[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

Building Bridges is the motto of Munich’s 850th birthday. The project A Day in a Life is going to establish virtual bridges: Munich is linked via livestreaming with some parts of the world. The public place Wittelsbacher Platz is connected via image and sound with – since now - the following cities: Curitiba / Brazil, Skopje / Macedonia, Wellington / New Zealand, London / England, Sendai / Japan.

Artists of diverse backgrounds are involved, working mainly through performative strategies. Sceneries involving the passers-by in every city are created. For example you may see four people of four countries at the same time on four screens, communicating via webcam their wishes oder questions as a sort of statement. Continue reading

Virtual Residency Project - Call for Participation :: Deadline: May 1, 2008 :: Dates of Residency: June 1 - November 4, 2008.

Location One presents its first ever Virtual Residency Project in the form of a call to artists and other creative individuals with the express purpose of fostering collaboration and creativity across geographical expanses and areas of expertise around the topic of the 2008 US Presidential Election. Continue reading

Invisible Threads by Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg :: April 15, 2008; 8 -10 pm :: Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, 540 West 21st (between 10th & 11th) :: Free event + performances by current Eyebeam artists.

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. Continue reading

THURSDAY CLUB :: Camille Baker & Marilene Oliver - MINDTouch + Making DICOM Dance - The Digitised Body as a site for performing subjectivity :: May 8, 2008; 6-8 pm :: Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor, right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross :: FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME.

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). Continue reading

This is a call to collect videos, sounds, texts and images that witness the attempt to contact the abandoned areas of the brain. The reason for this call is a series of videos found on the Internet using the keyword cronovisore.

The Chronovisor is a machine for viewing past and future events. It was invented in the ’40s by Father Pellegrino Ernetti together with a group of twelve world famous scientists. The Chronovisor was portrayed as a large cabinet with a normal cathode ray tube for viewing the received events and a series of buttons, levers, and other controls for selecting the time and the location to be viewed. Continue reading

Multiplace Network Culture Festival #7 - telematic networking, imaginary broadcasting, experimental mobility :: April 26 - May 3, 2008 :: CALL FOR ENTRIES - Deadline: February 29, 2008.

Multiplace 2008 invites artists and cultural workers to submit events / performances / installations / ideas of a networked character, such as online performances, streaming and radio projects, collaborative networked projects and workshops, or the works accessing the networks within a physical location, urban space or between remote venues. Use of digital technologies is not a crucial requirement.

Submitted projects will be proposed to participating venues and organisers. These will assist in providing the infrastructure (technical equipment, internet connection, material, staff, etc) for the project (if needed). Continue reading

Remote — by Neill Donaldson, Usman Haque, Ai Hasegawa and Georg Tremmel — connects together two spaces, one in Boston the other in Second Life, and treats them as a single contiguous environment, bound together by the internet so that things that occur in one space affect things that happen in the other and vice versa - remotely controlling each other.

From Feb 7 to April 15, 2008 you can see: The Remote chair in Boston, Huret & Spector Gallery, Emerson College :: The Remote chair in Second Life, Ars Virtua :: PDF menu of interactions between the two spaces :: Real time data from the two spaces @ turbulence.org. Continue reading

In contributing to the discussion on Second Life and the politics of virtual labor I’d like to report on a hybrid reality, social networking project I recently exhibited / performed at the Sundance Film Festival with Jeff Crouse, Senior Research Fellow at Eyebeam in NYC. The project titled “Invisible Threads” explores the growing intersection between labor, emerging virtual economies and real life commodities through the creation of a designer jeans “sweatshop” in Second Life (SL). The factory virtually manufactures designer jeans that are “teleported” into the real world upon completion and worn by real live people. Continue reading

With his project Liberate Your Avatar Paul Sermon best known for his telepresence research explored the merge of virtual and real worlds on a public screen. At Urban Screens Manchester 07 he presented the interactive piece on a temporary screen in All Saints Gardens on Oxford Road.

Beforehand Sermon had recreated the actual square in Second Life. Liberate Your Avatar transformed the screen situated in All Saints Gardens into a portal between these two parallel worlds, allowing both ‘first life’ visitors and Second Life avatars to coexist and share the same park bench in a live interactive installation. Continue reading