DIY in Oklahoma City

Upgrade! New York announces Upgrade! International: DIY Oklahoma City :: Nov 30-Dec 3 :: ARTISTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD CONVERGE IN downtown OKLAHOMA CITY :: Traveling across the globe from cities such as Berlin, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Seoul and Salvador, artists will come together in Oklahoma City to present art and ideas to each other and the community in the second annual meeting of Upgrade! International. The Upgrade! International: DIY Oklahoma City symposium, to be held November 30 – December 3, 2006, is an opportunity for local and international artists to exchange ideas about the developing field of new-media arts.

Open to the public, the four day symposium will feature exhibitions, workshops, presentations, lectures, screenings and performances by new-media artists. Topics such as Water Testing and Art, Making Art Interactive and Social Mapping as a Medium of Self-Expression will be explored in lectures and workshops. Interactive installations will offer participants a chance to explore an abstract universe, hear experimental audio works or experience the pulse of other participants through a created environment. A variety of short film and experimental video works will be screened at the Oklahoma City Museum of ArtÂ’s Noble Theatre as well as in a Do-It-Yourself Drive-In Theatre setting. “DIY or Die,” a net art exhibition featuring 25 artists will open at IAO gallery. The exhibition celebrates the 10th anniversary of Rhizome and Turbulence, and was curated in collaboration with Upgrade! New York. Continue reading

Second Life Gets a Paper Book

Second Life has been on Techmeme a lot lately. Most of this has been about the continuing inroads that larger companies like Dell and Reuters have made into the world. Some of it has been about strife within the world due to things like land price increases and copybot (a recently released program that can copy any artifact in world; BoingBoing has a good piece discussing the issues).

The latest splash is a physical book, entitled Second Life: The Official Guide, that is now available on Amazon. As the documentation for the world moves off the web it becomes more accessible and even *more* people will join.

“Second Life: The Official Guide is the perfect book for anyone interested in Linden Lab’s fascinating Second Life metaverse. It explores in detail every aspect of Second Life’s rich and multilayered virtual world, explains how it works, and offers a wealth of information and practical advice for all Second Life residents. The first part, “Getting a Second Life,” acquaints potential and new players with the Second Life world. It describes the metaverse’s geography as well as its society, explaining its written and unwritten rules. The second part, “Living a Second Life,” deals with the practical and economic aspects of Second Life: creating and customizing an avatar, building objects, scripting, and making money. The third part of the book, “Success in Second Life,” discusses ways to enjoy Second Life more. It includes profiles of successful Second Life residents, discusses fascinating in-world events, and examines how some are using Second Life for business, training, and other purposes. The book closes with a glossary as well as quick-reference and additional-resources appendices. The book’s CD includes special animations, character templates, and textures created by Linden Lab exclusively for this book. The disc also guides new users through the installation and includes a code that grants a special object the first time they enter the metaverse.” [blogged by Brad Forrest on O'Reilly Radar]

Investing Time and Money in Virtual Worlds

“In the last month something happened that shook the world to its core. It was the sudden appearance of the capability to instantly replicate three-dimensional objects, suddenly in the hands of the common people. Everyone’s intellectual property was up for grabs, and the very notion of manufacturing under attack. Small business owners who relied on handcrafting luxury goods found themselves completely vulnerable to perfect knockoffs…

Microtransactions for digital assets and virtual goods is a rising, potentially multibillion dollar industry. To succeed, entrepreneurs who are building networked systems based on user content (be they citizens of Second Life or the makers of virtual worlds themselves) must realize that anything displayable is copyable; the value lies instead in service and in server-side functionality. Content is like songs around a campfire: destined to be enjoyed for free. Those who build businesses around hosting campfires would be wise to focus on making the campfire experience great, rather than charging listeners by the song.” From Investing time and money in virtual worlds: Caveat Emptor by Raph Koster, Venture Beat. [via] Continue reading

[...] Simon Mills: How do you think the plethora of so-called Web 2.0 applications (E.g. Myspace, Youtube, Bitorrent, Google) are changing the media landscape? These are all predominantly based on constantly evolving databases so exhibit a distinctly new media aesthetic. They also seem to aid a more democratic means of cultural production making publication and involvement cheap and easy. Are you sold on the idea of ‘network as platform’?

Sean Cubitt: Cheap and easy is always good. talk, as they say, is cheap. Thank God. It takes millions of people talking (and writing, which is nearly as cheap) to produce one poet; and it takes millions strumming away to produce one musician. Those of us who only talk and strum are nonetheless experts, in the sense that we know how hard it is to make words and sounds do what you want them to, and so we are the perfect audience for the poet and the muso. It will take a million mash-ups to make one work that will really make your jaw drop. Continue reading

TANGENT_CONSPIRACY

V2_ presents TANGENT_CONSPIRACY :: Friday 1 December, 2006, 20:00 hrs :: Live stream: & IRC chat: irc.v2.nl/#tangents.

Long before a clandestine military-academic collaboration created the 1960’s ARPANET the speculative mechanisms of conspiracy theories have fueled global events. The Internet and its growing Web 2.0 counterpart have moved beyond the realm of information exchange and redundancy to become the real-time fora of narrative construction. Fuelling and fanning all forms of popular speculation the net now creates its own post-modern mythologies of world domination, corporate control and government induced fear fetishism. If the net itself is not a conspirative construct designed to control and influence global intellectual expression then, rumour has it, it plays the central role in implying as much. Has the Internet now become a self-fulfilling prophecy of its own destructive speculation? V2_, in collaboration with the Media Design group of the Piet Zwart Institute, invites you to join Florian Cramer, Claudia Borges, Hans Bernhard and Alessandro Ludovico in an evening of net-based conspiracy built upon abrasive speculation, conjectural divination and devious web bots.
Continue reading

Call for papers

Internet Research 8.0: Let’s Play! :: International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers :: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada :: Workshops: October 17, 2007 :: AoIR conference: October 18 20, 2007 :: CALL FOR PAPERS :: Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2007.

Let’s Play The Internet better, internet/s - is at once part of the background hum of the developed world and an exotic realm of fantasy and play. It is an essential, mundane part of daily life, and simultaneously radical, revolutionary, profane, and fun. Internet/s invite us to play. We surf, blog, role play, and chat in the interest of work, learning, and play. Serious technologies and applications invite playing around as a way to learn how to use them. Playful applications take root in serious business, as online chat becomes a business communication tool.

Games find applications in education, business, and war. Playful blogging evolves into a social and political force to be reckoned with. We play with our identity online, shaping current and future roles offline. The play goes onS Our conference theme of play invites empirical research and theoretical reflection on how human beings “seriously play” with one another on, via and through internet/s, on local, regional, and global scales. We call for papers that explore the intersection of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane, the revolutionary and the mundane, and fantasy and the reality. Continue reading

Call for papers

After convergence, what connects? :: Call for papers :: fibreculture has established itself as Australasia’s leading forum for discussion of internet theory, culture, and research. The Fibreculture Journal is a peer-reviewed journal that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations.

Papers are invited for the ‘After convergence’ issue of the Fibreculture Journal, to be published early in 2008. Guest editors are Caroline Bassett (Sussex, UK), Maren Hartmann (Bremen, Germany) and Kate O’Riordan (Lancaster/Sussex, UK).

Everything that arises does not converge. A more variegated landscape emerges as processes of digitalization, crystallizations of an intrinsically technological-social, continue re-shaping cultures and re-working societies, not in their image, but into something new. It is increasingly obvious that there is no digital behemoth, no single form, no single function, no New World Order. Rather a series of reconfigurations, reformulations, new functions, new contents, new spaces, new grounds, new uses, have emerged and are emerging within global media networks. Continue reading

NOISE ARCHIVE AND ‘WE’RE ALIVE, LET’S MEET!’

HER NOISE ARCHIVE AND ‘WE’RE ALIVE, LET’S MEET!’ in residence at LANDMARK, BERGEN KUNSTHALL :: ELECTRA WITH EMMA HEDDITCH :: 27 November - 1 December 2006, 12 - 1am daily (except Friday 12 – 8pm) ::
Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers Alle 5, 5015 Bergen :: Tel 00 47 55 55 93 10.

Electra opens up its extensive archive of sound based work by women and invites visitors to Landmark to take part in a range of events and to contribute to the archive.

Her Noise was an exhibition which took place at South London Gallery in 2005 with satellite events at Tate Modern and the Goethe-Institut, London, curated by Lina Dzuverovic and Anne Hide Neset of Electra. Her Noise gathered international artists who use sound to investigate social relations, inspire action or uncover hidden soundscapes. The exhibition included newly commissioned works by Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether, Hayley Newman, Kaffe Matthews, Christina Kubisch, Emma Hedditch and Marina Rosenfeld. A parallel ambition of the project was to investigate music and sound histories in relation to gender, and the curators set out to create a lasting resource in this area through building up an archive. Continue reading

Gannett Newsrooms Rechristened “Information Centers”

Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.” The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features. (via del.icio.us/network/yatta) Continue reading

Wearable Sculpture

With The Fruit Fly Farm sculpture, Laura Beloff is investigating both technological society and organic (insect) society. The Fruit Fly Farm is built as a wearable object for people to adopt and carry around. It is a personal “pet” and wearable system with a public access via mobile phone. A camera phone, embedded in the sculpture, is observing the fly community. Anyone can access the phone camera by sending a sms to the piece. The camphone will then capture an image and send it back as an MMS. The photo along with the sms-messages (comments) will also be uploaded to a dedicated website.

The fly nest is located in the middle of the Ø20cm transparent acryl ball. The nest capsule contains rotten fruits and needs to be re-filled approximately once a week. Small holes allow the flies to fly in and out of the nest. Until November 30th 2006, you can send the sms to this number: +47 92096767 (Norway). In the same series of “wearable” future works which address the society and surrounding environment as the their theme: The Head. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art] Continue reading