Prior to this trip, I had spent several years working in collaboration with atmospheric scientists to develop systems for understanding storm and climate information through sound (a process called sonification). I created a spatialized sonification of highly detailed models of storms that devastated the New York area; a series of sonifications of actual and projected climate in New York City’s Central Park, and one of the world’s first locations for climate monitoring; and a real-time multichannel sonification and visualization of weather in the Arctic. I used data in my projects that I had collected from remote weather stations, but had never visited them. In going to Antarctica, I hoped to find a way to engage more directly with the issue of global climate change…” Continue reading Andrea Polli on Ground Truth, NYFA Current.

<new.media.art>
. Ludic Society/Margarete Jahrmann interview.
. Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition report.
. Play Cultures, the world of digital games report.
. Be My Controller, opening the urban, button by button.
news: Emotoscope, Modi 2.0, Rom Check Fail
Amalgus Cycle Process1, HAI.
reviews:
. books/dvd/cd-rom: Delusive Spaces, Unit Operations,
. Art Machines Machines Art, Conspire,
. From Technological to Virtual Art
. centerfold: ‘Totemobile’ by Chico Macmurtrie

<e.music>
. Paul Slocum (interview),
. Modified Toy Orchestra (interview),
news: Skinstrument, Plink Jet, Street Radio, Tinnitus Tamer, BeatBox
reviews: Carsten Nicolai: Static Faders, Fundamentals of Sonic Arts,
. Background Noise, Sonic Acts XII, Rechenzentrum Silence
reviews cd: Mahmoud Refat, Frank Rothkamm, Philip Jeck, Scorn,
. Felix Kubin und das Mineralorchester, Carter Tutti, Charlemagne Palestine,
. An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music vol. 5,
. Saralunden+Andrey Kiritchenko, Maja Ratkje, Fenin, Now Underscan,
. Nemeth, Yuta Segawa, Robert van Heumen, Favourite Places, Autistici,
. Schurer, Kapital Band 1, Josh Russel

<hacktivism>
. Too close to the Screen, Reality and Unreality in wargames,
. The H-Gamer’s Song of Dawn,
. Golden Farmers / Ge Jin (interview),
. news (2.4Ghz, Intelluctual Property Donor, Fake is a Fake, P2P Art,
Logo_Wiki)
. reviews: (MyCreativity Reader, Art and Revolution, Access Denied, An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Digital Contagions)

NEURAL http://neural.it/

Turning the machine inside out - Creating Worlds as Interface by Eric Kluitenberg: It is always a good thing for artists who work with technology and technological media to study the inner life of the machines. Break open the box and look what is inside. This helps to foreclose an overly naive relationship to the medium. Obviously, it also seems a good thing for artists to simply know their material, understand their medium. This is hardly any different today for media-artists than it was, for instance, for Fresco painters in the grand hall of Sienna’s Palazzo Publico in the thirteenth century. Still there might be more at stake in the case of digital machines, something that moves beyond the usual questions about the artist’s material.

That something might be the creation of Worlds as Interface. This speculative idea was suggested in the proposal for a new physics by the physicist Otto E. Rossler. An approach he named Endophysics. The main problem for Rossler was the apparently insolvable question of how to define an explicit model of the world in its entirety, in which the implicit role of the observer was accounted for, given that the observer is always inextricably implicated in what can be observed of the world in the first place. It would require an explicit model that includes the observer. Such a model would, however only be possible to construct from an ‘exophysical’ location, a position outside of the world (in its entirety), which is by definition impossible.

The world according to Rossler is defined by that what transfers between the observer and the ‘real’ world at the interface. It is the interface to the world that defines what can be observed about the ‘real’ world. This interface constitutes a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ which remains in itself inaccessible, as it is the very implication of the observer in the observed. The riddle of the necessary but impossible inclusion of the observer and the interface in the picture of the world would appear as a problem without solution. But Rossler suggest there might just be a little escape hatch from this unresolvable implication. He describes it as the construction of model worlds that include the model-observer and their interface with that model world, which allows us, by deferral, from our meta-position outside the model world, to study explicitly the implicit implication of the observer into the microscopic phenomena that transpire in the model world, and their influence on macroscopic phenomena in that model world.

Through this deferral it is possible to make explicit the relationships between the observer, the interface, and the ‘real’ world. While the true nature of the ‘real’ world remains as such unknowable, since all knowledge is a product of an interface whose structure and effect cannot be determined as there is no external position to the ‘real’ world from where this could be judged, this deferred study suggests next steps to bring the analysis closer to our own world. First of all Endophysics recognises the necessity to include the study of the human brain, the biological material substructure that structures the interface to the ‘real’ world. It attempts to bridge the gap between physics, neurophysiology and the subjective, the object of psychological study and psycho-analysis. Endophysics understands the world as something specific to each observer, defined and constituted by the specific structure of the observers’ brain and experience, but still attempts through this deferred study and return to the original observer to come closer to an explicit understanding of the interface that defines the world this observer inhabits and escape ‘mere subjectivism’, even if the interface itself remains ultimately inaccessible for external scrutiny.

It cannot be a coincidence that Rossler chooses his terminology of the interface as a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ that we know so well from Lacanian psycho-analytical theory. In a Lacanian understanding it is the symbolic order that ‘cuts’ across the ‘real’, which is always in its place but is itself unknowable. The symbolic order, language par excellence, but also the wider objects of semiotic study, open the real as in a cut, without a sense of where or how this cut is applied. The subject is thus stumbling in the dark of that what cannot be known - the ‘real’ itself.

What the interface creates, both in Rossler’s conception as well as in Lacan’s, is not an access to the world, but the world itself. As such we can never study the world in its entirety as it s structured by the interface that exists prior to this world, but escapes its own detection by the observer - us as human subjects - being nothing more than the effect of an unknown interface that links us to a an equally unknown ‘real’. We continue to stumble in the dark, playing around whit the effects of the interface and delimited by its structural limitations, the structuring principles of which are unknown to us. When we try to observe them at their microscopic (fundamental) level they change as a result of our action. When we want to see place we cannot see time, when we want to see moment we cannot see space. The state of the fundamental building blocks of ‘reality’ is unknown to us until we look inside Shrodinger’s box, but when we look inside we produce the reality we observe. Outside the box the state of that reality remains undecidable, it can be one or zero, we just cannot know. Rossler also refers to Kurt Godel’s undecidability theorem that shows the limits of formal (explicit) reasoning in a thus far undisputed mathematical expos?.

What to do then, if we cannot extricate ourselves from the world to study the interface that produces our world as an ‘effect’? Should we give up trying to understand hat world, our world, our relationship to that world, as we are entangled in a senseless circulatory motion that will never get us closer to the ‘real”, closer to understanding, to ‘enlightenment’? Or is this all just a formal game, a puzzle, a fancy at best? Surely there are still ‘real’ passions, joys, pains, beauty and sublime suffering to engage with?

Rossler suggests one possible trajectory: the construction of model worlds. He sees them embodied in our times in virtual worlds, in simulations that can run on digital brains, in finite schemes of explicit description.

Well…, perhaps. But over the years (as a personal note on this) I have become increasingly disaffected with the sterile aesthetics and anaemic experience of virtual worlds. They simply do not capture my soul, or haunt my dreams. They do not stir my passions, as the dramatic foreshorthenings in a grand Caravaggio painting do. So I am wondering, can there be another way in which we can build a deferred reality that includes the observer and the implicit interface, suitable for explicit study? Such an undertaking would not simply be the construction of formal model worlds in finite schemes of explicit description, but much rather a more visceral experimental practice. Its object would have to be the construction and simultaneous deconstruction of the interface; the conscious explication of an interface with the aim to study the interfaces that implicitly structure our world - not just our experience of the world, but notably the world itself.

The reason why I am going into all this is that some of these thoughts were triggered by one work in particular I had the privilege of seeing ‘under construction’ (always the most exciting phase of a technologically invested art work, in preparation for the Piet Zwart Institute’s Media Design MA graduation show of 2008. An installation work by Danja Vassiliev. The monstrous machine he created felt like a psychoanalytically ambiguous tunnel that allowed a view into the very belly of the beast, as if we are looking at the inner life of the machines themselves. It looked a bit like the wonderfully kitschy culmination scene of the Matrix trilogy, where the story’s protagonist Neo visits the heart of the machine empire to negotiate a truce between men and machines.

Vassiliev constructed a patently absurd machine, called m/e/m/e/2.0[1], and finds himself (inadvertently or not) in the best company of a long tradition of ‘avant-garde’ artists who created various sorts of absurd, ironic, impossible, sadistic, insane or ridiculous machines. His likes are the creators of ominous bachelor machines (Duchamp, Lautreamont, Picabia, Roussel, Kafka), self-destructing machines of the Tinguely type, right down to the magically autistic robotic anti-sculptures of Allan Rath.

In his comments Vassiliev showed himself sceptical of the current infatuation with disembodied information, especially the world-wide web with its inapt page metaphors that suggest a stability where only flux and impermanence are the rule. To counter the loss of materiality in the info- interface, Vassiliev constructed an elaborate machine that allows us to look, through the tunnel in the installation an via a web cam on the web (yes the object of criticism is part of the work) at a stunningly analogue ‘interface’. The information is printed or drawn on half transparent sheets of circuit board material and becomes visible by a light that shines through the sheet from behind, like an electrical viewing box. To make the whole thing ‘interactive’, Vassiliev constructed a tunnel of surgically removed and reinserted cd/dvd computer drives, mounted at 45 degrees angle relative to each other, and hollowed out their sliders. The sheets are now covering the slide and the drive places a different sheet in front of the light - at the click of a mouse!

“My main problem was to get the camera to focus automatically”, said Vassiliev, as the slides of the drives necessarily had to be placed at different distances from both the source of light as well as the relative position of the observer/camera. So here some complex algorithmic manipulation had to be put in place to give us a readable ‘in-focus’ web cam image on the website - what would the point of the whole web-interface otherwise be if the image be systematically out of focus…?!

The interesting point of Vassiliev’s machine is that we can witness it in two forms at once, as a physical interface to a limited universe, five or eight half translucent sheets (depending on the number of drives mounted in the machine) containing some printed information, or maybe one or two hand- drawn images, whatever might be stored on those few lowly sheets, illuminated by the artists’ light from behind. Captured for us lower mortals by a cheap mass-consumption web cam and made visible again in an indirect exposure emanating from the computer screen in the from of a web page containing the webcam feed.

We need this double perspective to understand the nature of the interface, as a principle. We can witness it simultaneously from within the model world constructed by the artist (the feed on the web page), and from the outside as a materialised structure (in the installation). Obviously here the ‘content’ is not the point of the work. Neither is the medium the thing under scrutiny. Much more it is the interface: The way in which our relationship to whatever it is that is mediated is structured by this interface. By extension we can understand our relationship to the ‘real’ world as a question of interface and mediation through this deferred but still visceral model world.

One word of caution, though: The analogy of the biological brain to the electronic machine should not be taken too literally. We have witnessed over many century’s of scientific and engineering discourse a recurrent recourse to mechanistic models of the mind. Most recently within Hard A.I. research. According to this latter doctrine a symbol processing machine such as an electronic digital computer, should, if it is able to perform ‘typically’ human tasks (of symbolic processing) offer us a possibility, by analogy, to understand the mechanisms of the human mind and the workings of the human brain as a biological symbol processor. However, leaving the obvious contestations of scale and complexity aside (the complexity of the human brain outranks that of current computers by an enormous magnitude), these models offer very little insight, quite likely none whatsoever, into the workings of the human mind and brain. For the simple reason that human minds do not only process symbols, but also many other sensations. The brain itself is not independent of the rest of the body, most notably the nervous system. The biological brain is not silicon-based, and therefore essentially (physically, quantum-mechanically) different from electronic digital machines. And finally, humans are part of living cultures that transform with and through them, while the electronic digital machines are little more than a mere product of the same, without any significant immanent transcendent potential[2].

So the central issue in these experimental practices is not to create a literal analogy to the biological brain as such, but much rather to explore the question of the interface in a visceral manner. In fact virtually all works represented in the Media Design graduation show exemplify and embody this central point. They investigate, externalise, and manifest the interface to the domain of information, which lies at the heart of the digital machine.

In the case of Michael van Schaik’s Archus Browser[3] project he investigates simultaneously the (so far) never delivered promised of the semantic web, an information structure based on ordering by association of meaning and semantic properties, rather than syntactical and physical (and therefore often arbitrary) links, and the emerging practice of social tagging. Van Schaik’s project is the most purely informational of the group, but through its emphasis on extra-medial structuring and social praxis it clearly explores the interface as problem and suggests alternative approaches to the information interface.

Maria Karagianni’s project “Notations under Provisions” creates a linkage between the informational and embodied realm by creating a system in which Laban dance notations can be interactively performed with the help of a digital machine. But the linkage then exceeds the relationship of notation and performance by capturing this instant performance and putting it under copyright, utilising legal provisions that enable the copyrighting of a first-time performance of a dance score. The interface between the informational and embodied realm is thus extended into the social, institutional and legal realm. Copyright itself, of course, is a purely informational construct, and deeply contested one for that matter. The interesting transformation is the movement from the informational (a digital rendition of Laban notation) through the corporeal (the performance) back to the informational domain (the legal regime). Here again we can be both inside and outside the system to witness how the interface between these domains produces new realities as an ‘effect’.

In Gordan Savcic’s project “PlaySureVeillance”, similarly the interface between a physical game console, a game, and a hidden profiling system creates a play of entertainment and security politics. Player’s of hacked version of Nintendo’s Terror Toad are recorded, profiled and automatically presented and tracked on Facebook. In the course of the game more and more information is gathered of the participant and stored in a public record. The sinister politics of social coercion in the revered social web are revealed as a problem of unwarranted interfacing.

During my studio visit Ivan Monroy Lopez showed me a version of his algorithmic typography generator, where the typeface could be dynamically generated using a midi controller to influence seed parameters for the system. While the final version should be implemented in a web interface, this haptic interface seemed all the more prescient to the interrogation of the interface-problem, so it seemed to me.

Linda Hoffling’s “Remote Control / Democracy Player” fits in a series of projects that have attempted to deregulate the tight editorial control of mass-media channels - the ultimate tool for social normalisation. Here she proposes a series of participatory tools to influence the content and programming of a local Copenhagen TV station, subverting the logic of tight top-down control of the mass-brainwash-medium TV - it should include the on/off switch, which might have a devastatingly stroboscopic effect on the TCV transmission…

Salvador d’Souza’s Traditional Ritual Information System (TRIS)[4] explores the abyss of post-colonial transcultural misunderstanding. Investigating how to build web-based tools to support the study of symbolic and visual anthropology. In this case d’Souza is looking at the representation of Ghanaian Chieftaincy rituals and their relationship to world cultures. While these rituals are regularly and often erroneously framed as exotic and authentic (in the sense of untainted by external cultures), d’Souza reflects on the complex interrelations between Colonial history, migration and translocal linkages, as for instance in the Libation Pouring ritual, which as a local Ghanaian phenomenon is entirely dependent on De Kuyper’s Schnapps from Schiedam, another local but distinctively not Ghanaian product. The question is how the essential translocal and borderless nature of the world wide web relates to such local/translocal practices and linkages.

That in virtually all these projects the information interface and the inner life of the machine are at the heart of the works produced here is certainly no coincidence. Under the leadership of the Media design MFA, first by Matthew Fuller and now Florian Cramer, there has been a deliberate attempt to question the structure of the machine and the construction of the interface from its inception. Both Fuller and Cramer understand this necessity to dive into the machine, to turn its bowels inside out, to make explicit the implicit interface, to deconstruct and reconstruct it in visceral examinations. Some of the projects presented this year take this objective quite literally, while others imply the interface as a border and as a problem; a locus of activity even if the interface is ultimately a non- locality (because of its essential inaccessibility).

We could maybe even call this approach a ’style’, though both Fuller and Cramer would probably abhor such a notion. It is certainly significant, however, that the machine is turned inside out here to reveal that the interface is a permeable border which can be reconfigured through such visceral, sometimes haptic acts.

Eric Kluitenberg,
Amsterdam, June 2008.

[1] http://k0a1a.net/meme20/
[2] Granting some transcendent potential to self-programming machines - but only very little and limited…
[3] http://archusproject.org/
[4] http://tris.ofamfa.org/

[This essay was commissioned for the graduation catalogue of the Media Design M.A. of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, and will appear in the graduation catalogue designed by Open Source Publishing, Brussels. For more information on the graduation show YOU ARE PWNED at WORM Rotterdam, 4-6 July.]

Abstract: The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology, wearables for short, and fashion, design and science is a highly promising and topical subject. Offered here is a compact survey of the theory involved and an explanation of the role technology plays in a fabric or article of clothing. The practical application is explained in detail and numerous illustrations serve as clarification. Over 50 well-known designers, research institutes, companies and artists, among them Philips, Burton, MIT Media Lab, XS Labs, New York University, Hussein Chalayan, Cute Circuit or International Fashion Machines are introduced by means of their latest, often still unpublished, project, and a survey of their work to date. Given for the first time is a list of all the relevant information on research institutes, materials, publications etc. A must for all those wishing to know everything about fashionable technology.

The second volume of the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series asks the question: what lessons can architecture learn from software development, and more specifically, from the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement? Written in the form of a quasi-license, Urban Versioning System 1.0 posits seven constraints that, if followed, will contribute to an open source urbanism that radically challenges the conventional ways in which cities are constructed.

About the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series [Series Editors: Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, Mark Shepard :: Published by the Architectural League of New York]

The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series extends a discourse initiated in the summer of 2006 by a three-month-long discussion on the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) mailing list that culminated in the Architecture and Situated Technologies Symposium at the Urban Center and Eyebeam in New York, co-produced by the Center for Virtual Architecture (CVA), the Architectural League of New York and the iDC. The series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: how our experience of space and the choices we make within it are affected by a range of mobile, pervasive, embedded or otherwise “situated” technologies. Published three times a year over three years, the series is structured as a succession of nine “conversations” between researchers, writers and other practitioners from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media studies, performance studies, and engineering.

About the Architectural League: The mission of the Architectural League is to advance the art of architecture. The League carries out its mission by promoting excellence and innovation, and by fostering community and discussion in an independent forum for creative and intellectual work in architecture, urbanism, and related disciplines. We present the work and ideas of the world’s most interesting and influential architects and designers to New York, national and international audiences, through lectures, exhibitions, publications, and the worldwide web. We identify and encourage talented young architects, through competitions, grants, exhibitions, and publications. And we help shape the future of our built environment by stimulating debate and provoking design thinking about the critical issues of our time.

The Architectural League is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. League programs are also made possible by contributions from foundations, corporations, and League members and friends.

The proliferation of screens represents a signature feature of modern and contemporary life. Screens located on computer, cinema, television or mobile platforms offer possibilities for entertainment, communication, art, manipulation and monitoring, creating new forms of identity, community, expression and social control. These developments in turn have created a rich and rapidly changing set of research initiatives within and across academic fields. In late 2007 the University of Sydney held the Screenscapes: Past Present Future conference to consider these issues and changes. Participants came from China, Germany, the United States, England, New Zealand and Australia, and the keynote speakers were Professors Lev Manovich (University of California at San Diego), Sean Cubitt (University of Melbourne) and David Trotter (University of Cambridge). The conference offered a space for examining the creation of screen communities and identities, the remediation of screen technology into other cultural forms, the history and future of screen technology, aesthetics, audiences, developments in mobile platforms, and the use of screens in visual and data surveillance. Most of the articles in this issue were presented as Screenscape papers before being expanded and refined for publication.

UPDATE: The authors of the best abstracts may be invited to submit a full paper for inclusion in a special edition of a leading journal.

Location aware technologies such as widespread mobile computers and varying location sensors open up a massive range of possibilities for extending game playing into streets, buildings and even the rural landscape. New and extended forms of location-aware games including mobile or pervasive phone games, smart toys, role-playing games as well as Mixed Reality (MR) games all demonstrate promising new forms of game play. Substantial work has also gone into new game concepts, sophisticated technology and viable business models. However, research on the methodological issues of studying mobile player experiences, pervasive game activity and ubiquitous interaction has become necessary. Furthermore, there is also a need to explore the methodological issues in the evaluation of the intertwined, mutually dependent dimensions related to the usability and playability of location-based games.

This workshop will bring together researchers, practitioners, and students with the objective of sharing knowledge, experience and ideas so that the many user experience issues of location aware games can be more thoroughly addressed.

We would like to invite papers to be submitted to this workshop that focus on one or several issues of measuring player experience in location-aware games including but not limited to:

* User interface design issues on multiple device types: from ideas to guidelines and principals
* Devices and modalities, including tangible computing
* Appropriateness of existing HCI work to game interfaces e.g. task analysis, heuristics, interviews and other methods
* Social dimensions of location gaming technologies, from non-player participation to between player communication
* Theoretical issues related space, place and presence
* Contextual issues when designing and evaluating location aware games
* Using participatory design and probes in design and evaluation
* Game design patterns

SUBMISSIONS: Authors are invited to submit position or research papers of not more than 4 pages, including tables, figures and references. Submissions will be accepted to be presented in a talk or as a poster. Papers should present original research or summarize experiences related to the above mentioned workshop topics. All submissions should be made via the online workshop paper submission system.

Paper submissions should adhere to the HCI 2008 style guidelines. The respective templates may be found here. Please include all author and contact information in your submission.

Unless clearly indicated otherwise, submission of a workshop contribution implies permission for a publication on the workshop website.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES: Paper Submission: July 14th, 2008; Notification of Acceptance: End of July.

POST WORKSHOP: We are currently in advanced stages of negotiation with a leading journal and have provisional acceptance for a special issue. We anticipate being able to make a further announcement shortly. If you require more information please contact us.

Organising and Programme Committee: Rod McCall, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany (co-chair); Barbara Gr ter, Hochschule Bremen, University of Applied Sciences, Germany (co-chair); Anne-Kathrin Braun, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany (co-chair); Lynne Baillie, Glasgow Caledonian University (UK) and FTW; Austria Andrew Wilson, Blink, UK ; Richard Wetzel, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany; Zachary O’Toups, Texas A&M University, USA; Joerg Niesenhaus, University of Duisberg-Essen, Germany.

For more information contact Rod McCall (rod.mccall [at] fit.fraunhofer.de) or visit www.ipcity.eu

The workshop is being held in association with the EC funded IPCity and PEACH projects.

Interact or Die! concerns interaction at every level. The book is about communication between molecules, between humans and animals, between trees and the sun. Artists play an important part in the interviews and essays in “Interact or Die!” They are the ones who test material, stretch it, extend it, twist it and recombine it into artistic forms and structures.

The jury report on “Interact or Die!”:

“Ultimately, interaction is an essential precondition for every social organization. (…) Interactivity, in turn, is the method of bringing such behavior into a specific form and, at the same time, a particular approach to dealing with it, whereby attention is focused in equal measure on human activity as well as processes taking place in nature and technology.”

V2_ is delighted to have won the prize and views the bestowing of the Prix Ars Electronica as a recognition of its efforts to help develop a theory of electronic art. V2_’s books are used in art education and at universities in the Netherlands and abroad.

The articles section features new essays from a number of established and emerging scholars in the field. The topic of new forms and paradigms in performance emerges in essays such as Kate Rossmanith’s account of Bio Art, Jeffrey Morris’s discussion of digital music performance and Diana Smith’s account of Sydney based visual artists ‘The Kingpins’. We are especially excited to be publishing Meiling Cheng’s recent exploration of recent performance work in China.

Some of the essays:

Mapping Native Flora in NYC: The Choreography of Collaboration
Lise Brenner, Ulrich Lorimer & Katrina Simon

‘Mobility is our goal!’: challenging perceptions towards citizenship, migration and asylum seeking through performative interventions
Anja Kanngieser

The Augmented Theatre in Virtualised Society: See You in Walhalla
Eirini Nedelkopoulou

We Are Cells: BioArt, Semi-Livings, and Visceral Threat
Kate Rossmanith

‘Dragging’ Liveness in the Video Art of The Kingpins
Diana Smith

Featuring reviews of recent books by Rustom Bharucha, Mike Pearson, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris and the enormous Performance Cosmology from CPR in Wales. We also have Meg Mumford’s detailed analysis of recent publications on contemporary theatre in Europe by and Maggie Philiips’ discussion of new work by Ramsay Burt.

Embracing a Mediat[is]ed Modernity: An Approach to Exploring Humanity in Posthuman Music

“When I first began writing this review I thought that I’d just be writing a couple of quick paragraphs in response to Glorious Ninth’s latest artwork Invisibility_Phial. However this work has not only uncovered for me aspects of the nature of their artistic collaboration, but also how bringing everyday life into art adds essential value to art and culture. Through their recent work, Glorious Ninth (Kate Southworth & Patrick Simons) have created an intriguing interface introducing a more personal and emotional context. Their own lives become part of the works, that serve to introduce us to their world via their intuitive, creative practice.” Read on >>