CALL FOR PROPOSALS AND WORK

Version is an international festival about art, media, technology and politics. Our fourth annual convergence, Version>05> Invincible Desire, will examine the activities of local configurations and external networks that use visual art, innovative social practices, artist initiatives, creative uses of new technologies, organizing strategies and public interventions in order to engage in cultural reclamation. Through a diverse program featuring an experimental art expo, artistic disturbances, networked urban events, screenings, interactive applications, performances, workshops, art rendez-vous, parties, and action, Version>05 will investigate the urgency for interventions in everyday life, the organization of our shared interests, and the distribution of our ideas.
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The Ultimate Vehicle for Psychogeography

Taxi_onomy, by Celine Condorelli and Beatrice Gibson, is an urban mapping project and mobile cartographic research endeavour that seeks to re-appropriate the black taxi as the ultimate vehicle for psychogeography, based on its capacity for metro processing and spatial understanding. Tax_ionomy will utilise the black taxi for the purposes of enabling artists and the general public to create and utilise emotional, cognitive and networked maps of the city.

Taxi_onomy - a live art project to take place in a taxi; the practice of classification from the purview of the taxi. Mumbai, a Taxonomy of the City is now available to view on line.

New Movement Emerges

In 90’s, Dumb Type established multimedia performance in Japan. Teiji Furuhashi and Dumb Type in early 90’s were legend of Japanese Multi Media Performance and Media Art for their works, for example, “S/N”(Dumb Type) and “Lovers”(by Teiji Furuhashi).

In this season, I have a presentiment of stages after Dumb Type. There was a competition called Yokohama Solo X Duo Compe’tion + R at the end of January. This competition has a relation with a French famous competition called “Recontres Choreographique Internationales de Seine-Saint-Dennis.” [posted by Yukihiko YOSHIDA]
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Experiments in Connected Social Spaces

“…Sharing a meal, a walk in the park, weddings, sports, or caf?s…are the kind of social activities and rituals we associate with human relationships…What if you could go out for dinner and dancing with friends, even though you’re a thousand kilometers away?…(W)ireless Internet “hotspots”…provid(e) the possibility of multi-situated presence, but (are) also placed within a fixed physical location, a social environment rich with familiar objects, rituals and codes of behaviour.

LF:TK takes a playful approach to the ways we might inhabit such a hybrid environment. Furniture, decorations, cutlery, bric-a-brac and cultural debris are reconstructed as networked interfaces that populate surfaces within everyday social spaces. Each object provides a simple function, yet when combined with others helps build a complex arrangement of movement and gesture. Imagine a shared creation, a social ritual, a dance through objects, a table that is played.” [Recipe for Corkscrew Man]

Tear 2 Tear [T2T]

Ku:iyashikei-net by Urico Fujii and Ann Poochareon is a networked crying sculpture that allows people to communicate through the interface of tears, a physical output of human emotional expression that has been overlooked, and never made exchangeable with current communication devices. Two sides, installed at different locations, communicate over the Internet. On Side A, Tear Well allows a sad person to express his/her feeling by pumping a traditional water pump, the water representing her/his tears. The tears are sent over to Side B over the Internet, where teardrop sculptures called KU act as networked surrogates.

As soon as Side B receives the crying signal, KUs start to cry. When a viewer on Side B wipes KUs? tears, KUs stop crying. At the same time comforting response is sent to the sad person to cheer them up. Read PDF [blogged by regine on near near future]

In Pursuit of the Virtual Performer

“The nature of all performance includes the elements of time-based experience and space as “stage”. I use the term “stage” as a simple reference point to describe the space in which a performer performs and not as reference to the theatre. The nature of performance in the computer age includes these elements of time and stage as space. A simple definition of performance is : that which is feigned or pretended. It is action. It is speech. It is anything performative. The nature of the performer includes any entity who/which feigns, pretends, acts, and speaks. So, it is natural to include non-human entities, such as robots, cyborgs, and databases in this discussion of performance. Baudrillard might describe performing and the performer as more real than real, so real that they are virtual. “Of course we have a multitude of objective, real proofs, but what does one do with historical reality in a system which itself has become virtual? “(1)
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Liquid Boundaries

Abstract: As an artist working in the field of virtual reality, I explore dynamically emergent environments with immersive, interactive display systems, which enable me to produce performative realities in which the boundaries between the Self and the (alleged) Other become liquid. This paper addresses the representational issues and performative aspects of virtuality and, through discussion of two of my works, examines the ambiguities inherent in contemporary technological expressions of a more or less disembodied Self as it inhabits (tele-)immersive virtual environments. Read Negotiating the In-Between:Space, Body and the Condition of the Virtual by Petra Gemeinb?ck, Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology, Issue 4.1

static>>dynamic-passive>>dynamic-interactive

Abstract: The interest of artists and art theorists in audience participation with artworks has been particularly active since the 1960s. Interactive artworks that could transform viewers into participants were envisaged and created using the media available at that time. Today the opportunities for including audience participation have been increased significantly by the widespread availability of digital technology. The degree of collaboration between technologists and artists affects the necessary interaction between artist and computer. This paper discusses the role of technology in interactive art and the complex ways in which the artist can interact with computers and digital media in order to specify artworks. Categories of interactive art systems defined earlier as static, dynamic-passive, dynamic-interactive and dynamic-interactive (varying) are brought up-to-date and illustrated by examples of work from the Creativity and Cognition Research Studios. Read Interaction in Art and Technology by Linda Candy and Ernest Edmonds, Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology, Issue 2.1

Collaborating on Interactive Performance Works

Abstract: Composers and choreographers face unique and largely unexplored problems as they collaborate on interactive performance works. Not the least of these problems is settling on schemes for mapping the various parameters of human movement to those possible in the world of sound. The authors’ collaborative piece, Seine hohle Form, is used as a case study in the development of effective mapping strategies, focusing on dance gesture to real-time music synthesis. Perceptual correlation of these mapping strategies is stressed, albeit through varying levels of abstraction. Read Seine hohle Form: Artistic Collaboration in an Interactive Dance and Music Performance Environment by Joseph Butch Rovan, Robert Wechsler and Frieder Wei?, Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology, Issue 1.2

The Body as Host For a Remote Agent

From The Body by Stelarc, Switch Journal #19, 2005:

Movatar: When I started experimenting with involuntary body movements we quickly realized as well as the Body being locally controlled it might be possible with a touch screen interface to control the Body remotely. In fact we did a performance at Telepolis. We constructed a touch screen interface that allowed people in Paris, Helsinki and Amsterdam to access my body in Luxembourg and by touching the muscles on the computer model you could effectively program the choreography of the remote body in Luxembourg. You could do this either by pressing the touch screen or by pasting together from a wide array of gesture icons and then press Play and the physical body would respond in Luxembourg.
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