Networked_Performance

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  Live Stage: Robert Wilson [Oakland, CA]

  Posted: 15-October-2012, 11:29am EDT by jo

  1 Have You Been Here Before 2 No This Is The First Time — A Performance Lecture With Director and Artist Robert Wilson :: October 29, 2012; 7:00 pm :: Littlefield Concert Hall, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland, CA.

  Presented by the Technology and Society Lecture Series & the Intermedia Arts Program of Mills College, the world-renowned director will reference his original works for the stage such as Deafman Glance, A Letter for Queen Victoria, Einstein on the Beach (created with composer Philip Glass), the CIVIL warS, and The Black Rider, as well as his acclaimed work for operatic and theatrical repertoire including his luminous stagings of Madame Butterly, Wagner?s Ring Cycle, The Magic Flute, Ibsen?s Peer Gynt and Heiner Mueller?s Quartett. At the conclusion of the event, the audience will be invited to explore Mr. Wilson?s ideas further during an informal question-and-answer period. The extended solo presentation provides the public a rare opportunity to learn more about Wilson and his process.

  Wilson will share his vast aesthetic universe, combining hundreds of striking images from throughout his prolific career to offer an intimate self-portrait of Wilson?s creative process.

  Wilson appears in the Bay Area for the restaging of his epic and legendary collaboration with Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, which will be presented by CalPerformance October 26, 27, 28 at Zellerbach Hall on the campus of UC Berkeley.

  For more information please contact: Patrice Scanlon at pscanlon [at] mills.edu

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  Live Stage: Yono Pixel-Art Jam [online]

  Posted: 15-October-2012, 11:36am EDT by jo

  Yono Pixel-Art Jam/Hangout Online with Ed Stastny: I’d like to invite you to come hangout with us Sunday (October 21) while we doodle and code. I’ll specifically be focused on facilitating Yono participation (taking reservations, editing data, uploading pieces) and making Yono pieces, but you can do your own thing or just pop in to say hi. If it’s anything like past Yono hangouts, there’ll be a lot of screen-sharing and pixel-pushing. And that’s fine with me.

  I set it up for afternoon (PST) so our European friends can potentially join in.

  All you have to do is RSVP yes/maybe to this and be on Google+ at the time and I’ll invite you in to the hangout. If you see me on then and don’t have an invite, just send me a message.

  For those planning to get in on the Yono action, you might want to check out [sito.org] and find an [OPEN] slot to reserve. Hell, pick two. You can just respond to this thread with your requests and I’ll do my best to get you into the dataclump before we start.

  Also, be sure to check out Yono’s new funding effort on Indiegogo.

  See you soon!

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  iPhone Game Based on Foxconn Suicides Censored

  Posted: 15-October-2012, 11:45am EDT by jo

  “Benjamin Poynter’s In A Permanent Save State is a surreal and visually striking interactive narrative that the creator says imagines the spiritual afterlife of seven overworked laborers who have committed suicide, alluding to real-life events at Foxconn’s electronics manufacturing plants in 2010. But the game was quietly removed from the App Store less than an hour after it went live earlier today.” — Apple removes iPhone game based on Foxconn suicides from App Store by Joshua Kopstein, The Verge.

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  Turbulence Commission: ?WoodEar? by Peter Traub

  Posted: 2-October-2012, 6:31pm EDT by jo

  Turbulence Commission: WoodEar by Peter Traub [Needs download, and Speakers/Headphones]:

  Bringing the body of the tree to the network is a natural fit — a tree is a network too: roots sensing and absorbing nutrients, leaves sensing and photosynthesizing sunlight, and phloem and xylem running throughout to carry nutrients across the structure. WoodEar attempts to merge the dynamic qualities of this biological network with the digital network. A series of sensors attached to the tree stream data on the state of its environment — light, temperature, air pressure, and wind. This live data is merged with photos and recordings of the tree’s immediate surroundings into a generative application/installation. By downloading and running the application, anyone can access the live environmental experiences of the tree — one that may be very distant from them, but that still shares the same air, sun, earth, and sky.

  WoodEar is a 2012 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence website. It was made possible with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  BIOGRAPHY

  Peter Traub is a composer/installationist/net artist currently living in Charlottesville, VA. He completed his Ph.D. in 2010 in the Composition and Computer Technologies program at the University of Virginia. He received his Master’s in Electro-Acoustic Music from Dartmouth College in 1999, and has composed numerous works of electronic music, net art, and sound installations. His works have been performed and exhibited internationally and his piece, ItSpace — also commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. — was featured on National Public Radio’s “Day to Day” in 2008. Between Dartmouth and UVA, Peter lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years where he worked as a software developer at internet startups. His dissertation, titled “Spatial Exploration: Physical, Abstracted, and Hybrid Spaces as Compositional Parameters in Sound Art,” was a series of performances, installations, and a large paper exploring the use of technology-mediated spaces in contemporary music.

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  Digital Aesthetic³ 2012 [Preston]

  Posted: 2-October-2012, 10:52am EDT by jo

  Digital Aesthetic³ 2012 Conference and Exhibition ? the third and final manifestation of the Digital Aesthetic series :: Conference: October 5-6, 2012 :: University of Central Lancashire, Preston :: Exhibition: October 6, 2012 ? January 5, 2013 :: Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston :: October 6-19, 2012 :: PR1 Gallery, University of Central Lancashire, Preston.

  The conference explores the impact that the digital has on our sense of self and our relationship to the physical world through talks, performances and discussion sessions. Join Arthur Elsenaar (Netherlands) for electronic facial hacking and Takahiko Iimura (Japan) for an interactive demonstration of learning Japanese ? wrongly!

  Chaired by Professor Sean Cubitt (Film and Television Studies, Goldsmiths, London) and Dr Sarah Cook (CRUMB, University of Sunderland), the event also includes presentations and performance by:
  Ruth Catlow (UK), Terry Flaxton (UK), Maria Chatzichristodoulou (UK/Greece), Peter Callas (Australia), Alexa Wright (UK), Lindsay Taylor (UK), Beryl Graham (UK), Peter Campus (USA), Adam Lockhart (UK), Marilene Oliver (UK), Brendan Dawes (UK), Chris Meigh Andrews (UK) and Mary Lucier (USA).

  The exhibition demonstrates some of the diverse ways that artists are using digital technology, and includes two new commissions:

  Mark Amerika: Museum of Glitch Aesthetics ? an online-turned-physical project that sees the whole museum subjected to the notion of the ?glitch? (co-produced with AND Festival).

  Harrison & Wood: DIYVBIED ? a world premiere of a new film commission which juxtaposes the familiarity of the everyday with the horror of the car-bomb.

  Also exhibiting are: Keith Brown (UK), Peter Callas (Australia), Sophie Calle (France), Peter Campus (USA), Paul Coldwell (UK), Brendan Dawes (UK), Stefanie Dykes (USA), Terry Flaxton (UK), Pat Flynn (UK), Yuan Goang-Ming (Taiwan), David Henckel (UK), Takahiko Iimura (Japan), Mary Lucier (USA), Jo Lansley & Neeta Madahar (UK), Ingrid Ledent (Belgium), Marilene Oliver (UK), Alexa Wright (UK), Katsutoshi Yuasa (Japan), Lee Yongbaek (Korea)

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  Augmented Reality Dance

  Posted: 2-October-2012, 11:03am EDT by jo

  Augmented Reality Dance :: October 7, 2012 :: World-Wide Call for Participation.

  On Sunday the whole world is invited to join a globally synchronised choreography. By following the instructions on a smartphone, a dance routine is performed. A dance to be experienced alone, together. As a distributed worldwide flashmob. While standing anywhere on earth, moving your phone above your head from left to right, someone standing somewhere else, will do the exact same thing, at that exact moment.

  With the rapid growth of the use of mobile pocketsize digital technology, our environment of today consists of more than just physical tangible material. There?s a data-reality invisibly surrounding us with virtual games to be played, stories to be experienced, treasures to be searched for. Using ?augmented reality viewers? people are uncovering virtual manifestations around them, appearing on the live camera view of their mobile phone.

  While doing so, they make quirky movements, waving their smartphones in the air in search of virtual content. These moves resemble an improvisational choreography. It triggered Dutch new media artist Sander Veenhof to turn the phenomenon into a real choreography. The project is the result of a cooperation with choreographer Marjolein Vogels.

  A virtual instruction cube floats around a participant. The cube can be viewed using the augmented reality app ?Layar?. While keeping ones? feet at the indicated position, the cube instructs a person to hold the phone with specific hands while following the moves of the cube. The moves are initiated in a synchronised way across the globe because the system is controlled from one central source.

  The current choreography consists of 33 moves, designed specifically for persons holding a smartphone in either left or right or both hands. The series of movements of the cube, moving back and forth, from left to right, up and down, from closeby to far away, are chosen in such a way that the movements of the hand(s) and thereby the body becomes a structured dance.

  ARTISTS

  Sander Veenhof studied ?unstable media? at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Being an adept of digital and virtual realities and fascinated by the intrinsic lack of impossibilities of these domains, Veenhof now pursues his fascination throughout the physical realm thanks to Augmented Reality which has turned the world into a programmable environment. With his creations for our geographically-connected data-reality, he explores the practical and conceptual opportunities for artistic expression within the new hybrid semi-digital space. He is joined in these efforts by the Augmented Reality artist collective Manifest.AR, which he co- founded after the full-scale uninvited AR exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York he organized with fellow members of the group.

  Marjolein Vogels works as a performer with NB projects, Jack Gallagher en Jennifer Tee. Besides this, she creates her own choreographies which are presented at various theatre festivals, performed by the collective The Magic Life Club. She is the organiser and curater of the yearly WhyNot festival.

  CONTEXT

  The launch of the Global Choreography will be presented at the Tempo Festival Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. A projection at “Oi Futuro” will show the Dance.AR participants across the earth, both as dots on a Google map or through live video-streaming, wherever streams are generated.

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  Open Air [Philadelphia]

  Posted: 2-October-2012, 2:36pm EDT by jo

  Association for Public Art Presents Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Open Air :: until October 14, 2012; Nightly, 8:00-11:00 pm :: Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA.

  The Association for Public Art in Philadelphia (aPA, formerly the Fairmount Park Art Association) presents the world premiere of Open Air by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Open Air is a spectacular interactive light experience directed by participants’ voices and GPS locations, illuminating the night sky from Philadelphia’s historic Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

  Inspired by the city’s rich tradition of democracy and respect for free speech, Open Air was created specifically for Philadelphia and for participation by the general public. Using a free mobile app developed by Lozano-Hemmer’s studio, participants are invited to record and submit messages of up to 30 seconds in length-shout-outs, poems, songs, rants, dedications, proposals.

  In response, 24 powerful robotic searchlights, stationed strategically along a half-mile section of the Parkway, will create a unique, dynamic light formation in the sky. The lights will respond in brightness and position to the GPS location of the participants and the frequency and amplitude of their voice recording, which can be heard through the app, the project website or public speakers located at the Project Information Center at Eakins Oval (24th Street and the Parkway). The free ‘Open Air Philly’ app will be available from the iTunes store starting Sept. 20.

  Priority will be given to those submitting messages from the Parkway, but for those not onsite, the project website, www.openairphilly.net, will allow users to record messages that will be archived and played back by the lights if other web visitors rate them highly. All participants will have a personalized webpage created automatically with their message, comments and images of the light sculptures that their voice created.

  The messages with the highest ratings online will be featured during the opening night celebration, a free public event that will take place September 20, 7:30?11pm, on the closed inner drive of the Parkway. The evening will host a selection of local food trucks, a live countdown and ceremonial lighting, a presentation by Lozano-Hemmer, voice performers and other special guests.

  Depending on atmospheric conditions, Open Air will be seen up to 10 miles away from the Parkway each evening from 8 to 11pm. The Project Information Center will be equipped with app download, free mobile loan stations and seating areas for watching the lights and listening to the messages. There will also be an Information Outpost located at Sister Cities Park (18th Street and Logan Square).

  ‘This project is meant to be a new public space for Philadelphians to express themselves,’ says Lozano-Hemmer, who is globally acclaimed for his large-scale interactive art experiences, including the well-known 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics installation Vectorial Elevation. Thousands of individuals will be able to participate onsite during the project’s duration, and hundreds of thousands more will experience the project online and as viewers. Lozano-Hemmer’s interest ‘is to create intimacy and not intimidation. While the project will be spectacular in scale, what matters to me is that individual participants can personalize their city with their contributions.’

  The project is presented in conjunction with the 2012 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and the 2012 DesignPhiladelphia Festival and supported in part by the Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Concurrent with Open Air, Lozano-Hemmer will present the exhibition Voice Array, Sept. 6?Oct. 13, at New York City’s bitforms gallery.

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  ?Evil Media? by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey

  Posted: 25-September-2012, 10:08am EDT by jo

  Evil Media by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, MIT Press:

  Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.

  The title takes the imperative ?Don?t be evil? and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed.

  Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories, information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak and manage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Media sets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in the networks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformative medium.

  About the Authors

  Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software and Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and editor of Software Studies: A Lexicon (MIT Press, 2008).

  Andrew Goffey is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, and Communication at Middlesex University, London. He is the coeditor, with Éric Alliez, of The Guattari Effect and the translator of Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre’s Capitalist Sorcery, of Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, and of work by Maurizio Lazzarato, Barbara Cassin, and Etienne Balibar. He is also coeditor of the journal Computational Culture.

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  Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art

  Posted: 25-September-2012, 10:19am EDT by jo

  Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art; Edited by Catherine Morris and Vincent Bonin; Preface by Lucy R. Lippard:

  In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years, sometimes referred to as a conceptual art object itself, not only described and embodied the new type of art-making that Lippard was intent on identifying and cataloging, it also exemplified a new way of criticizing and curating art. Nearly forty years later, the Brooklyn Museum takes Lippard?s celebrated experiment in curated concatenation as a template, turning a book that resembled an exhibition into an exhibition materializing the ideas in her book.

  ?Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ?dematerialized.?? - Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years

  The artworks and essays featured in this publication recall the thrill that was tangible in Lippard’s original documentation, reminding us that during the late sixties and early seventies all possible social and material parameters of art (making) were played with, worked over, inverted, reduced, expanded, and rejected. By tracing Lippard?s own activities in those years, the book also documents the early blurring of boundaries among critical, curatorial, and artistic practices.

  With more than 200 images of work by dozens of artists (printed in color throughout), this book brings Lippard?s curatorial experiment full circle.

  About the Editors

  Catherine Morris is Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

  Vincent Bonin is an independent curator living in Montreal.

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  Right or Risk? 1st Public BioBrick [London]

  Posted: 23-September-2012, 10:48am EDT by jo

  Right or Risk? The 1st Public BioBrick: Exploring Public Access to the Tools of Synthetic Biology :: September 24, 2012; 7:00 - 9:00 PM (BST) :: Grant Museum of Zoology, London, United Kingdom.

  Synthetic Biology is turning genetic engineering into a simple exercise, with thousands of DNA components - BioBricks - available to program bacteria. What if ordinary citizens want access to these tools? Now, for the first time, UCL have teamed up with a group of ?biohackers? (citizen scientists in molecular biology) to create the world?s first ?Public BioBrick?. Join us for an evening exhibition and Q&A hosted by UCL iGEM with C-LAB.

  Synthetic biology, which is based on principles from engineering, attempts to standardise genetic sequences like electronic components, so that lego-like ?BioBricks? can be plugged into each other with ease, to create entirely new functional systems in microorganisms. This could include transforming bacteria into machines for sensing and degrading pollutants.

  The UCL team participating in this year?s international competition for synthetic biology, iGEM, are attempting to highlight issues of public access to these tools, by being the first team to work with the London Biohacking group to create a ?Public BioBrick? to be submitted to the iGEM registry for future use in competitions.

  The London Biohacking group are part of a wider DIYBio movement which is dedicated to the democritisation of science, and making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists. Working with the UCL group over the last few weeks, the ?biohackers? have chosen to create a BioBrick which can degrade mercury, a common water pollutant in India. To do this, they have designed the necessary genetic components and used their public lab at the London Hackspace to replicate the gene and prepare the E.Coli for genetic transformation. The second stage of actual genetic modification has been completed in the licensed UCL lab to comply with UK regulations.

  Artistic Advice for the exhibition comes from C-LAB’s Howard Boland, an artist/researcher working with Synthetic Biology.