The Mediatopia Project and related events will reflect upon the ISEA 2008 Border Transmissions Theme and will exploit the potential of networks, communication tools, alternate economies and experiential technologies as a collaborative engine to enable the emergence of a different conception of borders, and of the transmissions that problematize these demarcations.

It also seeks to expand the models of production and distribution that have arisen as social networks, hardware, generative software components, small-scale download practices and peer-to-peer protocols have changed the nature of not only how material is made but distributed. Mediatopia will act as an incubator and working model for experimentation, inquiry, and cross-cultural collaboration within the framework of these overarching themes.

Mediatopia seeks to expand upon the concepts of production and distribution as participants contribute discrete media from a variety of readily available sources, recognizing advances in technology, software and social networking strategies that have arisen in recent years. The Mediatopia project will be able to function as an international mashup / remix of broadcast media and simultaneously as a database and interface of freely accessible sound / video materials that transcends time, location, cultural and geographical borders without emphasis on market driven outcome.

The Mediatopia Project and scheduled events at ISEA 2008 will function as the primary event host while numerous satellite nodes worldwide will serve to further expand and engage the participating individuals in creative collaborations and cross cultural exchanges. The Mediatopia Project and related international events will be accessible online and live throughout ISEA Singapore 2008 and culminate in a 24 hour live remix in the Gallery Theatre at the National Museum of Singapore. To view, participate and/or contribute to the project or to see a complete list of participating artists and scheduled events both onsite and at remote nodes, please visit the project website at: http://www.mediatopia.org.

Yet YouTube’s term’s of service has already brought down The Empire Strikes Barack and Baracky. (btw, you can find them at RemixAmerica.org) So we at RemixAmerica.org are publicly beta launching to enlist your input…

RemixAmerica.org is the new home for remixers and video remixes. We are a non-partisan, non-profit project of Declare Yourself. Through RemixAmerica.org you can participate within the political medium of video remixes, mashups and video comments. Not only can you use our software to easily create your own remixes! BUT you can join the discussion by using your webcam to “talk back.”

Through our “American Playlist,” we make it easy to combine today’s political debate with America’s great ideas and historical speeches — from the Gettysburg Address to Kennedy’s Inaugural to Dr. King’s speeches — we give you the power to remix America’s greatest moments. Check out our blog for highlights.

If you are a remixer, we would love to feature your work. Upload to http://RemixAmerica.org today, and we promise you an informed and engaged community.

If you are a citizen journalist, cultural producer, campaign worker, etc. and have videos to share, upload them to http://RemixAmerica.org. We want to explore the impact of video remixes around America. We want to hear your voice and see your thoughts.

Also, we have noticed that there is no global discussion list for remixers. SO we have set up a google group at http://groups.google.com/group/videoremix. We hope that you join the mix and help us develop a global network of creators.

In short, we are ready to see your creativity. If you think we need to change ANYTHING, please email me noel [at] remixamerica.org and I will make sure your questions, comments, complaints, or problems are addressed.

We look forward to seeing you and we really look forward to your comments.

From the staff of www.RemixAmerica.org - Fred, Erika, Noel, Ali & Marshal.

From Cory Doctorow’s May 22, 2008 post on Boing Boing

” Danah sez, “The Social Science Research Council has made Structures of Participation in Digital Culture available for free download. This is a collection of fabulous scholarly articles on topics like gaming, DRM and filters, digital commodities, social network sites, contagious media, media remix, etc. It’s a fabulous book.”

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by SSRC Program Director Joe Karaganis, explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume.
(Thanks, danah!)

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.

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” Rex Bruce, director of the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, will be screening a video he directed that uses public domain imagery from the US Military (also playing at the Centre Pompidou).

Holly Willis, Director of Academic Programs at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, will be presenting on art in Second Life, focusing on creators who are cognizant of the formal and ideological implications of virtual worlds.

Jack Lerner, Acting Director at the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic, will give a talk on research he has been conducting in relation to music sampling that looks at defects in the market and proposes changes.

Finally, we will be joined by multimedia designers Chris Weisbart and Michael Wilson who will explain how they are using open source technology in museums and will give a live demonstration of a holographic projection system they’ve recently built into an interactive exhibit.

All the presenters of course will touch upon the interaction their various topics play with CC licensing. So come out and join us for what is bound to be an eye opening night, and yes, there will be free (as in beer) drinks.

A panel discussion and virtual performance event, From Cinema to Machinima will explore the many ways in which the digital medium has reconfigured, even transformed, the moving image and thereby redefined concepts of cinema. Whether through software processes or interaction by the viewer, image sequences have become discrete units that can be remixed in new constellations; indeed, once digital interactivity became connected to databases, the possibility of assembling and reconfiguring media elements from a compilation of image sequences opened the way to a host of new cinematic forms.

These emerging cinematic forms include database cinema, interactive narrative or non-narrative films, and machinima — filmmaking within computer games or 3D virtual worlds, such as Second Life, in which characters and events can be controlled either by humans, scripts, or artificial intelligence.

The discussion will be followed by a short performance event in Second Life, which will be broadcast in the Lecture Hall. The panel and Q&A with the audience will be streamed live in Second Life.

Henrik Bennetsen works as research director at the Stanford Humanities Lab. He’s also the head of the Lifesquared research project, which is building a 3D immersive archive of the art of Lynn Hershman Leeson inside the virtual world of Second Life. The work was recently shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and is planned for exhibition at SFMOMA in 2008. In Fall 2006 he was a part of the Stanford course The Human and the Machine, which used Second Life as a teaching tool. Bennetsen holds a MSc in Media Technology and Games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc in Medialogy from Aalborg University. He has a strong side interest in creative self-expression augmented by technology.

Char Davies is internationally recognized for pioneering artworks using the technologies of virtual reality. Originally a painter, she transitioned to digital media in the late 80s, becoming a founding director of the 3D software company Softimage. Her virtual environment Osmose (1995) is considered a landmark in the history of new media art. Davies has also published numerous essays on virtual space and in 2005 she completed a doctorate in philosophy (from CAiiA, University of Plymouth, UK). A monograph on her work Char Davies’ Immersive Virtual Art and the Essence of Spatiality came out in 2007. Davies’ practice has expanded from “virtual” to “actual” place. She is currently shaping another immersive environment, on 500 acres of land in Québec. Davies lives in San Francisco.

Scott Kildall is a crossdisciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture, and performance. The core of his artwork is formed by material he gathers from the public realm. Through this method, he uncovers relationships between human memory and social media technology. He holds a BA in Political Philosophy from Brown University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited internationally in galleries and museums in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Helsinki, Ireland, Spain, and Romania. Scott is a founding member of Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Christiane Paul is the adjunct curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts and a revised version of her book Digital Art (2003) as well as the anthology New Media in the White Cube and Beyond will be published this year. She teaches as adjunct faculty in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York, the Digital and Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design, SFAI, and UC Berkeley. She has curated a number of shows at the Whitney Museum, including the online exhibition CODeDOC (2002).

Howard Rheingold is the author of the acclaimed books Tools for Thought (1985), The Virtual Community (2000), and Smart Mobs (2003). He has been the editor of Whole Earth Review, and The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, the founding executive editor of Hotwired, and founder of Electric Minds. Rheingold has taught classes on participatory and social media and virtual community at UC Berkeley and Stanford University and is a visiting professor at De Montfort University in the UK. His current projects include the Social Media Virtual Classroom, an online community for teachers and students; the Cooperation Project, aimed at building an interdisciplinary framework for understanding cooperation; and Participatory Media Literacy.

Scott Snibbe’s immersive interactive artworks have been installed in over 100 art museums, performance spaces, science museums, and public spaces worldwide. His awards include the Prix Ars Electronica and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. He is the founder of two companies: Snibbe Interactive, Inc. and Sona Research. In 2007 he was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant for research in Interactive Narrative. Snibbe holds a BA in Computer Science and Fine Art and an MA in Computer Science from Brown University. He studied experimental animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught media art and experimental film at Brown University, SFAI, the California Institute of the Arts, the Rhode Island School of Design, and UC Berkeley.

Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Utterback’s extensive exhibition history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award and a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship. Recent projects include a large-scale interactive projection on the San Jose City Hall commissioned by ZeroOne and the City of San Jose. Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College and an MA from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.

MINDTouch explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments. MINDTouch involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of streamed and/or archived video-clips created by video-enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during (a) live visuals performance(s). The participants invited to contribute to the video blogs are asked to explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional /affective senses and dream states, embodiment and communication.

CAMILLE BAKER is a Ph.D. Candidate at SMARTlan, University of East London, conducting research on Networked Performance Media, funded by BBC R+D.

Making DICOM Dance: Marilene Oliver’s practice-based research looks at medical and laser imaging technologies that scan bodies and break them down to bytes. Oliver examines from an artist’s perspective, the processes needed to convert flesh to pixel (digital photography), flesh to voxel (MRI, CT and PET) and flesh to xyz co-ordinates (3D laser scanning). Oliver will present a selection of artworks made using MRI data (where the subject of the scans is bespoke) and CT data (where the subject of the scans are either infamous or anonymous). The presentation will be both technical and theoretical, concentrating on the performative puppeteering activity that emerges when working with MRI and CT data.

MARILENE OLIVER is currently a research student in the Fine Art Print department at the Royal College of Art. Oliver has exhibited widely in the UK and Europe including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Academy, Royal Institution, Science Museum (UK). Oliver was awarded the Royal Academy print prize in 2006 and the Printmaking Today prize in 2001.

Join us in Berkeley for a three-day symposium and festival of new media and art hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Berkeley Center for New Media. This event is timed to link with 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, so come spend the week in the Bay Area and be part of the biggest explosion of new media art in the nation. [On June 2, Embodied Media, the first of a two-part symposium.] June 3:

8:30 - Introduction by Steve Wilson, Leonardo board member since 1983, about the 40 years of Leonardo ISAST

9:00-10:30 - “Osmosis”: What can the arts do for the sciences?

Art-Science interaction is a two way process. The impact of science and technology on the arts is much discussed and well documented. This panel seeks to examine the influence of the arts on the sciences, and the benefits that science can derive from the arts.

- Bronac Ferran
- Jim Crutchfield physicist at UC Davis
- Chris Chafe at Stanford’s CCRMA

11:00-12:30 - Brilliant Noise: how data becomes experience for artists and for scientists

Most information about the world we live in is now mediated by instruments. This data is often visualised and sonified both to aid analysis and to communicate with other researchers, but artists too can make this data meaningful and “sensual”. The same data sets can lead to very different kinds of work. One person’s noise is another person’s sound.

- Michael Joaquin Grey, artist and inventor
- Laura Peticolas, geophysicist at the Space Sciences Lab in Berkeley
- Douglas Kahn, UC Davis Technocultural Studies Program

12:30 - free-form meeting of the interested audience with Leonardo ISAST board members during the lunch break

1:30-3:00 - The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very Very Small

Human cognition is bounded by the inadequacy of human senses to allow us sensory contact with the world on scales larger or smaller than ourselves. To perceive the nano world one needs extended senses or new senses. The nano world requires a new ontology and a new epistemology.

- Ruth West artist with background as a molecular geneticist
- Gordon Wozniak former nuclear scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Wayne Lanier microbiologist at the Hidden Ecologies project of the San Francisco Exploratorium

3:00 - Closing event of the two-day conference for the audience to mingle with the speakers of the various panels and with Leonardo board members.

Since March 1, in cooperation with the online zine balsas.cc for media and technology, we have focused on the migration between reality, media, technologies, art, spaces, disciplines, politics, and networks. Migration interests us in cultural and technological aspects as well as in aspects of the movement of different objects and subjects. Balsas.cc has been publishing online in Lithuanian and English from Vilnius, Lithuania since 2005. Every fourth month it announces a new topic and as of now Migrating Reality is open for your interpretation.

We invite the submission of texts, sounds, and visuals (photo, video, etc) which will help us to delve deeper into the subject during the Berlin project. Balsas.cc is stimulating interest in the generation and publishing of ideas online — the most interesting of which will be published in the printed catalog at the end of 2008. We are interested in not only pure texts but also in migrating formats, interdisciplinary discussions, interviews, and the meetings of artists and theoreticians.

Please submit texts in English, German, and (or??) Lithuanian to balsas [ at] vilma.cc. The rolling submission and publication period is open until June 1.

Editorial Board: Vytautas Michelkevicius, Mindaugas Gapsevicius, Zilvinas Lilas and John Hopkins

Migrating Reality Conference: The event focuses on the Baltic nation of Lithuania. In the last fifteen years, more than ten percent of Lithuania’s population has emigrated, among them numerous individuals engaged in the cultural sector. Others, while still living in Lithuania, are deeply engaged with the subject of migration. Selected individuals from both these groups will present their work at the conference and exhibition.

Migrating Reality deals specifically with the realities of migration and migrating realities that are independent of global structural changes and economic or cultural processes and are opening unique opportunities for creative exchange.

Electronic and digital cultures generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms to hybrid digital forms. Analogue products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are re-mixed and fused into new datasets.

The emergent processes of migration generate temporary autonomous zones where socio-political actions occur without the interference of formal control mechanisms. These zones and enclaves appear in physical space as well as in virtual space. By integrating these into available structures and temporarily interconnecting them, new trajectories and ideas are created.

Migration is reality and reality is migrating. This dialectic, appearing as a banal topic in everyday politico-economic debate, includes unarticulated issues which, by their fragmented nature have to be dealt with through creative multidisciplinary means. Only occasionally do components of the migrating global situation surface in the mass media, within individual mediums of expression, or in exhibitions as documentation and artwork. This is likely because dealing with the realities of migration in an explicitly European context means accepting the potential for conflict.

This trans-cultural German-Lithuanian event will take on the risk in highlighting certain fragments of the discourse. Participants will be invited to piece together aspects of this inexorable global mobility on the one hand and of retrograde power relations on the other.

Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow from Furtherfield.org will demo VisitorsStudio and introduce participants to its (easy-to-use) tool-set and features. Using your own files (bring jpg, mp3, swf, flv under 200k) or harvesting files from the net, you can work with others to create and distribute mixes and remixes. The day will end with a live online performance by all participants.

VisitorsStudio (Furtherfield.org 2003-) is an networked, many to many, real-time art project created and distributed live in real-time across the Internet. Participants link together at the same time and mix and remix audio-visual files. The VisitorsStudio artware is also an always-on, open, social space. As they work together, live conversations between participants (identified by their moving cursor arrows) become a part of the performance- along with comments and heckling from the audience.

Through VisitorsStudio, Furtherfield.org explores the ongoing expressive and communicative processes of human beings collaborating in new ways in this context, as active agents in the production of the cultural landscape.