SURVIVALL, ‘Sur-viv-all’, is a word which reflects the 3 languages used during the project, which formed part of Andre Lemos’ sabbatical research at University of Alberta - English, French and Portuguese. The joint interest of the artists was to reflect on the relationship between the virtual territories of cyberspace, abstract representations of our worlds and the material conditions of life. In this case, the videos collected along the way show not only suburbia in winter snow but the blanket of private wifi signals, both closed and open which were detected at the beginning and end of each ‘letter’. Continue reading

Cityscapes — initiated by Myron Turner — offers a common ground where people can share their experiences of the places where they live and have lived, or have visited. Or places they’ve imagined, read about, hope or have hoped to visit. In other words, Cityscapes is not only the reflection of physical space but of a shared imaginative space.

Its theoretical basis lies in ideas of locative art and pyschogeography. The camera and descriptive text are its locative technologies, and the pyschogeography consists of the spaces we inhabit as a global community. Continue reading

How do you find the spirit and play of exploration in an optimized geography?

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates. Continue reading

Test_Lab: Topology :: April 17, 2008; 8:00 pm :: V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam :: This event will be streamed live.

Featuring: Tiziana Terranova (IT), Christoph Wachter (DE), Mathias Jud (CH), Yolande Harris (UK), Bureau d’etudes (FR), and Di Mainstone (UK).

Topology is often mentioned as an ultimate example of the same subject being studied in parallel within various branches of science and art, each branch approaching the subject from its own background and with its own methodologies. Today, there are numerous initiatives on the radar in which representatives of the various branches of topology explicitly state a desire to exchange ideas and methodologies related to the topic. But do all these diverse branches even share a common understanding of what topology is? Continue reading

No Place - like Home. Perspectives on Migration in Europe :: April 15 - June 21, 2008 :: Opening: April 12; 6 - 9 pm :: Argos - Centre for Art and Media, Werfstraat 13 rue du Chantier, B – 1000 Brussels.

The group exhibition No Place - like Home: Perspectives on Migration in Europe features eighteen Belgian and international artists. Their videos, photographic works and installations take a closer look at what lies under the surface of the migration issue. Migration is a thing of all ages. Where Europeans once colonized various continents and emigrated en masse to other lands both in and beyond their own continent, movement from the opposite direction has now taken hold. Capital, goods and information circulate freely in the late-capitalist, globalized world economy. Continue reading

Brentford Biopsy :: April 5- June 15, 2008 :: :: Watermans Gallery, 40 High Street, Brentford, London.

Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design / mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Imaging Beijing by John (Craig) Freeman [Part of the Mixed Realities exhibition, on view until April 15, 2008] - Imaging Beijing is the latest installment of Imaging Place, a place-based, virtual reality project that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and virtual worlds to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. When a denizen of Second Life first arrives at Imaging Beijing, he, she or it can walk over a satellite image of central Beijing where they will find a networks of nodes constructed of primitive spherical geometry with panoramic photographs texture mapped to the interior. Continue reading

“It’s another installment of Entropist, a sci-fi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. The British branch of Penguin Books recently premiered a new website called - a bit lamely - We Tell Stories. The basic idea is that six authors will tell six stories over a period of six weeks. More interesting, however, is the fact that story #1, “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming, was told using Google Maps. So combine this same strategy with today’s urban sci-fi, add a few more cities - and you’ve got a way to map science fiction across the planet. Could there someday be a Google Maps of Sci-Fi? Continue reading

Made partly in a Generator.x 2.0 workshop, Andreas Nicolas Fischer’s ‘A week in the life’ is a three dimensional visualisation of movement and communication made with a cell phone during a week roaming around Berlin. Using bespoke software written for his mobile phone, Andreas was able to record the longitude and latitude of his position in the city. The data was then passed to a Processing sketch, which resulted in the 3D representation. WMMNA extracted the following info regarding the journey from Processing to final data sculpture:

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’ Continue reading

Nomadic Shopping - A locative media project by Esther Polak :: World premiere of GPS track docu-fiction: Esther Polak used a new innovative GPS-functionality to tell a poetic story: a GPS docu-fiction, central theme being the The Opzeeland Dairy Route by night :: Place: The Waarder Polder, an industrial area in East – Haarlem, Netherlands :: Space: The daily route of the mobile Dairy Shop Van Opzeeland.

To create a double image of space and place, Esther Polak used the “mashup website” VeoGeo.com. The website combines images of GPS registrations with YouTube route-footage. Combined and synchronized, tracks and video’s can be followed step by step resulting in an extremely realistic experience of armchair traveling. Continue reading