REBRANDING ACTS is an investigation into cultural identity in an age of global migration. The project asks artists to look closely at the ongoing production of “nationality” in their home countries and to examine the ways in which this public narrative includes certain individuals and groups - while excluding others.

The REBRANDING ACTS project encourage artists to perform and document “rebranding acts” that directly intervenes with the hegemony of this excluding narrative and presents a radical re-thinking of it. In other words, acts that aims to “rebrand” the national identity in question. Continue reading

[Image; Seul Bi and the "troop soup" (pude chige)] 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, Or, let’s find a completely new art criticism by Brian Holmes - For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Let’s take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, definitively. Continue reading

Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization by Jeffrey S. Juris (Duke University Press): Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action(PGA)— including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process.

In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Continue reading

Upgrade! International 3: Chain Reaction :: September 11-14, 2008 :: Skopje, Macedonia :: Open to the Public.

The first and the second Upgrade! International gatherings took place in the United States in 2005 and 2006. After this experience, some members of the network expressed their wish to get familiar with other countries, artistic contexts and realities of Upgrade! members. Upgrade! Skopje, hosted by Line initiative and movement, received the network’s support to organize and host the 3rd international gathering. Continue reading

Upgrade! Skopje presents: ДЕН ОД ЖИВОТОТ - UM DIA NA VIDA - A DAY IN A LIFE - EIN TAG IM LEBEN [streaming performance] :: July 19, 2008; 2:00 - 4:00 pm :: CARMA Caffe, near Universall Hall, Skopje.

A Day In The Life begun as a multimedia project, initiated by Upgrade! Munich on the theme of Munich’s 850th birthday. The project A Day In The Life locates the global in the local. The peculiarities and characteristics of each location are contrasted with those typical and atypical to other locations, other cities, other countries, coalescing their similarities and differences into a poetic fusion. Continue reading

Mediatopia {mashup, remix, transmit} :: Call for Participation: Submit any media files, playlists, links, node coordinates, live webcasts or URLs. Please read criteria for Border Transmissions at ISEA 2008 Singapore for related context. Your media can be uploaded or linked into the Mediatopia database and be included in the participatory sequence produced onsite at the National Gallery of Singapore and viewable / re mixable / mash-up-able on the net via live webcast.

The Mediatopia Project and related events will reflect upon the ISEA 2008 Border Transmissions Theme and will exploit the potential of networks, communication tools, alternate economies and experiential technologies as a collaborative engine to enable the emergence of a different conception of borders, and of the transmissions that problematize these demarcations. Continue reading

Practice of Encroachment: From the global border to the border neighborhood :: July 10 - October 25, 2008 :: Opening Reception: July 10, 2008, 6-8 pm :: PARC Foundation Gallery, 29 Bleecker Street, New York.

Estudio Teddy Cruz’s research-based architectural studio, located at the San Diego-Tijuana border, has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations for using the neighborhood as a site of experimentation in order to research new forms of affordable housing and social density. Continue reading

FRESH 2.0 by Tiffany Holmes premiered on June 10, 2008 as part of the Visual Foreign Correspondents project developed in cooperation with De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics and The Netherlands Institute for Media Art, Amsterdam. Visual Foreign Correspondents is a monthly series of audio-visual artworks for a number of screen based platforms. Distinguished artists from around the world are invited to give their personal visual commentary on events and situations from their locally situated perspective.

The Urban Screen video FRESH 2.0 by Tiffany Holmes shows nature imagery appropriated from the labels of popular brands of bottled water. The generic snow-capped mountains and gushing waterfalls seem oddly familiar. Stripped of their bar codes and corporate logos, the landscapes turn into curious symbols for a product that is proven to have harmful effects on the environment. Continue reading

Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction - a new artwork by Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji at 01SJ Biennial, San Jose Museum of Art :: May 10 - August 31, 2008.

Tantalum Memorial - Reconstruction€ is the first in a series of telephony-based memorials by the artists group Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji, to the people who have died as a result of the €coltan wars€ in the Congo. The installation is constructed out of electromagnetic Strowger switches, the basis of the first automatic telephone exchange invented in 1888. The movements and sounds of the switches are triggered by the phone calls of London’s Congolese community as they participate in €œTelephone Trottoire, a concurrent project also built by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka. Continue reading

1000 Joyce Walks Call for participation :: When: Bloomsday June 16th 2008 :: Where: Any city in the world :: How: Generate a map and walk in your city.

Participants are now sought for the 1000 Joyce Walks project taking place on June 16th (Bloomsday) 2008. 1000 Joyce Walks is a participatory global intervention which aims to create a day of psychogeographical exploration with 1000 interventions in 24 hours across the globe.

The project uses the Joyce Walks project to remap routes from James Joyce’s Ulysses to any city in the world to be used as the basis of walks which navigate urban space in a new and unexpected way. Continue reading