Subversive Complicity: Critical Conversations in a Limo - created by Holly Crawford :: May 1, 2008; 5, 6, 7, and 8 pm :: The LAB, 16th and Capp St., San Francisco :: The limo will leave from and return to The LAB. Reserve your free space by calling the gallery at (415) 864-8855 :: Exhibition runs May 1-24, 2008 :: Opening Reception: May 1, 6-9 pm.

Hop into a white limousine with eight strangers to converse about anything in art for one hour. Hosts, who are critics and curators, will guide conversations and offer refreshments. Continue reading

Sousveillance Culture Conference :: April 26, 2008; 12 - 5 pm :: The Change You Want to See Gallery, 84 Havemeyer @ Metropolitan, Brooklyn, NY.

Presentations on the theory & practice of surveillance and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The presenters’ talks will be grouped into four panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Curator at Large, Rhizome), on topics ranging from voyeurism and play to intervention and networks of control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and critical essays, and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress. Continue reading

[Image: Operation Urban Terrain (OUT): 2004-6 by Anne Marie Schleiner] “Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious. But the work of the Situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come.” Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play, Internationale Situationniste #1, June 1958)

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. Continue reading

Dream Amsterdam - Ryoji Ikeda :: June 6 - 21, 2008 :: Opening: June 6, 8:30 pm - live concert and performance by Ryoji Ikeda and an amazing line up of other international guest artists and DJ’s.

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. Continue reading

“It’s the Transmediale at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Somewhere, something in this cavernous Marshall Plan edifice is flickering. Closer at hand in the exhibition hall, half-tilted black boxes on the floor solicit you to crawl under them and encounter others of your kind watching videos. The fauna underneath are warm and resistant, though you would expect to encounter something rather more cold and slimy when lifting a rock, which is what the black-box bivouac viewing situation feels like. Continue reading

NEW LIFE BERLIN FESTIVAL: Call for Artists :: Deadline for Applications: May 1, 2008.

NEW LIFE BERLIN is a participatory art festival dedicated to new modes of moving and existing. Curated from the online art community WOOLOO.ORG, NEW LIFE BERLIN aims to connect the critical resources of a global network of artists with a specific geographical location of importance to today”s cultural production.

INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR ARTISTS: Artists working in all mediums are encouraged to apply for participation in NEW LIFE BERLIN. All applications must be made online. Continue reading

UPDATE: Brian Holmes wrote: “… Thanks to all of you who wrote back (and especially, who wrote to RPI president Jackson) about this clash. Now you should know the latest: Wafaa Bilal’s show has been restaged in the nearby Sanctuary for Independent Media and guess what? The police has closed it on a building code technicality … (C)omplete story of the affair with links. All of this is going very far and looks like a true case of hysteria. The symbolic gap between a cosmopolitan outlook able to understand what is going on from an Ira(q)i point of view and a pure America first rejection of anything foreign is frightening to behold…” END UPDATE. Continue reading

Joseph DeLappe performs dead-in-iraq :: March 20, 2008; 7 pm :: Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st St., NYC.

On Thursday, March 20 — the date of the US invasion of Iraq — Joseph DeLappe will enact his ongoing protest and memorial work set within the Department of Defense’s online military recruiting and marketing video game, America’s Army. Using the login name “dead-in-Iraq”, DeLappe enters the multiplayer game as a player and, forgoing fighting, uses the game’s features to memorialize US military members killed in Iraq. “As of 1/17/08, I have input 3745 names. I intend to keep doing so until the end of this war. As of 1/17/08 there have been 3929 American service persons killed in Iraq.”

“The performance-, theatre- and radio-art group LIGNA (formed 1997) consists of the media theorists and radio artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners and Torsten Michaelsen, who work in the FSK (Free Broadcaster Combine), a non-commercial, local radio in Hamburg. LIGNA repeatedly design experimental situations which aim for the transgression of the conventional application of radio technology and the re-actualisation of its inherent, but forgotten or ignored potentials.The action Radioballet took place in the main station of Hamburg and one year later in Leipzig. Both spaces had been recently privatised and subject to control by surveillance cameras and security guards. Continue reading

Cleotronica: Festival for Media, Art, and Socio-Culture :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Flat 6, Azarita, Alexandria, Egypt.

Cleotronica 08 is the inaugural version of Cleotronica a festival for media, art, and socio-culture organized by Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) an alternative initiative for art and culture based in Egypt’s second largest city. Cleotronica 08 is planned as a monthly series of public art projects, workshops, lectures, performances, and exhibitions that commenced in January 2008 gradually building up to an international symposium in May. The festival presents a diverse set of projects, mediums, and issues, ranging from net art to tactical media and from public intervention to design. Continue reading