Being Social :: February 25 - April 28, 2012 :: Opening: February 25; 1:00 - 4:00 pm :: Furtherfield Gallery, McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London, N4 2NQ, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Continue reading

e-flux journal issue 31, with contributions by Keller Easterling, Gean Moreno, Gregory Sholette, Sven Lütticken, Grant Kester.

As we continue to reflect upon the chain of political upheavals of 2011, it may be interesting to consider a particular shift in the status of information technology, now that it has been deployed as such a powerful force in facilitating the rise of a new popular voice.

But first, how did this happen? How did a form of communication — developed in the late 1950s with a well-funded US Defense Department initiative in response to the Sputnik threat, then blossoming in the hands of engineer-entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley of the 1970s into the center of accelerated hyper-capitalism in the 1990s — evolve to become a strange hybrid of a free press, judiciary, and public market? Continue reading

Social Cities of Tomorrow - International Conference: February 17, 2012 and Workshop: February 14-16, 2012 :: Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Our everyday lives are increasingly shaped by digital media technologies, from smart cards and intelligent GPS systems to social media and smartphones. How can we use digital media technologies to make our cities more social, rather than just more hi-tech?

This international conference brings together key thinkers and doers working in the fields of new media and urbanism. Keynote speakers such as Usman Haque, Natalie Jeremijenko will speak about the promises and challenges in this newly emerging and highly interdisciplinary field of urban design. Continue reading

Dialogue Cafe: Computation and Humanities - Revisiting a Silent Revolution with Kavita Philip (University of California, Irvine) :: December 2, 2011; 4:00 - 6:00 pm :: The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, India :: RSVP: Prasad [at] cis-india.org

The Centre for Internet and Society announces the launch of its Dialogue Cafe, where every month, we approach seminal thinkers, scholars and practitioners to help explore knowledge paradigms that help us understand and research techno-social realities through innovative thought, concepts and frameworks. Continue reading

Mapping Community Arts: Subversion, Repressive Tolerance and Pastoral Power by Pascal Gielen — organized and moderated by Hakan Topal with a response by Alex Villar :: November 8, 2011; 6:30 pm :: Art in General, 79 Walker Street, New York, NY.

In recent years there has been increased attention to so-called ‘socially engaged art practices’. Equipped with a sense of urgency and intent, artists and curators develop work with the support of communities or groups to tackle political and social issues. While the success of these projects are not easily measurable, they often reiterate the role of artist/ curator as protagonists of specific forms of social change, which posits a direct contrast to recent activism which carefully distances itself from any leader-based political organizational categories. Continue reading

Electronic Cafe International, “Hole in Space Revisited,” 1980-2009. Courtesy of the artists Continue reading

SKOR| Foundation for Art and Public Domain presents: Actors, Agents and Attendants II: Social Housing—Housing the Social :: November 4-5, 2011 :: Felix Meritis, Keizersgracht 324, Amsterdam.

Social Housing—Housing the Social is a two-day symposium that emphasises the relationship between the waning political and practical imperative of social housing and the broader political and philosophical idea of ‘housing the social.’ Given the increasing global condition of unequal wealth distribution, and the specific urgency brought about by cuts in social and cultural funding in the Netherlands, can forms of cultural production be reclaimed as tools with which to design and defend social space, or are the agents and engineers of such projects merely tools in the further decoration of reduced welfare rights? What do we want cities to accommodate today? Continue reading

Marked Territory — A Physical Twitter Client that lets you Retweet News Stories Based on Brute Strength — by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, with Erin Kennedy Continue reading

The Printing Dress by Asta Roseway and Sheridan Martin Small: You are probably familiar with the old saying, “You are what you eat” but how about, “You are what you tweet?” What if this concept were incorporated into garments of the future? Would you censor yourself, knowing you would reveal your statements to the world around you?

The Printing Dress is an artistic piece that explores the notion of wearable text and its potential impact on the future of fashion, as well as our social identity. Built almost entirely of paper, the dress enables the wearer to enter “thoughts” on to its fabric and wear them as public art. By selecting materials and technologies that draw on the past, present, and future of communication media, we encourage viewers to reflect on the path that has brought us to ubiquitous digital communication and to contemplate its forward evolution. [PDF]

Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings by Judith F. Rodenbeck, MIT Press:

“Happenings” have pop connotations that conjure up 1960s youth culture and hippies in public, joyful rebellion. Scholars, meanwhile, locate happenings in a genealogy of avant-garde performance that descends from futurism, surrealism, and Dada through the action painting of the 1950s. In Radical Prototypes, Judith Rodenbeck argues for a more complex etiology. Allan Kaprow coined the term in 1958 to name a new collage form of performance, calling happenings “radical prototypes” of performance art. Rodenbeck offers a rigorous art historical reading of Kaprow’s project and related artworks. She finds that these experiential and experimental works offered not a happy communalism but a strong and canny critique of contemporary sociality. Continue reading