In each of the pieces, using a game controller, the viewer navigates freely throughout the 3D computer graphic environments. The spaces are comprised of both exterior and interior landscapes, each thematically, visually & sonically distinct where users can interact with avatars to create new performances / performance spaces.

SwanQuake is a surreal semi-abstract inhabited world, home to a series of potential encounters. These may be theatrical and dreamlike, sometimes uncanny perhaps even frightening, at times quotidian and familiar. It’s these interactions that inspire curiosity, wonder and the desire to continue looking and sensing. However, despite the title ‘mashup’ of computer game Quake and traditional ballet Swan Lake, there are no targets, health points, wins or dying swans here.

SwanQuake: The User Manual opens the project up to discursive reflection and expansion through its selection of articles and essays. In the first section, the User Manual takes you through some of the processes of making SwanQuake including sound composition, choreography and computer animation work. Also in section one is a modicum of do-it-yourself instructions and two views on Igloo’s work in relation to the wider field of digital arts practice and culture. In the second section, the User Manual broadens the scope of the discussion to include the ontology of game art, analysis of perspective in 3-D spaces, ‘uncanny’ realism and collisions between game artistry and commerce. With essays by Johannes Birringer, Helen Stuckey, Shiralee Saul, Bruno Martelli, Ruth Gibson, John McCormick, Katharine Neil, Alex Jevremovic, Adam Nash, Helen Sloan, Stephen Turk, Marco Gillies, Harry Brenton & David Surman. Reviewed here.

Igloo make intermedia works exploring the poetices of time, space and natural phenomena. Questioning the reality of nature and how it can be influenced by individual experience and collective mythology. Employing many of the tools of the military EC recently they have investigated the role of the’real’ in virtual environments.

Igloo are Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli who have earned a string of accolades for their artwork including a NESTA award for SwanQuake, a commission from the Royal Opera house for Goodbye Venus and a BAFTA nomination in 2002 for WindowsNinetyEight.

Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow from Furtherfield.org will demo VisitorsStudio and introduce participants to its (easy-to-use) tool-set and features. Using your own files (bring jpg, mp3, swf, flv under 200k) or harvesting files from the net, you can work with others to create and distribute mixes and remixes. The day will end with a live online performance by all participants.

VisitorsStudio (Furtherfield.org 2003-) is an networked, many to many, real-time art project created and distributed live in real-time across the Internet. Participants link together at the same time and mix and remix audio-visual files. The VisitorsStudio artware is also an always-on, open, social space. As they work together, live conversations between participants (identified by their moving cursor arrows) become a part of the performance- along with comments and heckling from the audience.

Through VisitorsStudio, Furtherfield.org explores the ongoing expressive and communicative processes of human beings collaborating in new ways in this context, as active agents in the production of the cultural landscape.

BIOGRAPHIES

Nathan Halverson works with found, sampled and original audio using various methods and processes to produce new sounds. His work combines elements of film, literature and popular culture which he uses to investigate the boundaries that divide and connect various media, their reception and our perception of them. A CD of his work, Nurse Shark, was released in September 2007 on the Peapod label.

G. Matthew Jenkins teaches poetry and writing at The University of Tulsa. His writing explores the visual form of language and the page as a unit of measure. He has worked with several visual artists, including painter Sheila Giolitti. Their collaborations appeared at the Old Dominion University Literary Festival and at the Hampton University Museum. Flash has become his latest poetic medium.

David Goldstein teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at York University. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Been Raw Diction (Dusie), and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Jubilat, Typo, Pinstripe Fedora, Alice Blue Review, and Epoch.

Mindy Stricke is a photographer, artist and entrepreneur whose photographs have been exhibited throughout the US and Canada, most recently at the Safe-T Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her portraits and other work have been featured in national and international publications including the New York Times, Time, Time Out New York, Newsweek, PDNedu and Voce. In 2008 her work will be seen in Click! Photography Changes Everything, an exhibit curated by the Smithsonian Photography Initiative.

For more Turbulence Spotlights, visit http://turbulence.org/spotlight

Concrete Daisies is a site-specific performance / installation of dance, sound, and live-feed video projection. A stellar ensemble of dancers, musicians, and video artists will explore the interior and exterior spaces of the Velaslavasay Panorama, an historic exhibition hall, theatre and garden dedicated to the production and presentation of unusual visual experiences. The garden of concrete daisies will play foil to the theater’s own “garden of carnivorous plants and sinister foliage“. Opportunity for a bird’s eye view pointed to an investigation of that which can only be understood from above, thus introducing the concept of the labyrinth.

This performance assumes a hybrid form that collapses the boundaries between installation / live-feed video shoot / live dance / live music / and live video projection. The viewer is invited to roam through this immersive environment and grapple with the simultaneity of the live performers and how they are mediated into the visual and audio spatial mix. It is ultimately a structured improvisation where the viewer witnesses the instantaneous, responsive dialogue between dancer, cameraperson, video artist and musician.

ENSEMBLE OF PERFORMERS:

CAROLE KIM direction/video installation

dance
OGURI
ROXANNE STEINBERG
MICHAEL SAKAMOTO
SHURIU LO
JESSKE HUME

sound
ELLEN BURR flute
MARK DRESSER electro-acoustic bass
JESSE GILBERT sound spatialization
MOTOKO HONDA piano
JOE BERARDI percussion
JESSICA CATRON cello
KADET KUHNE electronics

visuals
ASTRA PRICE live video mix
BO SUL KIM live video mix
CHRISTINE MARIE shadow play
MAILE COLBERT live-feed video
MIRABELLE ANG live-feed video
ANN KANEKO live-feed video

SPECIAL THANKS TO: SASSAS for generously providing technical assistance in this production, BILL BALLOU-technical direction, JORGE MARTIN and CHAUNCY GODWIN-sound engineers:, BITA SHARIF-production assistant:, JIHYUN SONG, YOUNG-MIN SON-video documentation.

Please note: As this is an indoor/outdoor performance comfortable footwear and appropriately warm clothing are suggested. In the event of rain, the performance will be condensed primarily into the indoor spaces.

After ten years of the emergence of the world wide web, artists have consistently sought to describe its ability through metaphor, material, and social means, such as creating a place of community beyond the borders of politicians and their regulations. Imagining the Internet as a live, emergent poem, or an on-going platform toward explorations of the Internet as material is the mission of concreteSTREAM. In the tradition of music concrete, concrete poetry, and concrete video, concreteSTREAM seeks to understand and define the possibilities of time and geography on the internet through streaming technologies.

concreteSTREAM is an international netcast of artists works, discussions of artists works, and experimental live exchanges on the internet. These projects offer a platform of interactive discussion, as well as a venue for live and recorded experiments in performance, video, intermedia and intervention art between artists and theorists throughout the world. Three areas of research activities define concreteSTREAM:

1. Streaming live panels and lectures of artists, activists and theorists. This area includes invited panels and regular visiting artists lecture series at UMBC.

2. concreteSTREAM netcasts firstTHURSDAYS where the first Thursday between 4-5pm each month during Fall/Spring season will offer a special topic video series by a Guest Curator.

3. concreteSTREAM engages in experimental live exchanges with similar creative research organizations for 2-way live events between locations, using low-bandwidth and Internet 2.

Archive.

Beginning in the last decades of the 20th century, the increasing expansion of multimedia has made the digital synthesis of image, interactivity, non-linearity and intermediality not only ephemeral practices of contemporary art, but also prevalent and established characteristics of popular culture. These are also expectations and demands towards a contemporary cinematic work resulting in the creative processes, models of production, distribution and perception of a film art gradually moving away from traditional forms.

Do the contemporary experiments with digital techniques have a chance to invariably permeate the tools of film creators? How does the Internet change the appearance of film distribution? What influence will the narrative structures of interactive computer games have on the classic cinematic storytelling? Which of the ever-increasing repertoire of possibilities and promises of the digital media are liable to transform cinema as profoundly as did the expansion of video in the 80s?

The conference, organized by Media Desk Poland in programmatic co-operation with WRO Art Center is an attempt to present the consequences and possibilities that interactivity, mobility and multi-platform availability, along with the technological progression of communication tools, can contribute to film production and distribution.

Gathering arguments of artists, established international experts and practitioners from such interrelated fields as the theory of games, telecommunication industry, media sciences, sociology and media art, the conference defines the phenomena currently changing the state of cinematography.

Participants:

Richard Bartle, the co-author of MUD, the first multiuser narrative game; University of Essex, UK
Jakub Brzęczkowski, specialist in TV/VoD technology implementation, Orange/France Telecom, PL/FR
Mirosław Filiciak, media theoretician, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, PL
Paweł Janicki, independent media artist, curator and producer, WRO Art Center, PL
Piotr Krajewski, expert in contemporary art and media culture, WRO Art Center, PL
Michael Lew, media artist and research engineer, LEV Studio, CH/UY
Dawid Marcinkowski, creator of interactive music videos and the net-based film Sufferrosa, PL
Henk van der Meulen, television producer, musician and composer, NPS/IMZ, NL
Tom Putzki, author and producer of computer games, phenomedia publishing Gmbh, D
Aleksander Tarkowski, sociologist, Warsaw University, Creative Commons, PL

POW!, Performance Art Mini-Festival is searching for original “cutting edgy” works that combine disciplines in an unusual, original, and intelligent manner. We are looking for 20-minute maximum, low tech or semi-low tech (simple video+audio, performance, lighting) creative pieces that integrate music, sound, performance art, theater, dance, and/or visual arts. Selected works will be performed live at Space Gallery in San Francisco, California during our 1st Annual Spring Performance Festival March 6 - 8, 2008.

Please include: * One page proposal * Bio * Email address and Website link (if applicable) * 5 minute video summary (VHS, DVD, or working YouTube links are acceptable as well) of the piece that you would like to present * $10 application fee - check or money order made out to group A.

Send to: POW!, PO Box 9492, Oakland, CA 94613. Email samowilmotek [at] yahoo.com to let us know you applied.

IN HAND DEADLINE: 11/12/07. You will be notified by email if your piece has been accepted by December 1, 2007.

For questions please contact samowilmotek [at] yahoo.com

jury members/curators: kattt sammon, alyssa lee of group A, and guillermo galindo

www.myspace.com/samowilmotek was established by Kattt Sammon + Alyssa Lee in 2004 to present the works of artists involved in installation, dance, electronic music, theatre, and video.

samo-wilmo-tek has presented artists such as George Alley, Kenneth Atchley, John Bischoff, Barb Golden, Cenk Ergün, gal*in_dog, Alyssa Lee/group A, Tim Perkis, Brian Reinbolt, & Kattt Sammon.

The samo-wilmo-tek artistic vision includes having a select number of artists to be able to present longer works; choosing a venue with a specific ambience (such as one without a traditional stage); designing a sound and lighting system to create a softness in the space; and to create a performance space whose atmosphere and artistic aspects compliment one another, resulting in performances fully absorbed by the audience. All of this creates the samo-wilmo-tek aesthetic vision throughout the evenings of performance we curate and present.

A unique collaborative process engages biologists, architects, digital, sound and video designers and performers. This team researches the dynamic behavior and “natural” biorhythms of specific ecosystems to create a physical installation based on real and metaphorical data, a digital model that triggers, connects and governs events in the physical environments. A mythology about the creation of the environment and its inhabitants builds the story for the work.

In an environment made “live” by the integration of interactive technology, performers and audience move within a full sensory landscape - witnessing the story that unfolds as a way to re-examine contemporary urban life. By engaging in discourse between diverse disciplines of composition, choreography, architecture, writing, digital code and the visual arts, echo::system questions one perspective to illuminate another, including science and its methods. echo:: system creates a new awareness for collaborators and audiences alike of the potential relevance of live art, the resonance between art and science and the impact of technology on the American landscape.

Fluxus is well-known as an (anti-)artistic, international network with centres in the USA, Western Europe and Japan. But what about this “intermedia” art — art encompassing music, actions, poetry, objects and events — beyond the “Iron Curtain”? What echo did Fluxus find in the states of the former Eastern Bloc, and what parallel developments existed there? As a “programme of action”, Fluxus — according to its self-styled “chairman”, the exiled Lithuanian George Maciunas in a letter supposedly to Nikita Chruscev — was predestined to bring about unity between the “concretist” artists of the world and the “concretist” society of the USSR. Maciunas planned Fluxus as a collective based on the model of the Russian LEF (Leftist Arts Front). But these plans — e. g. for a performance tour by the artists on the Trans-Siberian Railway –, developed with polished communist rhetoric in manifestos and letters, were to remain no more than a utopia.

After 1962, a different FLUXUS EAST developed through creative exchange between Fluxus artists and artists/musicians of the former Eastern Bloc, leading to events including Fluxus festivals in Vilnius (1966), Prague (1966), Budapest (1969), and Poznan (1977).

FLUXUS EAST represents a first stocktaking of the diverse Fluxus activities in the former Eastern Bloc; the exhibition shows parallel developments and artistic practices inspired by Fluxus, which are still adopted by some young artists today. Besides the “classic” Fluxus objects, the display will include photographs, films, correspondence, secret police files, interviews and recordings of music that document the presence of Fluxus in the former Eastern Bloc. As an interactive exhibition, FLUXUS EAST aims to facilitate a profound encounter with ideas, works and texts — some presented as facsimiles to permit intense study. It is possible to play at FLUX PING PONG, and visitors are also invited to explore the POIPOIDROME by Robert Filliou.

With Gábor Altorjay, Eric Andersen, Tamás St. Auby, Azorro, Robert Filliou, György Galántai, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Tadeusz Kantor, Milan Knízák, Alison Knowles, Július Koller, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Vytautas Landsbergis, George Maciunas, Jonas Mekas, Larry Miller, Ben Patterson, Mieko Shiomi, Slave Pianos, Endre Tót, Gábor Tóth, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Jirí Valoch, Ben Vautier, Branko Vucicevic, Emmett Williams

curator: Petra Stegmann, exhibition architecture: Andrea Pichl

Performances by Eric Andersen, Geoffrey Hendricks, Milan Knízák, Alison Knowles, Larry Miller, Ben Patterson, Tamás St. Auby, Ben Vautier and others will take place at the opening on September, 26.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue (German/English, ca 250 pages, ca 200 images, hardcover).

The exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien and the catalogue are funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

From September 27-29, 2007 the conference FLUXUS: NETWORKS BETWEEN WEST AND EAST — a joint event of Künstlerhaus Bethanien and House of World Cultures — will take place at House of World Cultures and Art Forum Berlin.

Further exhibition venues: Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius (November 30, 2007 - January 13, 2008), Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków (February 7 - March 30, 2008), Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest (April 17 - June 1, 2008).

Network programme in Berlin:

Tschechisches Zentrum Czechpoint
Czech Action Art of the 1960s to the 1990s
Exhibition, September 14 - November 2, 2007

Collegium Hungaricum Berlin Portable Intelligence Increase Museum. Pop Art, Conceptual Art, and Actionism in Hungary during the 60s - 1956-1976 / The Near-East-European Criss-Cross (1956-1989)
Exhibition, September 26 - November 4, 2007

Polnisches Institut Berlin Galeria Akumulatory 2
Exhibition, September 28 - November 8, 2007

Art Forum Berlin Slave Pianos: Dissident Consonances
(The Flux-Labyrinth & the Iron Curtain at the Art Forum Berlin)
Concert, September 28, 2007

For more information about FLUXUS EAST contact: fluxus@bethanien.de or presse@bethanien.de

The Childhood Machine, presented at Babel Art Space, is an interactive kinetic installation that incorporates newer-than-new age idea therapy to transport viewers to their past - a return to childhood. The League’s engineering division developed The Childhood Machine in the hopes of reversing the psychological and ecological damage wrought by Western Civilization. The machine is designed to reverse Progress in a complicated process of regression that requires precise mental and atmospheric conditions (78% childlike curiosity and 22% humidity). Visitors to the exhibit, as children, will inevitable grow up again: time, it is revealed, is a bi-cycle.

The exhibition includes the interactive childhood machine, a participatory fill-in-the-timeline of the collective childhood of the city of Trondheim, a documentary on the development of The Childhood Machine, artifacts from childhood, and an acoustic flight of fancy. In addition, an online search engine will permit viewers to search time’s index for isolated moments in childhood. The machine itself works in coordination with mental exercises developed by Ms. MU.

Dr. L. Hernandez Gomez will give a lecture on the regressive process of decivilization at the opening reception on Friday, August 17.

This exhibition was made with the support of the Royal Norwegian General Consulate, the community of artists at Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre (TEKS), Clas Ohlson, and the city of Trondheim, whose discarded bicycles proved constructive.