[Worldview is an urban installation for tourists that enables them to record their experience with both an instant-print postcard and a video clip and look through realtime windows into public spaces in other cities.] Fitting in with the surveillance theme in the last few posts but also some older work discussed here (World Bench, Miroir Aux Silhouettes, Intimate Transactions and the work of Paul Sermon), Worldview (by Haque Design) allows users to engage with both the spaces around them, subsequent users to the installation and users interacting with a similar installation elsewhere. Continue reading

Ars Virtua is pleased to announce _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ by Mary-Anne (Mez) Breeze. Mez has initiated this work as part of her ongoing interrogation of the space, place and language of synthetic worlds. This text brings Mez’ prodigious talents and experience to bear on several fundamental issues relating to the nature of game and social space:

“_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ explores concepts that shape and are shaped by an extensive range of online / synthetic encounters. These concepts are formed through principles generated internally within specific online environments. Continue reading

Cityscapes — initiated by Myron Turner — offers a common ground where people can share their experiences of the places where they live and have lived, or have visited. Or places they’ve imagined, read about, hope or have hoped to visit. In other words, Cityscapes is not only the reflection of physical space but of a shared imaginative space.

Its theoretical basis lies in ideas of locative art and pyschogeography. The camera and descriptive text are its locative technologies, and the pyschogeography consists of the spaces we inhabit as a global community. Continue reading

The Temporary Travel Office has just released a 44 page report that summarizes our research and initial recommendations for expanding the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, FL. The report, titled Contaminating the Preserve, outlines two proposals: our 2006-7 proposal for an 800 km elevated boardwalk connecting the current Preserve to Guanabacoa, Cuba as well as the more recently proposed extension to the current Preserve that we are currently referring to as the Ash Site Annex, a 43 square mile area of Northwest Jacksonville that contains 7 former incinerator and ash- dump sites. You can download the report as a 3.4MB PDF file here. Continue reading

Nude Studies in Aleatoric Environments, by Pall Thayer, consists of automated nude studies abstracted through geological intervention. Though it was conceived primarily as a gallery installation, here Thayer offers us a “taste” of the full piece. The online version uses 4 locations — Lone Pine, California; College Outpost, Alaska; Isla Barro Colorado, Panama; and Wyandotte Cave, Indiana — and only represents the Americas. The gallery version uses 12 locations and represents the whole globe; it also has audio which could not be included in the online version due to bandwidth constraints. Continue reading

How do you find the spirit and play of exploration in an optimized geography?

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates. Continue reading

No Place - like Home. Perspectives on Migration in Europe :: April 15 - June 21, 2008 :: Opening: April 12; 6 - 9 pm :: Argos - Centre for Art and Media, Werfstraat 13 rue du Chantier, B – 1000 Brussels.

The group exhibition No Place - like Home: Perspectives on Migration in Europe features eighteen Belgian and international artists. Their videos, photographic works and installations take a closer look at what lies under the surface of the migration issue. Migration is a thing of all ages. Where Europeans once colonized various continents and emigrated en masse to other lands both in and beyond their own continent, movement from the opposite direction has now taken hold. Capital, goods and information circulate freely in the late-capitalist, globalized world economy. Continue reading

Turbulence Commission: Imaging Beijing by John (Craig) Freeman [Part of the Mixed Realities exhibition, on view until April 15, 2008] - Imaging Beijing is the latest installment of Imaging Place, a place-based, virtual reality project that combines panoramic photography, digital video, and virtual worlds to investigate and document situations where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. When a denizen of Second Life first arrives at Imaging Beijing, he, she or it can walk over a satellite image of central Beijing where they will find a networks of nodes constructed of primitive spherical geometry with panoramic photographs texture mapped to the interior. Continue reading

Nomadic Shopping - A locative media project by Esther Polak :: World premiere of GPS track docu-fiction: Esther Polak used a new innovative GPS-functionality to tell a poetic story: a GPS docu-fiction, central theme being the The Opzeeland Dairy Route by night :: Place: The Waarder Polder, an industrial area in East – Haarlem, Netherlands :: Space: The daily route of the mobile Dairy Shop Van Opzeeland.

To create a double image of space and place, Esther Polak used the “mashup website” VeoGeo.com. The website combines images of GPS registrations with YouTube route-footage. Combined and synchronized, tracks and video’s can be followed step by step resulting in an extremely realistic experience of armchair traveling. Continue reading

Spacecowboys - a workshop about hybrid spaces :: May 6-7, 2008 :: Z33, Hasselt, Belgium :: 15-20 participants within a wide range of disciplines Free.

Our feeling of space and place changes and refreshes constantly through the interaction and communication possibilities of new media. Locations and environments may be altered from public to a private and from concrete to virtual through mobile technologies. These hybrid spaces create emotional and aesthetic possibilities for artists to experiment with. How do artists work with hybrid space and how do they make us aware of the social and cultural implications?

This workshop will be moderated by John Hopkins. Speakers & guests: Armin Medosh, Anne Nigten, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Eric Kluitenberg, Kurt Vanhoutte, Peter Westenberg, Maja Kuzmanovic and Pieter van Bogaert. Continue reading