TX-AP is a joint initiative between media activists in Australia and Indonesia. It is organised collaboratively by EngageMedia (Australia), a video sharing website and free software development, training and networking project and Ruangrupa (Indonesia) a non-profit artist initiative supporting the development of art in the cultural context through events, exhibitions, research and documentation. 50 specially invited media activists and artists will be coming to Indonesia to attend the workshop and share their skills and ideas.

The camp will provide a unique opportunity for artists, video makers, software developers and activists to collaborate and share skills in a global context where on-line video communication skills have become an increasingly important strategy for activists.

Andrew Lowenthal of EngageMedia explained “Transmission Asia-Pacific will be a unique face to face meeting between video makers and open source software developers to shape open source online video sharing applications and their strategic use for social aims”. He went on to explain “free and open source makes sense for organisations with limited means, both from a strictly economic point of view and also as part of their overall strategic aims, as the system of open collaboration and sharing that free software is based on has a natural philosophical fit with organisations working on environmental or social justice issues”.

Participants will attend from around the region, for example participants from from Hong Kong making videos about communities resisting gentrification and over development of urban areas in Hong Kong and China. This group puts video cameras into the hands of those most affected by these policies and then helps them edit and share their work on-line. Projects such as these increase the communication rights of marginalized and displaced peoples allowing them to articulate their concerns to a wider public.

Another media activist from India has been using on-line media distribution to raise awareness of censorship of diverse sexualities in mainstream Indian media outlets. They have produced a satirical and humorous look at queer moments from Bollywood films to draw attention to the marginalisation of these voices within Indian society.

Transmission Asia-Pacific is the 4th in a series of events bringing together video activists and web developers. Previous events have occurred in Rome, London and Amsterdam.

For media access to the camp, stories of individual participants and topics of discussion at the event please contact:

Andrew Lowenthal (EngageMedia): +61 439 093 779 (Australia) +6281319339823 (Indonesia) http://engagemedia.org
Mirwan Andan (Ruangrupa): +62 813 1924 2965 http://ruangrupa.org

For more information on the workshop: http://transmission.cc/txap.

Transmission Asia-Pacific is supported by Hivos and the Open Society Institute.

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.

Heike Wiermann, Holger Mader and Alexander Stublic focus on video art installations, media facades and art in the public sphere. Their latest projects cover for example the spectacular media facade design (”twists and turns”) of the Uniqua tower in Vienna, where they have managed to transform the structure of the architecture into an ever-changing, fluid state of transition. Furthermore, they co-initiated OSRAM’s new light platform Seven Screens, which they launched with their LED-piece Reprojected. This installation focuses on the shadows of computer-simulated people. The group engages in a site-specific and medium-specific way with visual perception.

Upgrade! Berlin is currently also involved in the development of the Media Facades Festival Berlin and is thus taking the opportunity to invite Alexander Stublic and Holger Mader for a public talk about their media facades and other collaborative works in the public sphere.

More infos on Mader | Stublic | Wiermann. More infos on the Media Facades Festival.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm. Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.

This show will feature new and experimental works in dance, music, and video art. Each artist/team came up with a work based on meditations on the word “SPACE.” The artists with works being shown are:

Nina Barnett & Robyn Nesbitt, Jessica Feldman, David Jensenius, Hiram Navarrete, Jessica Noe & Kate March, Blithe Riley, Kathleen Stanard, Carl Testa.

The Retrosabotage project is less “artistic”, but in a way more sophisticated: every week it publishes a famous arcade variance. The algorithms are treated as if they were jazz standard, falling short of player’s expectations, still maintaining well-known mechanisms. Mokumentary speculates about a never released Pacman version, where you control the ghosts, Incompatible Visions is an impossible mash-up between Tetris and Duck Hunt, while variances on Space Invaders theme variations push to the absurd the tragic spaceship destiny. Sometimes the “sabotage” generates new game patterns: “Compomise” is a Tetris short circuited for two players, “Build On” and “Balance” turn over the tedious Break Out with new original features. Retrosabotage is a little more than a collection of jokes but nevertheless it gives pleasing disappointments to the Skinner’s mouse hosted in our brain. But probably the most radical experiment in this tradition is probably Rom Check Fail, a sort of psychedelic remix of a dozen classic arcades. Graphic, enemies, scenes and their respective dynamics are randomly remixed by a software gone crazy. Every game is a frantic zapping among unpredictable situations but oddly playable. Remix culture, contaminated the video and now invades videogames. With astonishing achievements. - Paolo Pedercini, Neural.

Ronen is an artist, writer and activist. He has participated in many self-organized exhibitions and festivals, founded and edited over five cultural, art and political journals / magazines and produced many events linking art, culture and grassroots politics. For the past ten years Ronen has been active in anti-occupation and anti-capitalist direct action groups.

Visual Foreign Correspondents is also set in the context of an international program of public debates — The Globalised Crystal Ball — in which aspects of the new phase of globalisation is explored by panels of distinguished commentators. This month’s issue is The Military-Strategic Future Predicted - In 2004 the United Nations published A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, which advised the international community how to tackle common threats. The report suggests that it is time for a new security consensus, one in which “we all share responsibility for each other’s security. And the test of that consensus will be action”. Speakers are:

- Thomas P.M. Barnett is senior Managing Director at Enterra Solutions.
- Andrew Small works for the German Marshall Fund in Brussels since 2006 as the co-ordinator of work on China and transatlantic relations.
- Awil Mohamoud is a political scientist and the founding director of SAHAN research & advice bureau.

De Balie, Klein Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam :: April 15, 2008; 8:00 pm

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is the third, ground-breaking international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide events around the redefinition of a growing digital infrastructure of moving images in public space. It will mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association and will take place at Federation Square, Melbourne. Federation Square is a unique cultural and community oriented multimedia precinct, centred around a significant 38m2 public LED screen.

CALL FOR FILM & VIDEO and MULTIMEDIA PROJECTS

The Urban Screens 08 exhibition is looking for Artists, Urban Poets, Filmmakers and Multimedia and Interaction Designers to submit film and videos or multimedia, interactive or participatory screen based projects. A large diverse urban screens infrastructure is available at Federation Square.

Criteria: We are looking for existing and potentially adaptable projects that interrogate screen media as a medium| content and tackle the festival’s key themes of issues of building community and sustainability in relation to water. These two complex themes aim to provoke discussion and spark questions such as: What is community in times of the high-speed, global flows of the new media scape? How can we explore the diversity of water, an element, essential to the existence of life on earth?

For a detailed description of the event and curatorial framework see
www.urbanscreens08.net/art-+-events
For a detailed description of Fed Squares infrastructure see
www.urbanscreens08.net/technical

The projects should preferably employ one or more of the listed existing infrastructure of urban screens of Fed Square and should consider and adapt to the special circumstances of outdoor public spaces, transforming urban spaces to foster dialogue and community engagement. We are looking for:

A) Film and video such as

- Video art, text art, animation, animated slideshows, or fictional advertisements and community information (under 3 min.)
- Silent works especially for the joint broadcasting or daily screenings in-between (under 3 min.)
- Short experimental films, documentary and journalistic content (under 15 min.)
- Small curated programs of the mentioned type of works

B) Interactive, performance based or participatory projects such as

- Interactive software applications for urban screens
- Participatory community projects using creative digital practices
- Live media art merging performance and new media
- Community displays for education and exchange
- Virtual/real world hybrid projects using streaming content
- Real-time generated content
- Screen related sound experiments
- Digital storytelling projects
- Mobile games using urban space as social and educative playground
- Connecting mobile culture of locative media with urban screens

CALL FOR POSTERS

To bridge the Conference and the Multimedia Exhibition, we are looking for posters about the latest development of Urban Screens. They will be displayed in a public exhibition in the Atrium next to the conference venue. Conference will be encouraged to get in exchange with the authors during the breaks. Eight submissions will be additionally shown in an experimental presentation on the four outdoor I-sites around Federation Square. These are equiped with an integrated screen, which offer the possibility to present remotely via scheduled skype sessions, while the audience gathers in groups around them.

Criteria: Posters are aimed at presenting the latest development in this interdisciplinary field of Urban Screens. Posters are ideal for presenting speculative, late-breaking results of ongoing research projects, drawing important conclusions from practical experiments, for giving an introduction to innovative art works or new practical design applications, reports on cutting edge technologies and content management systems under development.

Posters will be reviewed by the Poster Committee, soon to be announced. Authors of accepted submissions must provide a one or two page summary for publication in the conference proceedings. Selected submissions will also be published on-line on the International Urban Screens Association website.

APPLICATION AND DETAILED CALL

Please have a look at the detailed calls and the official online forms for application, available here.

CONTACT: exhibition [at] urbanscreens.net (please use the subject “USM08 - question concerning the CALL”)

Best regards,
Mirjam Struppek

URBAN SCREENS MELBOURNE 08
Artistic Director

International Urban Screens Association
Rheinsberger Str. 68
D-10115 Berlin

“One man, vocals, maracas and a stripped pulsating showcase of obscure sounds and visuals.”

Major B cuts up analogue, obscure audio samples from all over the world and merges them in his own audio visual recordings or found footage. This shuffle results in rhythmic, surreal pieces that tell about people, animals and their bizarre encounters. These sounds and visuals form basis and background for his vocals and maraca on stage, where the projection works alternately as a spotlight or camouflage kit.

Think virtually. Buy locally. Invisible Threads - a virtual sweatshop - will be operating live from Second Life and Eyebeam as part of the Synthetic Times Beijing Media Arts Symposium closing reception. The mixed reality performance explores the politics of virtual labor through the creation of a designer jeans sweatshop in the online, 3-dimensional world of Second Life. Simulating a real life manufacturing facility that includes hiring Second Life workers to produce real world jeans sold for profit, the project provides an insiders view into current modes of global, telematic production.

During the evening visitors will be able to order a pair of Double Happiness Jeans through the factory’s just-in-time telematic manufacturing process. Customers in the real world place their jean orders to the workers in the virtual factory via streaming audio and video. The workers, avatars controlled by humans sitting at computers around the globe, operate textile machines on an assembly line that produce the jeans. Styles include “MyPants”, “No Pants Left Behind” and the “LowRider”. Video.