Augmented Systems: Explorations in Complex, Emergent, and Generative Systems Workshop with Alexander Jones Gross (University of Main) :: March 25-26, 2010; 6:30 - 9:30 pm + March 27; 10:00 am - 6:00 pm :: CIANT - Art laboratory, Kubelíkova 27, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic :: Zdarma / V angličtině / For free / In English — Please register at ivan.nemeth [at] ciant.cz.

Complex, indeterminate, and chaotic systems exist everywhere we look from the flight paths of birds to the growth patterns of plants to the formation of clouds. These systems are not simply random, they are complex systems bounded by discrete natural laws. Through study and investigation much can be learned about how these systems work. Continue reading

A Light Green Light: Toward Sustainability in Practice by Sabrina Raaf — Curated by Steve Dietz :: April 2 - June 4, 2010 :: Panel Discussion (Sabrina Raaf and Steve Dietz, moderated by Jordan Crandell): April 2; 6:00 - 7:00 pm and Opening Reception 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: gallery@calit2, Atkinson Hall, First Floor, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA.

The gallery@calit2 goes green this spring with an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Sabrina Raaf, whose custom-built robotic sculptures and site specific installations include a series of experiments that address issues of sustainable practice, the construction of social spaces, and prototyping for modular green architecture. Continue reading

[Image: Usman Haque's Natural Fuse] ZER01, xClinic and Pachube.com call for Out of the Garage, Into the World :: September 4 - 20, 2010 :: South Hall, San Jose, California :: Open Call for Projects — Deadline: March 29, 2010 (application).

ZER01: the Art and Technology Network, in collaboration with xClinic and Pachube.com is soliciting proposals from artists to create environmental health projects and lifestyle experiments that make use of Pachube (a web-based sensor data storage and brokerage system that makes it easy to publish geolocated time-series data in real-time and to couple local and remote sensors and actuators). We are looking for truly innovative projects that push the boundaries of both environmental analysis and action, projects that don’t just “make data public” but help the “public make data,” projects that consider very carefully the relationship between all sorts of systems, human and non-human alike, technological and cultural. You will need to do a lot more than just plug a sensor into a tree and get it to tweet! Continue reading

rAndom International, Wayne McGregor, et al @ EMPAC: Dr. Philip Barnard: Cognition, Emotion and Action (TALK) :: February 17; 7:00 pm :: Dr. Philip Barnard, Scott deLahunta, Wayne McGregor on R-Research (panel discussion) :: February 23; 6:00 pm :: rAndom International: Real-Time Reactive Systems in Art and Design (TALK) :: February 24; 7:00 pm :: Wayne McGregor | Random Dance: ENTITY (PERFORMANCE) :: February 26 - 27, 2010, 8:00 pm :: EMPAC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY.

For two weeks, the London-based dance company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance is pursuing a creative residency at EMPAC, investigating tools, ideas, and visual design concepts for their current work-in-progress. Their work involves collaborations in research on the cognition of choreography and the development of new directions in scenography. Continue reading

Lovebytes - A Festival of Digital Creativity and Culture :: Opening: February 12, 2010; 6:30 - 10:00 pm @ Sheffield Winter Garden and Millennium Gallery :: Lovebytes, Workstation, Sheffield, S1 2BX, United Kingdom.

Lovebytes is a cultural festival for the digital age. A season of extraordinary events taking place at some of Sheffield’s landmark venues and public spaces, from February to June 2010. The festival opening night features a late night opening of the digital art exhibition Code:Craft along with with live performances by Francisco Lopez, Russell Haswell and Mark Fell. Continue reading

Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory presents If You Lived Here Still… An archive project by Martha Rosler :: January 17 – March 14, 2010 :: Opening: January 16; 5:00 pm :: Open forum: January 17; 2:00 - 5:00 pm :: Nieuwekade 213-215, 3511RW Utrecht, The Netherlands.

In 1989-1991, artist Martha Rosler organized her project ‘If You Lived Here…’ at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. ‘If You Lived Here…’ was a seminal group project on housing, homelessness and the systems and conditions underlying them such as gentrification, bureaucratic complicity or non-compliance and increasing privatisation of the public sector. It took a radical approach toward art and institutions of that time, in a mode that might be called cross-disciplinary and “participatory”. Continue reading

Media-N, v.05 n.03, Winter 2009: agriART: Companion Planting for Social and Biological Systems; Mark Cooley and Ryan Griffis, guest editors.

[...] agriArt is an attempt to highlight other possibilities for the consideration and development of bio art. As an exhibition, it brought together an array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption as a specific site of biopolitics. In essence, our concern was to step back from the assumption that bio art needs to start at the line drawn by industrial capitalism, and look at the work of artists investigating other intersections of the biological and social. The questions they pose are not exercises in philosophico-ethical deliberations that take for granted a given industrial paradigm as the most productive site of action. Instead, they practice a relation between the biological and the social that is pragmatically opposed to the instrumentalization of life that Critical Art Ensemble has termed the molecular invasion. Continue reading

Matteo Pasquinelli … suggests that the form of our cities, the organization of our labor, the content of our entertainment and, I would add, the rules of our lawbooks and the teleological principles of our arts and sciences are all dependent on the greed, fear and irrational exuberance that drive the denizens of the electronic markets. - Brian Holmes

“[...] Imagine the night sky as an overarching dome, filled with thousands of shimmering points of light. Like celestial messengers they glitter and gleam as they drift across the face of the heavens. Each of these bright stars represents the stock of a publicly traded corporation. The intensity of their luminous presence varies in real time according to the frequency of trading. If one star co-varies with others – that is, if a pattern emerges between the rates at which certain stocks are bought and sold – then the flickering points of light draw slowly together, forming unstable constellations. Continue reading

A Parallel Image — by Gebhard Sengmueller and Franz Buechinger — is an electronic camera obscura which digitises an image and simultaneously transmits all elements to a location.

This media- archaeological, interactive sculpture is based on the fictive assumption that the currently still valid principle of electronically transmitting moving images, namely by breaking them down into single images and image lines, was never discovered. The result is an apparatus that attempts a highly elaborate parallel transmission of every single pixel from sender to receiver. This is only possible by connecting camera and monitor using about 2,500 cables. Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, A Parallel Image is technologically completely transparent, conveying to the viewer a correspondence between real world and transmission that can be sensually experienced. Continue reading

[Sylvère Lotringer, Baja California, Mexico (2009). Photograph: Iris Klein] From Frieze Magazine, Issue 125 — Intelligence Agency: Theorist Sylvère Lotringer talks to Nina Power about art and the market, the failings of capitalism and how radical thinking can help us survive ‘the system’:

Born in Paris, Sylvère Lotringer studied at the Sorbonne before he moved to New York in the early 1970s, and founded the journal Semiotext(e). In 1975 he organized the ‘Schizo-Culture’ conference at Columbia University, New York, at which Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari addressed an audience of thousands, and in 1978 ‘The Nova Convention’, a three-day homage to William S. Burroughs. Lotringer was responsible for introducing the work of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio and others to America through the publication of the small, desirable Foreign Agents book series. Continue reading