Golan Levin makes art that looks back at you
Continue reading

Radio Berkman 127: Video Killed the Video Star — report back from the Open Video Conference, with Amar Ashar, Chris Peterson, and Catherine White of the Berkman Center.

Is the idea of a mainstream video culture dead? TV news anchors, sitcom stars, and A-list actors are losing ground to the groundswell of citizen journalists, independent web series creators, and the occasional cats falling off of pianos on YouTube. If everyone is a producer, what role will video play in our lives in the future? This was one line of questioning taking place at the first ever Open Video Conference in New York City this past June.

Continue reading

Culture Café, Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Mumbai presents The New Media Series — A set of provocative presentations and discussions about our relationships with new media and technologies :: Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, V.N. Purav Marg, Deonar, Mumbai.

Shilpa Gupta on her Work and Art :: July 31, 2009; 4:00 – 6:00 pm, Room 4 — Shilpa Gupta creates artwork using interactive video and objects, photographs and performances to probe and examine subversively themes such as desire, religion, notions of security on the street and on the imagined border. The artist will share her work. Continue reading

How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software by Richard Stallman:

The bullying of the copyright industry in Sweden inspired the launch of the first political party whose platform is to reduce copyright restrictions: the Pirate Party. Its platform includes the prohibition of Digital Restrictions Management, legalization of noncommercial sharing of published works, and shortening of copyright for commercial use to a five-year period. Five years after publication, any published work would go into the public domain.

I support these changes, in general; but the specific combination chosen by the Swedish Pirate Party backfires ironically in the special case of free software. I’m sure that they did not intend to hurt free software, but that’s what would happen. Continue reading

“Since the birth of primitive social networking technologies in the mid-’90s, the rise of modern equivalents such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace have permanently reconfigured the fundamental DNA of human communication. They have moved beyond the simple technological augmentation of existing communication paradigms, and now communication itself is technological.

For many users, especially those who don’t remember the world pre-Internet, organic forms of communication are firmly obsolete. They demand instantaneous, online communications suites that are easily configurable, and are able to capture their personalities, in the pursuit of living at least part of their lives in the digital world. There is a cost, though – these new developments in human socialisation are eroding the very foundations of traditional interpersonal relationships, and corroding our ideas of who we are, and what it means to be represented as a living, breathing, and yes, organic human… Continue reading Screaming In Digital: The New Media Generation’s Inner War by D.C. Elliott, PopMatters.

Chris Ziegler Forest 2 – another midsummer night’s dream :: September 2-6, 2009 (with live interventions on 5th and 6th) :: ZKM_Media Theater, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany.

Chris Ziegler, an artist affiliated with the ZKM, presents his latest theater work forest 2 as an interactive theater installation. forest 2, which is based on Shakespeare’s drama “A Midsummer Night‘s Dream” and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, plays with the complex elements of its literary origins. The text written by Michael Hewel weaves together the three motifs of love, art, and death and ties them to the theme of the forest. An extensive installation, which in conjunction with the music by Torsten Brandes and the Ensemble für Neue Musik Schloss Hamborn as well as a specific movement, light, and image architecture, creates an unusual association space in which the forest appears as a site of myths and fairytales, fears and dreams. The audience is invited to explore these different spaces with Puck (Friederike Plafki). Continue reading

DataGolem Lab :: July 30, 2009; 4:00 – 7:00 pm :: Space Gallery, Eldon Building, University of Portsmouth, Winston Churchill Avenue, Portsmouth, United Kingdom.

You are invited to see the work in progress of 14 participants who are working together over 5 days to develop a piece of responsive and adaptive software for artists. The participants are: Jacqui Banks, Fab The Detonators (Tiago Gambogi), Jeannie Driver, Simone Gumtau, Alain Renaud, Olu Taiwo, Jo Tyler, Adam Vanner, Wanda Zyborska with facilitation, participation and documentation from Tessa Eliott and Jonathan Jones Morris (SurgeryDar), Helen Sloan (SCAN) and Steve Lewis (OrangeAlert).

Drawing on the metaphors of artificial life, in computer science, literature and the arts, the title DataGolem compounds Data – “the qualities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by computers” with Golem – “a shapeless mass, a human figure of clay supernaturally brought to life, an automaton, a robot” to suggest a radical, generative live art performance system. Continue reading

Equation: a balanced state? — Second Site — CLUI Display Facility :: August 1 – September 19, 2009 :: 516 Arts, 516 Central Avenue SW, Albuquerque, NM.

A collaborative project exploring land-based art in New Mexico, Equation: a balanced state? is an exhibition of site specific installations by artists Katherine E. Bash, Paula Castillo, Ted Laredo, David Niec and Mayumi Nishida, reflecting a world where the environment is as much about ourselves and our creations as the natural world with which we struggle to strike a balance. The exhibition includes digitally simulated waterfalls, built environments that glow in the dark, and explorations of the division between day and night in the natural environment as observed in the night sky of New Mexico. Science, technology and the study of climate and land usage play an important role in the research and development of these art projects. Curated by Thomas and Edite Cates of THE LAND/an art site. Continue reading

Part 2. Mez Breeze wrote:

e) Information Deformation: akin to process centering, this Social Tesseraction involves a shift in the very definition of information:

Information may be defined as the characteristics of the output of a process, these being informative about the process and the input. This discipline independent definition may be applied to all domains, from physics to epistemology.”

These deformed systems of data are constantly in flux and available for perpetual revision. Examples include:

• cloud-based applications
• constantly transliterated google waves.

Users are able to simultaneously modify, update and adapt their input in real time: Continue reading

[Image from this post] “The _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ project reaches out into a multitude of networked environments, like a multi-tendrilled creature, it explores and reports back information to a central hub, located at the _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ blog. Existing in the virtual, the task is to explore other synthetic worlds and attempt to reflect back something of the nature of living within them and our own world. The resultant collection of projects and ideas can be considered a “Synthetic Reality Manual” as Mez Breeze, who initiated the project, describes it.

Mez, along with Joseph DeLappe, Shane Hinton, Trevor Dodge and Greg J. Smith are developing and testing ideas that come from explorations of on-line encounters and the development of virtual personae. Continue reading