Missed Connections — by Cristobal Mendoza — is a 2-channel Internet-aware software piece that continuously fetches the latest posts in the “missed connections” section of Craigslist.org. Each post is presented one at a time, and is filtered by looking for so-called stopwords. Computer Scientists define stopwords as those words that do not convey the meaning of a message. In essence, they are considered signal noise in the stream of potential information. Continue reading

Conducting Mobility - Brian Collier, Free Soil, Amy Balkin / Kim Stringfellow / Tim Halbur / Greenaction / Pond, kanarinka, Michael Mandiberg, Laurie Palmer, Platform, Josephine Starrs / Leon Cmielewski :: Curators Ryan Griffis and Claude Willey collide with a carload of cultural projects focusing on the problems of mobility and energy :: @ greenmuseum.org.

Our world is continually shaped and reshaped by patterns of mobility. In the United States, motorization and single-use zoning are the principal components of a system that depends upon long distance travel and cheap energy. In the developing world, the wasteful patterns of the West are being repeated in places like China and India where increased automobile and fuel use are quickly becoming the norm. Continue reading

Multiplace - Network Culture Festival - 16 cities / towns in 8 countries + the Internet :: April 26 - May 3, 2008 :: Bahon, Banska Bystrica, Bratislava, Kosice, Nitra, Trnava, Zilina (Slovak Republic), Berlin (Germany), Brno, Prague, Ostrava (Czech Republic), Budapest (Hungary), Glasgow (UK), Novi Sad (Serbia), Reykjavik (Iceland), Wroclaw (Poland).

Multiplace is a network of people and independent organizations interested in the interaction between media, technology, the arts, culture and society. The activities of this network culminate each year in this festival that simultaneously takes place within various independent organizations internationally. Continue reading

3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA 2008) :: September 10-12, 2008 :: Athens Information Technology (AIT), Athens, Greece :: Call for Papers and Artworks / Games / Demos :: Deadline: May 12, 2008.

The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player /online gaming, technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created new forms of entertainment that attract, immerse and absorb their participants. The phenomenal success of such a “culture” to initiate a mass audience in patterns and practices of its own consumption has supported the evolution of an enormously powerful mass entertainment, digital art and performance industry extending deeply into every aspect of our lives, leading further to major societal and business contacting changes. Continue reading

“[…] The idea of this work more than its execution is the compelling element. Anyone who has clipped articles out of a newspaper, saved snippets of poetry or edited together their own home videos has experienced the process that is re-created in “Dolls”. But (Kate) Armstrong cleverly nurtures a circumstance of wry tension that illustrates the fraying tether between traditional literary and neo-digital expression. The same page never appears twice but the user can capture and save a favorite page. This is an intriguing re-enactment of the experience of reading a narrative book where particular passages haunt the imagination and are saved to our cognitive hard drive. Continue reading

The Iowa Review-Web [TIR-W] Volume 9 no. 1: Multi-Modal Coding: Jason Nelson, Donna Leishman, and Electronic Writing :: Guest edited by Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink.

“Literary hypertext and hypermedia have been made for 15 years with a wide variety of development systems. When the ELO curated its first Electronic Literature Collection in 2006, in an open call for works, the 60 selected were made in some 10 different development systems, from HTML to VRML. Who is in this game, and how do we draw in new readers and players? Our featured artists answer this question in our interviews. Continue reading

Nude Studies in Aleatoric Environments, by Pall Thayer, consists of automated nude studies abstracted through geological intervention. Though it was conceived primarily as a gallery installation, here Thayer offers us a “taste” of the full piece. The online version uses 4 locations — Lone Pine, California; College Outpost, Alaska; Isla Barro Colorado, Panama; and Wyandotte Cave, Indiana — and only represents the Americas. The gallery version uses 12 locations and represents the whole globe; it also has audio which could not be included in the online version due to bandwidth constraints. Continue reading

The winners of the Turbulence supported ShiftSpace Commissions Program have been announced. In The Space category the winners are:

1st Place - Yeas & Nays: A ShiftSpace widget for calling representatives by Christian Croft ($2000) - A ShiftSpace that allows a citizen to call her representative from any webpage, record her call and publish it on that very page. Yeas & Nays attempts to promote civic responsibility and a democratic discourse and make our citizen duty just a bit easier. This space combines ShiftSpace’s power to layer commentary above existing contexts with advances in VoIP telephony to build a tool for informed civic action. It layers the citizen’s act of calling an official on top of online information substantiating her argument. Continue reading

Kunstensite vzw and Courtisane Festival present the mini-symposium Mediakunst 2.0 with Geert Lovink and Mark Amerika focusing on the changing shape and repositioning of media-art in the age of Web 2.0.

In a string of fast paced mini-lectures and presentations, Amerika and Lovink will explore some of the recent tendencies within both the field of media-art as well as popular digital culture. They will attempt to maneuver through the hype and trends emanating from these emerging fields while taking into account broader cultural and historical perspectives. Continue reading

Theory + Practice curated by Evonne M. Davis; Networked curated by Donna Kessinger, New Media Room; If So, Then So! New Work by Kevin Darmanie, Project Room :: April 19 - May 17, 2008 :: Opening Reception: April 19, 7 -10 pm :: Gallery Aferro 73 Market St Newark NJ .

“There are no countries now.” From artist Alan Bigelow’s When I was President :: Theory+ Practice is an acknowledgment, interrogation and fete of the void between what the world could be and what it is. Web artist and writer Alan Bigelow’s piece, When I was President is an interactive projection that details a presidency ended by a suicide bomber: ‘a high school teacher from Des Moines.’ ‘She said it was the only way to make the world right again.’ Continue reading