Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art; Edited by Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin; Preface by Lucy R. Lippard:

In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Continue reading

Evil Media by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, MIT Press:

Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.

The title takes the imperative “Don’t be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed. Continue reading

xCoAx 2013: 1st International Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X :: June 27-28, 2013 :: University of Bergamo, Bergamo Città Alta, Italy :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: December 31, 2012. Continue reading

[Internet Cache Self Portrait: July 17, 2012, Evan Roth, 2012] Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age — Curated by Domenico Quaranta :: October 18 – November 4, 2012 :: Opening: October 18; 7:00 – 10:00 pm :: 319 Scholes, 319 Scholes Street, Brooklyn, NY.

Collect the WWWorld: The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age is an attempt to show how art responds to the information society. The last decade has witnessed an incredible growth in the production and distribution of images and cultural contents. Continue reading

Wasteland Twinning Network Forum — An exploration of urban wastelands and networked transdisciplinary practice :: September 21-23, 2012 :: Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U), Berlin.

The Wasteland Twinning Network hijacks the concept of ‘City Twinning’ and applies it to urban wastelands in order to generate a network for parallel research and action.

The Forum will bring together the international project partners of the Wasteland Twinning Network from Europe, Asia, USA and Australia. Hosted at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, the Forum will feature presentations, guest speakers, critical debates, Twinning Ceremonies, wasteland interventions and workshops. Continue reading

Daniel Temkin – 98.1034 Bottles of Beer on the Wall :: October 5-28, 2012 :: Opening: October 5; 7:00 – 11:00 pm :: Devotion Gallery, 54 Majuer Street, Brooklyn, NY (L to Lorimer, G to Metropolitian).

98.1034 Bottles of Beer on the Wall provides drunken encounters with compulsive systems. A program continually preens itself, inserting lines of code to change its visual representation, but along the way, introducing glitches and new patterns of behavior. A therapist program tries to dispense advice as her logic slowly breaks down. Continue reading

Remediating the Social :: Conference: November 1-3, 2012 :: Edinburgh College of Art, Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9DF :: Exhibition: November 1-25, 2012 :: Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.

The Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) research project invites scholars, artists, researchers and performers to the conference, Remediating the Social. The conference programme consists of expert presentations, across a range of disciplines and modes of inquiry, addressing examples of creative communities that have formed around various practices, media and discourses. Case studies, papers and panels, discussing examples arising from the ELMCIP project and other contexts will be presented. The conference will be e-cast, allowing for remote attendees to freely monitor events and put questions to conference via Twitter. Continue reading

Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, MIT Press:

In Life after New Media, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska make a case for a significant shift in our understanding of new media. They argue that we should move beyond our fascination with objects — computers, smart phones, iPods, Kindles — to an examination of the interlocking technical, social, and biological processes of mediation. Doing so, they say, reveals that life itself can be understood as mediated — subject to the same processes of reproduction, transformation, flattening, and patenting undergone by other media forms.

By Kember and Zylinska’s account, the dispersal of media and technology into our biological and social lives intensifies our entanglement with nonhuman entities. Continue reading

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship — A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian, Claire Bishop, Verso Books:

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson.

Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Continue reading

Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, Hannah B Higgins (Editor), Douglas Kahn (Editor), University of California Press:

Mainframe Experimentalism challenges the conventional wisdom that the digital arts arose out of Silicon Valley’s technological revolutions in the 1970s. In fact, in the 1960s, a diverse array of artists, musicians, poets, writers, and filmmakers around the world were engaging with mainframe and mini-computers to create innovative new artworks that contradict the stereotypes of “computer art.” Juxtaposing the original works alongside scholarly contributions by well-established and emerging scholars from several disciplines, Mainframe Experimentalism demonstrates that the radical and experimental aesthetics and political and cultural engagements of early digital art stand as precursors for the mobility among technological platforms, artistic forms, and social sites that has become commonplace today. Continue reading