Yet YouTube’s term’s of service has already brought down The Empire Strikes Barack and Baracky. (btw, you can find them at RemixAmerica.org) So we at RemixAmerica.org are publicly beta launching to enlist your input…

RemixAmerica.org is the new home for remixers and video remixes. We are a non-partisan, non-profit project of Declare Yourself. Through RemixAmerica.org you can participate within the political medium of video remixes, mashups and video comments. Not only can you use our software to easily create your own remixes! BUT you can join the discussion by using your webcam to “talk back.”

Through our “American Playlist,” we make it easy to combine today’s political debate with America’s great ideas and historical speeches — from the Gettysburg Address to Kennedy’s Inaugural to Dr. King’s speeches — we give you the power to remix America’s greatest moments. Check out our blog for highlights.

If you are a remixer, we would love to feature your work. Upload to http://RemixAmerica.org today, and we promise you an informed and engaged community.

If you are a citizen journalist, cultural producer, campaign worker, etc. and have videos to share, upload them to http://RemixAmerica.org. We want to explore the impact of video remixes around America. We want to hear your voice and see your thoughts.

Also, we have noticed that there is no global discussion list for remixers. SO we have set up a google group at http://groups.google.com/group/videoremix. We hope that you join the mix and help us develop a global network of creators.

In short, we are ready to see your creativity. If you think we need to change ANYTHING, please email me noel [at] remixamerica.org and I will make sure your questions, comments, complaints, or problems are addressed.

We look forward to seeing you and we really look forward to your comments.

From the staff of www.RemixAmerica.org - Fred, Erika, Noel, Ali & Marshal.

Heike Wiermann, Holger Mader and Alexander Stublic focus on video art installations, media facades and art in the public sphere. Their latest projects cover for example the spectacular media facade design (”twists and turns”) of the Uniqua tower in Vienna, where they have managed to transform the structure of the architecture into an ever-changing, fluid state of transition. Furthermore, they co-initiated OSRAM’s new light platform Seven Screens, which they launched with their LED-piece Reprojected. This installation focuses on the shadows of computer-simulated people. The group engages in a site-specific and medium-specific way with visual perception.

Upgrade! Berlin is currently also involved in the development of the Media Facades Festival Berlin and is thus taking the opportunity to invite Alexander Stublic and Holger Mader for a public talk about their media facades and other collaborative works in the public sphere.

More infos on Mader | Stublic | Wiermann. More infos on the Media Facades Festival.

Armed with cameras, we are making our way through a three-dimensional space. The landscape before our eyes is scarred by war-demolished buildings, armed men, tanks and artillery, piles of rubble, the wounded and the maimed. This arrangement of photographs and news pictures from different zones and theaters of war depicts a universe filled with mute violence. The audio reproduces the sound of a world in which to breathe is to suffer. Special effects? Hardly. We, the visitors, feel as though our presence could disturb this chaotic equilibrium, but it is precisely our intervention that stirs up the pain. We are taking pictures; and here, photography is a weapon of erasure. More >>

Némo 2008 - Le festival incontournable de tous les Amateurs d’expérimentations audiovisuelles et de nouvelles images, en partenariat avec Le Cube, centre de création numérique (Issy-les-Moulineaux), le festival Elektra (Montréal) et le magazine Repérages. Entrée libre :: April 10 - 20, 2008.

Naturally coupling these running files with a nice domain can easily do the job (actually the result is a sarcastic http://financialtimes.isafake.org for example). The duplication of digital information on one hand has already celebrated the death of the “original”, and on the other hand it pushes on the impossibility of establishing quickly the information sources reliability. Reappropriating mainstream communication spaces and manipulating it extensively means not only to play with its corporate aesthetics, but also to make their established popular identity more fragile. In the daily media hype smorgasbord, the “perception” is what rules on the web economy of attention, so a fake proliferation, that could be triggered by projects like this, can seriously start to question the media veneration by the masses. In 1976 the Italian visionary political zine A/traverso published an inspiring article entitled “false information produce real events”. Should we assume then that a different reality is just ready to strike back? - Fake is a fake, false information produce real events, Neural.

The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism. The key to The Influencers is found in its guests and stories: impostors, pseudo-totalitarian musicians, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers, anarchitects and actors from invisible theatre. In these three days they are going to present their work, show known and less known material and speak with the public about challenges, goals and strategies.

With The Influencers, the border between disciplines is erased (since the message really is the message, and the medium is just a tactic), links between apparently distant projects are found, and bold genealogies are drawn between different countries and generations. Ambiguities are also explored and contradictions are discussed. In the manipulation of everyday symbols, as well as within what is excessive and politically incorrect, we will possibly find inspiration for changing the present and imagining the future.

In order to stand even a remote chance to realize this objective, and to critically unravel the societal role of participation, we need to acknowledge that participation is a complex and contested notion, covering a wide variety of meanings and practices that are converging into a hybrid of technologies, genres, and formats. At the same time, prudence is required, as many of the empowering and transformative opportunities cover-up a multitude of restrictions that deal with muting voices, appropriations, techniques of surveillance, inequalities, and exclusions. This volume thus provides its readership with a set of analyses that reconcile the appreciation for the analog and digital empowerment and emancipation with the critical analysis of their boundaries.

In the book’s preface, Sonia Livingstone, ICA President 2007-8, says: “This volume showcases some of the best work analysing the conditions, the complexities and the significance of contemporary forms of technologically-mediated communication and participation for ordinary members of public and for society more widely. It asserts that critique is needed more than ever, as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. Only with a critical lens can we hope to recognise both the diversification of political expression, the exuberant irreverence of youth and the quieter flowering of digital storytelling among hitherto marginalised voices as well as the anti-democratic responses of repressive governments and the legal, regulatory or economic barriers that restrict the potential of the contemporary communication environment. Since, in addressing such questions, the very standpoints from which we as researchers draw our strength are also challenged in the context of globalisation, all this adds up to an agenda that, I believe, will stimulate the field of media and communication for the decade ahead. This volume sets the scene most ably, and I look forward to the debate as it unfolds.”

Contents:

* Preface - Sonia Livingstone
* Introduction: Blurring Participations and Convergences - Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen

Part I: Critiques

* Media and the Problem of Voice - Nick Couldry
* Corporate Appropriation of Participatory Culture - Mark Deuze
* Alienation in the Information Economy: Toward a Marxist Critique of Consumer Surveillance - Josh Lauer

Part II: Images/Sounds/Texts

* Blogs and News Processes: Net Neutrality and Digital Inequality - Gaye Tuchman and Stephen Ostertag
* Inviting Comment: Public Creation of Content in Early Spanish American Newspapers - Juanita Darling
* What Does it Take for a Newspaper to be Latina/o? A Participatory Definition of Ethnic Media - Isabel Awad
* Youth-Produced Radio and its Impacts: From Personal Empowerment to Political Action - Robert Huesca
* Wireless for the Poor: No Strings Attached? A Framework for Wireless Initiatives Connecting Rural Areas - Seungyoon Lee and Arul Chib
* Mapping Publics and Issues of The War Tapes: Claims and Connections Online - Katja Wittke and Patricia Aufderheide
* Shared Internet Videos about New Orleans Reconstruction: Examining an Emerging Genre of Citizen Journalism - Deborah Clark Vance
* Afterword: The People Formerly Known as the Audience - Jay Rosen

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.

STREAM is an exhibition that will surprise New York audiences, making us reconsider, rethink and re-contextualize global art making and information technology. The selected group of Portuguese artists stretch and stream their particular lenses into outposts of innovative art, be it where their work is made, in New York or elsewhere. STREAM’s media-based works require a public art space where the art is available in a one-to-one temporal engagement, a viewing that takes place in the context of continual coming and goings, with traffic and a constant flow of visitors – different from a cinema or a concert hall. STREAM is presented as an irregular flux, which overflows its margins and continuously re-establishes its limits. All are time-based works, moving in various directions, streaming from the artist’s studio to a public space: artworks that fetishize digital media, use video and audio narratives, and display performative aspects inherent to technology.

ARTISTS: PEDRO BARATEIRO / PEDRO CABRAL SANTO / FILIPA CÉSAR / LUISA CUNHA / ALEXANDRE ESTRELA / CRISTINA MATEUS / CARLOS ROQUE /ANDRÉ SIER / JOÃO SIMÕES / MIGUEL SOARES / RUI TOSCANO

For this edition of Etoiles Polaires, we are very happy to invite Juha Huuskonen as guest curator. Juha Huuskonen is the founder of Pixelache, a festival for electronic art and subcultures which originated in Helsinki in 2002. Today, Pixelache organises events in different parts of the world: Mal Au Pixel in France and Pixelazo in Colombia. Pixelache gives a platform to creative minds from the most diverse disciplines (artists, engineers, designers, researchers, architects, etc.) but they all have a shared interest in technology and media. Pixelache focuses on grassroots networks, like the VJ scene, media activism, open source communities, etc. This way, Pixelache successfully connects traditional creative disciplines and rapidly developing (e-)subcultures.

Program:

1) The video and installation trail will feature two remarkable Finnish media artists. Terike Haapoja will present three works which illustrate her fascination for the beginning and the end of life. Juha Valkeapää’s work on the other hand is a cross between sound art and performance art. You’ll also be able to view work by several international media artists in the Pixelache screening: Mike Nourse (US), Geert Mul (NL), JODI (NL), Simon Faithfull (UK), Kristian Simolin (FI), Steven Dixon (SE), Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen (FR) and Abhishek Hazra (IN).

2) Huuskonen will also bring the Placard headphonefestival to the Vooruit Café. Musicians from all over the world will be connected with each other with their laptops and the internet. In the non-stop concert that ensues they will take turns in showcasing their talent.

3) Finally, three artists will provide visuals at one of the many concerts: Samuli Alapuranen will take the stage with Aavikko, Maippi Ketola joins Jimi Tenor & Flat Earth Society and Marita Liulia does the same for Kimmo Pohjonen.

Etoiles Polaires 07 opening night!

On Wednesday 12 Dec, Etoiles Polaires kicks off with the opening of the video and installation trail and a FrictiesSalon in which Juha Huuskonen will talk about his media arts programme. You’ll also be able to enjoy an opening concert by Kimmo Pohjonen & Marita Liulia - “Animator”. Finnish accordion wizard Kimmo Pohjonen explores traditional music, jazz, rock and avant-garde with his instrument. For Animator, Pohjonen will work with Marita Liulia, a.k.a. The Queen of Multimedia, who designed the costumes and will provide live animation at the concert.

The full programme on Wednesday the 12th of December
6 pm - midnight video and installation trail
8 pm - 9 pm FrictiesSalon with Juha Huuskonen
9 pm - 10 pm Animator opening concert
10 pm reception

More Etoiles Polaires !

New music productions:

1) The extravagant musical mastermind Jimi Tenor seems to have developed a healthy obsession with big bands and symphonic orchestras over recent years. That’s why the festival has hooked him up with jack-of-all-trades Peter Vermeersch and his big band Flat Earth Society. Tenor wrote some new songs for FES, while Vermeersch rearranged some existing Tenor songs. You can see the result on Thursday 13 Dec: Kusti Vuorinen + Jimi Tenor meets Flat Earth Society & Maippi Ketola.

2) The experimental electronic duo Pan Sonic (Mika Vainio an Ilpo Väisänen) and Belgian cellist Arne Deforce (Champ d’Action) have a shared fascination for improvisation and electronics. They met in Berlin for EP 07 and they got on like a house on fire, so get ready for a surprising concert on Saturday 15 Dec: Magyar Posse + Circle + Pan Sonic & Arne Deforce + Aavikko & Samuli Alapuranen + Polarparty .

Etoiles Polaires 07 nice extras:

1) Film night with Aki Kaurismäki’s “Leningrad Cowboys trilogy” as a warm-up in the Vooruit Café on Sunday 9 Dec.
2) Finnish food and drink in the Café during the festival

Etoiles Polaires is a co-production of Etoiles Polaires vzw and Vooruit, with the support of the Flemish government / LUSES / ESEK; made possible with the help of the FIMIC / The Finnish Cultural Institute / the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Department for Communication and Culture / the Embassy of Finland in Brussels. With special thanks to VRT - Klara.

The 2007-2008 season was made possible with the support of: The Flemish Government / the province of East Flanders / the city of Ghent; De Morgen / P&V/ VRT - Radio 1.

Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence is a combined art and architectural exhibition wherein the different parts in the exhibition are synthesised into a complete whole. The exhibition stages a theatre or space of communication: communication between the visitors and the exhibited works, between the virtual and the real. Throughout its period, the architectural installation will serve as a hub for various events including lectures, art performances, hosted talks with invited guests, and DJ-sessions.

The architectural installation, entitled The Thing, is designed by Städelschule professor for architecture Ben van Berkel together with professor Johan Bettum and Luis Etchegorry. The Frankfurt-based design-groups MESO Web Scapes and MESO Digital Interiors have developed a projection work that elaborates on the installation by dynamically embellishing it with moving images and thereby activating its surfaces. The projection work, On Things Off Things On, is a case study in augmented architecture. It is an attempt to create a reactive surface of extraordinary spatial complexity.

The installation, The Thing, consists of an upper and a lower level. The upper level serves as a form of theatre and the lower level as a more traditional exhibition space. The two levels are separated by a volumetric surface which is perforated by open holes. These holes serve to connect the two areas visually and audibly. On the lower level, the exhibition presents a group of works by artists and architects who have participated in the one-year long experimental project, entitled the Space of Communication, a project by the Städelschule Architecture Class (SAC).

The exhibiting participants in this project are the architects Asterios Agkathidis, Brennan Buck & Igor Kebel, Holger Hoffmann, Jonas Runberger, Gabi Schillig and the artists Florencia Colombo and Dani Gal.

Background

The exhibition Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence marks the end of the one-year long exploratory project the Space of Communication which consisted of a group of international artists and architects investigating various aspects of the contemporary conditions for social interaction and communication. The exhibition aims to present the artistic and architectural results of this project to the public.

While some of the projects inherently engage with new electronic technology, some take it for granted and others merely reflect upon it in a distant fashion. Common to all the projects is that they address the social and inter-relational aspects of communication or spaces of communication. In this manner the projects insist on the relevance of art and architecture to which new technology can only add but not change the basic missions or functions.

Needless to say, the emergence and current ubiquity of electronic media have had a revolutionary influence on the nature of spaces of communication. Even today, the electronic and digital technologies continue to change the conditions in which we relate and communicate with one another. These facts underlie much of the project existence and it has been developed with a keen interest in the many relevant historical and contemporary achievements within the arts and architecture.

The investigations in the Space of Communication have been undertaken in an ongoing discussion conducted through a series of seminars, Internet-exchanges and in project development efforts. The investigations have been guided by a series of invited specialists, first and foremost professor and architectural theorist, Sanford Kwinter (Rice University, Houston), and artist and professor Peter Hagdahl (Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm).

Bringing Architecture to Life

Ben van Berkel & the Theatre of Immanence presents an advanced shape projection design on architecture. This coincides with a general, increasing interest in projection on architecture. MESO Digital Interiors installation On Things Off Things On activates the structural surface of the installation. In this manner, it is also a very ambitious case study in augmented architecture, an attempt to create a reactive surface of extraordinary spatial complexity. The built structure inside the Portikus is illuminated by multiple precisely matched digital projections that both enhance and obscure the physical objects, adding information and disinformation, atmosphere and detail, playing on topics of presence, absence, body, and volume.

The installation will also be accessible via interactive live-feeds.
Journal 3 is the last of three Internet-journals that are published by the project group behind the Space of Communication. This quality is enhanced by the many events that are planned during the exhibition period. Some of these will be more conventional lectures and talks, but others will bring their own projected reality to the upper level of the theatre, turning the gallery into a performance space. Some events will fuse sound with images. In this manner, the liveliness and life-like qualities of the exhibition is emphasized.