SoftWhere: Software Studies Workshop :: May 21-22, 2008 :: Atkinson Hall, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA.

Following on the first Software Studies Workshop organized by Matthew Fuller (Rotterdam, 2006), the Software Studies Workshop @ UCSD is a foundational event bringing together key U.S. scholars in this emerging area. The workshop will discuss what it means to study software cultures, and the direction and goals of Software Studies as an emerging movement. Our goal is for the workshop to result in publishing a founding statement on the field, as well as initiate a set of interdisciplinary project collaborations. Continue reading

DRHA 2008: New Communities of Knowledge and Practice :: September 14-17, 2008 :: Cambridge, UK :: Call for Papers and Performances :: Deadline: April 30, 2008

The DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. The conference theme this year is to promote discussion around new collaborative environments, collective knowledge and redefining disciplinary boundaries.

The aim of the conference is to: * Establish a site for mutually creative exchanges of knowledge * Promote discussion around new collaborative environments and collective knowledge * Continue reading

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

Amateurs :: April 23 - August 9, 2008 :: CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco.

Participating artists: Johanna Billing, Jennifer Bornstein, Andrea Bowers, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Harrell Fletcher, Josh Greene, Cameron Jamie, Alan Kane, Long March Project, Yoshua Okon, Michele O’Marah, Hirsch Perlman, Jim Shaw, Simon Starling, Javier Téllez, Jeffrey Vallance, and Eric Wesley :: Curator: Ralph Rugoff.

Amateurs surveys a terrain of artistic practice that departs from the hyperprofessionalization characterizing so much cultural production today. Whether working as amateurs in disciplines beyond the art world or collaborating with amateur practitioners, the artists featured in this exhibition refuse to let the experts have the last word. Continue reading

Virtual Residency Project - Call for Participation :: Deadline: May 1, 2008 :: Dates of Residency: June 1 - November 4, 2008.

Location One presents its first ever Virtual Residency Project in the form of a call to artists and other creative individuals with the express purpose of fostering collaboration and creativity across geographical expanses and areas of expertise around the topic of the 2008 US Presidential Election. Continue reading

Pat Kane wrote: A general, not-too-technical review for mainstream paper in the UK of Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and Leadbeater’s We-Think, but it may be a departure point for the IDC community. One thing I would add: the tension between these books’ approach to the same phenomenon - what Shirky calls ’social tools’, what Leadbeater calls ‘mass collaboration’ - lies in the role of the state as having an input into internet governance.

Shirky takes a largely hands-off line - these are historical rapids, made turbulent by a Gutenberg-level of social transformation, in which the best we can do is to ’stay upright on our kayak’. Leadbeater believes that there are elements of mass collaboration - open source biology? ‘we-think’ between terrorists or criminal networks? - that politicians and citizens need to try and police, through some intervention in the enabling network infrastructures. Continue reading

Test_Lab: Topology :: April 17, 2008; 8:00 pm :: V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam :: This event will be streamed live.

Featuring: Tiziana Terranova (IT), Christoph Wachter (DE), Mathias Jud (CH), Yolande Harris (UK), Bureau d’etudes (FR), and Di Mainstone (UK).

Topology is often mentioned as an ultimate example of the same subject being studied in parallel within various branches of science and art, each branch approaching the subject from its own background and with its own methodologies. Today, there are numerous initiatives on the radar in which representatives of the various branches of topology explicitly state a desire to exchange ideas and methodologies related to the topic. But do all these diverse branches even share a common understanding of what topology is? 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

Turbulence Commission: No Time Machine by Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska [Needs a Java-Enabled Browser] - Quiet time, dead time, free time — call it what you will, there seems to be less and less of it. What do people give up in the race to maximize every second of their waking life? What kinds of activities are replaced by the panicked drive for efficiency? No Time Machine explores these questions by mining the Internet for mentions of the phrase “I don’t have time for” and variations such as “You can’t find the time for” and “We don’t make time for.” Continue reading

AREA 10 Project Space, Peckham presents () RE | BOOT - the launch event of Area10’s new media media platform: AREA 10: MEDIALAB /> :: Live Event and Opening: April 12, 2008; 7:00 pm - film screenings, live performances, interactions, vjing, sound art, experimental and electronic noise music :: April 11-12; 11 am - 5 pm - activities include workshops, lectures presentations being held alongside an exhibition of digital and interactive arts :: Area 10 Project Space, Eagle Wharf, Peckham Square, London SE15 5JT (White building behind Peckham Library). Continue reading