Image: Photograph by Monica Nerula] The Sarai-CSDS Media Lab Associate Fellowship for Contemporary Art and Media Practices: City as Studio :: Call for Proposals — Deadline: December 26, 2009.

The Sarai Media Lab invites expressions of interest and intent from artists and practitioners in diverse media - textual, visual, aural, spatial and temporal - who could be - visual artists (photographers, sculptors, installation artists, graphic artists), writers and independent scholars, filmmakers, architects, experimental musicians and composers, sound recordists, performers and people whose practices straddle or transcend different areas of practice - for participation in the City as Studio Project. Continue reading

I. From the Dematerialized Object to Immaterial Labor

Anglo-American Conceptual art, which emerged in the mid to late 1960s, displayed a new interest in linguistics and information theory that clearly distinguished it from the industrially coded production aesthetics of Pop art and Minimalism. The thesis that went along with this was that replacing author-centered object production with linguistic or information-based propositions represented a challenge not only to any traditional “material-object paradigm” (Art & Language) but also to those aspects of craftsmanship within “production values” that are crucial to any claims to authorship and the “work,” and this perhaps helps to explain how and why the history of Conceptual art has mistakenly been written as a history of “dematerialization of the object.”(1) Continue reading

Ambient.TV’s Mapping CCTV around Whitehall, Review by Rob Myers, furtherfield.org.

Two-part exercise to map CCTV cameras around Whitehall, London, within a zone covered by SOCPA (Serious and Organized Crime and Police Act 2005). A map of the hundreds of cameras in the zone was made over two days of observation. The second part involved mapping the range of one of these cameras, no. 40 in Villiers street, by intercepting its signal as it was transmitted wirelessly without encryption. As passers-by entered the marked area covered by the camera, they were alerted to the its presence and handed a copy of the map of CCTV cameras in Whitehall. Continue reading

Discontrol Party :: November 20, 2009; 10:00 pm - 3:00 am :: Espace Pasolini, International Theatre, 2 rue Salle Le Comte, 59300 Valenciennes, France.

A party where future devices of control are put to the test: surveillance cameras, face detection, identification (RFID), traceability. A series of concerts in an interactive setting reacting to its public. A live collective and artistic experience!

Discontrol Party is a device that combines two worlds: the world of highly developed surveillance technologies and the party world. The dance floor and the venue are constructed with regard to the projectors lights as well as to a computerized control system (computer vision, RFID, etc.). Continue reading

DATA browser 04: Creating Insecurity — art and culture in the age of security (2009):: edited by Wolfgang Sützl & Geoff Cox:

‘Today we are facing extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. The thought of security entails an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terrorist.’ Continue reading

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) INVITES YOU TO PARTICIPATE: Two years in the making, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) is now open for comments, revisions, and translations. You may also submit a chapter for consideration.

active, aethetics, aggregators, authenticity, authorship, BEN FRY, BEN RUBIN, BURAK ARIKAN, collaborative, communication, data, data mining, digital traces, distributed, DIY, EDUARDO NAVAS, everyday life, flow, GOLAN LEVIN, identity, improvisation, Internet, JANET CARDIFF, JASON FREEMAN, JODI.ORG, JONATHAN HARRIS, latency, lifelogging, lifetracing, MANIK, mapping, MARK AMERIKA, MARK HANSEN, MARTIN WATTENBERG, MAX NEUHAUS, Mechanical Turk, mediation, memory, music, narrative, NastyNets, NATHANIEL STERN, net art, network, NICK KNOUF, nonlinear, OLIVER LARIC, participation, performative, persistance, PETER TRAUB, platform, postmodernism, presentational, privacy, prosumer, prosurfer, ranking, realism, reality, real-time, relational, remix, representation, research, RYBN, SCARLET ELECTRIC, SCOTT KILDALL, SCOTT RETTBERG, search engine, self, self-exposure, SHIFTSPACE.ORG, social networks, software, sousveillance, STEVE LAMBERT, storage, surveillance, tactical media, telepresence, THE HUB, THEY RULE, TrackMeNot, transmission, TV, user-generated, visualization, web 2.0, webcam, widget, Wikipedia Art, YES MEN. Continue reading

Read | Write Lifetracing: The Traces of a Networked Life by Anne Helmond — in Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art):

ABSTRACT: This chapter deals with the change of identity on the web as a result of the assemblage of social software platforms, engines and users. It can be stated that major platforms for presenting the self online have developed over time: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile and the lifestream. They each have their own specific way for presenting the self online. The advent of the search engine has had a major impact on both the construction and the presentation of the online identity. Continue reading

They Told You So — Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, John Menick, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, Roee Rosen, and Brina Thurston :: July 16 - August 14, 2009 :: Opening Reception: July 16, 6:00 - 8:30 pm :: bitforms gallery nyc, 529 West 20th Street, New York City.

The works selected in the exhibition share a process akin to what the Situationists International have referred to as détournement; a term that implies a reuse of well known media to deliver a message opposed to the original. The artworks gathered have studied a very specific form of rhetoric, one shaped and disseminated as a tool for the political and economic industries. The artworks in the exhibition They Told You So invert, expand, and parody the rhetoric of power. Continue reading