The Australia Council for the Arts is offering up to $30,000 for a collaborative, embodied art project in a massive multi-user virtual environment (MMUVE). The grant aims to give Australian artists the opportunity to creatively and critically explore interactive, virtual worlds, with a particular focus on the body and interfaces facilitating ‘mixed realities’. The grant allows for a collaborative team of up to three artists (including a digital visual media practitioner) to develop inter-disciplinary artwork in a MMUVE of their choice. Continue reading

Upgrade! São Paulo: Wearable Computers: Spatiality, Sensory Experience, Mediation -Luisa Paraguai Donati :: April 26, 2008, 7:30 pm @ i-People: Av Vergueiro 727, next to the Vergueiro Subway Station.

Luisa’s present research reflects about mobile technologies and several objects / gadgets, particularly the wearable systems, that explore other orders / configurations of the body in the space, as they introduce a digital context that overlaps / creates the physical domain and that bring not only social consequences but also other spatial and temporal dynamics of perception and action. Continue reading

THURSDAY CLUB :: Camille Baker & Marilene Oliver - MINDTouch + Making DICOM Dance - The Digitised Body as a site for performing subjectivity :: May 8, 2008; 6-8 pm :: Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross :: FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME.

MINDTouch explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments. MINDTouch involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of streamed and/or archived video-clips created by video-enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during (a) live visuals performance(s). Continue reading

THURSDAY CLUB :: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer: Knitting Intangibles :: April 17, 2008; 6-8 pm :: Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross :: FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will be presenting work in progress from her residency that explores the motion of knitting and the motion of code. Some of the work includes a knit zoetrope, interactive virtual knitting, knitting with the Nintendo Wii and others. She describes the interactive virtual knitting as demonstrating the motion from the knitting actions are tracked and translated into a visualization of knit code displayed on screen (and eventually on the web). Continue reading

desktopperformance deals with the relationship between the synthetic space[1] and the body. I am travelling several hundred kilometres from the place where I actually live to the place where I grew up several years go. this time I am not travelling by car or train. I am travelling by googles map with the power of my mousehand.

Moving a mouse with your hand can be one of the most powerful actions a man can do in the beginning 21 century. Its one of the most common actions of modern everyday life work. The proletarian of the 21 century has not to deal with big machines, he transfers billions of dollars over the world - with one mouseclick. Continue reading

Ars Virtua presents Need, an emerging artists exhibition in collaboration with the ICAM program at the University of California San Diego :: March 20, 2008; 7 pm SLT :: Second Life (Teleport).

The idea of a separate set of needs for ones Second Life is both absurd and fundamental. Abraham Maslow provides an interesting hierarchy for us that other than a few differences lays over the synthetic world very nicely, however avatars are not the people they represent and as such do not have the same needs. The Virtual Environments class at UCSD takes a look at the difference and similarity in this space, this borderland between avatar and human and reflects on different aspects of need for both. Continue reading

MILLENNIUM FILM - Personal Cinema Program - Winter Series 2008: Alan Sondheim :: March 15, 2008; 8:00 pm :: Film Workshop, Inc. 66 East 4th St. New York, NY.

CUTTING THE EDGE. Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, Sandy Baldwin and Gary Manes have been working for the past several months at the Virtual Environments Laboratory, West Virginia University, Morgantown. Sondheim will be presenting the results of that research, which involves avatars, human modeling, phenomenology of virtual lives, choreography, motion capture, and a host of other issues. Continue reading

[Image: Traces by Simon Penny] “Dualistic thinking is as difficult to avoid as the sticky clay that passes for topsoil where I live in Topanga Canyon. Topanga Canyon is a beautiful place, a vibrant reminder of what this Southern California coastal region was like before it was despoiled by freeways, smog, condominiums, and the exoskeletons we natives call cars. The valleys here are filled with spreading live oaks, and the chaparral-covered mountains rise up to the sky like hymns of stone. But down where I live, there is this torment my geologist refers to as «highly expansive soil.» Continue reading

[Image: Simulate Editions - unique and authenticated virtual art objects by Nathaniel Stern] Crossing the Void II - Chris Ashley, Scott Kildall, Nathaniel Stern, Jon Coffelt, and Claire Keating :: Ten Cubed Gallery, Second Life :: Opening Receptions: January 31, 2008; 7 pm EST (4 pm SLT) and February 1, 2008; 3 pm GMT (7 am SLT).

Artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern have each been exploring performance and performativity in their archival prints. Kildall restages then remediates iconic performance artworks in Second Life, and Stern straps on a scanner appendage and battery pack, and performs images into existence; both processes produce art objects in the real world. Continue reading

Party Dress - by Dana Karwas and Karla Karwas - is a roving performance that is part living architecture: part monumental fashion. It functions as a pavilion worn exclusively by five women that seamlessly injects architecture into fashion by using the body as space. The dress begins as a shared, bustled garment that gradually unfolds to create a temporary, inhabitable structure. Each seam, each dress, and each body are interconnected by a single, amorphous surface of flowing material. Continue reading