The piece uses Craigslist’s RSS feature to obtain new feeds to add to the XML database that the software uses. Once new feeds are obtained, a screen scraping routine is employed to obtain the full text of the post. The software operates in real time, but it keeps a cache of posts to cycle through. This cache is periodically flushed, its period determined by the number of missed connections posts that the program obtains in a day. Like many of my other pieces, Missed Connections was developed in Java. XML reading and writing was made possible via JDOM and the RSS component used ROME for parsing the feeds.

Cristobal Mendoza is a Venezuelan media artist and programmer whose interests lie in the intersection of technology with the personal. His current research involves databases and data bodies, networks and visualizations of networks. He obtained an M.F.A. in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, and his B.A. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 2003. His work has been shown in various venues in the United States and Italy.

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. In all parts of the world, city governments struggle to keep pace with the energy and mobility needs of their expanding populations. Tourism, migration, military conflict, and environmental disasters all keep human beings on the move. Many choose their destinations, while others are forced towards them. Our 21st century world may ride the precarious line between the temporary and the permanent, and the ecosystems plundered by our unquenchable energy needs might have the final word. Art, and other forms of cultural reflection, can help to make accessible the structures and! systems that propel us. It falls to all of us as global citizens to redirect our governing institutions and cultural perceptions ? or we may find ourselves facing the end of the road.

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. There are workshops, installations, discussions, concerts, performances, exhibitions, presentations, screenings and live streaming.

Multiplace is distinguished from other similar European festivals not only by content, but by its informal structure. It attracts visitors through its support of unexpected and creative connections between art, culture and new media as well as by its decentralized character and openness to participation. This year, it includes around 40 independent galleries, art schools, art centers, clubs and many unaffiliated individuals. Visitors can enjoy more than 100 events, some of them taking place at several locations at the same time.

Program selection: An unconventional music / internet performance; Ping Melody by Pawel Janicki from Wroclaw, and the premiere of the new local electronic group Bulkladung, will open the festival in Bratislava. A4 Zero Space prepares a dance / motion / kinetic dance performance working with the electromagnetic field of performers also in Bratislava, while an opportunity to listen to an LP made of neon light will be available in the former synagogue in Trnava. On the top of Iceland’s Blafjoll Hill with a view of the Atlantic Ocean, the First May Manifestation by Movement Freedom Sound group will take place. In the House of Art in Brno, online archives and new media education will be discussed. Brno will also offer the installation, Expogeneca, plastic figures which will melt if they do not get enough visitor’s attention. Additionally, this city will be the location for a survey of contemporary music-visual culture and communication called Uchoko and the! Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno will be the host of a virtual cafe that will connect favorite cafes in Brno, Praha, Hradec Kralove and Budapest through streaming. Nomad Space’s Soundbus, the nomad gallery, will wander around various festival locations to present a selection of contemporary Austrian sound art.

Performance Beer Barrel Polka Accordion Theremin Reunion will mediate through the internet a collective play on accordion and theremin in several other cities at the same time. Through skype you will be able to train a parrot to talk at FreeDom in Bahon. At this location as well, Ursula Endlicher will discuss new media art in the USA and introduce her project html_butoh, bringing the human body into the technical world of the Internet.

Organisers:

Bahon: FreeDom
Banska Bystrica: Tvor
Berlin: Lady Gabi
Bratislava: Multiplace, A4 - asociacia zdruzeni pre sucasnu kulturu (A4 ? Associations for contemporary culture), Atrakt Art, 13 kubikov, SPACE projects | residency lab | store, Film club 35 mm, Open Design Studio, Urbsounds Collective, Polish Institute, Goethe-Institut Bratislava, Itchy bit, Jurgen Rendl, Urban Flow
Brno: Hucot, Dum umeni mesta Brna (The Brno House of Arts), Dum panu z Kunstatu (House of the Lords of Kunstat), Kavarna Kunstatska trojka, FaVU VUT (Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Fine Arts), Chernobylmusick, Anymade, Fiume initiative, Galerie G99, Jan Zalesak, Ars Publica, Lenka Dolanova and Michal Kindernay, klub Desert, club Fleda
Budapest: Transformers Hacklab, PsyShip Medialab
Glasgow: Glasgow School of Art
Kosice: IC Culture Train
Nitra: Nitra gallery (Bunker)
Novi Sad: Open Design Studio
Ostrava: Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Ostrava
Praha: Mlok, Institut Intermedii, Circle of Curators and Critics, CIANT ? International Centre for Art and New Technologies
Reykjavik: The Lost Horse Gallery
Trnava: Galeria Jana Koniarka
Wroclaw: WRO Center Sztuki
Zilina: Stanica Zilina - Zariecie

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.

The International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts (DIMEA), in cooperation with ACM, is the premier forum for the presentation of societal, business and technological advances and research results in cross-disciplinary areas related with digital interactive media in entertainment, art and creative technologies. This conference is dedicated to build common ground between research, design and development, learning and collaboration in its myriad digital media forms: one of its many objectives is the exploration of ‘play & learn’, demonstrating new arenas and applications for digital gaming and incorporating leading edge technologies, designs and models in our changing views about what is involved in gaming.

DIMEA 2008 is jointly organized by Athens Information Technology (AIT), ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI, Singapore Chapter) and the Society for Excellence and Innovation in Interactive Experience Design (InExDe).

DIMEA 2008 will bring together academics, technologists, artists, designers, and industry representatives to address and advance the leading edge of new digital and interactive media.

Who should attend:

Academics, Animators, Artists, Designers, Developers, Educators, Engineers, Game Designers, Industry Professionals, Media Industry, Video Producers, Directors, Writers, Performers, Photographers, Videographers, Researchers, Students. Anyone who wants to be inspired to adopt advanced ways in industry, society, business, research and teaching, expand their knowledge on a wide variety of topics within the field of digital media, network with cross-disciplinary experts from digital media professionals to academic experts, and evolve with this ever-changing field!

DIMEA 2008 is one of the few conferences that combines full technical papers as well as artwork / game / demo submissions, to accommodate, after evaluation and selection, both technical oral sessions as well as artwork / game / demo exhibition sessions. For each one of the two tracks of the conference further information is separately provided below.

Technical Conference Track: The following, non exclusive, topics are called for:

Entertainment, Art and Technology - Location-based and Pervasive Gaming, Mobile Entertainment, Digital Games in Practice, Computer Entertainment Research, Open-Source Gaming Engines, Implications for Multimedia and Web Design, Artistic Games, Commercial Games, Edutainment, Educational/Serious Games, Interactive Games, Games as Pedagogy, Analysis of Games, e-Performance (e-Opera,e-Theatre, e-Concert, …), Virtual Exhibitions and Museums

New Media Emerging Technologies - Personal Broadcasting (Podcasting and Vlogging), Novel Applications for Mobile Phones, Social and Interactive Computing Applications, Collaborative Spaces/Environments, Innovative Applications of Technology in the Arts, Mixed Reality and Enhanced Visualization, Context-aware Environments and Devices, Immersive Learning Experiences, Communication Technologies and Systems for Digital Media, Advanced Authoring and Composition of Media, Advanced Interaction, Targeted/Personalized Media, Adaptable Media and AI

Code Art - Algorithmic Art, Software Art, Net Art, Installation Art, Tangible Computing, Sonic Art

Digital Visual and Auditory Media - Digital Photography, Digital Imaging as Art, Advances in 3D Modelling, Digital Printing, Non-Photorealistic Rendering, Digital Sound and Music, Digital Music Synthesis and Composition, Graphics and Animations, Digital Comics

Moving Media - Digital Video, Distance Collaboration/Performance, Computer Animation, Interactive Movies

Culture of New Media - Network Culture, Philosophy of New Media, Digital Identity

Interactive Stories - Digital Narrative, Digital Asset Management, Semantic Web Technologies, Interactive Television and Cinema, Game Design and Storytelling

Full Paper Submissions: Prospective authors are invited to submit full technical papers of not more than 8 pages, including tables, figures and references at the conference online paper submission system. Prospective authors should adhere to the conference full paper submission guidelines. Full Papers should present original research related to the above mentioned scientific areas, not published elsewhere. Please refer to the conference Web site for detailed submission guidelines. Full papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers from the International Technical Program Committee in a single-blind process, judging on their relevance, novelty and technical quality.

Art Work / Game / Demo Exhibition Conference Track: DIMEA 2008, with the participation of the MEDIATERRA FESTIVAL, aims to offer the opportunity to artists, independent creators, multimedia authors, programmers and theorists to exhibit their digital interactive rich-media works in art and entertainment, and at the same time to create a forum of communication, discussion and collaboration on advances in the already deployed practices.

We cordially invite artists, creators, designers, game developers, generally practitioners working with digital interactive media to submit their original contributions to the DIMEA2008 Artworks / Games / Demos exhibition track, in the context of the following five DIMEA 2008 subject art-related areas:

Entertainment, Education, Art and Technology: Location-based and Pervasive Gaming, Mobile Entertainment, Digital Games in Practice, Computer Entertainment Research, Open-Source Gaming Engines, Implications for Multimedia and Web Design, Artistic Games, Edutainment, Educational/Serious Games, Interactive Games, Games as Pedagogy, e-Performance (e-Opera, e-Theatre, e-Concert, …), Virtual Exhibitions and Museums

New Media Emerging Technologies - Personal Broadcasting (Podcasting and Vlogging), Novel Applications for Mobile Phones, Social and Interactive Computing Applications, Collaborative Spaces/Environments, Innovative Applications of Technology in the Arts, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and Enhanced Visualization, Context-aware Environments and Devices, Immersive Learning Experiences, Communication Technologies and Systems for Digital Media, Advanced Authoring and Composition of Media, Advanced Interaction, Targeted/Personalized Media, Adaptable Media and AI, Semantic Web Technologies, Digital Identity

Code Art - Algorithmic Art, Software Art, Net Art, Installation Art, Tangible Computing, Sonic Art, Artificial Entities

Digital Visual and Moving Media - Computer Animation, Interactive Movies, Advances in 3D Modeling, Semantic-based Approaches, Real-time 3D

Interactive Media - Digital Narrative, Interactive Television and Cinema, Interactive Drama, Interactive Storytelling

At the very least, “Dolls” explores a fabulous range of themes including but not limited to everything from ethics to fashion. These themes are explored through an absurd collection of systems and materials, from Mohair, through contagion to Venus Fly-traps. Absurdity is perhaps the resuscitated and re-fertilized Venus Fly-Trap of today’s digital art world not to mention the now myriad “send to a friend” online communities. Everything old in the recent history of culture is new again online. Repetition begets re-examination…” From Why Some Dolls Are Bad by Eliza Fernbach, Furtherfield.org.

“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.

In a world that challenges (and sometimes defeats) writers with its constantly multiplying means, we chose to focus this issue of TIR-Web on two committed long-time practitioners. Donna Leishman, coming from both a fine arts and commercial background, creates finely wrought narrative based on folkloric or historic myth, using very few words. Jason Nelson, coming from a print MFA program and self-taught in software, creates poetical / fictionary “creatures” in great numbers, many of whom use text he has written or appropriated, while others focus on screen morphology or interface, as if “interface” were itself the real “critter” at issue…”

Another reason Thayer released an online version is because of its “documentation.” The “about this work” link reveals the source-code for the work, which Thayer has open-sourced under a GPL license. He writes “The source-code is presented in a framework I’ve designed called CodeChat.”

Separated into three categories — (1) Visualizer client (what you see), (2) Image retrieval, image manipulation and network communication, and (3) Real-time seismic data retrieval — “it’s a web-based, threaded discussion forum that allows for separate discussion at each line of the code. What I do to start things off is put in a few comments, trying to focus mostly on the conceptual and aesthetic implications of the lines I choose to comment on as I want the discussion to be more at that level rather than a technical level. By doing this what I’m pointing out … is that everything you need to know about the work is in the code … (which) can easily be materialized … (W)hen galleries and museums are wondering how to preserve this type of art, they should be looking at preserving the source-code.“

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. The proposed space enables a phone call with a representative from a webpage that politically concerns you. Type shift + space, enter a location, and Yeas & Nays fetches your matching representatives. Next, enter your phone number, and the system initiates a call that bridges your phone to that of the representative’s office. After the call, the widget updates to include a recording of your call whose URL you can send as proof of your civic action to all your friends. Read on >>

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. The discussion will also attempt to locate the connections between recent phenomena such as the 90s net art movement and contemporary web 2.0 culture, club-culture VJing and and live audiovisual performance art, and the interface of web design and media-art.

Session 1: the ‘net.art’ movement in a historical perspective (Amerika)
Session 2: media-art today (Lovink)
Session 3: fictional narratives in media-art (Amerika)
Session 4: web-design vs. media-art (Lovink)
Session 5: net.art VJ - cyberpsychogeography and digital flux persona (Amerika)
Session 6: media-art and Avant-Pop (debate Amerika - Lovink)

Speakers:

Geert Lovink is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and internet critic. He studied political science in Amsterdam and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has been involved in the cultural politics of internet since the early nineties. He is the co-founder of projects such as the Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. In 2002 MIT Press published two of his books, Dark Fiber and Uncanny Networks. Since then other books appeared such as My First Recession (2003) and The Principle of Notworking (2005). In 2004 he moved from Brisbane to Amsterdam to found the Institute of Network Cultures. He is research professor at School of Interactive Media (University of Applied Sciences) and associate professor in the new media program at the humanities media studies department of the University of Amsterdam. In 2005-2006 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third study on critical internet culture for Routledge New York entitled Zero Comments. Currently, together with the US political scientist Jodi Dean, he is writing a book for Polity Press called Blog Theory.

Mark Amerika has exhibited his work in many venues including the Whitney Biennial, the ICA in London, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum. He has had four early career retrospectives including the first-ever net art retrospective in 2001 at the ACA Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo, Japan (”Avant-Pop: The Stories of Mark Amerika [an Internet art retrospective]”). Both retrospectives covered the years 1993-2001. In 2004, he had two follow-up retrospectives, one at Ciberart Bilbao in Spain, and one at the Festival International de Linguagem Eletronica at the Gallerie do SESI in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

A cult novelist, media theorist, web publisher, and VJ artist who has performed internationally, Amerika is the author of many books including his recently published collection of artist writings entitled META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press). He has also directed a series of feature length foreign films scheduled to be released in various formats as part of a new body of work entitled the Foreign Film Series. Amerika, who as the founder of the Alt-X Network [altx.com] is publisher of the electronic book review, is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

April 24, 2008; 1:30 -5:30 pm :: Cirk - Zebrastraat, Ghent, Belgium

“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.’

Artists: Andrew Leo Baron, Alan Bigelow, Deric Carner, Robert Ladislas Derr, Nisha Drinkard, Katarina Jerinic, Darren Jones, Tracie Lee, Paula McCartney, Tori Purcell, Stephanie Standish, Alina Tenser, Matthew Verdon, Brian Wondergem

According to independent curator and video artist Donna Kessinger, the world of networked art is expansive and constantly evolving daily with new technology and applications. Networked is an effort to take into consideration both literal and physical interpretations based on an open call for networked art on a local and international level. This small group survey is an attempt to look at the manifestation of net-based interactive projects, and physical attempts to escape from virtual realities, resulting in work with a more personal connection - going back to an idea of networks having to do with people and the way we live and work, both alone and in community.

Artists: William Brovelli, Doris Cacoilo, Beatrice Coron, The Coalition for Daring Behavior, Sean Hovendick, Visakh Menon, William Oliwa, Gunter Puller, Katherine Sweetman, Amanda Thackray, Michelle Wilson, Jody Zellen

Kevin Darmanie’s oversized comic panels each function independently but can be read as part of an ongoing narrative. Set between Trinidad and a city not dissimilar to Newark, NJ, the series is notable for the humor, honesty and sly queries posed by Darmanie?s alter ego, Kedar. If So, Then So! is the culminating exhibition of Darmanie’s 07 studio residency at Aferro.