The Creative Act

A luminous text that will set the listener free! This CD is devoted exclusively to Marcel Duchamp and brings some very rare documents, all of which are crucial not only to understand Duchamp?s work but also grasp the rebellious, unconventional, anti-conformist spirit that was Zurich of 1919. Picasso and Duchamp: these two names span the extraordinary iconoclastic adventure of art in the early 20th century. Picasso, the incessant creativity where everything becomes art and Duchamp, ?former Cartesian? underminer of every received idea, Dada before Dada, inventor of the ready made and the Big Glass, cool humorist and debunker, creator of a creative universe, constantly being renewed, and creator of the mysterious person called Rrose Selavy.
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Global Headphone Festival

[Though it looks to be quite dysfunctional, this sucker sends the streaming Plug signal around the globe [Photo: Keith Axline].] “…In some ways Plug, held here Saturday, is just what you’d expect from a music fest: rotating performances in front of a live audience, socializing and plenty of beer. But the headphones (bring your own) replace a traditional concert’s amplified speakers, and much of the socializing happens over a computer terminal linked to an IRC chat room, populated by members of the global audience listening to the performances over the internet…

The 13 hours of performances represented San Francisco’s turn at the global le placard headphone festival, which hits cities all over the world, including London, Montreal, Paris, Brussels and Nagoya, Japan. Each city hosts a headphone party for a given period, in this case one day, before handing off the feed to the next location. Theoretically, this continues for 97 days in the hopes of providing one nonstop experience, though there are gaps in the schedule.” From Fest Rocks With BYO Headphones by Keith Axline, Wired.

Virtual Instruments for Live Performance

Repercussion.org is a collection of on-screen virtual instruments designed for live performance and online user exploration. Rhythms and musical phrases can be dynamically composed and altered based on the arrangement of objects on the screen.

The collection is a showcase for the visual representation of freely-formed musical compositions. The project aims to be engaging enough to encourage the viewer to experiment, while being sophisticated enough to allow for a great deal of variation in the sound being created. The actual musical compositions are generated in real-time from a library of pre-recorded midi-based sounds, employing algorithms to map the on-screen graphics to characteristics of the sound arrangement such as pitch, tempo and volume.
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[via Eyeteeth] + Godcasting.

See Your Journeys Come Alive

Transform your PDA into a fully scrollable detailed map of the New York City subway system. See your journeys come alive with a superb animated display of the route tracking around the system map. Save hours by automatically having the quickest routes to hand, with all the details you need including line changes, platform directions and accurate journey times. “Tube, the absolute best subway mapping program for the Palm, has been updated to a significantly new and improved version. Incorporating subway lines and station information with either a system or street view, Tube even includes route planning and timing information to figure out the optimal series of connections during any time of day.”- Josh Rubin [via]

Urban Noise Pollution Displayed on Street Advertising Boards

Pink Noise by arts collective HeHe.org will be installed in Witte de Withstraat, Rotterdam on Sept. 10th, during the live event Hands On Hands Off organised by V2. Bruit rose (Pink noise in English): The interaction of this work is based on visualising the ambient sounds in the environment aswel as the passerby. The light emmitting panels, usually used to divulge numerically formatted information, are instead d?tourn? from this didatic function and serve as an animated visual, disengaged from all the gloss that usually occupies this urban advertising space. [via URBAN SCREENS 05]

Extended deadline for submissions

MINDPLAY is a one day conference on the social, intellectual and experiential dimensions of play and interaction in digital media environments. The conference focuses on mindful and playful relationships with digital media environments including mobile and ubiquitous media, new cinema, gameplay, wired performance spaces and networked communities. We encourage submissions of papers, practice-led research, poster presentations, demonstrations and installations. Selected papers may be published in a special issue of the journal Digital Creativity. Conference date: Friday January 20th 2006; Extended deadline for abstracts: Friday 30th September.

6-day Workshop

The Intermedia Institute of the Budapest Academy of Fine Arts is going to host a Mediamatic Interactive Film Lab. Intermedia has promoted the contacts of art and technology in the past years, building up an extensive network in Hungary and Europe. As part of its diverse interest in non-linear modes of narration, the Intermedia Institute invites participants to share experiences and create prototypes for online interactive film projects.

The workshop is designed for up to 16 film-, tv-. radio-, or new media makers from all over Europe. You can use your own footage (up to 40 min) to make an interactive film and publish it on- or offline. The approach is interdisciplinary and introduces new media and cross media content production to people with a background in filmmaking.
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Pillow Secrets

Babs Reingold and Caroline Burton seek participants to reveal a secret by posting one or more on their Pillow Talk website. Pillow Talk is a two-person exhibit that illuminates as object the symbolic pillow and all that it implies. What if pillows could talk? Exposing our intimate secret conversations, obsessions, longings and fears. The concept for Pillow Talk embraces the need to reveal and store our secrets in a safe place.

All secrets submitted on the site will be utilized in the exhibit and in the opening night performance. Their specific use in the exhibit will be disclosed on the site at the start of the show. Before the exhibition, you may continue to view the secrets submitted on the site, the postings will remain on the site until the close of the show.

Theory, Projects, Criticism, Resources

Reader for Mobtagging DisCourse: Mobtagging is the practice of a large group of users who freely apply and exchange tags (metadata) to a set of unstructured online information. The aim is to describe content more adequately, personally or pinpoint interesting information faster than a search engine or online directories. Mob ? or Social tagging can provide more precise search results for specialized interests and as such is a form of Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP).

Reader for Triggered by RFID: Radio frequency identification is a technology that is now situated in the elevator of technical development. A growing number of logistical companies see the advantages and possibilities of RFID for managing large bodies of objects. But what uses can this technology be applied to that are not in the logistical realm? How can it serve and/or change society and human interaction? How does it change the concept of information and information networks as we know them today? This reader compiles a number of resources on the technical and philosophical aspects of RFID.