[Image: Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett / Grafik Dynamo / 2004-2005] Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist and theorist with a panache for new media powered permutational storytelling. Her work questions the nature of narrative in light of computation, social media and contemporary urban space. She has exhibited widely and is currently en route to Turkey for the March 8th launch of PATH, a bookwork generated by “an anonymous individual living in the city of Montreal between 2005-2007″ at the Akbank Art Centre in Istanbul. Above and beyond her creative practice, she is the author of Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, sits on the board at The Western Front artist-run centre and is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology. Continue reading

“…Cyberspace is the illusion of space, or the inferred space that we get when we use electronic communications equipment. I’m talking to you right now, but I’m talking to your listeners as well, and in their mind, they can imagine the two of us being in this studio. There’s a kind of space that happens there as an illusion, but there’s also the compression of space and time as they’re receiving this information at a later date than it was actually recorded. So these kind of manipulations of conceptual space are actually a byproduct of electronic media, and we didn’t get that quite so obviously in previous media. Continue reading

Internet art, net art, and networked art in relation - Conversations and interviews with curators, artists and directors by Karen Annemie Verschooren: Isabelle Arvers :: Marc Garrett :: Benjamin Weil :: Charlie Gere :: Christiane Paul :: Cory Arcangel :: Jemima Rellie :: Sara Tucker :: Jon Ippolito :: Dirk de Wit.

The complete records of this investigation can be found here and present the reader with an elaborate discussion of the key players, institutions and discourses on aesthetics, economics and exhibition methodologies that characterize Internet art’s relation with the traditional institutions for contemporary art. Continue reading

Last summer, Cati Vaucelle at Architectradure tipped me off about Meta-Markets, a project which created a means to buy and sell units of social media. I penned an enthusiastic review of the project in the fall and continue to be engaged by this ongoing thought-experiment. Meta-Markets was authored by Burak Arikan, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab who is currently based in Brooklyn. This Friday, Burak will be taking part in a panel discussion entitled Real World Implications of Virtual Economies at the Turbulence Mixed Realities Exhibition and Symposium in Boston (and streaming live in Second Life). Continue reading

Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic talk about the One Laptop Per Child

The following text complements the exhibition An 8-bit Moment in Gameplay: [giantJoystick], currently on view at gallery@calit2, Calit2, University of California at San Diego.

Mary Flanagan Interview: Social Change, Video Games and the Visual Arts by Eduardo Navas: Mary Flanagan is an artist and media theorist invested in developing games for social change and performance/action installations. Based on her interests Flanagan produced [giantJoystick] in 2006, and gallery@calit2 is proud to present this working large-scale game-interface from February 4 to March 17 of 2008. [giantJoystick] brings together Flanagan’s diverse interests as a cultural producer. Continue reading

How did you come up with the idea for making an animated geoglyph? Why did you choose to make a walking figure? What does it mean to you?

Last year I began my honors thesis, which is series of conceptually-based animations. As I investigated the history and process of animation, I decided to concentrate on animation as it is integrated with new technology. As a part of this series, inspired by a class called “computing in the wild”, I decided to use GPS technology. Continue reading

[…] Helen: Avatars play an important role in your work by activating the sound. And yet you have “core problems” with them. “The avatar concept”, you say in July’s empyre discussion “is the one I find the most troubling, and it also grows from the 3d-space-as-physical-simulation misassumption. There is no need to concentrate presence into one cohesive point (an avatar).” I wonder if you would explain what you mean by this, and perhaps suggest alternatives.

Adam: Well, if avatars play an important role in my work, it’s because they play a very important role in Second Life itself. The problems I refer to are both technical and conceptual. Continue reading

Jussi Parikka is author of the book Digital Contagions, a media archaeology of computer viruses, published by Peter Lang earlier this year. The book is a speculative meditation on the nature of viruses and their part in contemporary technocultures. This interview was carried out (by Matthew Fuller) by email in November and December 2007.

Matthew Fuller: How do you figure ‘the body’ or the biopolitical in your discussion of viruses? Clearly it would be possible to simply fall into the trap of equating computer viruses with biological ones, to mistake the metaphor for the thing named. On the other hand it is possible to trace the ways in which the term has been used to mark a cross-over between categories that is about a kind of understanding of kinds of behaviours not delimited by material instantiation, for instance a certain kind of dynamic of proliferation, that makes the term meaningful. What are the stakes in following this through? Continue reading

“Alexander R. Galloway is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the data surveillance engine Carnivore. The New York Times recently described his work as “conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.” Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and a new book coauthored with Eugene Thacker called The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minnesota, forthcoming). He teaches at New York University.

A general assumption is that networks have the potential to dehierarchize and dissolve rigid structures of all kinds. But in your book, “protocol” refers to the technology of organization and control operating in distributed networks. Continue reading