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.

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.

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] .

The Travel Office is also planning the second phase of our consultation, which is being planned as an exhibition and series of discussions at the University of North Florida sometime between Fall 2009 and Spring 2010. For more information about the Travel Office’s Not-In-Residence consultancy at the Preserve, go here.

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

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.

In between the record sets are the most interesting possibilities for new services, new ways of experiencing the physical world and new kinds of adventures. What I’m thinking about are ways to creatively explore within a fully instrumented, surveilled and mapped world, with counter intuitive uses of this data. There are some excellent examples within the art-technology and design-technology communities, such as GPS Drawing, as shown above. This practice is intriguing because it couples measurement with expression and finds an alternative use for the devices involved — a GPS and a mapping application like GoogleEarth.

Surveillance Camera Players using CCTV cameras as a site for performance opportunities

Younghee wonders, in this context, what are the ways of minimizing “digital traces” — those indications of where you are, and where you have been, in a surveillance world. She says,

That leaves another interesting question: How would people drop out of, or at least minimize their digital traces and minimize contributing to create others’? We are probably not expecting stickers and badges showing “this person does NOT have cameras” or “this person will NOT use cameras”. One of the memorable Ubicomp conference talks was on the interesting concept of creating capture-resistant environment, preventing camera phones to take photos by overexposing photos attempted in the region covered by this technology. While I am sure there are certain types of places this technology would be very useful, I do have my doubts if there would ever be any technology successfully controlling people’s digital behaviors.

Similarly, in a reverse mode, Life: A User’s Manual by Michelle Teran captures the signals leaked into public space by RF-based video cameras and reveals intimate spaces in a very DIY and performative fashion.

Minimzing traces is one possible perspective. I think, perhaps in this era where digital kids do not reflect so much on how much of a trace they leave behind, and indeed have entirely different perspectives on the meaning of surveillance and its implications. How many digital kids (the next “us”) have read “1984″ for example?

In contrast to the Surveillance Camera Players and their performances — where they are maximizing their impact and traces for counter-intuitive purposes, and counter-systemic purposes — groups like the Institute for Applied Autonomy have constructed — years ago, pre-Google Maps — a digital map system called iSee of surveillance cameras that would allow one to plot a course that does precisely what Younghee wonders about — minimizing one’s impact. In other words, the mapping system plots routes that avoids surveillance cameras.

It may be that the question is no to much avoiding “capture” but how to turn that space into something where your voice can be heard. I’m not convinced, but it seems that we (a bit older people) think of surveillance in one way that digital kids (the next “us”) will see as an opportunity for a new form of living.

Beyond this, I am interested in a kind of Personal Positioning System that points out the absences in my experiences in the world. For example, showing me where I have not been rather than showing the entire world from above, as if its fully prepared for my exploration. I’m interested in finding things like longer route between two points, rather than the minimal route. Or routes that are deliberately constructed based on streets or regions I have not been. Purely as a form of creative, digital-era perambulation or motoring. Exploration in a world that is pretty much completely mapped, indexed, databased and optimized. What is exploration in an optimized, instrumented world? [posted by Julian Bleecker on Near Future Laboratory]

The theme of this workshop is centered around exploring the tension of real versus fake. What is authentic in the realm of the digital? Can something be so fake that it moves into the realm of the real? As an urban art+tech research facility, Eyebeam supports experimental ways of thinking about what constitutes the “real” and “public space”; located in New York, Eyebeam is interested in presenting work that extends beyond the confines of the gallery and explores the theme of Interactivos? in relation to the urban environment. Participants are encouraged to consider how their projects might be presented inside or outside of Eyebeam’s gallery.

How do you generate belief around an idea that is fake or an illusion? How can hoaxes, recreations, and illusions be used aesthetically and critically? We invite you to ponder these questions as you design your proposals.

Interactivos? was initiated by the Medialab-Prado program and the Madrid City Council in 2006. The title, “Interactivos?,” means “interactivity?” in Spanish, and projects made in the workshop are invited to provoke, challenge and engage the notion or concept of interactive art. This summer, Eyebeam joins Medialab-Prado in running Interactivos? as part of its annual summer workshop-based programming. The two week program, a hybrid workshop and exhibition, takes place June 26-July 12, 2008. In addition to the workshop, Interactivos? encourages deeper exploration of the chosen theme through lectures and local events led by some of New York City’s finest. Interactivos? New York was initiated by current R&D OpenLab fellow Zach Lieberman, and will be curated and produced by Eyebeam staff, fellows and residents.

PITCH the WGBH Lab and P.O.V. your ideas for a compelling, 3-minute video short. Be creative — we want to be surprised! If selected, we’ll give you $2,000 to make it happen. Afterwards we’ll feature it online and we may broadcast it on national TV! Your story could be about an ongoing national or local issue, memories of elections past, or insight on how our NEW president can make a change — you decide! The WGBH Lab will post your idea online, ask the Lab community to vote for their favorites, and discuss your progress as you move forward. This is your opportunity to create content that voices your opinion, tells your story, and shows the world what issues matter to you.

In June, P.O.V. will begin broadcasting their slate of films for the 2008 season, including five documentaries related to the 2008 Presidential election: “Traces of the Trade” by Katrina Browne, “Election Day” by Katie Chevigny, “Campaign” by Kazuhiro Soda; “The Ballad of Esequiel Hernandez” by Kieran Fitzgerald; “Critical Condition” by Roger Weisberg; and “Soldiers of Conscience” by Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg. The programs tell stories that deal with critical election issues like voter turnout, healthcare, the Iraq war, race relations, election reform, immigration & border security, and the health of democracy both in America and around the world. As these films roll out, YOUR short may become a part of the conversation taking place around these issues.