The DRHA (Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. The conference theme this year is to promote discussion around new collaborative environments, collective knowledge and redefining disciplinary boundaries.

The aim of the conference is to: * Establish a site for mutually creative exchanges of knowledge * Promote discussion around new collaborative environments and collective knowledge * Encourage and celebrate the connections and tensions within the liminal spaces that exist between the Arts and Humanities * Redefine disciplinary boundaries * Create a forum for debate around notions of the ’solitary’ and the collaborative across the Arts and Humanities * Explore the impact of the Arts and Humanities on ICT: design and narrative structures and visa versa.

There will be a variety of sessions concerned with the above but also with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and theorising around practice. There will also be various installations and performances focussing on the same theme. Keynote talks will be given by our plenary speakers who we are pleased to announce are Sher Doruff, Research Fellow (Art, Research and Theory Lectoraat) and Mentor at the Amsterdam School for the Arts, Alan Liu, Professor of English, University of California Santa Barbara and Sally Jane Norman, Director of the Culture Lab, Newcastle University.

In addition to this, there will be various round table discussions together with a panel relating to ‘Second Life’ and a special forum ‘Engaging research and performance through pervasive and locative arts projects’ led by Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham. Also planned is the opportunity for a more immediate and informal presentation of work in our ‘Quickfire’ style events. Whether papers, performance or other, all proposals should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA.

The Deadline for submissions will be 30 April 2008 and abstracts should be approximately 1000 words.

Cambridge’s venues range from the traditional to the contemporary all situated within walking distance of central departments, museums and galleries. The conference will be based around Cambridge University’s Sedgwick Site, particularly the West Road concert hall, where delegates will have use of a wide range of facilities including a recital room and a ‘black box’ performance space, to cater for this year’s parallel programming and performances.

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 emphasis of the software is on the process of writing / typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. It reveals additional information on digital poetry, because the speed of typing and reading it, are visualised. E-mail, blogs, all kinds of digital media can be given a “human touch” by TBT. The software has been kept as basic as possible, is free to use and users are encouraged to add functionalities. The special TBT website offers space for TBT-created messages, haiku’s and poetry, so that visitors can admire each other work.

TBT was made by Jaromil and conceived by Jaromil and JoDi. Following is a short interview with Jaromil about this new tool.

Annet Dekker: TBT was born as an idea formulated by you and JoDi. An interesting relation, a computer programmer/artist and an artist couple who like nothing more than to deconstruct soft -and hardwares. Could you describe your relation and your shared interest?

Jaromil: It is definitely a result and very much inspired by JoDi. What brought us together, besides the curiosity we nurtured about each other, was this commission for “Net art is dead” by Impakt. So we spent two weekends together. JoDi initially thought of taking the dyne:bolic operating system and subverting its functionalities, but the perspective of working further to subvert something I already invested a lot of effort on building was really discouraging for me.

So I opposed their intention and argued that, if we have something in common, surely it is a minimalist aesthetic and a passion for text and inner processes. At that point JoDi mentioned their interest in building a “key logger” that would record keys typed in any program running, in particular word processors. I insisted in focusing on the aspect of literary production, stripping down the approach to a reference implementation of a time-based text protocol for recording time-based literature - I was extremely excited about developing a software tool for literature. We all realized we like literary experiments in automatic writing and we would be interested in a tool to publish online time-based poetry as well to be used in email communication, where hesitations in writing can be a vehicle for sentiments?

AD: One of the important changes in the way of thinking about language, typography and poetry came from Italy, Marinetti said “my revolution is directed against the so-called typographical harmony of the page, instead I want to grasp words brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.” is this something you can relate to? Does your own background, also coming from Italy has been of influence in your work?

J: Yes, I was born in Italy, but I’m part of a generation that starts, for necessity and virtue, to think about a common European heritage rather than a restricted (and in case of Italy over-celebrated) national identity. I guess this opens even more ways to play with language than Italians used to do in Italy anyway. My education was as classical as it can get in the south of Italy, mostly focusing on literature and philosophy, in particular ancient Latin and Greek; such traditions of written poetry respect metrical schemes and sometimes adopts a richer punctuation than the modern one we are used to. This is certainly a point of contact with the concept of Time Based Text, but by now I’d say my frequentation of digital haiku circles as the ‘five7five’ mailing list played a more important role in this project.

I find it very difficult to relate to Futurism, which I consider a decadent re-use of Symbolism. While it might be considered true that Marinetti’s furor has contributed to syntactical innovation and modern design, I do believe that was too functional to the mission of the industry to be considered art. Furthermore I fear the aggressive attitude of futurists, but that has more to do with personal taste I guess? My inspiration is coming from writers as James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, to name just a few that challenged in various ways the performative act of what used to be called “automatic writing”.

AD: As the title indicates an important aspect of TBT is that it is time based, something that seems almost paradoxical when linked with a computer. How do you see this relation?

J: TBT is about the dimension of time in literature. The act of writing a flow of consciousness discards information. Such information is very abstract when compared to words and concepts, it can intimately describe the writer’s thoughts with all the hesitations occurring in the creative act. TBT offers also to preserve all the sentimental information that is related to the mediation of text in human communication. With TBT we preserve the emotional information produced when writing, at the same time opening the media art domain to the world of literature. The existence of a software as TBT draws complex relationships between code and language: it softly unveils the mutual influence between literary art and computer programming suggesting they can benefit from each other not just in terms of productivity.

AD: TBT reflects much the Japanese haiku’s or dada experiments. Most of these actions in poetry have a strong relation with the human, organic and emotions. Very little do they relate it seems with the ‘hard’ and ‘cold’ language and command lines of computers. How do you view this difference or better, change? Can we finally start to emotionally engage and understand our mechanics?

J: I guess the exploration of our mechanics (as opposed to the mechanics of machines) is always doomed to a sweet failure, the one that poetry celebrates with the best tears one can cry. The literary approach shifts the analysis to a produced fact, which reflects our inner sentiments: a production that is written out of our inner emotions but still sub-consciously shaped by them. Today the act of writing is arguably the most natural act of creation human kind engages on a regular basis, so there are chances to access a precedented undisclosed intimacy of thoughts there, in everyone who writes, between the lines.

AD: What do you think is more artistic the TBT software, as being software art, or the poetry that can be made by using it?

J: I think what is most artistic is the concept of TBT. The software itself and the poetry that can be made by using TBT are also a propagation of the artistic value of this exploration, but the artistic value is rather conceptual, probably definable media art. There is a formal approach in the realization that also can be argued as artistic: it is not by coincidence that both from a programmer’s and user’s point of view TBT will result minimalistic and, when adopted, extremely flexible. At least I refuse the usual rhetoric of presentation for “artistic software”, instead caring very much for functionality and a design that is faithful to text.

AD: In the past you have also talked about making the net more ‘organic’ by devising ‘new ways for information’, is TBT a step in the right direction?

J: Hopefully yes, at least it is an attempt. I hope that it can work in a natural and spontaneous way. That is why the work consists of a portable source code that works as a clean reference implementation and can be included in any other software (being open source and licensed GNU GPL), rather than building a TBT software that does it all for you, that would probably limit its usefulness on the long term. I also expect it to inspire people to think about less superficial ways of communication: right in a time in which our media-scape is getting polluted by opportunist automatas abusing our attention, the difference between us and them might be just…sentiments.

AD: How can you use TBT in your email program?

J: As an external editor: it can be called when the message needs to be written, once done will quit giving back the TBT message, which can be sent in an attachment. The reference implementation is working with the mail client Mutt, but hopefully some mail client will implement TBT natively in future.

AD: Could you tell me step-by-step what I should do to make TBT poetry?

J: once you have downloaded and compiled the source code (or you have booted a dyne:bolic liveCD or downloaded the OSX binary), just open a terminal and type ‘tbt -h’, you will get this help:

TBT - Time Based Text - v0.7 - tbt.dyne.org
Usage: tbt [options] [file]

-h print this help
-v version information
-D debug verbosity level - default 1
-c console interface mode (S-Lang)
-r record tbt - option alias: rectext
-p playback tbt - option alias: playtext -m mail composer - option alias: recmail -s save format in [ bin | ascii | html ] -x convert binary tbt to html or ascii

which suggests various possibilities to write your message, for example to simply write a message type:

tbt -c -r mymessage.tbt

and type your message, once done quit pressing ctrl+c

you can then play the message on the screen with:

tbt -c -p mymessage.tbt

in case you want to create a web TBT do

tbt -c -r -s html mymessage.html

then type and quit with ctrl+c

you can then upload mymessage.html to your website together with the tbt javascript code to be put in the same directory.

TBT currently also include a full website with “guestbook” functionality for others to upload their TBT, it is written in PHP and quite easy to setup on a normal web server.

Jaromil is a free software programmer, a media artist and activist. He has made significant contributions to the development of multimedia and streaming applications on the GNU/Linux platform (the free counterpart of commercial brands like Microsoft and Macintosh). He was born in Pescara, Italy, but now lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is author of the dyne:bolic GNU/Linux liveCD, and of various free software projects, including MuSE (a streaming server) and FreeJ (a free VJ software to live mix and adjust images and sounds). As an artist, he has created performances and netart works as the :(){ :|:& };: forkbomb (when typed in the command line of a Unix system the computer crashes). He also founded dyne.org in 2000 under the flag of Freedom of Creation, playing hybrid between the fields of politics, art and technology.

Annet Dekker is program manager at Virtueel Platform and freelance curator and researcher based in Amsterdam.

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

Hop into a white limousine with eight strangers to converse about anything in art for one hour. Hosts, who are critics and curators, will guide conversations and offer refreshments.

Featuring: Laurel Beckman; Chris Barr; Julia Bradshaw, James Morgan, and Bennett Goble; Elisheva Biernoff; Cesar Cornejo; Holly Crawford; Sharon Daniel; Bryan and Vita Hewitt with Chuck, Inc.; Heike Liss and Ellen Lake; Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry; Neighborhood Sign Club with Alison Pebworth, Leigh Ann Martin, and Megan Saperstein; Nancy Nisbet; Jennifer Parker with Matthew McGuinness; Sasha Petrenko; Johanna Poethig with VPA Painting and Mural Class, CSU Monterey Bay; Alyssa C. Salomon; Randy Sarafan; and Sherri Lynn Wood.

Subversive Complicity brings together a group of artists whose work inhabits the interstices of contemporary life — physical, temporal, and conceptual gaps within existing structures — in order to subvert everyday systems and raise social awareness in subtle, humorous, and radical ways. What happens when artists working within these spaces adapt and co-opt the strategies, languages, mannerisms, and visualizations from divergent social personas and cultural sources to create alternative modes of action and expression?

The resulting range of projects presented in this exhibition suggests the myriad of possibilities for public and private transformation to emerge when artists assume such diverse roles as agent provocateur, broadcaster, political activist, conversationalist, oral historian, engineer, broker, trader, benefactor, gamer, and even evangelist. Through gallery documentation of past actions and a series of ongoing and special events these artists invite audiences! into a set of conversations, resistances, and exchanges at once real and imagined, geographic and social, local and global.

Come join us in this exploration of how art can disrupt, re-shape, and otherwise invigorate our daily existence through interventions enacted on the streets of San Francisco, across the landscape of the Bay Area, and within other cities and virtual realities far beyond.

This exhibition was developed in association with the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice Festival hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Critical Conversations in a Limo was organized by Heather M. Mikolaj (Curator) and Clare Haggarty (Assistant Curator), in collaboration with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Dee Hibbert-Jones and E.G. Crichton.

Flock is a work by digital artists KMA (Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler) and choreographer Tom Sapsford. Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and specially commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Flock premiered in Trafalgar Square in February 2007. Watch in HD.

KMA’s mission is to apply leading digital innovation to large-scale live environments in order to expand the audiences’ experience of theatrical work beyond the physical environment in which it is presented. Within the last few years KMA has become a leading and prolific innovator across stage, film and public environments, expanding expectations of how technology can interface with these fields and how audiences ultimately experience the work.

KMA’s interactive work stems from their joint areas of interest in patterns of social behavior and digital technology as a vehicle for public theatre.

KMA’s most recent large-scale interactive installation projects (Flock, Trafalgar Square, 2007; The Hive, Grand Canal Square, Dublin, 2008) have expanded the horizons for how technology can interface with theatrical activity in an emotional and playful way. These pieces are set out of doors, in large urban spaces, without prepared actors or formal participants. The scale of the work creates a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which these works reside, drawing audiences to it, quite often by chance as people go about their daily lives, curiosity draws people in but it is the intelligence of the language structures which layer within these installations which holds the public attention and engages them in problem solving, play and social engagement. By arresting time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between performer and audience, KMA’s work is opening up new and vast environments in which art and audiences meet, equally on each other’s terms.

Every summer since 2006, Gasworks organizes an open submission project that concentrates on one art form. This year, the focus will be on Performance. How applicants approach performance can vary from the lecture and conference format, walks and outdoor actions, to experimental dance and theatre.

The applicants will be asked to submit a proposal for a performance to be realized at Gasworks (or off-site providing that no permission is required) between 7th and 16th August 2008 within a production budget of 700 pounds, this figure including fees and production costs. Four proposals will be selected: these will receive the aforementioned production budget, as well as curatorial and technical support (i.e. a project manager guiding them and sourcing material for them; and a technician working for them for one day).

The proposals will be selected by a panel composed of: Alessio Antoniolli, director, Gasworks; Pablo Bronstein, artist; Anna Colin, exhibitions curator, Gasworks; Vanessa Desclaux, assistant curator, Tate Modern.

Rules for applicants:

- A written proposal for a performance (strictly no more than 300 words)
- An artist’s statement (strictly no more than 200 words) A budget breakdown A short CV
- 4-5 images or relevant documentation of previous work.

Note that material will not be returned, so please only send non- precious items. Also please make sure you write your name on all material.

Submission information: Submissions are welcomed from all practitioners working in the UK. Deadline for submissions: Friday 6th June 2008, 5pm. By post:

Showtime
Gasworks
155 Vauxhall Street
London SE11 5RH

Short-listed artists will be notified by Monday 23rd June 2008. Performances will take place on Thursday 7th, Saturday 9th, Thursday 14th and Saturday 16th August 2008.

During the course of Fictive Days, everyday functions in the project apartment will be arranged solely on the structures of famous film scenes involving the performing characters. Consequently, everything that happens during the two weeks can be understood as a scene. All scenes will be realized by collaboration of the group and then further developed following the individual intentions, emotional reactions and practical needs of each participant.

As with any other private apartment, it will be entirely up to the participants to decide when they want to allow visitors and guests into the space during the two weeks. Participants can come and leave, as they want.

Video equipment will be available to use in the apartment and the participants can document any scene(s) they want. After the performance-residency, all participants will get a copy of all recorded material and will be free to create they own version of a final film - should they wish to do so.

To participate in this project APPLY NOW.

FICTIVE DAYS is a project developed by Peruvian artists Sergio Zevallos in collaboration with TEMPS – space support for nomadic projects. The project arises from the premise that the conscious aspects of affective relations happen between imagined identities and that the human ability to create fiction* is one of its defining characteristics. Through its live cultivation of personal relationships, FICTIVE DAYS aims to investigate both the clichés of cinema and those of our everyday lives.

More about Sergio Zevallos at www.wooloo.org/sergiozevallos.

*”Fiction” is here defined as an imaginative form of narrative, behaviour or communication that is not entirely based upon facts.

Artists of diverse backgrounds are involved, working mainly through performative strategies. Sceneries involving the passers-by in every city are created. For example you may see four people of four countries at the same time on four screens, communicating via webcam their wishes oder questions as a sort of statement.

The artists are still in dialogue about the common strategies. Given the same rules, the differences of the mentalities in the participating countries are going to be shaped more clearly. A Day in a Life is an international networking project. It gives a lot of space for discoveries, pushes accidental development in communication, letting emerge irritating and surprising connections.

The performances will take place on 19th and 20th of July 2008 at Wittelsbacher Platz. At the same time at ZKMax, Passage Maximilanstrasse / Altstadtring, video works of the participating artists will be shown. Sponsored by the Department of Culture of the Bavarian Capital Munich. Some participating artists are supported by the „Artist-in-Residence“ programme of Villa Waldberta.

A DAY IN A LIFE builds bridges, highlighting the familiar in the foreign and the foreign in the familiar.
Curation and Coordination: Horst Konietzny

CALL FOR PROPOSALS/PROJECT PARTNERS

Further development of a streaming event between nodes of Upgrade! International. The first version was held between Munich, Istanbul, Boston and Oklahoma City as part of the annual Upgrade! International gathering on November 30, 2006.

The project A DAY IN A LIFE (DIAL) locates the global in the local. The peculiarities and characteristics of each location are contrasted with those typical and atypical to other locations, other cities, other countries, coalescing their similarities and differences into a poetic fusion. Enabled by the growing power of the Internet - all locations are networked together via broadband technology.

DIAL was begun as a multimedia bridging of peoples and locations world-wide. Its second version will be specially aimed at the theme of Munich’s 850th birthday: “Building Bridges.” Artists in various places will interpret the theme in cooperative interventions in daily life both in their home locations and on-site in Munich. The 3rd annual gathering of Upgrade! International can help to bring oversees artists to Munich as stopovers on their way to the gathering in Skopje, Macedonia. The following is a description of the basic concept which should be further developed by the participating artists.

THE SETTING

Publicly accessible spaces in participating cities around the world will be connected via Internet for a span of several hours. At any given time, streaming video and audio from at least two participating partner locations can be seen and heard in these spaces, projected next to each other on screens or monitors and audible over speaker systems.

The spaces should be locations that play a role in the typical everyday life of each country – cafes, squares, city streets. These snapshots of daily life from diverse cultural backgrounds are given meaning by the selective eye of the streaming camera, the defining frame of the screen and the juxtaposition with similar but different scenes from another city. Stimulated by the tendency of the viewer to fill a formal frame of reference with meaning – in Marcel Duchamp’s words, “It is the viewers who make the pictures.”

Meaning is constructed not only by the formal framing, but also by focusing the action on specific themes. This is done through targeted media interventions and actions that take place at both locations simultaneously and which at pre-arranged times react to a common theme.

The simultaneous artistic interventions bring the snapshots into sharp juxtaposition with each other. The performance creates a medial and performative bridge of prepared performance, chance occurrence and the inevitable intercultural differences between the locations.

THE ACTION

The events in each location are structured spatially by the eye of the camera and the image frame, and the chance occurrences are given meaning via medial interventions such as a soundtrack or subtitles. Interactions between the local and the distant participants are particularly interesting and stimulating, as our event last year in Oklahoma City has shown. For instance a simple sandbox of red earth served as the site for a lively exchange for visual and textual feedback as artists in both locations mirrored and developed on each other’s words and images drawn in the sand.

The interventions may make use of various formal methods, but all will deal with the common theme “bridges” and the intervention from each city will illuminate characteristic local references to this theme.

The interventions may be executed using differing formal strategies but will all treat the common theme “bridges.” The interventions from each city will reflect on characteristic local references to this theme.

Examples of possible performances:

All performances should incorporate direct interaction with participants in another location. This can be visual, textual or audio, but the mutual interaction should be directly recognizable to non-participants watching only the screen view showing the two streams.

* Annotating everyday life: Participants and passers-by write or draw on a glass surface (for instance a café window) while a camera records the scenes of daily life visible through the glass frame.

* Bridging texts: The streaming camera records text banners as they are unfurled across the two participating locations. In each location only a fragment is visible; the full meaning only becomes clear when the videostreams of the two locations are viewed simultaneously on a screen.

* Express yourself: Passers-by are requested to jot down personal wishes for changes in the political, economic, private, ecological etc. situation and drop the notes into collection boxes. These texts can be held directly in front of the camera as the streaming image itself, or inserted as “subtitles” into the streaming video of the scene.

* Do it yourself political protest: Passers-by are requested to demonstrate spontaneously for or against something, or can write their own slogans on placards.

* Street happenings: Passers-by are handed leaflets requesting them to perform specific actions. Within the anonymous stream of pedestrians new patterns of motions and behavior arise.

* Multi-local choreography: Dancers are linked to each other with a common time code. The complete choreography is only visible when viewing both videostreams together on the screen.

ACCOMPANYING EVENTS For those who are able to come to Munich, we will arrange art talks and if possible workshops and an exhibit in cooperation with institutions in Munich.

Introduction: SVEN … is a project developed by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, and Vincent Rabaud with Jesse Gilbert, Nikhil Rasiwasia, and Marilia Maschion. The following text focuses on SVEN’s approach to and issues surrounding computer vision. Cinematography, and its relationship to both software and surveillance video, is also important to SVEN, but it’s a topic for a different text. (Art is of course of particular importance to SVEN—but that should go without saying.)

SVEN is a piece of tactical software art. Tactical software art comes out of traditions of tactical media and software art. It’s a logical mix: tactical media is a response to the way mainstream media influences culture; software art is a response to the ways mainstream software influences culture. Tactical media often involves a combination of digital actions and meatspace—or street—actions. In SVEN, these are one and the same—digital actions that take place on the street (just off the curb in this case)…” Continue reading About… Software, Surveillance, Scariness, Subjectivity (and SVEN) by Amy Alexander [PDF] .