“…(R)ecent confrontations within the field of contemporary art have precipitated an awareness that there have emerged in increasing numbers, within the last decade, new critical, artistic formations that foreground and privilege the mode of collective and collaborative production. Is this return an acknowledgment of the repressed memory of a social unconscious? Is the collectivization of artistic production not a critique of the poverty of the language of contemporary art in the face of large scale commodifications of culture which have merged the identity of the artist with the corporate logo of global capitalism? These questions shadow the return of collectivity in contemporary artistic practice and in so insistent a manner, across a broad geographic area that to ignore the consequences is to miss the vital power of dissonance that is part of its appeal to the contemporary thinkers and artists who propose collectivity as a course artistic work. Continue reading

[Image: Martha Rosler, Point and Shoot, 2008] OUT NOW! - Friends of William Blake (Patrick Cockburn, Kathy Kelly, Trevor Paglen, Martha Rosler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jalal Toufic) :: September 5 - November 8, 2008 :: Opening: September 5, 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: e-flux, 41 Essex Street, New York City :: Lecture program at The Cooper Union: October 16, 7:00 pm - Kathy Kelly (at Wollman Auditorium); October 22, 7:00 - Patrick Cockburn (at The Great Hall).

Last April in Liverpool Martha Rosler invited me to attend a book launch and a lecture by Patrick Cockburn, an Irish journalist widely considered to be among the harshest critics of the war in Iraq. From this experience, the idea emerged to organize an exhibition and several lectures on the occupation of Iraq to take place in New York this Fall. Continue reading

The New Forms Festival and SWARM present Performative - roots+wires and Free Daily :: September 4, 2008; 8:00 pm - September 5, 2008; 1:00 am :: Open Studios, 252 East 1st, Vancouver, BC.

Performative explores differing approaches to new media integration within interdisciplinary contexts. Stemming from research in the fields of dance, lecture, and installation, the works utilize disparate new media technologies to not only accent and augment performance techniques, but to entirely pollinate the creation and presentation of the work. Continue reading

Ambient.Vista: Fahim Amir - The end of time and space (as we know it) :: A lecture-performance by Fahim Amir (premiere) :: July, 10, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Austrian Cultural Forum London, 28 Rutland Gate, London.

Artist in residence at London-based ambient.vista, Fahim Amir, will present The end of time and space (as we know it), a commission by the interdisciplinary arts production company Ambient Information Systems. Amir’s lecture-performance will feature the city as an ensemble of battlefields and sites of negotiation.

Fahim Amir is a Vienna-based theoretician and cultural producer with Afghan origins. Recently he worked as dramatic adviser of spiel:platz at the dietheater Vienna.

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

MICHAEL SMITH + JOSHUA WHITE :: Artists’ Talk and Screening :: Tuesday, June 17, 2008, 6:30 pm :: Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) :: 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011 :: Admission free

EAI presents a special evening with Michael Smith and Joshua White. Smith and White will screen works that they have produced together and speak about their long collaboration.

Over the last 11 years, Michael Smith and  Joshua White have collaborated on numerous videos and installations that incorporate Smith’s deadpan and wide-eyed alter-ego, “Mike.” Gullible and ever-hopeful, Smith’s eponymous character is an Everyman living in a media-saturated world that he does not really understand. Continue reading

NEW THURSDAY CLUB :: Supported by the Goldsmiths GRADUATE SCHOOL and the Goldsmiths DIGITAL STUDIOS :: 6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW :: FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME. No booking required.

Don’t miss the last Club of this academic year on 5 June 6-9 pm, followed by sound performances and wine!!

JUNE 5 with ALEX MCLEAN & DAVE GRIFFITHS: Live Coding:
Live coders program in conversation with their machine, dynamically adding instructions and functions to running programs. Here there is no distinction between creating and running a piece of software - its execution is controlled through edits to its source code. Continue reading

IMMEDIATE ART :: The Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia in Gdansk (PL) and curator Kasia Wozniak are happy to present the IMMEDIATE ART project: the IMMEDIATE ART project concerns a wide range of phenomena that deal with the modern mutual relationships between arts and new technologies. Our aim is to build a panorama of these artistic phenomena and offer an event dealing with these issues in an integral form and wide thematic scope.IMMEDIATE ART is a series of lectures given by the eminent theoreticians. In parallel to the above mentioned lectures, the invited artists will present their works, discuss the interconnectedness of art and technology and will talk about their art from the point of view of the latest technological changes. We are deeply convinced that these two complementary cycles will provide the public with an in-depth panorama of the fascinating phenomena in the body of New Media Art. Continue reading

tinynoise :: TALKS in BETHANIEN, BERLIN :: May 11;  16h  @ HACKfemEAST exhibition, Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien :: Mariannenplatz 2 - 10997 Berlin, Germany.

HACKfemEAST is an exhibition about women, technology and networks in Eastern Europe. The exhibition project HACK.Fem.EAST seeks to present experimental and artistic practices of artists and activists working in digital networks in Eastern Europe. Main topics are media, art and hacking. Main protagonists are women or projects in which women play an important role. Aim of the project is to provide and to develop a network platform. This is achieved through five elements: the exhibition, the opening event, two days of conferences, a publication in newspaper format and a website. Continue reading