This is not the only innovation of Nico Nico Douga. Its collectively negotiated tags and social bookmark based rankings create a platform, where new genres and subgenres constantly evolve at high speed. The evolution of the genres becomes a meta-story on its own (Yoshikawa Hideyuki). More than one million videos were uploaded in the last 16 months, most of them self-produced by the fans. The majority of these videos are remixes of anime, games or TV content. They are thus relatives of AMV (Anime Music Videos), though wilder, faster, and with a wider range of contents and references.

Nico Nico Douga’s Url is http://www.nicovideo.jp/. You can access the main interface directly, but if you want to see the videos, you have to subscribe. However, access is free and pretty easy. If you are interested in academic research about Nico Nico Douga: The Metadata Project, based at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, London, conducts ethnographic research on it. First results are published on this blog: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/metagold/. Here you can also find further help how to access Nico Nico Douga: See the early post “So what is Nico Nico Douga” for this.

Perception of viruses stems both from the way we consider the most recent epidemic diseases and from an innate fear of having one’s own body invaded by other efficient organisms, capable of re-arranging their working patterns in order to facilitate infiltration into their host. Perception of spam, as one of the inescapable communication phenomena of our times, is a changing lively part of our everyday infoscape. Spam is extremely pervasive and effective for billions of persons whose (easy to spot and trade) personal and open communication door are infiltrated usually after being verbally titillated. Cultural infections that potentially change our identity, with communicative distances growing shorter, are becoming more and more inevitable. Continually reinventing the concise language on the net, the verbal protection / censorship game will be played using different code / sign combinations. With a constant retina overload, few strategic (key)words can make the difference.

Alessandro Ludovico (IT) is a media critic and editor in chief of Neural.it magazine from 1993, (Honorary Mention, Prix Ars Electronica 2004). He is the author of: ‘Virtual Reality Handbook’ (1992), ‘Internet Underground.Guide’ (1995), ‘Future Digital Sounds’, (2000) and co-edited the ‘Mag.Net Reader’ series (2006-2008). He’s one of the founding contributors of the Nettime community and one of the founders of ‘Mag.Net (Electronic Cultural Publishers organization). He was also an advisor for the Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. He teaches at the Academy of Art in Carrara. Since 2005 he works with Ubermorgen and P.Cirio on projects such as ‘Google Will Eat Itself’ (Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica 2005, Rhizome Commission 2005, nomination Transmediale Award 2006) and ‘Amazon Noir’ (2nd prize Transmediale Award 2008, 1st prize Stuttgarter Filmwinter 2007) projects.

CIANT GALLERY is a non-for-profit space for presentation of experimental projects which connect the worlds of arts, sciences and new technologies. The Gallery is operated by CIANT - International Centre for Art and New Technologies in Prague with support of the City of Prague and the Municipality of Prague 3.

An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, "Survival," with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book "Survival", the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to "write" the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth...). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my "survival" here.

The word "SURVIVAL" has been changed to "SUR-VIV-ALL," trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred "SUR VIV (R) E / VIE ...", something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, "VIVA", claiming to live, an imperative. In English "survival", has its original meaning, plus the "ALL" that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The "Waypoints" on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we've accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

“_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ explores concepts that shape and are shaped by an extensive range of online / synthetic encounters. These concepts are formed through principles generated internally within specific online environments. These environments include - among others - Massively Multiplayer Online Environments [World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Second Life], Social Networking Platforms [Twitter, Facebook, OpenSocial], Social Gaming [Passively Multiplayer Online Game, Parallel Kingdom] and Alternative Reality Games [I Love Bees, Perplex_City, Year Zero]. Entries will dissect post-geophysically defined notions of reality through a mixture of:

* Platform-specific case studies.
* Analysis of contextual behaviour sets.
* Construction of theoretical projections derived via synthetic, mixed and augmented formats.”

Mez is a Futurist who has had a sustained presence in synthetic realities for over two decades. She is also an established net artist and game theorist who practices _Poetic Game Interventions_ [the creative manipulation of MMO parameters in order to disrupt or comment on various aspects of augmented states]. She is a widely exhibited, award winning artist and we are extremely fortunate to be able to present her work here and enjoy her company as a member of our guild.

Ars Virtua is a New Media Center and Gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life, World of Warcraft and the World Wide Web. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. The Ars Virtua Foundation is a locus of research around the issues of reality within simulated environments.

Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

Anything that can be made, can be made black.

Space Race #1 is a 3d simulation in which teams of autonomous elements compete for a mysterious green fuel, that allows for a spaceship, the only possible way of escaping, to take them to another planet, the next level of the game. The team members are always organized and operating according to the team’s internal logic, either it being looking for the spaceship and running to it, gathering fuel and working either together or independently. Each member is characterized by unique features and each group is organized in swarms that perform the required tasks in order to achieve their goal, conquering the spaceship and traveling to another world. When they arrive to the new planet, they alert the local population that they are ready to compete with them in search of fuel for the next spaceship that will, once again, transport them to yet another planet.
Space race #1 follows and repeats this logic endlessly, taking on the structure of an abstract computer game, where accomplishing certain tasks and defeating the enemy allows the team to reach subsequent levels. But reaching another level never brings the teams closer to the end of their missions. This space race has no visible end or any kind of possible gameplay for us to interact with it. It is an abstract generative fantasy that explores the language, codes and strategies of contemporary computer gaming.

André Sier works as a media artist-programmer. He has a degree in philosophy but studied also painting and sculpture. Sier creates objects involving audio-visual programming languages and has been showing them since the late 90’s , as well as collaborating with visual artists, performers and musicians. He teaches audio-visual programming since 2002.

The exhibition The Space Between addresses certain dynamics where simple gestures suggest an alteration and a politicization of temporal and spatial conditions inherent in the work and between the artwork and the viewer. This is manifested both in the content and in the formal structure of the work. The artworks presented involve aspects including the politics of identity and language reinterpreted in concepts such as dimension and distance, spatial transformation and temporal shifts – but also psychological distances in the form of flights of fancy, changes in mentality and reverie.

The exhibition presents experiences of social solidarity as well as isolation and marginalization, translated here into spatiality: into a kind of architecture of emotions where the works of the artists also turn a spotlight on the more unexplored regions of psychogeography. This can be seen converted into a multitude of different formats – moving pictures, text, sculpture, animation, linguistic translations and musical interpretation – transforming the slightest object, image or everyday situation into a subject of sociological debate.

The Space Between attempts to raise issues of the construction of identity in transit, in rupture, between different cultures in a globalized reality and, furthermore, as examples of emotions of alienation in a complex, contradiction-filled world. Nevertheless, The Space Between consists of equal proportions of humour and melancholy. The works often play on inequalities and claims to power in relations, and on failures primarily based on misunderstandings of the mind, the deceptions of language and the limitations of the body.

Participating artists: Bas Jan Ader (The Netherlands/USA), Latifa Echakhch (Morocco/Switzerland), Maria Lindberg (Sweden), Adrian Piper (USA/Germany), Mark Raidpere (Estonia), and Gabriela Vanga (Romania/France).

Museum Anna Nordlander is a meeting-place for gender issues and contemporary art. The Space Between will inaugurate Museum Anna Nordlander Konsthall on occasion of the opening week of Nordanå, March 14 – 19. During these days a wide range of creative activities, lectures and performances will be offered.

Nordanå is a cultural center and recreation ground in Skellefteå with art galleries, museums, theater, museum shop and café.

Always fans of language games, MTAA took turns taking sides in the binary of YES vs NO. They each recorded themselves saying these respective words sixty times and the computer randomly selects the order of each clip, so that the artists can disagree with each other in a myriad of chance combinations. Despite the randomness of these face-offs, they read as intentional, and like any good montage, meaning seems to emerge organically from the juxtaposition of the discrete units. The two-channel work looks quite a bit like the duo’s Infinite Smile (2005), while perhaps illustrating that a sense of humor and the occasional agreement to disagree are the cornerstones to any happy artistic relationship. - Marisa Olson, Rhizome.

State of the Union provides searchable access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to the present. Using visualization software, the site allows a user to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context. State of the Union focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. From this information, users are invited to try and understand the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.

As we are in the midst of a presidential campaign, and the vagaries of political rhetoric flood the media, it is especially important this year to be able to analyze and understand how politicians use words to court us, to convince us, and ultimately to gain access to positions of power and control. Lamenting the triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity, Borevitz describes the gradual changes in political speech from argument to brand. The project asks us to consider if evidence for this assertion exists in the language of the State of the Union address which stands as a controlled sample of political speech over the course of U.S. history.

Brad Borevitz is an artist whose work focuses on language, politics and software. He has produced websites, videos, software applications, and robots, all of which have at their core a deep commitment to understanding the political and cultural implications of computer technology. He is a recent participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego.

Related: By ASCII BUSH Yoshi Sodeoka.

Words to Be Looked At - Language in 1960s Art by Liz Kotz: Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s - whether in the form of printed texts, painted signs, words on the wall, or recorded speech. In Words to Be Looked At, Liz Kotz traces this practice to its beginnings, examining works of visual art, poetry, and experimental music created in and around New York City from 1958 to 1968. In many of these works, language has been reduced to an object nearly emptied of meaning. Robert Smithson described a 1967 exhibition at the Dwan Gallery as consisting of “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read.” Kotz considers the paradox of artists living in a time of social upheaval who used words but chose not to make statements with them.

Kotz traces the proliferation of text in 1960s art to the use of words in musical notation and short performance scores. She makes two works the “bookends” of her study: the “text score” for John Cage’s legendary 1952 work 4′33″ - written instructions directing a performer to remain silent during three arbitrarily determined time brackets - and Andy Warhol’s notorious a: a novel–twenty-four hours of endless talk, taped and transcribed–published by Grove Press in 1968. Examining works by artists and poets including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, George Brecht, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Jackson Mac Low, and Lawrence Weiner, Kotz argues that the turn to language in 1960s art was a reaction to the development of new recording and transmission media: words took on a new materiality and urgency in the face of magnetic sound, videotape, and other emerging electronic technologies. Words to Be Looked At is generously illustrated, with images of many important and influential but little-known works.

Liz Kotz writes on contemporary art and on interdisciplinary avant-gardes of the postwar era. She teaches in the Art History Department at the University of California, Riverside.

“If cities are indeed unique and unparaphraseable, then, as such, they have more in common with poetic than literal language, with literature than information. Insofar as the city exceeds interpretation, it operates like a work of literature does. For while they have economic, political, social and cultural histories which can be identified and in relation to which they can be described, interpreted, explained, judged etc., cities also display a resistance to such interpretation. My thesis is that this lies, not in some deep or hidden meaning that we have failed to uncover about a city, or in a theory not yet written, but rather in the unique and particular way cities shape the lives of those who live in them, what I have called their “citiness”.

This can be understood, I think, analogously, through Blanchot’s concept of the “literariness” of a work of literature. Literariness, for Blanchot, is something that occurs when language is released from its significatory, descriptive or narrative function and becomes material effect - rhythm, sound, colour, contour, style etc. (Blanchot 1943). He refers to this as the double negativity of literature (Haase and Large 2001). Information bearing language communicates by the dual operations of negating the presence of reality, and positively substituting ideas for things. In literature however, “the word does not transform the negativity of language into the positivity of the concept, but stubbornly maintains and preserves it” (Haase and Large 2001:32).

The “thingness” and the “aboutness” of language are superimposed. Language no longer substitutes concepts for things, it no longer communicates, but becomes itself, becomes “other”, circulating among, between and within the world of words itself. This explains the resistance of literature to interpretation or comprehension, or rather the infinite displacement or slippages of meaning that occur within it. Failure to understand literature cannot be attributed to insufficient knowledge, but rather to its inherent autonomy, its “otherness”.

The city asserts its otherness in a number of ways.

Firstly, it exposes us to an excessive presence of others, of strangers, who call into question our ownership of the world…

Second are questions of authorship … the city annihilates authorship … The very multiplicity of agency at work in it means firstly that it is not made by any one … Urban life is constantly made and unmade by multiple realities, and authorship, no matter how prominent, quickly disappears into obscurity, anonymity or cultural history…

Thirdly, like the work of literature, the city brings its authors / writers into existence, not the other way round … The city is not authored by us, not written by us, but writes us. It writes us into being as city people, as people constituted by and living in “the constantly moving stream of money” (Simmell 1971:330) and does so as we “read” it, or, in de Certeau’s words, walk it, live our everyday lives in it…” From Citiness and Literariness: Architecture Dejeuner with Lindsay Bremner [PDF]