Trafficked Bodies — exhibition for FLEFF 2011, Ithaca, New York :: Call for New Media Art (locative media, tactical media, electronic civil disobedience, experimental coding, radical cartography): Deadline: March 15, 2011.

In collaboration with the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) based in Bangkok, Thailand, the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is looking for submissions of digital art for the exhibition Trafficked Bodies in conjunction with the festival theme of Checkpoints for 2011. Continue reading

Frakcija Magazine for Performing Arts, Issue No. 55: Curating Performing Arts:

The concept of the curator has become more and more influential in the performing arts in recent years. But while it has been heavily discussed and theorized within the visual arts, the function of the programmer, producer, curator in the performing arts remains strangely un-debated. Even though programming in dance, theatre and performance has undergone fundamental changes over the last decades there are barely any texts that reflect on its specific role in art production and reception.

This edition of the performing art magazine Frakcija is the first publication fully dedicated to investigating the concept of the curator in performing arts, from its pragmatic limitations, its relations to art and artists up to its conditions within the field of immaterial labour and its role within the system of the art market. Continue reading

In the Mud and Blood of Networks: An Interview with Graham Harwood by Anthony Iles, Mute Magazine:

“Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji (YoHA) build contraptions that expose and collapse down the productive chains linking telecommunications media to some of the raw materials that constitute them. In this interview with Anthony Iles however, Harwood rejects theoretical discourses of resistance in favour of a more direct and technical method of ‘action research’ which skirts art and politics.

In the 1990s Graham Harwood’s work with the media arts and education group Mongrel plotted a characteristically antagonistic approach to cultural hybridity and the social uses of technology. Continue reading

Media Fields Journal Issue 2: Media, Labor, Mobility :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: October 15, 2010.

This issue of Media Fields Journal brings together interdisciplinary approaches to media, labor, and mobility. We invite manuscripts, art projects, and interviews that foreground the dynamic between the global circulation of media texts and the global dispersion of media production (the “new international division of cultural labor”). In popular and scholarly discourse on media, information technology, and globalization, mobility is often celebrated as a positive, enabling force without sufficient regard for material concerns and human subjects. Continue reading

Pits to Bits, Interview with Graham Harwood by Matthew Fuller (posted on nettime):

This interview follows on from a project called Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers – 318,000 Black Lungs) carried out in Newcastle in spring 2010 for the AV Festival. The project, by Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji with Jean Denmars involved a means of producing a physical diagram between components in production as they undergo transformations across different kinds of time, politics, matter, knowledge, and vitality. The project found a way of working with such things that was particularly powerful. The interview begins with a discussion of CFC but also moves off into databases and a certain understanding of their material force. One thing we don’t cover in the interview is the detail of the Coal Fired Computers project’s work with miner activists, including the inspirational Dave Douglass. Continue reading

Esse, Nosse, Posse Common Wealth for Common People — Online exhibition and Platform :: Curated by Daphne Dragona (Greece).

Contributing artists and theorists: Burak Arikan & Engin Erdogan (Τurkey), Samuel Bianchini (France), Michael Bielicky, Kamila B. Richter (Chech Republic/ Germany), Marcelo Expósito (Spain), Furtherfield (UK), Pat Kane (UK), Carlos Katastrofsky (Austria), Dmytri Kleiner (Germany), Nicholas Knouf (USA), Tobias Leingruber (Germany)/ Jamie Wilkinson (USA)/ Greg Leuch (USA), Aarton Koblin & Daniel Massey (USA), Geert Lovink (Netherlands), MediaShed & Eyebeam (UK/ USA), Molleindustria (Italy), Ge Jin aka Jingle (China), Matteo Pasquinelli (Italy), Platoniq.net (Spain), Juan Martin Prada (Spain), Kate Rich (UK), Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse (USA), Trebor Scholz (USA), Anders Weberg (Sweden), Dan Phiffer & Mushon Zer-Aviv (US/IL). Continue reading

e-flux journal – issue #13, February 2010 :: Editorial by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle:

Repeated attempts to dismantle the aura of value and rarity surrounding art objects have been, for the most part, unsuccessful. Why is that? The majority of these attempts throughout the twentieth century have consisted of infiltrating the economy of care, custodianship, conservation, and considered attention granted to art objects upon entry into the art establishment. While the introduction of impostors into this ecosystem in the form of real-world doubles (such as Duchampian readymades) served to short-circuit the aura of authenticity within spaces of art, over time these impostors nevertheless began to perform the function of ritualizing a general sense of disbelief with regard to the art establishment’s unpredictable and indeterminate patterns of attention to art objects. Continue reading

Representing Labor: Ten Thousand Cents and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk by Madeleine Clare Elish, Furtherfield.org:

Arriving at the homepage of Ten Thousand Cents, an Internet artwork by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, a mottled image of a one hundred dollar bill slowly fades into view. Ben Franklin looks out sedately. Mousing over the large image, the cursor is replaced with a small red rectangle. And here lays the beauty of the project; with the click of each rectangle, a zoomed in portion of the one hundred dollar bill is revealed. On the left side is a high-resolution photograph of that tiny portion of the bill. On the right side, a real-time moving image plays, revealing how the image was drawn by a human hand in a drawing program created by Koblin and Kawashima. There are, in fact, 10,000 such rectangles and each was created by a Turker through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk marketplace. Continue reading

Nick Knouf wrote: This past Saturday DARPA sponsored a challenge to find 10 red weather balloons spread across the United States. Working in teams, the first team to find all of the balloons would receive the reward, $40,000, and distribute it amongst the team in whatever manner they see fit. The winner, as you might expect, was a team from MIT and lead by a post-doc at the MIT Media Lab, a not-insignificant fact for me personally (and something I will return to in a moment). The Washington Post article on the event provides a good background.

The title of the hunt was the “Network Challenge“, and was announced to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the first transmission of packets across ARPANET. Continue reading

I. From the Dematerialized Object to Immaterial Labor

Anglo-American Conceptual art, which emerged in the mid to late 1960s, displayed a new interest in linguistics and information theory that clearly distinguished it from the industrially coded production aesthetics of Pop art and Minimalism. The thesis that went along with this was that replacing author-centered object production with linguistic or information-based propositions represented a challenge not only to any traditional “material-object paradigm” (Art & Language) but also to those aspects of craftsmanship within “production values” that are crucial to any claims to authorship and the “work,” and this perhaps helps to explain how and why the history of Conceptual art has mistakenly been written as a history of “dematerialization of the object.”(1) Continue reading