During this two-day conference, audience members will have the opportunity to learn about the progress of DOCAM’s research and to meet distinguished speakers among whom will be media artist Antoni Muntadas, who will deliver a keynote address. Please note that registration is not required and that admission is free.

For the first time, the Summit will be preceded by the Media in Motion Symposium. Co-presented by DOCAM and Media [at] McGill, it will take place on October 29, in conference rooms 832/833 of the New Music Building. Admission is free but as space is limited, registration is required by email with Marilyn Terzic at the following address: docam.symposium [at] mac.com.

DOCAM is an international and multidisciplinary research alliance on the documentation and the conservation of the media arts heritage with the main objective of developing new methodologies and tools to address the issues of preserving and documenting digital, technological, and electronic works of art. The project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) under its Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) program.

Initiated by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, the DOCAM Research Alliance includes some 15 institutional partners, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Canadian Heritage Information Network, the faculties of many Canadian universities (including McGill, UQAM, Queen’s and Université de Montréal), and international partners such as Leonardo and New York University. DOCAM also brings together more than 20 specialists and researchers in fields such as art conservation and restoration, cataloguing of museum collections, art history, information management, archival science, art documentation and computer science.

Contact information: info[at]docam.ca

In SECOND LIFE, Videotage plans to play on the larger theme of Attr/Action by discussing the second life of archives. As Videotage is in the process of reorganizing and re-emphasizing its media art archive as part of a longer transition to becoming a multi-faceted Media Art Center, we plan to utilize this as a jumping off point for a dynamic exhibition and series of events during October Contemporary 2008.

The archive itself is an attraction. It is an artificial system established to organize and preserve certain materials, and then by its very existence, begins to act as a magnet, “attracting” other similar materials and information, and also interested parties/ researchers due to its enduring research value. The archive is not dead after being set up. It has a second life. The “re-” actions (relive, retrieval, reframe etc.) involved give the archive a second life. In the exhibition, invited artists will respond to the topic by reprocessing physical or virtual materials that are possessed and archived over the course of a lifetime. The remix of history retracts the old and gives the personal or public
archives another remarkable life. With the use of different media, the blurred boundary between the virtual and the real will be presented.

To mark the closing of the program, a hands-on workshop* conducted by Douglas Easterly, Videotage’s FUSE artist-in-residence, will be held to introduce creative ways of utilizing ubiquitous computing (cell phones, PDA’s, etc.) and the largest online archive, the World Wide Web, in making art.

*Materials fee: HK$280 / HK$180 (Discount price for students and members) Please note that the fee is to help cover the cost of an Arduino microcontroller (US$36) that participants get to keep.

Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

“What impresses me about the project is the combination of ambition, community spirit, and humor that went into it. The website makes it look all so simple and elegant, but it’s easy to overlook how much work went into it. Fortunately, Matt’s documented that, including notes on how to make your own networked lamp. His narrative of the whole project is a great read if you want a sense of what it takes to pull off a network project. What’s apparent from his blog is something that’s often overlooked in interactive art work: it’s impossible not to collaborate. It’s clear from reading the blog that there were high points and low points, but that the project would not have happened were it not only for the artists and producer, but also for the community they have around them.” Tom Igoe

The Order of Things is an exhibition on the uses of archival images, image archives and image banks (and various other manifestations of a classificatory, encyclopaedic impulse) in contemporary art. It takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled The World as Will and Representation, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden, who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition, selects the visual motifs for his recent digital photo-collages.

In The Order of Things, this image archive’s use of a stringent classificatory logic – alphabetical and thus eminently logical, yet also often bizarre in its (inevitably arbitrary) ordering of one ‘class’ of images after another – operates as a curatorial trigger for a sustained reflection upon the various uses of archives, databases, encyclopaedias, typologies and other “ordering devices” (the title being an allusion to a well-known book by the historian of dis/order, Michel Foucault) as methods and strategies for confronting the delirious spectacle of the contemporary image world. This delirium is of course nowhere more palpably present than in the phenomenal proliferation of (photographic) imagery that is the worldwide: the conceptual horizon of the Internet figures as one of the exhibition’s defining parameters – hence the centrality accorded to Arden’s own The World as Will and Representation in the exhibition, hence also the inclusion of one of Thoma s Ruff’s emblematic “jpeg” photographs, or of Joachim Schmid’s exploration of the aesthetic of the ordered everyday in the depths of Flickr. In some sense, The Order of Things views the world as a universe entirely made up out of images/pictures (mainly of a vernacular photographic nature) and only made accessible to us through images/pictures; a world that may seem impossibly chaotic, and therefore invites all kinds of ordering interventions that seek to domesticate and contain the natural excesses of the image-world. This partly ironic, self-conscious Will to Order – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the “art of classification” that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called “the fundamental event of the modern age” – the “conquest of the world as picture.”

Visual abundance and the excessive aesthetics of plenty, as formal qualities of the world encountered in this chaotic, delirious avalanche of images, are at the heart of this exhibition. They are features of our contemporary digitized condition that inevitably invite critical scrutiny (much of which takes the shape of art – an art that seeks to impose order, or otherwise reveal the hidden order of things), yet at the same time also act as sources of authentic wonder to which art may respond by duplicating this spectacle of visual overload, by adding to it even. This deep, irresolvable ambiguity – a seamless reflection of the ambivalence of the image proper – is a defining characteristic of the exhibition, and of much of the work included in it, and of course serves to remind us of the ironies implied in all uses of the term ‘order’. It is an irony that is also present in the awareness that, no matter how sincere and profound contemporary art’s indignant criticism of the society of spectacle may seem (and effectively be), art – and art’s desire to see everything and show everything – also irrefutably belongs to this very regime of spectacularization.

Two types of profusion, then, are at work in this exhibition. One pertains to the brute fact of the visual abundance characteristic of contemporary society proper – the realization of the world’s overwhelming visual riches, and the mirror effect it creates in any art that seeks to respond to this relative wealth by replicating it. Here we find the rationale for the exhibition’s own character of visual overload – the sheer quantity of work on display that consists, precisely, of picturing (or imaging/imagining) quantity. Secondly, there is also the fact of the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual abundance that characterizes the image-world – hence also the heterogeneity of artistic responses to this fact: not only is it an art of visual plenty, it is also one of irreducible differences and differentiations. To grasp the baffling variety of artistic attitudes, methods and practices that are at play in this labyrinthine exhibition – a reflection in itself of the labyrinthine nature of the world as such, and one that must by its very definition remain incomplete – a number of organizational principles that symbolize or reflect these varying attitudes, methods and practices have been isolated, such as “appropriation”, “archives”, “collage & bricolage,” and “typology”.

As is clear from these enumerations and taxonomies, photography will be the dominant medium in the exhibition; it is the technical innovation of photography and of the ideally limitless reproducibility of its images, theorized to such epochal effect by Walter Benjamin, that has transformed our experience of the world into an overwhelmingly visual one. Furthermore, photography has also contributed decisively to the democracy of imagery that is implied in the exhibition’s conceptual make-up: as a project, The Order of Things would be entirely unthinkable without the democratization of image production that was ushered in by the popularization of photography, beginning with the introduction of cheap cameras and film at the beginning of the twentieth century, all the way up to the advent of digital photography and the Internet as everyman’s image bank.

Participating artists & artworks by: Roy Arden (CAN), Sarah Charlesworth (US), Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Hans Eijkelboom (NL), Daniel Faust (US), Douglas Huebler (US), Sanja Ivekovic (CRO), Luis Jacob (CAN), Cameron Jamie (US), Arthur Lipsett (CAN), Tine Melzer (D), Marc Nagtzaam (NL), Cady Noland (US), Peter Piller (D), Sigmar Polke (D), Richard Prince (US), Robert Rauschenberg (US), ROMA Publications (Mark Manders & Roger Willems) (NL), Julian Rosefeldt (D), Thomas Ruff (D), Joachim Schmid (D), Steven Shearer (CAN), Nancy Spero (US), Batia Suter (CH), Els Vanden Meersch (B), Christopher Williams(US)

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

City of Nodes is a collection of works from the last decade that explores the everyday domains of street, neighbourhood and the entire city as platforms for mapping, movement and communication. These projects adopt a bird’s-eye view of urban space and storyboard the city towards a number of idiosyncratic ends. In these augmented and annotated cities, space and context are interrogated, surveillance technology exposed, fleeting histories archived and the role of the body reconsidered.

It was quite exciting for me to research this project as it will serve as the foundation for a venture that I’ll be working on later in the year. Beyond my enthusiasm about this body of work, I was an early fan of the use of delicious as a tool for curation (see my post Tagging as Curation from last summer); contributing to TAGallery felt right on point with my research interests. What follows is a brief introduction to a few of the projects included in City of Nodes.

256² from aram bartholl on Vimeo.

Aram Bartholl is German artist whose work explores the intersection of web culture and everyday life. 256² was an exercise in delineating a parcel of land from NewBerlin (a reproduction of Berlin in Second Life) in Berlin proper. For this 2007 project, Bartholl used chalk to trace the bounding box of a 256 square meter area in Alexanderplatz reinforcing the connection between this public space and its virtual counterpoint.

One Block Radius was a 2004 project by Christina Ray and Dave Mandl founded on archiving the ephemera of a Manhattan city block (now the site of the New Museum). The work utilizes a web interface to store a variety of entries which catalog photographs and experience via categories such as rules/regulations, daily life and sounds/noise. I really enjoy the rigor of this project and in many ways it seems prescient of sites like Everyblock, a web service that I’ve written about several times in the past.

City of Nodes was also an opportunity for me to finally pay homage to Amsterdam Realtime, a 2002 project by Esther Polak, Jeroen Kee and The Waag Society. The work equipped volunteers with GPS devices to track their movements over a two month period. The resulting “personal” maps were compared and composited as part of retrospective exploring 100 years of cartography in Amsterdam. Amsterdam Realtime is as a benchmark locative media project and an ancestor to later, influential work including Polak’s MILK project (2005), the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s Real Time Rome (2006) and Stamen Design’s Cabspotting (2006).

TAGallery 021: City of Nodes also contains work by Tuur Van Balen, Gordan Savic, Tom Carden, the Insitute for Applied Autonomy, John Geraci, Mushon Zer-Aviv + Dan Phiffer + Kati London + Laila El-Haddad + Thomas Duc + Ran Tao + Charles Pratt, Shawn Micallef + James Roussel + Gabe Sawhney and David Rokeby.

You can view the full list of projects and annotations via this link. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]

Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes. His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore’s Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace.

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast enlarging universe of words and images generated by new technologies?

How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes. Potential topics include:

• The digital archive
• The future of libraries and museums
• The past and future of the book
• Mobile media
• Historical systems of communication
• Media in the developing world
• Social networks
• Mapping media flows
• Approaches to media history
• Education and the changing media environment
• New forms of storytelling and expression
• Location-based entertainment
• Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
• New modes of circulation and distribution
• The transformation of television — from broadcast to download
• Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
• Virtual worlds and digital tourism
• The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital transformation?
• The fate of reading

Submissions: Abstracts of no more than 500 words or full papers should be sent to Brad Seawell at seawell [at] mit.edu”> no later than January 9, 2009. We will evaluate abstracts and full papers on a rolling basis and early submission is highly encouraged. All submissions should be sent as attachments in a Word format. Submitted material will be subject to editing by conference organizers.

Email is preferred, but submissions can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

Please include a biographical statement of no more than 100 words. If your paper is accepted, this statement will be used on the conference Web site.

Please monitor the conference Web site for registration information, travel information and conference updates.

Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis until Jan. 9, 2009.

The full text of your paper must be submitted no later than Friday, April 17. Conference papers will be posted to the conference Web site and made available to all conferees.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r7mkSNRenE

Hidenori Watanave and a student team of Tokyo Metropolitan University are developing a 3D image database of Oscar Niemeyer in Second Life. This is an official art project of “The 100th anniversary of exchanging between Japan and Brazil“.

A big image screen appears from a floating box, and when it is touched, the original website is displayed. All images are downloaded from image search by Google. Because of the specification of Second Life, it is necessary to one by one upload all images now. This is still a prototype now. I want to form it to “Niemeyer’s shape” finally. And also, the other archiving project that uses Google Earth is starting.

I will stay in Brazil between from August 1 to 9, and take photographs of Niemeyer’s architecture and the city scenery of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. These material will be used for this project. Moreover, I will make a presentation of this project in FILE 2008.

Developing team: Hidenori Watanave + Kanako Hayashi, Kaname Shimizu, Makiko Suzuki, Ryuta Kawahara, Yohei Nakano. [via]

The aim of the international symposium (New)Media Art in Museums is to consider status of (new)media art in museum collections, conditions of keeping, protection, modes of exhibiting and all the changes that (new) media art introduces into the everyday practice of contemporary museums. Special attention will be paid to the specifics regarding production and rights that evolve from interrelations between museum - author - agency - certified producer. By employing the main subject: What are new media? - the symposium will thematically process temporal definition, production, keeping and presenting of (new)media art, as well as artistic features and influences that new media and digital technologies exert on contemporary museum presentation practice.

SPHERES AND MAIN SUBJECTS:

- new media and cultural heritage

- production / artwork

- the diversity of museum material and the status of (new)media artworks in museum collections the conditions of keeping and the modes of exhibiting the museum in a role of producer, risks, rights and duties, experiences and prognoses the influence of technological development on museum institutions, interaction between (new)media ? institution - artists global information system and museums

Detail information on symposium:

By organizing the symposium (New)Media Art in Museums we wish to stimulate colleagues from the museum profession and artists towards reflection, writing and discussion on interesting and actual subject of new and digital media, the various means in which the latter are implemented into museum activities and art creation, as well as their influence in forming the views on contemporary world.

The symposium’s subject is defined, yet opened towards problematizing the experiences and insights from both theory and practice.

We take special interest in the present state of artworks from the countries of the symposium’s participants, as well as in institutional interest and actual artists. We hope for the high number of participants as it will enable us to develop discussion, provide practical examples and create conditions for quality comparison. We wish to reach conclusions on situation both within the region and globally.

We take special interest in discussing the following subjects:

- relation between media and museums
- the percentage of representation of (new)media works in the specialized museums of visual art
- institutions’ relation to (new)media museum items
- author’s rights (author and collaborators…)
- relation between original and copy (the number of copies, ethics)
- conservation procedures that are applied when a (new) media artwork is endangered due to a process in which it happens to be (keeping, outdated technology)

Abstracts, papers:

Besides five invited international experts we expect applications from museum professionals, artists and other interested experts from Croatia and abroad. We shall accept only the original, unpublished papers, previously not presented in public. Accepted works, presented at the symposium, will be published (with abstracts in English language) in both a printed and a CD-ROM edition by MMSU in 2009. The expositions will be presented orally, along with multimedia presentation.

Official symposium languages are Croatian and English (with simultaneous translation). The application including personal data, a subject’s title and an abstract (up to 200 words) should be sent not later than 20 August 2008 by either:

- mail at MMSU, Dolac 1/II, 51000 Rijeka (with a designation FOR SYMPOSIUM) or
- email at simpozij [at] mmsu.hr (with a designation FOR SYMPOSIUM).

Detail information on the symposium’s program can be found at http://www.mmsu.hr/. Final program of the symposium will be announced not later than 22 September 2009

Often only fully realised in their installed state, time-based media works are complex systems that pose new challenges for their custodians. Effective approaches to their stewardship rely on the blending of traditional museum practice with new modes of operating that derive from and respond to the complex nature of these installations. In many cases artists are very specific about the way in which the work should be installed and the technology used to show it. The installation of these works requires new skills and new areas of collaboration within museums. Whereas internationally agreed standards exist for the handling, installation and care of traditional works of art, there are no such standards at present for time-based media works. This project aims to raise awareness of the requirements of these works and to provide a practical response to the need for international agreement among museums.

The challenge of preserving time-based media is best met collaboratively, and it is the consortium’s hope that others will not only benefit from this information but will also contribute over time to the further refinement of the methods of care for these works of art. We hope this material will be an aid to artists, collectors, dealers and museums, the primary custodians of time-based media.