Föhnseher (Seer of Warm Winds) by Julian Oliver — Modified Sanyo television, software, hardware (2011):

Föhnseher rises from the scrap heap of analog TV. Unlike other televisions, Föhnseher captures and displays images downloaded by people on surrounding local wireless networks.

Other people’s phones, laptops and tablet computers all become broadcast stations for this device, replacing the forgotten television towers of old.

The name föhnseher derives from fernseher, the German word for television, and the föhn, a strange warm wind known to the south of Germany. The words have a very similar pronunciation. Continue reading

East of Borneo: A Collaborative Art Journal and Multimedia Archive edited by Thomas Lawson:

The launch of East of Borneo marks the convergence of two very distinct lines of thought. What is the nature, and the future, of art magazines? And how might we give form to the sprawling history of art in Los Angeles, a form that can be generative and productive, not merely descriptive or fancifully speculative?

Launched in October 2010, East of Borneo is a collaborative online art journal and multimedia archive that offers a new way to research and present the various histories of contemporary art. Its hybrid form — which publishes newly commissioned art writing within a larger context of user generated material — reflects an editorial process of thinking through the delights and constraints of printed magazines, and fully considering the transcendent possibilities of online publishing today. Continue reading

Nam June Paik :: until March 13, 2011 :: Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4BB, UK + FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ.

Media artist, performance artist, composer and visionary, Nam June Paik (1932–2006) was one of the most innovative artists of the twentieth century. Paik’s radical ideas on art and technology transformed what we now understand as video and media art. Renowned for his spectacular video installations and manipulated images of avant-garde performances, pop singers and television commercials, Paik paved the way for the sensibility of the MTV generation and YouTube phenomenon.

Tate Liverpool presents the first major retrospective since the artist’s death with museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf. The exhibition in Liverpool is the first UK exhibition of Paik’s work since 1988, and is presented in collaboration with FACT. Continue reading

May 13-15, 2011 :: Massachusetts Institute for Technology :: Call for Papers - Deadline: March 4, 2011.

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? Continue reading

[Image: Nam June Paik, "Mercury," 1991 (Detail), Multi-Monitor Installation, Ø 140 cm, T= 50 cm. 2 channels, neon systems, 12 TVs (color, no sound)*] Nam June Paik :: September 11 - November 21, 2010 :: Stiftung museum kunst palast, Ehrenhof 4-5, 40479 Düsseldorf, Germany.

In collaboration with Tate Liverpool, the museum kunst palast, Düsseldorf, dedicates a comprehensive retrospective to Nam June Paik (*Seoul 1932, +Miami 2006), founder of video and media art. With numerous loans drawn from both international public and private collections, the exhibition brings together German, Anglo-American and Korean research on Paik’s work for the first time and provides an extensive overview of the crucial developments of this extraordinary and influential artist of the 20th and 21st centuries. Continue reading

NJP Reader #1: Contributions to an Artistic Anthropology:

The Nam June Paik Center is dedicated to the artistic and intellectual legacy of Nam June Paik, the renowned Korean-born artist who transformed visual art worldwide. In addition to its function as an exhibition space, the Nam June Paik Art Center developed a new publication, NJP Reader. The aim of the NJP Reader is to recontextualize Nam June Paik’s artistic thought and his ‘random access’ strategies in a topical discursive practice. Leading questions are: What is the meaning of Nam June Paik’s multi-medial experiments, performances, and sculpture for our current artistic practice and discourse? What new dimensions for re-imagining notions of technology, ubiquity, and human experience do Nam June Paik’s thinking and practice suggest? How does his practice potentiate paradigm shifts in broader understandings of the potentialities and characteristics of alternative processes of participation afforded by the introduction of media technology into artistic practice? Continue reading

Claiming Its Space: Machinima by Michael Nitsche, Dichtung-Digital #37, 2007:

ABSTRACT: Although machinima has grown exponentially, it remains a largely undefined digital artistic practice in-between existing traditions. Machinima makers freely sample/ combine/ and break elements of traditional media. They “play” their references. This essay does not attempt to fix machinima to any single definition but will identify the intermedia relations to better position machinima into the digital media landscape. The argument will target three main influences: film, television, and theatrical performance. To exemplify these points the essay will discuss exemplary and relevant machinima pieces. It puts emphasis on the real-time aspects in production and play back to highlight the key specifics of this relatively new format.

直接当下：网络文化与现实诗学 by Kazys Varnelis; Chinese Translation by Lily & Honglei:

在整个九十年代，数字计算和网络技术在很大程度上只应用于办公室工作，其文化影响仅限于个别专有领域的爱好者。如果说这十年的新媒体艺术形成了一种非常重要的艺术亚文化，它基本上还是孤立和自我参照的，部分原因是由于艺术家们对黑客文化的迷恋，由于长期以来格林伯格主义者 (Greenbergian) 的艺术审察, 还由于艺术机构将其边缘化. 在电脑离开有限的用户群体, 成为有广泛社会功能之前,瓦克﹒寇司克 (Vuk Cosic)，朱迪(Jodi)，阿列克谢﹒舒利金 (Alexei Shulgin)，和希思﹒班廷 (Heath Bunting) 等艺术家重演了二十世纪初的前卫战略，同时将图形与八十年代黑客文化的程序演示平等化[1].

今天，相比之下，数字技术，是日常生活中的明确无误的存在，并逐渐与地来自主流社会的需要和公约不可分割的. 网络文化是一个广泛的社会文化的转变，就像后现代性，并不限于科技发展或“新媒体” [2]. 正因为数字和网络技术的成熟与当代文化是不可分割的, 我们必须在更宽广的背景下理解其, 事实上, 这甚至比电视产生于后现代的现象更令人瞩目. 今天, 可以说, 所有的艺术都是网络艺术的一种延伸.

Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and 70s :: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape ::: The Sum of Myself: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection :::: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles CA.

VIDEO SCREENING: Vital Signals: Japanese and American Video Art from the 1960s and 70s is a three-part screening program presented in collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) that investigates the correspondence between the pioneering, and rarely seen, works of artists experimenting with video in both Japan and America. Continue reading