[PostSpectacular / Print Magazine - cover design / 2008]
David Crow just published??Magic Box: Craft and the Computer,??a thoughtful essay on digital craft in a recent edition of Eye Magazine. This text situates the production of contemporary, generative digital art in relation to William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement??(industry is a "beast without hands") and Michael Mateas' notion of Procedural Literacy. The article includes discussion of work by PostSpectacular,??Flight 404 and??LettError.
??
[photo: Medialab-Prado]
Deadline for entries: February 15, 2009
Call for collaborators: March 6, 2009
Medialab-Prado and the Cultural Center of Spain in Lima (Peru) issue a call for the presentation of projects to be developed within the INTERACTIVOS?' Lima'09: Magic and Technology workshop, to be carried out in Lima from April 13 through 28, 2009.
Led By: Julian Oliver (New Zeland/Spain) ??Clara Boj (Spain) ??Diego D??az (Spain) ??Kiko Mayorga (Peru)??
The aim is the selection of a maximum of 8 proposals for the development of software pieces and interactive installations that propose a rethinking of the usual scenario in magic tricks. The workshop proposes to explore the use of open hardware and software tools in a collective and interdisciplinary manner in order to create technological prototypes with success in the Media from different perspectives: playful, creative and critical. The call is aimed at artists, magicians, engineers, musicians, programmers, designers, architects, hackers, psychologists, etc.
Contact: interactivos (at) medialab-prado.es / more information
Organizers: Cultural Center of Spain in Lima (AECID) and Medialab-Prado (Madrid City Council)
Although a little late in passing along the news, I'd like to point out that??Michelle Kasprzak's??essay??For What and For Whom???(from our Curediting issue) was recently republished in prss release #22. An "independent blog aggregator", prss release compiles interesting blog posts into "issues" ready for online viewing or PDF download. Editors??Marten Dashorst and Edwin Gardner have a knack for sniffing out great art, design and technology content and the publication is worth subscribing to - especially if you are not a RSS addict.??
Although quite overdue, we've finally started adding our past issues to the VT archives. We're going to work reverse chronologically so the first addition is Vague Terrain 08: Process??which contains interviews with??Chris Messina, Daniel Shiffman, McKenzie Wark, Peter Mettler, Tara Rodgers, and Thomson & Craighead. These were conducted by some of our closest peers and collaborators who included??Malcolm Levy, Jeremy Rotsztain, Noir, Corina MacDonald and Martin John Callanan. The issue was originally published in November 2007. Next up is our epic sample culture issue, hopefully we can attend to that in January.
It is most definitely fundraising season and Rhizome is in the midst of their annual community campaign. The new media portal has set out to raise $30,000 by midnight on December 31st and they are about 80% of the way there. Rhizome are an utterly essential online arts organization whose importance was recently described by Steve Deitz as capturing "the memory of what has been and the possibility of what can be". Contributing to Rhizome awards participants the following benefits: The opportunity to vote and help determine which artists will receive support through their??commissions program, full access to the ArtBase archive of digital art and continually updated listings of residencies and opportunities.
Rhizome is also offering a bunch of goodies for donations of more than $25. Please consider supporting??this pivotal ongoing project in nurturing and preserving technology-based art.
??
If you weren't already aware, our friends at Turbulence are conducting their annual fundraising campaign. This organization if fundamental to online arts promotion and in addition to commissioning a lot of new (and vital) work, they are active as event and symposia presenters. A quick recap of their impressive 2008 actions:
Having launched 30 COMMISSIONED WORKS on Turbulence.org and Networked_Music_Review; co-presented two exhibitions ??? MIXED REALITIES (with Ars Virtua and Huret & Spector Gallery) and LUMENS (with Greylock Arts and MCLA Gallery 51); co-presented two symposia ??? FLOATING POINTS 5: MIXED REALITIES (with Emerson College) and PROGRAMMABLE MEDIA II: NETWORKED_MUSIC (with Pace Digital Gallery); co-presented UPGRADE! BOSTON (with Massachusetts College of Art and Design); and participated in Upgrade! International: CHAIN REACTION (Skopje Macedonia).
Please consider supporting Turbulence and keep in mind the fact that when it comes to arts promotion, no donation is too small. You can find out more information about their campaign (and 2009 plans) here and donate via this link.
[Adrian Holovaty /??Everyblock]
In the 1980s architect Bernard Tschumi posed the following question: "If writers could manipulate the structure of stories in the same way as they twist vocabulary and grammar, couldn't architects do the same, organizing an architectural program in a similarly objective, detached, or imaginative way?" While Tschumi was speculating the foundation for a new type of architectural practice, his thinking can be applied to problematizing our current, informatized cityscapes. Ubiquitous computing, home-brew geospatial analysis and open source culture are rapidly changing our conception and experience of urban space. If "event" could be used as a catalyst in architecture, what paradigms might we employ to recontextualize the city?
Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE??is dedicated to exploring urban representation. The issue will serve as a global index of strategies for abstracting, quantifying and documenting urban life. Subjective cartographies, architectural mashups, urban informatics, augmented reality gaming and field recording based work are all examples of research that we are interested in. What is important is that the work is ambitious and innovative.
We are seeking submissions in all formats - audio, video, photographic documentation and text. If you are interested in submitting work to be considered for inclusion in??Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE??please note the deadlines below and contact the issue curator, Greg J. Smith at??greg@vagueterrain.net.
Additional Information
Format:??Please see??http://vagueterrain.net/content/journal/submission-guidelines??for full submission guidelines. Please consult this document as it is very important to read when considering the scope and deliverables of a submission. All of these criteria will have to be met in order for work to be included in the issue.
Copyright: Vague Terrain publishes material under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons License. Potential contributors are welcome to propose alternative licenses for their work - but we prefer the flexibility and open nature of CC.
Submission Deadline:??Potential contributors should establish contact and provide links/information about a proposed submission??before January 24th. Selected participants will be contacted by February 1st and all submission material and supporting documentation will need to be uploaded by February 15th. The tentative publication date for the issue is March 1st.
Curator Information:??Greg J. Smith??is a Toronto-based designer and researcher with interests in media theory and digital culture. His work is invested in exploring how contemporary information paradigms affect representational and spatial systems. These dynamics have been explored in a range of mediums including drawing, visualization, writing and editing. Greg co-curates and edits the digital arts publication Vague Terrain and is a contributor to Rhizome and Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1. Greg has presented work at venues and institutions which include Medialab-Prado (Madrid), the Annenberg Center for Communication (Los Angeles), the Public Memories Project (Syracuse), soundaXis (Toronto), Universit?? de Montr??al and TAGallery (online). He has taught digital humanities at the Department of Communications Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University and been a guest reviewer at the University of Toronto, Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), Ryerson University and the Los Angeles Institute of Architecture and Design (LAIAD).
??
"Open Source Video is a project of Constant, a Brussels based organisation for Arts and Media. This weblog is a collective testsite for producing and distributing open source video. Here we keep traces of experiments with software for sharing and editing video, and report on what we found to be effective hardware, good linux distributions and helpful configurations. Also: tips and hints on where to find manuals, practical info on using software etc. This blog contains posts on annotating, tracing, collectively editing and sharing video online. We are interested in finding ways to make archived video material accessible, to make it searchible and keep video archives alive by allowing the content to be re-interpreted." - posted to videovortex by Seth Keen on earlier today.
TRANZAC / RAT-DRIFTINGISH / HEALING POWER PRESENTS
BIRD SHOW (Ben Vida) ?? ??
SUN CIRCLE (Greg Davis and Zach Wallace)
Martin Arnold, Eric Chenaux, Ryan Driver
with charming Stage D??cor by
Heavy Water
THURSDAY DECEMBER 11TH 9:30 PM START
TRANZAC MAIN HALL
292 BRUNSWICK AVENUE??
Toronto, Canada
416.923.8137 ??
$10
BIRDSHOW. Ben Vida has been writing, recording and releasing records for over
ten years, both with such bands as Town and Country, Singer and DRMWPN as well
as solo under the name Bird Show. He has released records with many labels
including Thrill Jockey, Drag City and Kranky and has toured extensively
throughout the United States, Europe and Japan.
"...a primal drone that unites Vida's obsessions - electronic hum, acoustic
ambience and woodsy buzz - into one massive sound." ???Marc Masters, The Wire
SUN CIRCLE is the newish psychoacoustic, high volume drone music from the
wonderful Greg Davis and Zach Wallace.
???Sun Circle's important debut is psychoacoustic minimalism meets psychedelic
maximalism. ecstatic high volume drones, long form trance musics and peace
noise. bowed strings, voices, organs, percussion and world instruments.??? --
Kieth Fullerton Whitman
MARTIN ARNOLD / ERIC CHENAUX / RYAN DRIVER have been playing psychedelic lounge
music together for over eight years. This nights ??sprawl and slump will include
electric autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, electric guitar, analog synth, melodica, ??and
thumb-reeds.
HEAVY WATER is the audio-visual collaboration of Toronto-based filmmaker
Victoria Cheong and sound artist Wolfgang Nessel. With an interest in
experimentation, they have performed live, recorded videos and created
installations together.
If the comment buzz in his recent Create Digital Motion post is any indicator, Peter Kirn is on to something in his identification of 2009 as the year to learn Processing. While the open source software has been ubiquitous for several years, and has now moved beyond beta, perhaps this is the year we'll see a critical mass of user from the broader arts community dive headlong into this programming environment. To that end Kirn will be posting a series of tutorials on Create Digital Motion in the coming weeks and months. Processing/programming newbs take note!
[Darsha Hewitt / Scanned Sketchbook / 2007]
We've just launched the most recent edition of the Vague Terrain journal project and the issue is dedicated to device art. Guest curated by Toronto's art/technology guru Rob Cruickshank, the issue taps into the long lineage of machine making in arts and industry and collects a survey of contemporary work to represent this emerging microcontroller-driven age. In his introductory essay Cruickshank contextualizes this moment in the arts as follows:
This abundance feeds an underground culture of hackers and “circuit benders” in much the same way that the post World War II glut of cars fuelled the hot rod craze of the 50s and 60s ... The rise of rapid protoyping and small-run custom manufacturing means that an artist can essentially have a factory in their living room, and produce electronic devices as easily as previous generations made prints or ceramics.
Vague Terrain 12: Device Art provides a window into the creative practice of nine artists working in the world of machines. Participants include: Brad Borevitz, Darsha Hewitt, Erin Gee, iriXx, Jessica Field, Ken Gregory, Martin Wisniowski, Nicholas Stedman and Peter Flemming.
Somewhere There is a venue for creative music in the Parkdale neighbourhood of
Toronto, Canada. The programming features the diverse membership of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto (AIMToronto) as well as creative-musician friends and colleagues from other places.
Key components of Somewhere There programming are the residencies, during which a musician or group has two months of weekly performance slots on Wednesdays (8pm), Thursdays (8pm), or Sundays (6pm). If you would like to propose a residency for a two-month period between July 2009 and July 2010, please
send a proposal for consideration.
Please include:
1) A one-paragraph description of what you wish to do during the residency
2) A one-paragraph biographical statement for you and/or your group(s)
3) Preferences for time of the year and for night of the week (alternate choices
could be helpful)
Please send this information to sowehear@gmail.com by Friday, 16 January, 2009.
Slightly more information about Somewhere There is available on
www.somewherethere.org.
(Expand or Contract the Universe, © Constanza Camelo, artist in residency in 2008. Photos: James Partaik)
Studio XX's Residency and Co-Production Program was created in
keeping with the diversity of approaches that have been brought about
by new and multiple methodologies and processes being practiced by
artists working with new media and the Web as creative platforms.
Residencies are offered each year through three major axes identified
below. This offers a supportive context within which Québecois and
Canadian women artists may conceptualize and create, and which can
adequately accommodate the evolving realities of contemporary networked
practices.
Two 8-week residencies are offered.
This year, the residences are theme-free. All themes are eligible for
consideration. That said, we favour projects taking into account the
Studio's orientation and commitment to open source software.
Deadline for 2009-2010 : February 27, 2009
More information: http://www.studioxx.org/newsletter/callResCoprod09.html
This inventory is the result of an ongoing effort at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision R&D Department at creating an insight in the current availability of open source software for video. The main reason for this research is the current development of Open Images, but it is also aimed at expanding our institutional knowledge and expertise, and to share this within research projects and (collaborative) software development. The goal is to get an overview of the available tools for the whole spectrum, from production to distribution and ultimately consumption. Next to this, we also consider processes involved with preservation, interaction and creative reuse of video.
The publication of this document is meant as a first step towards sharing this knowledge and transforming this research into a collaborative effort. We hope this document can become a starting point for a more comprehensive and elaborate inventory. To make this possible we have used an OpenDocument Text file for this document and licensed it under a Creative Commons license. So feel free to correct and/or add information to this inventory, or – for instance – convert the document into a wiki! For the less ‘open’ readers, there is also a PDF version.
- Maarten Brinkerink from the 'Images for the Future' blog
http://research.imagesforthefuture.org/open-source-video-software-an-inventory/
Also available on the Open Video Alliance wiki:
http://openvideoalliance.org/wiki/index.php?title=List_of_Open_Source_Video_Software