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)

Multiplace is a network of people and independent organizations interested in the interaction between media, technology, the arts, culture and society. The activities of this network culminate each year in this festival that simultaneously takes place within various independent organizations internationally. There are workshops, installations, discussions, concerts, performances, exhibitions, presentations, screenings and live streaming.

Multiplace is distinguished from other similar European festivals not only by content, but by its informal structure. It attracts visitors through its support of unexpected and creative connections between art, culture and new media as well as by its decentralized character and openness to participation. This year, it includes around 40 independent galleries, art schools, art centers, clubs and many unaffiliated individuals. Visitors can enjoy more than 100 events, some of them taking place at several locations at the same time.

Program selection: An unconventional music / internet performance; Ping Melody by Pawel Janicki from Wroclaw, and the premiere of the new local electronic group Bulkladung, will open the festival in Bratislava. A4 Zero Space prepares a dance / motion / kinetic dance performance working with the electromagnetic field of performers also in Bratislava, while an opportunity to listen to an LP made of neon light will be available in the former synagogue in Trnava. On the top of Iceland’s Blafjoll Hill with a view of the Atlantic Ocean, the First May Manifestation by Movement Freedom Sound group will take place. In the House of Art in Brno, online archives and new media education will be discussed. Brno will also offer the installation, Expogeneca, plastic figures which will melt if they do not get enough visitor’s attention. Additionally, this city will be the location for a survey of contemporary music-visual culture and communication called Uchoko and the! Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno will be the host of a virtual cafe that will connect favorite cafes in Brno, Praha, Hradec Kralove and Budapest through streaming. Nomad Space’s Soundbus, the nomad gallery, will wander around various festival locations to present a selection of contemporary Austrian sound art.

Performance Beer Barrel Polka Accordion Theremin Reunion will mediate through the internet a collective play on accordion and theremin in several other cities at the same time. Through skype you will be able to train a parrot to talk at FreeDom in Bahon. At this location as well, Ursula Endlicher will discuss new media art in the USA and introduce her project html_butoh, bringing the human body into the technical world of the Internet.

Organisers:

Bahon: FreeDom
Banska Bystrica: Tvor
Berlin: Lady Gabi
Bratislava: Multiplace, A4 - asociacia zdruzeni pre sucasnu kulturu (A4 ? Associations for contemporary culture), Atrakt Art, 13 kubikov, SPACE projects | residency lab | store, Film club 35 mm, Open Design Studio, Urbsounds Collective, Polish Institute, Goethe-Institut Bratislava, Itchy bit, Jurgen Rendl, Urban Flow
Brno: Hucot, Dum umeni mesta Brna (The Brno House of Arts), Dum panu z Kunstatu (House of the Lords of Kunstat), Kavarna Kunstatska trojka, FaVU VUT (Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Fine Arts), Chernobylmusick, Anymade, Fiume initiative, Galerie G99, Jan Zalesak, Ars Publica, Lenka Dolanova and Michal Kindernay, klub Desert, club Fleda
Budapest: Transformers Hacklab, PsyShip Medialab
Glasgow: Glasgow School of Art
Kosice: IC Culture Train
Nitra: Nitra gallery (Bunker)
Novi Sad: Open Design Studio
Ostrava: Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Ostrava
Praha: Mlok, Institut Intermedii, Circle of Curators and Critics, CIANT ? International Centre for Art and New Technologies
Reykjavik: The Lost Horse Gallery
Trnava: Galeria Jana Koniarka
Wroclaw: WRO Center Sztuki
Zilina: Stanica Zilina - Zariecie

Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the “meme”. Started from a metaphor used in Richard Dawkins popular writings, it has later turned into an approach in the study of self-replicating units of culture. In The Selfish Gene (1976) Dawkins used the term “meme” to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings” “it has causal agency” and can propagate.

Based on this concept Hocking developed a game prototype where the characters “shout” at each other “expelling” words as if they were fire breathing. This work uses interactive 3D graphics and a recombinant narrative system, with touch-screen interaction. When a character is hit by a words’ stream, he incorporates those words in his database of ideas. So characters will start to say similar things, and they’ll evolve till the entire community will end up saying the same things. “When the simulation detects that this endpoint has been reached, the screen fades to black and everything starts over from a random distribution of ideas, repeating the process of the society’s homogenization” Hocking says.

What’s missing here is the definition of memes as variance. Indeed memes are information copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and so human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by mimicry, and they compete for space in our memory and for the vital chance to be copied again. Since the process of social learning is different for each person, the mimicry process can’t be an accurate reproduction. The same idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. So the mutation rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every interaction of the imitation process. This is why Memetic Simulation no. 2 is more likely a metaphor for mass communication aggressive behaviors then a metaphor of the society’s coalescence. More properly it’s a “shout them up” game. - Valentina Culatti, Neural.

CHINA CHINA CHINA!!! will present the work of 18 contemporary Chinese artists from three different cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou - who are all seeking to define a new cultural identity unfettered by the rules of the global market. A publication (published by Silvana Editoriale) and a series of lectures are planned with the exhibition. This event ties in with the exhibition on the first floor of Palazzo Strozzi, devoted to the Tang dynasty, universally recognized as a high point in Chinese civilization and central to the Chinese Renaissance.

The aim of the CCCS, under the direction of Franziska Nori, is to approach the much discussed “China phenomenon” from a different point of view. That’s why the project is entrusted to three young Chinese curators: Davide Quadrio, founder and director of BizArt in Shanghai, the first and only self-supported and non-profit cultural organization in China, also active in The In-Between, a network of alternative art spaces in Europe and Asia; Li Zhenhua, founder of the independent Art Lab in Beijing, artist and promoter of the new media art in China; Zhang Wei, director of Vitamin Creative Space Contemporary Art in Guangzhou.

They are all based and operate in different parts of China, sharing a commitment to consolidate an independent critical platform supporting artistic production in China. They want art going beyond official boundaries and not bounded by the art market rules. Art that represents the complex reality of a contemporary China in the complex process of an historical change and cultural transformation. The exhibition presents a lively interchange between the curators’ three sections, representing three distinct but complementary attitudes and perceptions.

Zhang Wei presents in “Throwing Dice” individual visions of human existence in a fragmented and constantly changing world. The videos of Kan Xuan, Pak Sheung Chuen and Yang Fudong (acclaimed in the most recent Venice Biennale), digital animations by Cao Fei (also present at the Biennale), technological installations by Chu Yun, and paintings by Duan Jianyu offer individual stories that engage the spectator in the exploration of a shared existential landscape and in the constant tension between the world of dreams and of reality.

“Art is not enough, not enough!,” is a multimedia installation in the Davide Quadrio’s section produced by the CCCS and presented as a world premiere. It draws on interviews made by the curator with forty different artists in Shanghai, asked about the role of the artist, their relationship with the external world, the social consequences of their work and the international market effects on traditional artistic production modes. It offers a dynamic anthropological insight into the urban panorama of modern Shanghai.

The focus of “Multi-Archeology”, the section curated by Li Zhenhua is the geo-political identity and cultural relativism. Installations by the Mongolian artists Wu Ershan and Ren Qinga, highlight the often conflictual relations between the different cultural groups in China today and pose questions about the undermining of the individual concerning social upheaval.
Both installations, created especially for the exhibition in Florence, take as their theme the human condition in the face of an uncertain future.

The art video by Zhao Liang and Shen Shaomin documents the situation on the Chinese border with North Korea and Russia. An analysis of the consequences of the Mongolian invasion by Genghis Khan on Asiatic culture is compared to the impact of modern globalization, in the constant cultural interchange between East and West.

One of the authors participating in this monograph is Pau Waelder, independent art critic and curator, who looks at Pain Games and describes various works of digital art which use pain as a form of interaction in the context of a two-player game.

Other articles include Playing Research: Methodological approaches to game analysis, by Espen Aarseth, Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen. The author explains how the study of game aesthetics is a very recent practice, spanning less than two decades. Unlike game studies in mathematics or the social sciences, which are much older, games became subject to humanistic study only after computer and video games became popular.

Digital Allegories (on The Sims), by McKenzie Wark, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Eugene Lang College and Sociology at the New School for Social Research, talks about how we are all now players. “You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in this gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but never leave it. No wonder digital games are the emergent cultural form of the times.”

Alexander R. Galloway, author and programmer who gives classes at New York University, has written the article entitled Gamic Action, Four Moments. This essay proposes a new hermeneutic for understanding the formal qualities of video games given the action-based nature of the medium and the interplay between diegetic and nondiegetic space.

Finally, Erkki Huhtamo, Associate Professor at UCLA, has written an article entitled Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble. This article is a contribution to the cultural and historical mapping of electronic gaming. Its basic premise is at least seemingly simple: electronic games did not appear out of nowhere; they have a cultural background that needs to be excavated.

As well as the monograph, Artnodes 7 also includes, in the Miscellany section, an article on graffiti: The Screen on the Street: Convergence and Agonic Coincidences between Graffiti and New Media Objects. The author is Noelia Quintero, filmmaker, researcher and professor in the Faculty of Social Communication at the University of Puerto Rico.

Building upon the energy of our first bus tour — A Journey through the techno-utopian beginnings and environmental currents of the Silicon Valley — Free Soil would like to use this year’s gathering of artists and practitioners to think about how we learn. How can we use our tools and practice to reflect and engage with the world around us?

The early work done in Silicon Valley by people with visions of improving the world wasn’t isolated from their politics or what was going on around them. It was part of a broader movement and a profound cultural shift. “Technology is shaped by the prism of culture, politics and economics,” says John Markoff.

Through this bus tour and its related events, Free Soil will look at education as a form of cultural production and creative resistance.

The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism. The key to The Influencers is found in its guests and stories: impostors, pseudo-totalitarian musicians, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers, anarchitects and actors from invisible theatre. In these three days they are going to present their work, show known and less known material and speak with the public about challenges, goals and strategies.

With The Influencers, the border between disciplines is erased (since the message really is the message, and the medium is just a tactic), links between apparently distant projects are found, and bold genealogies are drawn between different countries and generations. Ambiguities are also explored and contradictions are discussed. In the manipulation of everyday symbols, as well as within what is excessive and politically incorrect, we will possibly find inspiration for changing the present and imagining the future.

The project aims at exploring and mapping the complexity of elements, which constitute the urban, social and cultural texture of squatter settlements in the city of Mumbai. Considering these areas within the broader framework of urban transformations and redevelopment projects, the studio looks at the slums as forms of ‘emergent’ urbanities, which function with a multiple logic and structure of relations both within itself and with the outside.

Strategically, the studio questions both binary logics of opposition and problem-solving attitudes. Polarities such as formal/informal, legal/illegal will be put under scrutiny in order to understand the intertwining and shades of meanings that operate within a multi-faceted context. An explorative and analytical attitude will be therefore encouraged as a device to understand unfamiliar urban mechanisms in a non-judgemental way.

Questions of self-organisation, informal micro-economies, gender roles, private and public spheres will be addressed in relation to both their impact on the actual definition of the slums and to their relation to the broader network of power and political structures of the city. The main focus of the studio will be the slum of Dharavi; being the largest squatter settlement of Asia it allows for a deep and privileged understanding of the multiplicity of layers – on the local, regional and international level – that operate in the constitution and definition of these urban emergences.

Streets will be addressed as the crucial element of analysis. They represent the physical realm of interaction and social experimentation while also being the membrane through which different types of spaces mingle and transform. They will be the “laboratory” to understand relationships between flows of capital, labour forces and patterns of dwelling and inhabitation.

Throughout the nine weeks of its program, the studio will propose and interdisciplinary approach that will be developed through a variety of devices. An “action-learning” approach would foster students to embrace an experiential understanding of knowledge production.

The first four weeks will be dedicated to getting “acquainted” with the urban, social, political and cultural context of Mumbai in general and Dharavi in particular. Seminars, guest lectures, video screenings will be part of the program. Students will be also provided with a basic methodological tool-kit that will allow them to relate in a morally and professionally sober way to a non-western and unfamiliar context.

The studio will then propose a three-weeks research and mapping field work in Mumbai, which will be followed by two more weeks for elaboration and post-production of the collected material.

The “results” of the studio will be presented in a public exhibition at TU Delft and NAi and will be the core material for a forthcoming publication. There will also be a follow up of the research that will be presented at the CCA, Canadian Centre for Architecture, in Montreal in the Fall of 2009.

Here are some of the aims and key themes that the studio aims to explore:

This studio provides a base for the students to further explore the notion of ‘emergence’ and informality within their final projects, thus Urban Body remains at one level an exercise of active observation, but on the other level it intends to provide the observations/tools and lessons learnt to the people (inhabitants / activists / NGOs / governmental bodies) who can use them to intervene and improve the quality and living conditions etc for the dwellers of Dharavi.

Possible themes:

- Spatial Economy: the interaction of the informal and formal…’slum’ and the city
- Idea of migration and floating population within cities
- Role of women in the informal economy
- Notion of Emergence

The studio (20 students and 4-5 associate professors/collaborators) will spend about 3 weeks in India (first 3 weeks of march) engaging in studies and visits as well as workshops with inhabitants of Dharavi / activists / NGOs/Thinkers and Academics.

If any of the members on the list would like to help or have any suggestions or are in contact with any NGOs or individuals who could contribute to the studio, please do write to me.

We are also looking for schools of architecture in Bombay to participate in the studio thus we can begin to exchange knowledge with the local students if

Chintan Gohil - chintichinti [at] yahoo.com

In order to stand even a remote chance to realize this objective, and to critically unravel the societal role of participation, we need to acknowledge that participation is a complex and contested notion, covering a wide variety of meanings and practices that are converging into a hybrid of technologies, genres, and formats. At the same time, prudence is required, as many of the empowering and transformative opportunities cover-up a multitude of restrictions that deal with muting voices, appropriations, techniques of surveillance, inequalities, and exclusions. This volume thus provides its readership with a set of analyses that reconcile the appreciation for the analog and digital empowerment and emancipation with the critical analysis of their boundaries.

In the book’s preface, Sonia Livingstone, ICA President 2007-8, says: “This volume showcases some of the best work analysing the conditions, the complexities and the significance of contemporary forms of technologically-mediated communication and participation for ordinary members of public and for society more widely. It asserts that critique is needed more than ever, as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. Only with a critical lens can we hope to recognise both the diversification of political expression, the exuberant irreverence of youth and the quieter flowering of digital storytelling among hitherto marginalised voices as well as the anti-democratic responses of repressive governments and the legal, regulatory or economic barriers that restrict the potential of the contemporary communication environment. Since, in addressing such questions, the very standpoints from which we as researchers draw our strength are also challenged in the context of globalisation, all this adds up to an agenda that, I believe, will stimulate the field of media and communication for the decade ahead. This volume sets the scene most ably, and I look forward to the debate as it unfolds.”

Contents:

* Preface - Sonia Livingstone
* Introduction: Blurring Participations and Convergences - Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen

Part I: Critiques

* Media and the Problem of Voice - Nick Couldry
* Corporate Appropriation of Participatory Culture - Mark Deuze
* Alienation in the Information Economy: Toward a Marxist Critique of Consumer Surveillance - Josh Lauer

Part II: Images/Sounds/Texts

* Blogs and News Processes: Net Neutrality and Digital Inequality - Gaye Tuchman and Stephen Ostertag
* Inviting Comment: Public Creation of Content in Early Spanish American Newspapers - Juanita Darling
* What Does it Take for a Newspaper to be Latina/o? A Participatory Definition of Ethnic Media - Isabel Awad
* Youth-Produced Radio and its Impacts: From Personal Empowerment to Political Action - Robert Huesca
* Wireless for the Poor: No Strings Attached? A Framework for Wireless Initiatives Connecting Rural Areas - Seungyoon Lee and Arul Chib
* Mapping Publics and Issues of The War Tapes: Claims and Connections Online - Katja Wittke and Patricia Aufderheide
* Shared Internet Videos about New Orleans Reconstruction: Examining an Emerging Genre of Citizen Journalism - Deborah Clark Vance
* Afterword: The People Formerly Known as the Audience - Jay Rosen

Many contemporary artists are using craft as a largely unregulated place of protest where diverse and timely political statements are being made. Presented as part of a series of talks on agency, the panel proposes that crafting, because it is often social and communal, plays a vital role in the public sphere. The speakers examine the role of craft in forming national identities, especially in times of political turmoil or war; notions of patriotism; feminism and the domestic sphere; and economic models that circumvent conventional market models. By linking the act of production and handmaking in the public realm to political expression, participants will ask: how can art foster political agency?

This program is presented concurrently with the release of the February issue of Modern Painters that features a roundtable discussion by the panelists. Participants of this program have also collaborated on a large-scale knit banner to be unveiled at the event. Following the panel discussion, audience members are invited to an informal craft reception in which panelists will present tactile examples of the materials, machinery, and processes they use in their work.

This event is presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s program cycle on “Agency,” and is co-sponsored by Modern Painters. Allison Smith is a 2007 Artists’ Fellowship recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This presentation is co-sponsored by Artists & Audiences Exchange, a public program of NYFA.