Renowned composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda (Japan 1966) will create art projects for Dream Amsterdam. Ikeda’s hypnotic work plays with human perception through installations, performances, live concerts, recordings and album releases. Ikeda will use pure light as the material for his interventions in various secret locations across Amsterdam. Intensely bright light installations will appear mysteriously, connecting a constellation of points across the cityscape. The energy used for the light installations is generated from sustainable, recycled resources. The site-specific art projects can be viewed from June 6 until June 21, 2008 in the evening hours. A detailed map with the locations and a route can be found here from June 6.

His work has been exhibited and presented worldwide, including Tate Modern / Queen Elizabeth Hall (London) and Centre Pompidou / Museum of Modern Art (Paris). He has won important prizes, including the Ars Electronica Golden Nica (2001). Ikeda’s commission for Dream Amsterdam Foundation presents his first large-scale artworks for public spaces and marks a new direction in his artistic career.

On June 7, the SILENT NIGHT event presents a unique opportunity to experience the city as never before: Amsterdam switches off her lights. The darkness maximizes the contrast with the bright light of Ikeda’s installations spread over the city. Ryoji Ikeda and Dream Amsterdam Foundation invite residents of Amsterdam and visitors to actively participate in the SILENT NIGHT event and help contribute to the realization of Ikeda’s Dream, promising to deliver an extraordinary transformation of the city of Amsterdam for one night only.

A co-production by Dream Amsterdam and Forma Arts and Media

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

Murcia launches the event SOS 4.8: 48 hours of non-stop artistic creation related to the concept of sustainability. Sustainability basically means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. In words of the artistic director, Paco Barragán, SOS 4.8 understands sustainability not only in exclusively ecological terms  – an issue that has become very urgent but at the same time very trendy these days - but also as a concept that allows us to reflect and re-frame visual culture, democracy, information society, techno-sustainability, consumer society – CULTURE - as well as tourism, immigration, nature, and urbanism – ENVIRONMENT.

48 HOURS FORMAT: New times impose new challenges, and as a result suggest new formats. Thus SOS 4.8 has been conceived as an intense laboratory where during 48 hours artistic creation and exhibition will go hand in hand blurring the strict lines between artist and audience. Thus, all the selected works will be produced in situ in 24 hours and exhibited the next 24 hours. The artist will have the exhibition site or the city of Murcia as stage to carry out his or her proposal.

FROM INTERPASSIVITY TO INTERACTIVITY: From the traditional artistic institutions interpassivity (Robert Pfaller), wherein communication is only one-way, hierarchical, and imposed on the visitor, SOS 4.8 proposes a more democratic and exciting concept of interactivity by allowing the public to assist and be part of the artistic process. Culture, art and artistic practices are not any longer medium-based but idea-based. So visual artists, not only stick to their medium but engage with Visual Jockeying (VJ) and Digital Film -Micha Klein-, or play in a gothic rock band -Marc Bijl-, thus creating challenging exchanges between contemporary culture and arts.

OPEN CALL AND SECTIONS: SOS 4.8 is a mix of invitational and open call. All artists are invited to take part in the open call, regardless of their nationality, residence or age. A total of 6 artists will be selected by the curators from the proposals sent via the open call to our website http://www.sos48.com for the following sections: I) Visual Arts II) Net Art or Visual Jockeying (VJ)
III) Performance.

The 6 artists from the open call will be invited, together with 6 artists selected directly by the curators, and 3 artists from Murcia selected by the Artistic Director, to come to Murcia to carry out the selected proposal on the 2nd and 3rd of May 2008.

ARTIST PER DIEM AND PRODUCTION BUDGET
The selected artists will receive the following:
I) (Total) Artist fee of 2..500 Euros
II) Production/Equipment materials up to 2..000 Euros
III) Flight and Hotel up to 2.500 Euros

For further information and participation, please look into the SOS 4.8 website. NOTE: Please read the FAQs and conditions carefully before sending your proposal.

VJ Theory project intends to develop a community actively discussing and reflecting on philosophy and theory related with VJing and realtime performative practices. It is apparent, during workshops and discussions at Festivals and symposia, that practitioners of both VJing and Interactive Installations are moving on from problems with the practicalities of production to more complex ideas of how and why the process has, for example, significance for the viewer. This project and the associated publications, aim to bring together work by some of the foremost practitioners and academics in the field. We aim to produce a body of work which, for the first time, will address these theoretical issues and place the practices of VJing and Interactive Installation, into a useful context.

The website is a growing collection of articles, references, art projects,, a space for events and collaborative online projects, with contributors.

VJ Theory has been developing areas for discussions both online (through the Small Projects activities) and offline (through discussions and presentations at symposia and festivals).

At The Upgrade! Lisbon Ana Carvalho and Brendan Byrne will present the project and ways they have collaborated internationally and the alliances, which have formed supportive networks through an inclusive ethos framed around practitioners theory.

O projecto VJ Theory pretende criar uma comunidade dedicada à discussão e reflexão sobre a filosofia e teoria subjacente ao fenómeno do Vjing e das práticas performativas em tempo real. Tornou-se aparente, durante workshops e discussões em festivais e simpósios, que os praticantes tanto do VJing como de instalações interactivas se estão a afastar de questões ligadas a aspectos práticos da produção para ideias mais complexas de como e porque é que determinado processo, por exemplo, se reveste de significado para o espectador.

Este projecto, e as publicações associadas, tem como objectivo a apresentação e aproximação de trabalhos tanto dos praticantes como dos académicos mais importantes da área. O VJ Theory pretende produzir um corpo de trabalho que, pela primeira vez, vai abordar estas questões teóricas e assim contextualizar as práticas do Vjing e da instalação interactiva.

O site do projecto é uma colecção crescente de artigos, referências, porjectos artísticos, um espaço para eventos e para projectos colaborativos online.

O VJ Theory tem vindo a desenvolver áreas para a discussão, tanto online (através das actividades Small Project) como offline (através de discussões e apresentações em simpósios e festivais).

This exhibition is an announcement for the project Consumer vs. User 2 .0 that will be realized from January to June 2008. The exhibition will introduce several young female artists from Macedonia which will take part in the project afterwards. Besides, there will be a presentation of female artists which a result of continuous collaboration with Kyd Campbell from Canada. The participants of the exhibition are: Marija Sotirovska, Kristina Hadzieva, Kristina Gacova, Jasna Dimitrovska, Ruki and Ivana Dragsic.

Consumer vs. User 2.0 project is focused on the technological education of two different groups: female artists and youth between 11-21 years old. This project is an extension of the 6 workshops realized in 2007 that helped educating more than 50 people. Next years program will be consisted of two workshops with a longer duration and developed in collaboration with different partners that will be announced additionally.

Curators: Elena Veljanovska and Cveta Spasova, Line Initiative and Movement.

WJs (webjockeys) WJ-s is a software and a flexible, high speed connexion public device for web performances which allows actors of the Internet, sound and image artists, net artists, bloggers, graphic designers, flashers, programmers, curators, hackers, new media theorists, pioneers and web mutants…to play live with the full scope of contents available in the wideness of the web.

DJs / VJs / WJs DJs and VJs throughout the world are well represented in clubs, art centers, art galleries and constitute a creative, inventive and dynamic expression on the international art scene. The various sounds and visual sources (vinyls, CDs, MP3s, vidéos, mpeg4s, animations…) stored in their machines or their computers are superimposed and modified according to various technical processes, to produce live flows of reinterpreted images and sounds. Following the steps of DJ’s and VJ’s, WJ’ s (webjockeys) directly draw their sources from the Web and mix the network flow in real time.

Dates & location:
October 26, 2007; 2 - 6 pm : Workshop @ lx5 homebase
5, rue de l’aciérie, Luxembourg Hollerich (5 minutes from Luxembourg main trainstation)
http://www.aires-de-confluxence.info/spip.php?article110

October 27, 2007 8 - 11 pm: Performance @ lx5 homebase
5, rue de l’aciérie, Luxembourg Hollerich (5 minutes from Luxembourg main trainstation)
http://www.aires-de-confluxence.info/spip.php?article110

Artistes invités / Invited artists

Jean-Baptiste Bayle est artiste, actionniste audio, déprogrammeur et expert de la contre-surveillance au quotidien. Il est l’anti-auteur de nombreux sites parodiques et collections de remixs, dont quelques institutions et initiatives privées ont pris le risque de présenter, dont le festival README04, le CNEAI à Chatou, Villette numérique, le Cnac-Magasin à Grenoble, la galerie W139 à Amsterdam …. Agitateur à l’Université, puis à l’Ensba, le Collège Invisible, et enfin Agglo, il continue de rêver d’un monde vivable sous la perspective de la vie immédiate. Il a coordonné différents projets collectifs, Borderphonics, Bugnmix, Ressources, enseigné à l’Ecole supérieure d’art de Grenoble et conduit des ateliers avec l’Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée à Paris, et se produit régulièrement en concert, manifestant permanent de la société de Big Brother.

Sylvie Astié - Graphiste, DJ, co-fondatrice des collectifs Büro et Dokidoki, fondatrice de no-text.net
Créatrice graphique à l’atelier Dokidoki qu’elle a fondé en 2001, DJ (sous le nom de Sascii), Sylvie Astié a récemment créé la structure no-text www.no-text.net qui présente un réseau de musiques alternatives via d’inédites sonneries de téléphones composées par des artistes. Co-fondatrice du collectif Büro (diffusion et concerts de musiques électroniques alternatives depuis 1995), elle est également très impliquée dans les arts plastiques d’aujourd’hui, dans la vidéo numérique (Pokipoki project - cinetic videomix) et dans l’invention d’une approche inédite du karaoké (le projet « Orchestre Vide »). Elle intervient également de manière ponctuelle dans des écoles d’art (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux et Lyon) et dans des écoles d’ingénieurs (Ecole des Mines de Paris et Institut National des Télécommunications, Evry) sur la mixité des pratiques artistiques et économiques, et la participation des structures indépendantes aux marchés émergents.

Anne Laforet est spécialiste du Net art, chercheur. Elle rédige une thèse sur la conservation du net art et a également écrit en 2004 le rapport “Net art et institutions artistiques et muséales : problèmatiques et pratiques de la conservation” pour la DAP (Délégation aux Arts Plastiques / Ministère de la Culture). Elle écrit sur la culture électronique pour le site internet d’Arte. Elle tape sur des claviers d’ordinateurs et de moog.

Distributed Aesthetics

Distributed Aesthetics edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson–Abstracts: …and Beyond: Anticipating Distributed Aesthetics by Darren Tofts; Theses on Distributed Aesthetics. Or, What a Network is Not by Anna Munster & Geert Lovink; Sharing Styles: New Media, Creative Communities and the Evidence of an Open Source Design Movement by Greg Turner-Rahman; Excerpts From ‘Portrait Of The VJ’ by Mark Amerika; Multiple Perspectives/Multiple Readings by Simon Biggs; Beyond the Museum Walls: Situating Art in Virtual Space (Polemic Overlay and Three Movements) by Vince Dzekian; Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive and Distributed Aesthetics by Edwina Bartlem; Entropy And Digital Installation by Susan Ballard; Intimate Transactions: The Evolution of an Ecosophical Networked Practice by Keith Armstrong.

Finding new terminology for emerging art and cultural practices or for media and technological constellations is bound to be contentious. On lists, blogs and during face-to-face forums and conferences we continue to debate what the term new media entails, let alone whether this provides an umbrella for wearable computing, smart materials, mobile phone movies or bioart. It is clear that computational culture is drifting, fragmenting and laterally expanding: terminals are no longer dedicated; cultural producers are now recurrent and mobile multi-taskers; art is online, on the street, on a screen and coming at you from a million different places, now.

Rather than try to define the terminology or taxonomy of distributed art theories and practices we have proposed instead a descriptor for the ‘aesthesia’ of contemporary networked encounters. Distributed aesthetics, then, concerns experiences that are sensed, lived and produced in more than one place and time. This might equally be a sketch of reconsiderations of the operations of cultural memory or of phenomena such as endurance performances. But what we propose, through gathering together the disparate pieces in this fibreculture journal issue, is that techno-social networks are crucially constitutive of this distributed aesthesia. In various ways, all the texts here take up the mode through which ‘the network’ – the juncture and disjunction of here and there, you and I, social and individuated – functions as the crucial operand in dispersing and contouring perception, art practice and aesthetics.

It would be unwise, however, to assign distributed aesthetics the role of the ‘new’ new media. As Darren Tofts cogently demonstrates in his analysis of the burgeoning Australian media arts scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, certain network formations pre-date the current raft of theorisation. By re-visiting work from the 1980s by artists such as Philip Brophy and the band Tsk-Tsk-Tsk, which included street stencil art, live performances, video events and gallery shows, Tofts invites us to unpack media art as a temporally staggered and distributed event. The importance of drawing our attention to these pre-figurations of networked aesthetics lies in both highlighting the rich and remediated history of media arts and in sobering the frenzy around the fad for relational aesthetics doing the global rounds of art galleries and conferences. Like the Flash mobbing that arises form current distributed media, these earlier media art events depended upon a participatory audience prepared to facilitate information about the works’ distributed times and places. Geert Lovink and Anna Munster, on the other hand, discern a particular aesthetic dominating contemporary imaginings of the network, which they title ‘the will to network mapping’. In a series of speculative propositions that seek to move towards a social rather than formal aesthetics, Lovink and Munster prise this image of the network as an ever-growing euphoric entity to be charted via links and nodes away from biologistic and organisational metaphors. Instead, they suggest, networks are human constructions and their ‘aesthesia’ must come to terms with all too human experiences of frustration, boredom and labour that comprise life lived in and with distributed media.

From an altogether different perspective, Greg Turner-Rahman empirically explores the practices of resource, knowledge and skill sharing among online design communities that amount to a literal distribution of aesthetics. He offers us a different version of design practice, which is often only considered from the point of view of its corporate environment where the one-way transmission of brief from client to designer holds sway. Instead, Turner-Rahman compares an imaginative if more marginal set of designers who are operating in ‘open-source’ mode. Yet this is not an essay that is simply celebratory of the ‘network way’ again. We are invited to think through the felt tension of changes in design culture as it attempts to straddle both entrenched corporate and emerging online modes of production.

One of the most satisfying aspects of working on this issue of the fibreculture journal has been the response we have received from artists to the meshwork of issues covered by distributed media, art and practice. Satisfying because these responses tend to experiment with how to do distribution rather than worrying about the finer details of what it should comprise. In the extracts from ‘Portrait of the VJ’, Mark Amerika splices the cut and paste rhythms of computerised text with the slide and sampling of distributed audiovisual performance that characterise the art of VJjing. The VJ is a provocateur whose improvisational and hybridised practice recombines traditional art forms such as film with experimental writing, electronica and video, software and net art. In his own VJ art Amerika explores and performs the complex agency of images and sounds, often on-the-fly and comprised from a palimpsest of memories, perceptions, experimental digital effects, and geophysical and virtual networks. Such ‘visual hypertextuality’ is also a feature of Simon Biggs’ distributed and shared environments. In Babel, Biggs confounds the conventional geometry of vision – typically represented by an inverted triangle where the apex equates to the singular eye of the Cartesian subject – by creating a multi-user remote networking system so that what we see simultaneously includes the multiple perspectives of other viewers at dispersed physical and online locations. The installation Parallax also challenges the supposedly homologous relation between vision and self by creating a collective and interactive visual experience, effectively interspersing the behaviour of virtual objects in the screen with the multiple movements of inter-actors within the installation space. Keith Armstrong’s Intimate Transactions provides us with another practice-led contribution to research on the felt disjunction of networks/artworks. Armstrong’s essay is valuable in that it demonstrates that aesthetically working through the design of embodies and networked interfaces can also produce a theoretical and practical framework for artists. He names this ‘ecosophical’ – a thinking through of artist, interface, participant and artwork as a mutable ecology that produces change and difference for all nodes and interrelations.

If artists are busy distributing the event and object that we might once have called an art work, how are audiences and institutions reacting to and even re-constituting themselves as part of net-art-works? Although we may have heard quite a lot about the ubiquity of audience and the disappearance of the gallery with respect to online art, nevertheless exhibitions, installations and institutions stubbornly remain in all their localisation. Yet as Vince Dzekian points out, art galleries are increasingly both virtualised (their Web presence often producing entirely different aesthetic and cultural modes of engagement) and their infrastructure digitised. What, then, does this mean for the site-specificity of such institutions? Rather than take an online gallery as exemplary of such forces of distribution, Dzekian gives us a detailed polemic that brings distributed aesthetics into contact with the National Gallery of Victoria. Here we get a sense of the ways in which an institution wrestles with the experience of being dispersed between informatic and physical space and how its curatorial practices might negotiate this tension.

Of course as denizens of new media art we are already familiar with the splitting and conjoining of ‘the virtual’ and ‘the physical’ through analysis of virtual reality art work throughout the 1990s. In her article ‘Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive and Distributed Aesthetics’ Edwina Bartlem challenges the notion that immersive VR or VE art and distributed or networked art are of a different experiential or perceptual order. Both immersive and distributed aesthetics, she argues, provide the conditions for a mediated yet fully engaging telepresence, which can effectively shift our understanding of art spectatorship from passive to performative mode and transform how we interpret and experience community, the human-technology relation and our own corporeality and consciousness. Susan Ballard is also concerned with a thorn in the side of new media theory, albeit a somewhat older one – entropy. Resonating with a problem that is of concern for other authors in this issue – namely, the transmission model of distributing signal – Ballard argues that entropy is not the downside to information being pushed around a space. Rather than the decay of signal, art that harnesses the material forces of leakage and dispersal might actually constitute a kind of networked experience. In examining the ways in which participants, computers, installed spaces and networks inhabit some recent art exhibited in New Zealand, Ballard suggests that fragmentation assists the pieces to materialize in their exhibition space.

What is insightful about the particularity of these analyses from Dzekian, Bartlem, Ballard and Armstrong is that they dig for frayed and uncharted elements of networked media, art and culture instead of lauding the technical as a necessary ‘connector’ of experience. Overall – and as is fitting for this issue’s theme – there seems to be no formal system, no set of objects and no one technology that can serve to ground a distributed aesthetics. But there are certainly enough shifts and cracks occurring to suggest that however we inhabit and imagine networks this habitat and this imaginary have by now thoroughly permeated and reshaped contemporary experience.

The editors would like to thank the many anonymous referees who helped with their insightful comments in their reports and for their time. In addition we would like to thank the authors for their patience in putting this issue together. Thanks also to Andrew Murphie for his skill and patience as executive editor.

Lisa Gye
Anna Munster
Ingrid Richardson

December 2005