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.

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.

Chris Fry will be showing and talking about his research into how mobile and pervasive artworks offer the potential to transcend the traditional boundaries of time and place, allowing for highly personalized experiences. He will refer to his recent artworks Nomadic Guru and Magic Ray.

Max Schleser will be showing excerpts and discussing his work on mobile-mentary a film that captures Japanese metropolitan centres through the lens of a mobile phone and will discuss his research into the impact of mobile phones on the transforming mediascape.

An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, “Survival,” with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book “Survival”, the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to “write” the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth…). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my “survival” here.

The word “SURVIVAL” has been changed to “SUR-VIV-ALL,” trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred “SUR VIV (R) E / VIE …”, something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, “VIVA”, claiming to live, an imperative. In English “survival”, has its original meaning, plus the “ALL” that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The “Waypoints” on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we’ve accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhMl7_HiuKo

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

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.

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. The artwork is a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a computer interface.

[Image: left to right: Adam Nash (aka Adam Ramona), Christopher Dodds (aka Mashup Islander), and Justin Clemens (aka S1 Gausman)]

BabelSwarm, a metaphor for the Tower of Babel, uses voice recognition software that converts the spoken word of real and virtual world participants into 3-D letterform images in an evolving tower of words. The letterforms generate relationships with each other through a combination of visual and sonic manifestations, fragments of narrative, environmental / user awareness capabilities and through interaction with existing data generated within Second Life itself such as the virtual winds, sunrises and sunsets. According to Justin Clemens, Second Life is an already burgeoning platform for today’s art. ‘Every era has a form that exemplifies it: in Shakespeare’s time, it was the theatre; today, it’s Second Life. It’s a question of trying to meet the new challenges of a new time - and the new spaces that it generates, ”Second Life epitomises the innovations of contemporary technology and culture: an entirely virtual world that has entirely real effects,” Justin said.

According to artist Christopher Dodds, Second Life is a step in the right direction for Australia contemporary arts practice. “It is encouraging to see the Australia Council recognising virtual worlds as legitimate environments for artistic practice, and while we thought our idea was solid, we knew the grant would receive a lot of attention and some pretty spectacular applications,” Christopher said.

Read more here [PDF] and here.

To gain access to Babelswarm you need to register an avatar name, download the Second Life application software, and then log-in to see the virtual world. This can be done in three easy steps:
1. Go to http://secondlife.com/ and follow the “Get Started” link. This will allow you to register an avatar name, download the application and then log into Second Life.
2. New users go to an instructional island where they can learn to walk, fly talk etc.
3. When ready, click on (or paste into a web browser) the following link: http://slurl.com/secondlife/ACVA/119/180/295/ Follow the instructions and your avatar will arrive in the Babelswarm foyer.

Read Bettina Tizzy’s interview with Adam Nash here.

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. He became chairman for Northern Europe of Fluxus, started the First European Mail Order Warehouse for Fluxus works and made with Wim T. Schippers a national television program in which Holland heard for the first time about pop art, fluxus, zero, and his own anti-art activities. In 1965 he started a national newspaper in which everybody could publish anything they wanted. It caused a revolution in medialand (like internet now). Together with friends he started Paradiso and Fantasio, two clubs in which everybody could jump on stage and do whatever they wanted. Soon there were 150 of those clubs all over the country.

Together with English media adventurers like Jim Haynes, Germaine Greer, William Levy and Heathcote Williams he started SUCK, the First European Sexpaper, the beginning of the sexual revolution. They organised also the very first sexfilm festivals in Amsterdam, with visitors from all over the world. When he discovered how reading and writing had fatal effects on our society, he stopped with the newspapers and moved to the capital city of the image culture: Hollywood. There he started making weekly radio shows without any scripts for Holland. He developed the very first audio tours, before the walkman was invented. Then he made a radioshow in which the listeners were asked to sit in their car, turn on the radio and follow his instructions. About 30.000 of them started driving in the middle of the night having an adventure they would never forget.

Together with Max Lobckovicz, Shirley and Paul Eberle he made the first magazines in America in which everybody could publish anything they wanted about their sexlife. With Queen Adrena he introduced the first erotic telephone lines. He also made the very first magazine with sound in Hollywood, and so he went on and on.

In Holland he is called the Master Story Teller so you will hang on his lips, thumb in your mouth, time vanishes and space will disappear.

He is going to tell his entire story in TELIC Arts Exchange. Among others about his illegal exhibition in the MOMA.

Upcoming Gravity Art events:
April 19 - Time-Based Conceptual Art symposium at UCLA
http://www.telic.info/time-based-conceptual-art-symposium.yeah
April 26 - Erik Wesselo presentation
http://www.telic.info/erik-wesselo.yeah
April 26 - final screening of Here is Always Somewhere Else
http://www.telic.info/here-is-always-somewhere-else.yeah

No Time Machine is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHIES

Daniel C. Howe is a digital artist and researcher at NYU’s Media Research Lab. His interests include generative systems for artistic practice (specifically for digital literary production) and the social/political aspects of technology design. In addition to a background in music, he has graduate degrees in both computer science and creative writing, and has exhibited and performed his work internationally since 1997. He is currently a visiting professor at Brown University.

Aya Karpinska is an interaction designer and artist working in digital media. She creates interactive experiences through installation art, text, sound, and game design (but not all at the same time). Aya is currently an Electronic Writing Fellow at Brown University, developing children’s stories for mobile devices. She splits her time between Providence and New York City.

Daniel and Aya collaborated previously on a spatial poetry project, open.ended.

In Charles Cumming’s story, inspired by John Buchan’s old novel The 39 Steps, we follow a man, watching from above, in an omniscient satellite view. Someone is tracking his movements through London, as well as his trips south and north across the country. At one point, for instance, our narrator wakes up on a beach, unsure of where he is or what the date might even be. A loose piece of newspaper came cartwheeling along the sand and wrapped itself around my legs. I picked it up and looked at the date. Two days had passed since I had arrived in Edinburgh. The newspaper was the Evening News. So I was still in Scotland. If the story is about a man being tracked and followed, then it is also told in a way that allows us to track and follow, clicking onward through maps of the man’s experience. But what are the possibilities for science fiction?” Continue reading Google Maps of Sci-Fi by Geoff Manaugh, io9.

An obvious starting point in any line of questioning about your work would be the primacy of text. The vast majority of your projects could be described as machines for making fiction and you’ve explored storytelling through found documents, the blogosphere and social media, and even as a geo-locative phenomena. This list of work more closely resembles a bibliography than any conventional understanding of the word portfolio. Could you talk about your relationship with storytelling and why it is a driving force in your work?

I love your comment about the notion of machines for making fiction. It’s so apt that it draws me away from the word “storytelling”. I love stories, but there is always something in the concept of a story that to me indicates a kind of finish, and what I like to do is to play with alternatives to that. I like it when ideas are in play, and when writing is tight and elegant, and when there is something active that is taking place in terms of how the writing is compiled. This active element can be anything - mechanical, computational, physical, algorithmic, activity on the part of the reader… Continued.