The sun beat down on the plain outside of the Orc capitol city of Orgrimar and the dry ground crunched as I walked around Jaggedswine Farm waiting for the first candidates to arrive. I took to shooting a few boar to level up my new gun skill while I waited. The meetings were orderly and uninterrupted by the Alliance, though we did have the occasional “’sup” from a troll passing by on their way to the Zeppelin.

Eddo, Jay and I were impressed with the quality of the discussions and I was taken by the way the environment functioned and gave context to the process. In the end we chose Tom Betts and Alison Mealey as the first Ars Virtua Artists in Residence in World of Warcraft. Continue reading

In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Lyotard argued that our postmodern age is marked by “incredulity towards grand narratives” (the progress of history, the ability of knowing everything by science, and the possibility of absolute freedom). Lyotard argues that we don’t believe anymore they represent and contain us all. We are alert to difference, diversity, beliefs and desires, and so postmodernity is characterised by an abundance of micronarratives. Continue reading

Because coffee is such an important part not only of the daily routine of millions of Westerners but also of the economies and societies of the third world countries in which it is grown, it provides an excellent medium for exploration of taste informatics and specifically beverage informatics.

The News Brews device is an exploration of the possibility of creating a beverage which provides information about the daily news. News Brews connects to internet news feeds and parses them to determine the relative frequency at which different coffee growing regions are mentioned. It then brews a cup of coffee from freshly ground whole beans which contains relative proportions of beans grown in the regions in that day’s news. [via]

Created by Ebru Kurbak and Mahir M. Yavuz, News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data. News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater. The system consists of two different types of software: whereas one receives the content from live feeds the other converts it into visual patterns, and a fully computerized flat knitting machine produces the final output. Each product, sweater of News Knitter is an evidence/result of a specific day or period. Continue reading

Mark Marino announces the launch of a new collaborative blog titled Critical Code Studies. The blog is dedicated to exploring interpretations of computer code within cultural contexts. Rather than focusing primarily on making code function or even the pursuit of “beautiful” code, critical code studies brings in critical theory to examine the ways in which the lines of code reflect, shape, and reproduce our culture including aspects of class, gender, race, sexuality. These criticisms include both the context for the code’s creation and the ways in which it circulates in culture. Rather than one specific lens, CCS names a growing collection of methodologies for making/finding meaning in code. Continue reading

The ECOresearch Network has just released US Election 2008 Web Monitor, a geotagged news archive on the US Presidential Election. The system gathers and annotates documents from blogs, environmental organizations, the Fortune 1000 and news media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week.

The tightly coupled interface integrates geographic maps with information landscapes, ontology graphs and tag clouds to reveal both geographical and semantic relationships. Continue reading

Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality by Edward Castronova -Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live–both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.

Vodafone customers now have access to a new service called InsideOut that allows interaction between characters in the vast virtual world Second Life and real, actual phones (you know, like in the real world) operated by Voda. Both voice calls and text messages can be ferried in and out of the game, with SMSes running a cool L$300 (which we think is somewhere around $1) and voice calls running L$300 per minute. Continue reading

Dear Friends,

We cannot continue without your help. We MUST raise $25,000 by December 31, 2007. If you are one of the thousands of people who regularly visit Turbulence, Networked Performance, Networked Music Review and / or New American Radio ; are one of the hundreds of teachers who use Turbulence works in your new media / digital art courses; are an artist who has received a Turbulence, Networked Music Review or New American Radio commission; have presented at or attended Upgrade! Boston (Art Interactive or Massachusetts College of Art and Design), Floating Points (Emerson College), or Programmable Media (Pace Digital Gallery) … now is the time to give something back. Continue reading

Share Prize 2008: Jury Statement - Bruce Sterling, Piero Gilardi, Stefano Mirti, and Anne Nigten: This has been a very good year for the physical and the actual in digital culture. In the 1990s, virtual art, website art and Internet art would have dominated our entries. But in 2007, five of our six prize finalists involve a physical, hands-on encounter with digital technology — and we mean it is digital art that must be literally touched and gripped by the hands of artists and audience. The sixth piece is driven by living human breath.

It has recently been said that “cyberspace is turning itself out,” that “the virtual is becoming the actual.” We think this years’ chosen artists may have proven this thesis. Continue reading