SonarCinema, electronic music and the image
The programme has 14 menus, offering the opportunity to take a look at a constant creative effervescence scene. Projects like the documentary Part of the Weekend Never Dies about the Soulwax world tour, the videos from the Osaka, animations by E*Rock for the Audiodregs label, the fascinating portrait of the British company EMS in What the Future Sounded Like or the rise of dub in the early seventies as a result of a mix-up in a studio in Jamaica in the documentary Dub Echoes are some of the alternatives being projected in the CCCB Auditorium.

Sónar À La Carte:
- Digital Art À La Carte is part of the main theme of Cinema beyond Cinema
- Video À La Carte: the SonarCinema schedule at any time.
- Music À La Carte: the Sónar media library. A selection of the most outstanding and the latest in the audiovisual universe and current digital art, by a number of experts in the field.

SonarExtra:
- Red Bull Music Academy Lounge: The academy is ten years old, and it has hosted musicians who have succeeded in creating an exceptional mosaic of styles.
-Doropaedia – Producciones Doradas: An encyclopaedia of multimedia content that covers various concepts in different artistic disciplines.
- Museu del Cinema de Girona (Girona Film Museum): A journey through the attempts of humanity to capture images in movement.
- Hangar – Creating Space: The visual arts production and dissemination centre of with the highest profile in the city.
- Magnum. 10 sequences: An exhibition and workshop on the influence of film images on the collective imagination.

Talks and Debates:
- “Live Cinema, YouTube, short films and video games”: the curators of Digital Art À La Carte will analyse these new frameworks of audiovisual formalisation.
- Controleando featuring DJ Loomy. The new generation of MIDI controllers for DJs.
- 15 years of Sónar: characters like Mary Anne Hobbs and Heiko Hoffman will be analysing electronic music in the 21st century; Tara de Long will talk about her vision of ‘The female factor’ and artists like Jeff Mills, Arbol and Ewan Pearson will talk about the 15 years of Sónar.

SmartCity is an artistic project of research and production on the theme of the European city of
the future. It aims at exploring the new possibilities of artistic intervention in the urban space. At the forefront of new practices, SmartCity invites artists, architects, designers, researchers, engineers and groups of citizens to operate on a rereading of urban space. The project offers a vision of a balanced and sustainable city, centered around the citizen.

SmartCity is an European program of meetings, production and experimental workshops, production of artists’ projects in the urban space and events: monumental audiovisual installations, performances, locative art, sound design, ephemeral or interactive architectures, projects involving inhabitants, urban game art, installations in the shops, etc.

The call for projects SmartCity 2008 is already closed. You were many who sent us your propositions and we thank you for it. The selection is in progress. The answers will be communicated in the course of July. Within the framework of our permanent day and activities 2009, you can thus continue to send us your propositions.

Besides, Dedale appeals to specific projects in partnership with the Citéinternationale universitaire de Paris /
CitéCulture.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS - DEDALE / CITE INTERNATIONALE UNIVERSITAIRE DE PARIS

In the frame of the SmartCity project, Dedale and the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris jointly invite artists to realise an art project on the Cité territory.

Objectives :
To propose to a wide public a second reading of urban space and territorial issues, working on the modification of territory perception. To present projects directly connected with the inhabitants daily, their practices and urban environment, based on territorial characteristics (architectural, social,
historical and geographical).

Art fields concerned :
Visual arts, live art, architecture, sound and interactive design.

Action territory: the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris. The Cité internationale is located on a wooded park of 34 hectares in the south of the French capital and represents the largest concentration of residence halls in Paris and the Ile-de-France region: 5 500 beds in 37 residences. The residents - students, researchers, artists, etc. - come from more than 130 nationalities. From its creation, these has contributed to make the Cité a space of encounters and cultural exchanges. The strong artistic activity of the Cité enables to enhance this intercultural mix.

Identified as a laboratory of architectural innovation from its first building phase around 1925 and during the second wave in the 60’s, the Cité has to face the challenge of a new urban planning today.The Cité site presents many various communication axes, having for effect to produce several nuisances. The most important is the south ring road, made up of 5 lanes. There is also the RER line, the David-Weill avenue, an aqueduct underground line, etc. The harmonisation of the site and the regulation of the generated pollutions are right now the main priority for the Cité.

More information on:
www.ciup.fr/cite_culture.htm

Thematic:
In the south park, the ring road cuts the Cité in! to two parts: Paris part and Gentilly district part. For the moment, the only way to join the two sides by foot is limited by two narrow footbridges. Around the main topic of the ring road integration, artists are invited to shape new connexions between the Cité internationale and Gentilly.

Nature of the researched projects :
- Monumental audiovisual installations
- Strolling projects and artistic tours, connexions between residence hall
- Installations / ephemeral and interactive architectures
- Art project involving nature
- Sound design of public spaces, infrastructures, buildings
- Art projects involving the residents of the Cité and the inhabitants of the Gentilly city
- Urban game art
- Locative art
- Projects using mobile technologies, interactivity and ICT
- Projects connected with urban pollutions: sound, visual, atmospheric, electromagnetic
pollutions

: A minimum 10 000 ¤ will be given to the project ::

: Deadline for project submission:: 30 July 2008

: How to apply ::
You need to send by post :
- a project presentation and a production budget
- an artist biography
- CD-ROM or DVD for illustrating your project

To the following address:
Dedale
23, rue Olivier Métra
75020 Paris
France

Presentation of the call to projects’ carriers :

Dedale : Dédale is a platform of search, production and distribution (dedicated to the art and to the new media in Europe. It organizes, particularly since 2002, the Emergences festival, an international
meeting of the new artistic forms and the new technologies in Paris (meetings, shows, installations, electronic musics). http://www.festival-emergences.info

CitéCulture / Cité internationale CitéCulture is the cultural center of the Cité Internationale. It intervenes mainly in the domains of music, architecture and visual arts. Centered on the artistic experiment and the exchange between the cultures, CitéCulture welcomes foreign artists, manages working spaces, makes students and Parisians discover the contemporary creation and sensibilize them to architecture and urbanism. http://www.ciup.fr/cite_culture.htm

More information :

Map and pictures of the Cité Internationale de Paris (format pdf, 628 ko)

EOD 02 is an installation by Frederik De Wilde created in collaboration with LAb[au]. EOD 02 is a new-media installation exploring the capacity of special species of living blind fishes to perceive (electrosense) their environment and communicate with each other by emitting electric signals, either in pulses or waves. The installation is based on four aquariums of taintless mirror, each presenting a specific composition of fish producing different electric signals. In each aquarium antennas capture the electric communication between the fishes and render these signals into sound. Under each aquarium a matrix of leds is placed pulsing according to the intensity and rhythm of the emitted signals. In this manner the electrical impulses of the fishes drive sound, light and an entire audiovisual space. More info.

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is the third, ground-breaking international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide events around the redefinition of a growing digital infrastructure of moving images in public space. It will mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association and will take place at Federation Square, Melbourne. Federation Square is a unique cultural and community oriented multimedia precinct, centred around a significant 38m2 public LED screen.

CALL FOR FILM & VIDEO and MULTIMEDIA PROJECTS

The Urban Screens 08 exhibition is looking for Artists, Urban Poets, Filmmakers and Multimedia and Interaction Designers to submit film and videos or multimedia, interactive or participatory screen based projects. A large diverse urban screens infrastructure is available at Federation Square.

Criteria: We are looking for existing and potentially adaptable projects that interrogate screen media as a medium| content and tackle the festival’s key themes of issues of building community and sustainability in relation to water. These two complex themes aim to provoke discussion and spark questions such as: What is community in times of the high-speed, global flows of the new media scape? How can we explore the diversity of water, an element, essential to the existence of life on earth?

For a detailed description of the event and curatorial framework see
www.urbanscreens08.net/art-+-events
For a detailed description of Fed Squares infrastructure see
www.urbanscreens08.net/technical

The projects should preferably employ one or more of the listed existing infrastructure of urban screens of Fed Square and should consider and adapt to the special circumstances of outdoor public spaces, transforming urban spaces to foster dialogue and community engagement. We are looking for:

A) Film and video such as

- Video art, text art, animation, animated slideshows, or fictional advertisements and community information (under 3 min.)
- Silent works especially for the joint broadcasting or daily screenings in-between (under 3 min.)
- Short experimental films, documentary and journalistic content (under 15 min.)
- Small curated programs of the mentioned type of works

B) Interactive, performance based or participatory projects such as

- Interactive software applications for urban screens
- Participatory community projects using creative digital practices
- Live media art merging performance and new media
- Community displays for education and exchange
- Virtual/real world hybrid projects using streaming content
- Real-time generated content
- Screen related sound experiments
- Digital storytelling projects
- Mobile games using urban space as social and educative playground
- Connecting mobile culture of locative media with urban screens

CALL FOR POSTERS

To bridge the Conference and the Multimedia Exhibition, we are looking for posters about the latest development of Urban Screens. They will be displayed in a public exhibition in the Atrium next to the conference venue. Conference will be encouraged to get in exchange with the authors during the breaks. Eight submissions will be additionally shown in an experimental presentation on the four outdoor I-sites around Federation Square. These are equiped with an integrated screen, which offer the possibility to present remotely via scheduled skype sessions, while the audience gathers in groups around them.

Criteria: Posters are aimed at presenting the latest development in this interdisciplinary field of Urban Screens. Posters are ideal for presenting speculative, late-breaking results of ongoing research projects, drawing important conclusions from practical experiments, for giving an introduction to innovative art works or new practical design applications, reports on cutting edge technologies and content management systems under development.

Posters will be reviewed by the Poster Committee, soon to be announced. Authors of accepted submissions must provide a one or two page summary for publication in the conference proceedings. Selected submissions will also be published on-line on the International Urban Screens Association website.

APPLICATION AND DETAILED CALL

Please have a look at the detailed calls and the official online forms for application, available here.

CONTACT: exhibition [at] urbanscreens.net (please use the subject “USM08 - question concerning the CALL”)

Best regards,
Mirjam Struppek

URBAN SCREENS MELBOURNE 08
Artistic Director

International Urban Screens Association
Rheinsberger Str. 68
D-10115 Berlin

In a string of fast paced mini-lectures and presentations, Amerika and Lovink will explore some of the recent tendencies within both the field of media-art as well as popular digital culture. They will attempt to maneuver through the hype and trends emanating from these emerging fields while taking into account broader cultural and historical perspectives. The discussion will also attempt to locate the connections between recent phenomena such as the 90s net art movement and contemporary web 2.0 culture, club-culture VJing and and live audiovisual performance art, and the interface of web design and media-art.

Session 1: the ‘net.art’ movement in a historical perspective (Amerika)
Session 2: media-art today (Lovink)
Session 3: fictional narratives in media-art (Amerika)
Session 4: web-design vs. media-art (Lovink)
Session 5: net.art VJ - cyberpsychogeography and digital flux persona (Amerika)
Session 6: media-art and Avant-Pop (debate Amerika - Lovink)

Speakers:

Geert Lovink is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and internet critic. He studied political science in Amsterdam and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has been involved in the cultural politics of internet since the early nineties. He is the co-founder of projects such as the Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. In 2002 MIT Press published two of his books, Dark Fiber and Uncanny Networks. Since then other books appeared such as My First Recession (2003) and The Principle of Notworking (2005). In 2004 he moved from Brisbane to Amsterdam to found the Institute of Network Cultures. He is research professor at School of Interactive Media (University of Applied Sciences) and associate professor in the new media program at the humanities media studies department of the University of Amsterdam. In 2005-2006 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third study on critical internet culture for Routledge New York entitled Zero Comments. Currently, together with the US political scientist Jodi Dean, he is writing a book for Polity Press called Blog Theory.

Mark Amerika has exhibited his work in many venues including the Whitney Biennial, the ICA in London, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum. He has had four early career retrospectives including the first-ever net art retrospective in 2001 at the ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan (”Avant-Pop: The Stories of Mark Amerika [an Internet art retrospective]”). Both retrospectives covered the years 1993-2001. In 2004, he had two follow-up retrospectives, one at Ciberart Bilbao in Spain, and one at the Festival International de Linguagem Eletronica at the Gallerie do SESI in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

A cult novelist, media theorist, web publisher, and VJ artist who has performed internationally, Amerika is the author of many books including his recently published collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press). He has also directed a series of feature length foreign films scheduled to be released in various formats as part of a new body of work entitled the Foreign Film Series. Amerika, who as the founder of the Alt-X Network [altx.com] is publisher of the electronic book review, is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

April 24, 2008; 1:30 -5:30 pm :: Cirk - Zebrastraat, Ghent, Belgium

In each of the pieces, using a game controller, the viewer navigates freely throughout the 3D computer graphic environments. The spaces are comprised of both exterior and interior landscapes, each thematically, visually & sonically distinct where users can interact with avatars to create new performances / performance spaces.

SwanQuake is a surreal semi-abstract inhabited world, home to a series of potential encounters. These may be theatrical and dreamlike, sometimes uncanny perhaps even frightening, at times quotidian and familiar. It’s these interactions that inspire curiosity, wonder and the desire to continue looking and sensing. However, despite the title ‘mashup’ of computer game Quake and traditional ballet Swan Lake, there are no targets, health points, wins or dying swans here.

SwanQuake: The User Manual opens the project up to discursive reflection and expansion through its selection of articles and essays. In the first section, the User Manual takes you through some of the processes of making SwanQuake including sound composition, choreography and computer animation work. Also in section one is a modicum of do-it-yourself instructions and two views on Igloo’s work in relation to the wider field of digital arts practice and culture. In the second section, the User Manual broadens the scope of the discussion to include the ontology of game art, analysis of perspective in 3-D spaces, ‘uncanny’ realism and collisions between game artistry and commerce. With essays by Johannes Birringer, Helen Stuckey, Shiralee Saul, Bruno Martelli, Ruth Gibson, John McCormick, Katharine Neil, Alex Jevremovic, Adam Nash, Helen Sloan, Stephen Turk, Marco Gillies, Harry Brenton & David Surman. Reviewed here.

Igloo make intermedia works exploring the poetices of time, space and natural phenomena. Questioning the reality of nature and how it can be influenced by individual experience and collective mythology. Employing many of the tools of the military EC recently they have investigated the role of the’real’ in virtual environments.

Igloo are Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli who have earned a string of accolades for their artwork including a NESTA award for SwanQuake, a commission from the Royal Opera house for Goodbye Venus and a BAFTA nomination in 2002 for WindowsNinetyEight.

The festival kicks off with a performance by legendary culture jammers Negativland, returning to Houston for the first time in eight years. Animator and performer Brent Green takes over the second night with live narration and music (by Brent Green, Howe Gelb and Jeremy Gara) to accompany Green’s stop- animation films, and video and performance artists Tara Mateik and Shana Moulton round out the closing night of the festival.

Media Archeology Schedule

8 p.m. Thursday, April 17
It’s All in Your Head FM, Negativland
Herring Hall, Rice University, 6100 Main Street
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door

During this live performance of an imaginary radio show, audience members wear blindfolds as they listen to samples of people discussing the various facets of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other major religions, and the role of religion in society. The performance is narrated by the fictional radio host, Dr. Oslo Norway (inspired by Garrison Keillor).

Since 1980, the 4-6 members known as Negativland have been creating records, CDs, video, fine art, books, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arranges these found bits and pieces to create new works.

8 p.m. Friday, April 18
A Million Moths Flurrying Around the Front Porch: Brent Green
The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art
2402 Munger
RAIN LOCATION: Aurora Picture Show
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door

Brent Green will perform live narrations to his incredible handmade, animated films, accompanied by improvised soundtracks by Green, Jeremy Gara (Arcade Fire) and Howe Gelb (Giant Sand). It’ll be an hour spent on the verge of collapse: wobbly piano, musical saw, banjo, guitar, drums and cartoons! It’ll change your life. If you like your life the way it is, you should stay home.

Brent Green is a self-taught animator from Pennsylvania who has been exhibited at Sundance, the Getty Museum, Walker Arts Center, Andy Warhol Museum, Wexner Center and festivals across the country. Green had a Hammer Project at the Hammer Museum, “An Evening with Brent Green” at the IFC Center and a one-person gallery show at Bellwether in New York. His work has been written about in the New York Times, Village Voice, Art Forum, ArtNews, the New Yorker and BOMB magazine.

8 p.m. Saturday, April 19
Cynthia’s Moment, Shana Moulton
DiverseWorks Art Space
1117 East Freeway
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door (includes both shows on Saturday)

Shana Moulton will play her character, Cynthia, the fictional protagonist in her Whispering Pines series of videos. Moulton will bring Cynthia and her strange world to life through an innovative use of sets, props, costume and projected video. Combining live-action and projected video, Moulton describes her performance as presenting “a series of home-made and found orthopedic devices, cosmetics and belief systems.” Moulton’s presentation will at different points approximate a personal growth workshop, dance recital, instructional video and fairytale.

Shana Moulton works in video and performance. Moulton studied at the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew.

9 p.m. Saturday, April 19
Putting the Balls Away, Tara Mateik
DiverseWorks Art Space
1117 E. Freeway
Tickets $8 in advance and $10 at the door

In ‘Putting the Balls Away,’ Tara Mateik reenacts the legendary ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ Billie Jean King’s 1973 defeat of the former Wimbledon men’s champion, Bobby Riggs. By playing both roles in a video version of the match, and reviving remarks by sports commentators Howard Cosell and Rosie Casals, Mateik recalls the controversy sparked by the most watched televised sporting event of the era. This year also marks the 35th anniversary of the famous tennis match.

Tara Mateik is an artist and educator living in New York City. Through video, installation, and performance he explores issues of gender identity most recently through the subject of professional sports. In addition to his own work he has collaborated with collectives and artists, including Paper Tiger Television video collective, to produce short videos that demystify and democratize the media. Currently he teaches at CUNY Staten Island in the Media Culture Department and runs the Education Department at Art in General.

About the Curators

Curator Andrea Grover is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Aurora Picture Show, a 501(c)(3) non-profit center for film, video and new media housed in a former church building in Houston, Texas She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Syracuse University, and was a Core Fellow in residence at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2006 she curated the exhibition, “Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing,” exhibited at apexart, New York, and received praise from both Frieze Magazine and The New York Times. In March 2007, she and the artist Jon Rubin curated “Never Been to Houston” for Lawndale Art Center. Grover was one of 60 international curators invited to select artists for e- Flux’s Video Rental. She recently served as Lead Consultant in Film and Video for Creative Capital Foundation, New York.

Nick Hallett is a musician and curator working in the intersections of sound, moving image, and live performance. His projects encompass performing various genres of new music-from opera to cabaret to pop, composing for film and theater, developing audiovisual installations, DJing, writing, and filmmaking. He originated the band PLANTAINS, which from 2000 until 2003 operated as a live multimedia act, incorporating electronic music and video. In 2005, Nick started Harkness Audiovisual, an initiative devoted to creating innovative contexts for new media. This has resulted in a series of immersive salons, film screenings, and live a/v performances, including multiple presentations with pioneering live cinema artist, Josh White. He will direct a concert version of avant-rock band Oneida’s album, The Wedding, at The Kitchen this June.

Ticket Information: Tickets to each individual show are $8 in advance and $10 at the door. Festival passes are $20. Aurora Picture Show members can purchase all tickets for $8 and passes for $15. Tickets and passes are available online or by contacting Aurora at 713.868.2101.

About Aurora Picture Show: Founded in 1998, the Aurora Picture Show is the only facility of its kind in the Southwest. Art in America has called it “one of the most interesting and unusual new spaces in Houston.” Housed in a 1924 converted church building in the Heights this 100 seat theater is part of the micro-cinema movement that began in the mid-1990’s. Aurora supports non-commercial independent and artist-made film, video and new media artists through fifty programs a year. Aurora’s human scale promotes a meaningful and community-oriented exchange between artists and audiences.

Aurora Picture Show is funded by its stellar membership, Houston Endowment, Inc, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Brown Foundation, Texas Commission on the Arts, The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, the Nightingale Code Foundation, the Oshman Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. Aurora Picture Show is a proud member of Fresh Arts Coalition.

Under the theme Temporary Tactics, Simultan04 explores a conflict situation, a difficult cohabitation between the independent audio-visual works and the cultural, social and political context in which they are born. Temporary Tactics wishes to highlight time and space connected “speculative” situations, the practice of acting and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one’s immediate environment.

SIMULTAN04 is open for submissions of innovative works which that make use of technology in a creative, ingenious way or are based on a peculiar, unusual story. The video section is open to all video artists and not only, who can apply with narratives, experimental videos, animations, vj-ing movies and motion graphics.

Those interested may apply with a maximum number of 2 video works, each having a duration that must not exceed 3 minutes.

Terms and conditions, technical details, application form here.

After the event, a DVD/catalogue will be published, each of the admitted participants will receive a DVD/catalogue by the end of 2008.

For additional information please contact: Levente Kozma email: simultan[at]simultan.org

In 2008 the training will take place in Thessaloniki (Greece) and Sofia (Bulgaria) and will be available in three sessions:

- General Blender techniques, tips and tricks
- Media content for the web, e-Marketing, streaming techniques
- Advanced Blender techniques, external rendering engines, Python scripting

Deadline: April 10.

Each session has a participation fee of 1000 Euro, that covers the training and 6 days accommodation in Sofia, including coffee-breaks and lunches. Scholarships will be available.

This travelling exhibition, which now visits Montreal for its Canadian première, is an exciting overview of avant-garde art in Chile. It shows the great wealth of themes and styles that currently inspire the imaginations of Chilean artists. The mixed-media digital artworks of this exhibition are installations that invite the audience to reflect on and experiment with the sometimes inscrutable, often complex behavior of human beings.

Digital Chile_08 proposes an exciting overview of avant-garde art in Chile : Web art and micro-animation, public and media art, audiovisual creations, digital photography, immersive video and bio-art. All serve as a powerful means of translating physical signals into sound and image.