CyPosium – The Book :: Launch: December 12, 7:00 pm :: Platform, Munich and online.

CyPosium – The Book explores the field of cyberformance — live performance events that connect remote participants via the internet — offers a variety of perspectives on this multidisciplinary live art form.

CyPosium – The Book presents selected material from the CyPosium, a one-day online symposium organised in October 2012 to discuss cyberformance. Artists from a range of backgrounds have experimented in this field for as long as they have had access to the internet, and the CyPosium sought to remember and celebrate some of this ephemeral and pioneering work. Continue reading

[Image: Ole Worm, Cabinet of Curiosities, Musei Wormiani Historia, c. 1650] Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface by Johanna Drucker: ABSTRACT – This article outlines a critical framework for a theory of performative materiality and its potential application to interface design from a humanistic perspective. Discussions of the materiality of digital media have become richer and more complex in the last decade, calling the literal, physical, and networked qualities of digital artifacts and systems to attention. This article extends those discussions by reconnecting them to a longer history of investigations of materiality and the specificity of media in critical theory and aesthetics. Continue reading

Remix and the Rouelles of Media Production — in Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) — has been translated into Czechoslovakian by Pavla Stejskalová: Remix a mediální produkce:

Obliba remixování stoupá

Bylo by těžké představit si umění bez remixování. Naše nejstarší kulturní záznamy obsahují bezpočet příkladů, ve kterých se dochované materiály využily pro tvorbu nových děl. Irští vypravěči neboli “Seanchai” se se svými posluchači dělili o mytické příběhy, jež různě přizpůsobovali a měnili podle tamějšího publika. Klasický starověk nabízí řadu obměněných mýtů a hrdinů a tato tradice pokračuje po celou dobu historie kanonizované západní kultury. Samotný Louis Dudek vyzdvihoval “Nalezený úvod” Johna Roberta Colomba, ze kterého citujeme: “Jestliže A si myslí, že je lepším básníkem než B, zastavme jeho povýšené naznačování. Continue reading

Read | Write In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art) by Nathaniel Stern — in Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art):

“In Production (A Narrative Inquiry on Interactive Art) is a free, digital companion chapter to Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (2013, an Arts Future Book with Gylphi Press).

“In the book, I argue that interactive art suspends and amplifies the ways in which we experience embodiment as per-formed, relational, and emergent. I provide many in-depth case studies of contemporary artworks that develop a practice of embodied philosophy, setting a stage to explore how we inter-act and relate with the world. I offer a critical framework for analyzing interactive artworks and what’s at stake in our encounters with them, which can be applied to a wide range of complex and emerging art forms. Continue reading

Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance by Nathaniel Stern, Arts Future Book, Gylphi Limited, 2013:

What is interactive art? Is this a genre? A medium? An art movement? Must a work be physically active to be classified as such, or do we interact when we sense and make sense? Is a switch-throw or link-click enough — I do this, and that happens — or must subjects and objects be confused over time? Is interaction multiple in its engagements (relational), or a one-to-one reaction (programmed)? Are interactive designs somehow more democratic and individualized than others, or is that merely a commercial strategy to sell products and ideas?

This book argues that interactive art frames moving-thinking-feeling as embodiment; the body is addressed as it is formed, and in relation. Continue reading

Anti-Media. Ephemera on Speculative Arts by Florian Cramer, nai010 Publishers: Florian Cramer, lecturer at the Rotterdam based Willem de Kooning Academy, demonstrates in his new collection of essays Anti-Media, how media and art critique constantly reflect on their own tradition, language and manifestations, while at the same time trying to subvert them.

In the essays Cramer presents and analyzes a wide range of subcultures — from Internet porn to neo-Nazi’s and anti-copyright activists — and offers a critical view on their imagery and poetry, plagiarism and automatisms.

Cramer asserts that art coexists with ‘anti-art’, and that the term ‘media’ is just as vague, or unfixed, as is ‘art’. Continue reading

Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy by Sarah J. Arroyo:

Like. Share. Comment. Subscribe. Embed. Upload. Check in. The commands of the modern online world relentlessly prompt participation and encourage collaboration, connecting people in ways not possible even five years ago. This connectedness no doubt influences college writing courses in both form and content, creating possibilities for investigating new forms of writing and student participation. In this innovative volume, Sarah J. Arroyo argues for a “participatory composition,” inspired by the culture of online video sharing and framed by theorist Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy.

Electracy, according to Ulmer, “is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing.” Continue reading

[Image: Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments by Carmin Karasic, 2007] Digital Art and the Urban Environment: Symposium, Art Exhibition, and Scholarly Volume :: October 4, 2013 :: Pace University, Downtown Manhattan, New York City :: Call for Participation — Deadline: July 13, 2013.

Digital and new media artists utilize innovations in locative media, tracking technologies, telecommunication networks, and novel computer interfaces to craft artworks that create new ways to connect with the city. Just as their predecessors transformed urban neighborhoods, such as New York’s SoHo and Chelsea, through their energy and imagination, today’s artists are altering our perceptions of, and relationships with, urban space though their digital inventions and interventions. Continue reading

[…] “In much of her work, writer/artist J. R. Carpenter fabricates hybrid places that are both “virtual” and attached to real world locales. Like Ernst’s bedroom, these online spaces contain objects whose appearance together makes sense only in the context of the artwork, in Carpenter’s case, multimedia stories. Combining intimate details, both autobiographical and appropriated, of characters’ lives with real-world maps and photo and video “documentation,” Carpenter’s works are narrative landscapes through which the reader meanders.” From Reorienting Narrative: E-lit as Psychogeography by Illya Szilak, Huffington Post. Also see Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams curated by Kate Armstrong.

[…] “Such incomparable success is unexpected. Minecraft embodies few of the video-game fashions that were current when it appeared. Coded in Java, a general-­purpose programming language that emphasizes speed and lightness over the grand capabilities of more powerful tools, it features pixelated scenery that has nothing in common with the lifelike, polygon-stuffed characters and objects furnishing the blockbuster video games of the day. There is a certain Lego-like charm and blunt handsomeness to the rectangular clouds that throw shadows on the game’s pea-green hills and the dumpy sheep that roam them. But in an industry traditionally obsessed with chasing realism and authenticity, its kindergarten aesthetic at first appears anachronistic.” From The Secret to a Video-Game Phenomenon by Simon Parkin, Technology Review.