An Experiment in Community Building and Storytelling

Andrea, the creator of the website, is the fictional heroine of Shelly Silver’s upcoming film project desiredescape.net. She starts the website as a means of escaping her life in a conservative Upstate New York town. In her own words:

“I want this to be a website for all of us who wish to escape some part of our lives (our job, famly, relationship, political or economic situation, city, country world), where we can share stories about our current lives, as well as our plans, hopes and strategies for our desired escape.”

The stories Andrea receives will influence the trajectory of her story, and the images, sounds and videos uploaded to the site will be incorporated into the final film. So if you need to escape (or have successfully escaped already) please visit and contribute often! And if you’ve never wanted to escape, but are nevertheless curious about those of us who do, please visit too. Continue reading

Expanding Awareness of netArt

Open call for netArt for online exhibition and inaugural premiere on the DiverseWorks website and DiverseWorks Artspace1. Submission deadline on March 25, 2006, midnight CDT. Selected projects will receive an honorarium and will officially premiere at the DiverseWorks Visual Arts opening event on April 28, 2006.

About the open call: DiverseWorks is seeking to bring greater awareness for netArt through this open call. Projects should use the web to its inherent (decentralized) distribution advantages and/or address current artistic, technological and social concerns related to web-based activity or visual culture at large.

The DiverseWorks Visual Arts Director and New Media committee will review projects based upon their topicality and technical feasibility. Selected projects will receive a $100 honorarium and will officially premiere at the DiverseWorks Visual Arts opening event on April 28, 2006. After the inaugural debut, DiverseWorks will have non-exclusive rights to display winning projects indefinitely on the DiverseWorks website. Continue reading

OPEN CALL TO ALL ARTISTS

DEADLINE: April 1st, 2006 (postmark date)

Each year Franklin Furnace awards grants in two categories. (1) “The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art” supports emerging performance artists, allowing them to produce major works in New York; and (2) “The Future of the Present” funds the creation of “live art on the Internet,” works which engage the Internet as an art medium and/or venue. Grants from either fund range between $2,000 and $5,000. Artists from all areas of the world are encouraged to apply.

Franklin Furnace has no curator; each year a new panel of artists reviews all proposals. We believe this peer panel system allows all kinds of artists from all over the world an equal shot at presenting their work. All applicants are automatically considered for both categories of awards. Every year the panel changes, as do the definitions of “emerging artist,” “performance art” and “live art on the Internet.” So if at first you don’t succeed, please try again. Continue reading

Or, Phase 5: A Report from the Inventor of the Flash Mob

[Left. Fig. 2—Schematic, MOB #3 in Grand Hyatt Hotel.] [...] “The basic hypothesis behind the Mob Project was as follows: seeing how all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities the work might engender, it should theoretically be possible to create an art project consisting of pure scene—meaning the scene would be the entire point of the work, and indeed would itself constitute the work.

At its best, the Mob Project brought to this task a sort of formal unity, as can be illustrated in MOB #3, which took place fifteen days after #2 and was set in the Grand Hyatt, a hotel fronting on Forty-second Street adjacent to Grand Central Station. Picture a lobby a whole block long sporting well-maintained fixtures in the high Eighties style, gold-chrome railings and sepia-mirror walls and a fountain in marblish stone, with a mezzanine ringed overhead. The time was set for 7:07 P.M., the tail end of the evening rush hour; the train station next door was thick with commuters, as was (visible through the hotel’s tinted-glass facade) the sidewalk outside, but the lobby was nearly empty: only a few besuited types, guests presumably, sunk here and there into armchairs. Continue reading

The Anthology of Computer Art

Sonic Acts XI: Anthology of Computer Art–23 ­- 26 februari 2006,­ Paradiso / De Balie, Amsterdam. Live Streaming: For those of you who won’t be able to make it to the festival, the performances at the festival nights will be streamed live through FabChannel. The conference will be streamed through de Balie.

Day 2: Friday 24-02-2006, Conferences:

Stephen Wilson - Artists at the Frontiers of Research [US]; 13:00 - 13:45 / Balie big hall: Stephen Wilson is a San Francisco author, artist and professor who explores the cultural implications of new technologies. The presentation is based on material from his MIT Press book, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology.

Andreas Broeckmann - Image, Process, Performance, Machine. Aspects of an Aesthetics of the Machinic [DE]; 13:45 - 14:30 / Balie big hall–Andreas Broeckmann has been the Artistic Director of transmediale - international media art festival, Berlin since 2000. In texts and lectures he deals with post-medial practices and the possibilities for a machinic aesthetics of media art. Continue reading

GAME ENGINES/SOCIAL ENGINES

29. March from 17:30 GMT (12:30 - New York, 18:30 - Prague): Details on HOW TO INSTALL AND USE THE ACCESS GRID

Game Engines/Social Engines: polylogue session about game engines, their social and political aspects. The interdisciplinary meeting should create an open space for deeper theoretical reflection on the recent development in the field of serious games. We are looking for various perspectives, examples and thoughts on social, political and artistic aspects of videogames. Researchers, theoreticians, game designers, programmers and artists are welcome to join the discussion. List of topics:

Videogames & Politics: - Political aspects of videogames - Representation and self-representation - Digital emancipation and creation of heroes (Middle East, China) - Persuasive games and games as means of propaganda.

Social Engines: - Social aspects of videogames - Activism and virus campaigns - Social networking in games - Educational videogames. Continue reading

Every Environment is Text-Rich: Framingham

Every Environment is Text-Rich: Framingham, by Brooke A. Knight, is one of a growing series of artworks that concern themselves with the interaction between the landscape and our reading of it. I believe that every place carries with it a history — either social, political, natural, or geologic — and that the history becomes a “text” that is inscribed onto the landscape.

The piece uses a remote robotic camera that is trained on downtown Framingham. While the image is of a typical Massachusetts downtown square, the camera moves to spell out letters that write a text onto the scene. That text is the grant that gave Danforth (after whom the museum is named) two-thirds of current day Framingham. In essence, EEITR:F is writing the history of the town directly onto the town. It is a kind of ephemeral grafitti, making the historical current, and tying the past to the place.

At the Danforth Museum, Framingham, Massachusetts; February 22-April 19, 2006. Reception and Artist Talk on February 26, 1:00 p.m. Continue reading

GOING PUBLIC ‘06

GOING PUBLIC is a mobile open platform, a network of production, reflection and cultural exchange, that establishes itself in peripherical areas. GOING PUBLIC invites artists to work on places of the city, such as railway stations, public libraries, schools, ect…. The project develops an attitude for intervention in social issues, together with local communities, in the fold of public policy, nomadism, of today’s precarious and temporary settlements. The researches are addressed to contemprary subjects such as: mobility, borders, new geographies, new EU, mediterranean and eastern cultures, micro-geographies, ect. At its 5° edition, the Going Public project will develop, over the year, a series of activities and appointments for reflection and research, such as:

“Cyprus Day. Rebuilding geographies” : 25th February 2006, at Fondazione Pistoletto/Cittadellarte, Biella–For the first time in Italy, there will be a “study day” dedicated to Cyprus, its culture and its human and territorial geography, the social issues, the green line”, the wall crossing the town of Nicosia, the co-operation activities between the communities in the North and South of the Island, as well as its artistic events and cultural exchanges. Continue reading

Art, Technology and Popular Culture

The STRP Festival will take place between the 24th and 26th of March 2006 in the former industrial area, Strijp S, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. STRP is a festival at the intersection of art, technology and popular culture in the full context of all art disciplines. A festival where the public is treated to a broad palette of works through in-depth presentations and large spectacles, which provide an image of how visual art, design, stage arts, film, architecture and popular culture develop themselves through the means or appliance of both new and existing technology.

ROBOTICS: Amorphic RobotWorks (USA) - Inflatable Bodies, Robotlab (GER) - Juke_bots, Bill Vorn (CAN) - Hysterical Machines, Pascal Glissmann, Martina Höfflin (GER) - Electronic Life Forms (ELF), Garnet Hertz (CAN) - Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot #3, Gijs van Bon - Arabesk #23, Time’s up/HRL (AUT), Bar Bot - Dr. Christoph Bartneck (GER) - eMuu, Robbert Smit, Graham Smith, HKU - Telemoby, Björn Schülke (GER) - Nervous, Markus Lerner, Andre Stubbe (GER) - Outerspace, Michiel van Overbeek - Nazarenos, Lara Greene (UK) - You Move Me, Fred Abels & Mirjam Langemeijer - Dirk.
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Interaction is the Crystalpunk Drug

A Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture event Oudenoord 275, Utrecht, NL: Essentially it was William Butler Yeats who defined soft architecture as early as 1888 when he wrote: “Behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin.”. Yeats was talking about magic, but we are thinking about technology (and pointing out their similarities is pointing out the obvious) that is promising to make this worldview into a reality: equipping mindless objects with in silico brains, turning rooms into artificially intelligent machines.

Gargoyle computational processes evolving the optimal design solution to a problem and printing it in 3D, in real size. Every time you wave your hand a pandemonium of software agents start to reason on what they could do for you. Objects can sense and act and acquire personalities of which the complexity rises as their ecosphere becomes richer and more connected. Architecture is at the forefront in applying these ideas, at the same time it will pose new challenges to the practise.
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