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

[Image: Mark Amerika] New Works with Mobile Phones: Mark Amerika, Chris Fry and Max Schleser (Chaired by Tom Corby) :: May 2, 2008, 6.30 - 8.30 pm :: Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW [Nearest Tube Oxford Circus; Map] :: Please email corbyt [at] wmin.ac.uk to be put on the guest list.

The Centre for Research in Art, Education and Media (CREAM) invites you to presentations and discussions of new work using mobile phones by Mark Amerika, Chris Fry and Max Schleser.

Mark Amerika will be showing his new work which composites various art personas and artworks into a narrative sequence of mobile phone video images that conjure up both the spirits of the past as well as hauntological actors of the present. Continue reading

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

“[…] 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

Babelswarm — by Justin Clemens (Writer), Christopher Dodds (Artist/Designer), and Adam Nash (Musician/3-D Real-Time Artist) :: Opened April 11, 2008 :: Lismore Regional Gallery, 131 Molesworth Street, Lismore NSW 2480 + Second Life.

Socrates: What a lucky morning this is turning out to be! I was looking for one virtue and have found a whole swarm of them. — Plato, Meno

In September 2007, the Australia Council for the Arts announced the recipients of its $20,000 artists residency in the 3-D online virtual world of Second Life. Dodds, Nash, and Clemens were awarded the grant to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork which explores the possibilities of literary, music / sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within the virtual world. Continue reading

Willem de Ridder - presentation + screening of Here is Always Somewhere Else: The Life of Bas Jan Ader :: April 12, 2008; 6:00 pm :: TELIC Arts Exchange, 975 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA :: Due to the size of the installation of the Gravity Art exhibition (open until April 26), seating is extremely limited; you can reserve a seat by making a $5 donation to TELIC.

Willem de Ridder has been pioneering his entire life in the arts and the media. In the beginning of the sixties he brought in Holland all the modern young composers together in the MES (Mood Engineering Society), which resulted in the very first art performances and happenings. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: No Time Machine by Daniel C. Howe and Aya Karpinska [Needs a Java-Enabled Browser] - Quiet time, dead time, free time — call it what you will, there seems to be less and less of it. What do people give up in the race to maximize every second of their waking life? What kinds of activities are replaced by the panicked drive for efficiency? No Time Machine explores these questions by mining the Internet for mentions of the phrase “I don’t have time for” and variations such as “You can’t find the time for” and “We don’t make time for.” 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

[Image: Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett / Grafik Dynamo / 2004-2005] Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist and theorist with a panache for new media powered permutational storytelling. Her work questions the nature of narrative in light of computation, social media and contemporary urban space. She has exhibited widely and is currently en route to Turkey for the March 8th launch of PATH, a bookwork generated by “an anonymous individual living in the city of Montreal between 2005-2007″ at the Akbank Art Centre in Istanbul. Above and beyond her creative practice, she is the author of Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, sits on the board at The Western Front artist-run centre and is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology. Continue reading

“…Cyberspace is the illusion of space, or the inferred space that we get when we use electronic communications equipment. I’m talking to you right now, but I’m talking to your listeners as well, and in their mind, they can imagine the two of us being in this studio. There’s a kind of space that happens there as an illusion, but there’s also the compression of space and time as they’re receiving this information at a later date than it was actually recorded. So these kind of manipulations of conceptual space are actually a byproduct of electronic media, and we didn’t get that quite so obviously in previous media. Continue reading