The unprecedented growth of information puts new pressures on contemporary societies. We need to invent new ways to interact with information, new ways to represent it, and new ways to make sense of it. How are artists, designers, and architects are responding to these challenges? Rather than trying to defend ourselves against “information glut,” can we approach this situation creatively as the opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our information-rich world?

Since 2000, Lev Manovich has investigated these questions in a project called Info-Aesthetics. The concept of info-aesthetcis allows us to relate together a wide range of cultural phenomena, including some of the most interesting projects in a variety of areas of contemporary culture: cinema, architecture, space design, fashion, interface design, motion graphics, visual art, computer science, and, of course, information visualization. In his presentation Lev Manovich will report on his latest findings, showing some of the most exciting projects produced to date.

Lev Manovich is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department, University of California San Diego. He is also Director of the Software Studies Initiative at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and a Visiting Research Professor at the iCinema Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney and at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmith College, London. This presentation is a part of Professor Manovich’s forthcoming book Info-aesthetics: Information and Form. [Go here for archived talks from the series]

Another reason Thayer released an online version is because of its “documentation.” The “about this work” link reveals the source-code for the work, which Thayer has open-sourced under a GPL license. He writes “The source-code is presented in a framework I’ve designed called CodeChat.”

Separated into three categories — (1) Visualizer client (what you see), (2) Image retrieval, image manipulation and network communication, and (3) Real-time seismic data retrieval — “it’s a web-based, threaded discussion forum that allows for separate discussion at each line of the code. What I do to start things off is put in a few comments, trying to focus mostly on the conceptual and aesthetic implications of the lines I choose to comment on as I want the discussion to be more at that level rather than a technical level. By doing this what I’m pointing out … is that everything you need to know about the work is in the code … (which) can easily be materialized … (W)hen galleries and museums are wondering how to preserve this type of art, they should be looking at preserving the source-code.“

A panel discussion and virtual performance event, From Cinema to Machinima will explore the many ways in which the digital medium has reconfigured, even transformed, the moving image and thereby redefined concepts of cinema. Whether through software processes or interaction by the viewer, image sequences have become discrete units that can be remixed in new constellations; indeed, once digital interactivity became connected to databases, the possibility of assembling and reconfiguring media elements from a compilation of image sequences opened the way to a host of new cinematic forms.

These emerging cinematic forms include database cinema, interactive narrative or non-narrative films, and machinima — filmmaking within computer games or 3D virtual worlds, such as Second Life, in which characters and events can be controlled either by humans, scripts, or artificial intelligence.

The discussion will be followed by a short performance event in Second Life, which will be broadcast in the Lecture Hall. The panel and Q&A with the audience will be streamed live in Second Life.

Henrik Bennetsen works as research director at the Stanford Humanities Lab. He’s also the head of the Lifesquared research project, which is building a 3D immersive archive of the art of Lynn Hershman Leeson inside the virtual world of Second Life. The work was recently shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and is planned for exhibition at SFMOMA in 2008. In Fall 2006 he was a part of the Stanford course The Human and the Machine, which used Second Life as a teaching tool. Bennetsen holds a MSc in Media Technology and Games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc in Medialogy from Aalborg University. He has a strong side interest in creative self-expression augmented by technology.

Char Davies is internationally recognized for pioneering artworks using the technologies of virtual reality. Originally a painter, she transitioned to digital media in the late 80s, becoming a founding director of the 3D software company Softimage. Her virtual environment Osmose (1995) is considered a landmark in the history of new media art. Davies has also published numerous essays on virtual space and in 2005 she completed a doctorate in philosophy (from CAiiA, University of Plymouth, UK). A monograph on her work Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality came out in 2007. Davies’ practice has expanded from “virtual” to “actual” place. She is currently shaping another immersive environment, on 500 acres of land in Québec. Davies lives in San Francisco.

Scott Kildall is a crossdisciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture, and performance. The core of his artwork is formed by material he gathers from the public realm. Through this method, he uncovers relationships between human memory and social media technology. He holds a BA in Political Philosophy from Brown University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Helsinki, Ireland, Spain, and Romania. Scott is a founding member of Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Christiane Paul is the adjunct curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts and a revised version of her book Digital Art (2003) as well as the anthology New Media in the White Cube and Beyond will be published this year. She teaches as adjunct faculty in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Digital and Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design, SFAI, and UC Berkeley. She has curated a number of shows at the Whitney Museum, including the online exhibition CODeDOC (2002).

Howard Rheingold is the author of the acclaimed books Tools for Thought (1985), The Virtual Community (2000), and Smart Mobs (2003). He has been the editor of Whole Earth Review, and The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, the founding executive editor of Hotwired, and founder of Electric Minds. Rheingold has taught classes on participatory and social media and virtual community at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and is a visiting professor at De Montfort University in the UK. His current projects include the Social Media Virtual Classroom, an online community for teachers and students; the Cooperation Project, aimed at building an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation; and Participatory Media Literacy.

Scott Snibbe’s immersive interactive artworks have been installed in over 100 art museums, performance spaces, science museums, and public spaces worldwide. His awards include the Prix Ars Electronica and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. He is the founder of two companies: Snibbe Interactive, Inc. and Sona Research. In 2007 he was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant for research in Interactive Narrative. Snibbe holds a BA in Computer Science and Fine Art and an MA in Computer Science from Brown University. He studied experimental animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught media art and experimental film at Brown University, SFAI, the California Institute of the Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and UC Berkeley.

Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Utterback’s extensive exhibition history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. Recent projects include a large-scale interactive projection on the San Jose City Hall commissioned by ZeroOne and the City of San Jose. Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College and an MA from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.

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). The action of engaging or knitting with the piece naturally produces a physical cloth, while it also shows that code is constructed from the same types of patterns to create a type of virtual cloth (or software). Visually the piece will reflect our bodily interaction with machines, tracing the circular motion of the needles to our body’s give and take of working at a machine. Cloth is often seen as an element of comfort and protection. Machines are perceived to assist us with advancing technology and communication while they are also harming our bodies with carpel tunnel syndrome, back pain, sore eyes, and other strain as we interact with them. This piece explores that delicate space in-between.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently exploring the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body in contemporary art practice. Rachel Beth is currently working as an Artist in Residence at the University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton, and Furtherfield London as part of the Arts Council England Initiative, commissioned by Distributed South and curated by SCAN and Space Media.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer received her BFA from the Fiber department with a concentration in Digital Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and was an MFA fellow at the University of California, San Diego where she also was a graduate researcher at UCSD’s Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA). Her work has been exhibited internationally in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London, the Banff Centre for the Arts, ISEA 2004 and others. She formerly worked on the editorial staff of Artbyte Magazine in New York City, and continues freelance writing on art, modern society, and media culture.

Deer Blogs His Own GPS Position in Google Earth - In what may be a short-lived cool geo hack of the day, a deer named “Thor” now has his own blog where he shares his GPS position every five minutes. Someone named ‘Siberian’ at the Google Earth Community posted how he managed to make this happen. Turns out he had collared a deer they named “Thor” with a GPS and cellphone with SMS capability. They are studying deers living in suburban areas in Pennsylvania. Siberian then hacked up a way to use the resulting E-mail to create a spreadsheet which is then converted into a file you can use to track the deer in Google Earth. The system is totally automated using free services. His post goes into detail on how this was all accomplished. Siberian is using some tools by Valery Hronusov - who has developed and posted dozens of cool geo hacks for Google Earth (see his global rainfall example). Valery came up with the idea to let the deer blog his coordinates as well. Thanks to Valery for the tip on this cool deer hack! Note: you can also view the deer’s map in Google Maps. [blogged by Frank Taylor on Google Earth Blog]

Join us in Berkeley for a three-day symposium and festival of new media and art hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Berkeley Center for New Media. This event is timed to link with 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, so come spend the week in the Bay Area and be part of the biggest explosion of new media art in the nation. [On June 2, Embodied Media, the first of a two-part symposium.] June 3:

8:30 - Introduction by Steve Wilson, Leonardo board member since 1983, about the 40 years of Leonardo ISAST

9:00-10:30 - “Osmosis”: What can the arts do for the sciences?

Art-Science interaction is a two way process. The impact of science and technology on the arts is much discussed and well documented. This panel seeks to examine the influence of the arts on the sciences, and the benefits that science can derive from the arts.

- Bronac Ferran
- Jim Crutchfield physicist at UC Davis
- Chris Chafe at Stanford’s CCRMA

11:00-12:30 - Brilliant Noise: how data becomes experience for artists and for scientists

Most information about the world we live in is now mediated by instruments. This data is often visualised and sonified both to aid analysis and to communicate with other researchers, but artists too can make this data meaningful and “sensual”. The same data sets can lead to very different kinds of work. One person’s noise is another person’s sound.

- Michael Joaquin Grey, artist and inventor
- Laura Peticolas, geophysicist at the Space Sciences Lab in Berkeley
- Douglas Kahn, UC Davis Technocultural Studies Program

12:30 - free-form meeting of the interested audience with Leonardo ISAST board members during the lunch break

1:30-3:00 - The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very Very Small

Human cognition is bounded by the inadequacy of human senses to allow us sensory contact with the world on scales larger or smaller than ourselves. To perceive the nano world one needs extended senses or new senses. The nano world requires a new ontology and a new epistemology.

- Ruth West artist with background as a molecular geneticist
- Gordon Wozniak former nuclear scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Wayne Lanier microbiologist at the Hidden Ecologies project of the San Francisco Exploratorium

3:00 - Closing event of the two-day conference for the audience to mingle with the speakers of the various panels and with Leonardo board members.

Since March 1, in cooperation with the online zine balsas.cc for media and technology, we have focused on the migration between reality, media, technologies, art, spaces, disciplines, politics, and networks. Migration interests us in cultural and technological aspects as well as in aspects of the movement of different objects and subjects. Balsas.cc has been publishing online in Lithuanian and English from Vilnius, Lithuania since 2005. Every fourth month it announces a new topic and as of now Migrating Reality is open for your interpretation.

We invite the submission of texts, sounds, and visuals (photo, video, etc) which will help us to delve deeper into the subject during the Berlin project. Balsas.cc is stimulating interest in the generation and publishing of ideas online — the most interesting of which will be published in the printed catalog at the end of 2008. We are interested in not only pure texts but also in migrating formats, interdisciplinary discussions, interviews, and the meetings of artists and theoreticians.

Please submit texts in English, German, and (or??) Lithuanian to balsas [ at] vilma.cc. The rolling submission and publication period is open until June 1.

Editorial Board: Vytautas Michelkevicius, Mindaugas Gapsevicius, Zilvinas Lilas and John Hopkins

Migrating Reality Conference: The event focuses on the Baltic nation of Lithuania. In the last fifteen years, more than ten percent of Lithuania’s population has emigrated, among them numerous individuals engaged in the cultural sector. Others, while still living in Lithuania, are deeply engaged with the subject of migration. Selected individuals from both these groups will present their work at the conference and exhibition.

Migrating Reality deals specifically with the realities of migration and migrating realities that are independent of global structural changes and economic or cultural processes and are opening unique opportunities for creative exchange.

Electronic and digital cultures generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms to hybrid digital forms. Analogue products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are re-mixed and fused into new datasets.

The emergent processes of migration generate temporary autonomous zones where socio-political actions occur without the interference of formal control mechanisms. These zones and enclaves appear in physical space as well as in virtual space. By integrating these into available structures and temporarily interconnecting them, new trajectories and ideas are created.

Migration is reality and reality is migrating. This dialectic, appearing as a banal topic in everyday politico-economic debate, includes unarticulated issues which, by their fragmented nature have to be dealt with through creative multidisciplinary means. Only occasionally do components of the migrating global situation surface in the mass media, within individual mediums of expression, or in exhibitions as documentation and artwork. This is likely because dealing with the realities of migration in an explicitly European context means accepting the potential for conflict.

This trans-cultural German-Lithuanian event will take on the risk in highlighting certain fragments of the discourse. Participants will be invited to piece together aspects of this inexorable global mobility on the one hand and of retrograde power relations on the other.

A series of artworks were completed during the research to aid in understanding the nature of virtual surveillance; as a method to examine outcomes; and as an experiential interface for viewers of the research. The artworks investigate a series of surveillance perspectives including parental gaze, machine surveillance and self-surveillance. The outcomes include considerations into the influence surveillance has on player behaviour, security issues pertaining to the extension of corporations into virtual worlds, the acceptance of surveillance by virtual communities, and the merits of applying artworks as proposition.” From Avatars and the Invisible Omniscience: The panoptical model within virtual worlds by Christopher Dodds [PDF]

Video artifacts seen in ANEMICodeCINEMA were taken from encrypted DVD and Windows Media video sources (including Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema) and decoded using free, open source software. This work is dedicated to the authors of patent-free audiovisual protocols and software.

After years of waiting for Macromedia / Adobe to release Linux-compatible versions of its Flash player, it appears the trouble with codecs will resume with Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. Although promoted as “cross-platform,” there is no mention of support for Linux or other free, open source operating systems. Such privately controlled and patented codecs and protocols coerce content developers to exclude audiences.