Urban Organics: Figuratively describing the country of Matrizenzubehoerleute… :: May 3, 2009; 12:00 – 4:30 pm :: DIY Art Centre, 114-116 Amersham Vale, New Cross :: Call for Participants: Places are limited, please wrote to events [at] cultura3.net with the heading “Urban Organics Workshop.”

The city presents an unmapped, sparsely inhabited place, extravagantly rich in unexplored resources, waiting as it were for the arrival of someone to give form to the latent possibilities which lay beyond regular spatial comprehension. The poet, wandering describes reflections on street life, overlaid by the desire to develop typographies and document of human life. The civilian traveler as they traverse the urban terrain, passing amongst concrete corridors of the imagination remakes the city through forming their own reflective typographies. Continue reading

Co-Modify by @Platea — Online Public Art Collective to Enact Fictional Sponsorships on Social Media Networks :: May 3-9, 2009 :: Participate on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Instructions here.

Online public art collective @Platea will be performing Co-Modify, a commentary on and exploration of the commodification of social media. From May 3 through 9, a number of performers will be enacting a fictional sponsorship by a company of their choosing and embedding that company’s brand into their daily social media activities. Via a collective online performance focused on Twitter and Facebook accounts, @Platea performers will be enacting a world where everything we do online has monetization value and a world where, more and more, embedded and targeted advertising has become part and parcel with our daily lives. Continue reading

Vous êtes cordialement invitées, invités à la soirée de performances hypermédiatiques bleuOrange, mettant en vedette J .R. Carpenter, Jason E. Lewis et David Jhave Johnston, trois artistes reconnus pour leurs pratiques d’écriture faisant usage des technologies numériques. Ils seront suivis d’une prestation du groupe Graffiti Research Lab – Canada.

J.R. Carpenter est la récipiendaire du Carte Blanche Quebec Award décerné par la Quebec Writer’s Foundation, elle a remporté deux fois la CBC Quebec Short Story Competition, ainsi que, plus récemment, le Expozine Alternative Press Award dans la catégorie Best English Book pour son premier roman, Words the Dog Knows. Ses œuvres de littérature électronique ont été présentées partout dans le monde. Elle est présidente du conseil d’administration du Laboratoire des Nouveaux Médias OBORO à Montréal. Continue reading

Double Take — Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media Arts 2009 :: May 7 – July 19, 2009 :: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Road, The Domain, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia.

Each of the works in this exhibition articulates a double take by considering what it means to transform the self into another persona – as a doppelgänger, a karaoke performer, an avatar, a robot, or as a fantasy alter-ego. TV Moore, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano create private performances on video. Lisa Reihana’s digital photographs present friends and family posing as ancestral Mâori spirit figures. Mari Velonaki creates robotic avatars, while Cao Fei and Phil Collins bring together loose collectives of people around a desire to adopt imaginary identities. Continue reading

Ear Cinema is a collaborative multi-disciplinary installation/ performance piece incorporating animation and film footage, sound diffusion techniques (namely ambisonics) and live performance. We align the project with the ‘Expanded Cinema’ movement, a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema’s historical and cultural ‘architectures of reception’ into sites of immersive experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined. We have brought some of these concepts up-to-date and include cutting edge technology to combine with contemporary practices within sound art and live-performance to deliver a story in an entirely new way. Continue reading

InSite and Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) present El Ágora — A project by Gustavo Lipkau and Xavier Hierro :: Opening: May 16, 2009; 7:30 – 10:00 pm :: Centro Cultural Tijuana, Avenida Paseo de los Héroes y Mina, Zona Río, Tijuana.

El Ágora, envisioned as a new public space for dialogue, performance, action and reflection, is based on an extensive architectural and programmatic reconfiguration of a 9,000-square-foot area used for visual arts exhibitions prior to the completion of the CECUT’s new museum, El Cubo, in 2008. Lipkau and Hierro’s intervention includes new spaces for conferences, lectures and performance, a lounge and reading area, a café, and the first installation of the Mexico version of the recently completed inSite Archive. Continue reading

We begin 2009 with a special issue of Krisis on Science & Technology Studies (STS) and the arts, edited by Ruth Benschop. The relation between art and philosophy has always been special. Not least because both claim a special status, as a practice or idea that would express what is highest or most laudable. In this issue, Krisis again highlights the relation between philosophy and art, and considers in what light art would appear from the perspective of STS. Starting from the idea that science, philosophy, and art are all in a way “shops” that one “runs”, in four contributions, four different art practices are studied. They consider a wide variety of issues: How can the organ sound of centuries ago be restored? How can virtual artworks be saved from oblivion? Continue reading

Springerin: Model Laboratory Dance, Issue 2, April–June 2009.

The current dance scene as a testing ground and paradigm for interdisciplinary work? As a field that reflects (self-)critically on itself and its methods, its institutions and working conditions, as well as on its status in the midst of other arts? This description certainly fits the Tanzquartier Wien (TQW), founded in 2001, and springerin’s spring edition takes a look at the broad array of examples of dance, performance, discourse and crossover practices that have developed in and around this workshop. A small cross-section of the approaches that have developed or crystallised here seeks to show how this sphere can be understood as a role model for other artistic genres. Continue reading

“The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents including technological networks and software. This book reflects on these changes and asserts that the practice of curating cannot be dissociated from social and technological developments.1 It is therefore concerned with the politics of curating – with how power relations and control are expressed in the contemporary forms that curating takes and offers in the context of network technologies. Consequently, the book intends to examine the work of the curator, and the inherent structures of curatorial control in relation to the current socio-political and technological formations. Continue reading

Fluid Nexus — by Nick Knouf with Bruno Vianna, Luis Ayuso, and Mónica Sánchez — is an application for mobile phones that is primarily designed to enable activists to send messages and data amongst themselves independent of a centralized cellular network. The idea is to provide a means of communication between people when the centralized network has been shut down, either by the government during a time of unrest, or by nature due to a massive disaster. During such times the use of the centralized network for voice or SMS is not possible.

Yet, if we can use the fact that people still must move about the world, then we can use ideas from sneaker-nets to turn people into carriers of data. Given enough people, we can create fluid, temporary, ad-hoc networks that pass messages one person at a time, spreading out as a contagion and eventually reaching members of the group. Continue reading