Lies, Inc.: Eva and Franco Mattes :: June 9 – July 30, 2011 :: Site Gallery, 1 Brown Street, Sheffield, UK.

Site Gallery is delighted to present the first UK solo-retrospective of tricksters, pranksters and media hackers Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.org. Renowned for their masterful subversions of public media, their work is precariously balanced on the edge of legal, ethical and social boundaries.

For example, for Nike Ground, their notorious (and unauthorised) Nike advertising campaign, they changed the name of the historic Karlsplatz, in Vienna to Nike Platz and provoked significant debate about public and private space (as well as a law suit). From impersonating the Vatican (through copying and subtly changing the Vatican website), to stealing fragments of artwork from major museums, they use the tools of the time to question the rules of the games we play. Continue reading

[Image: The Vitruvian World by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker, David Steele] From Black Box to Second Life: Theatre and Performance in Virtual Worlds :: May 20, 2011; 10:00 am – 5:00 pm :: Performance Studio 3, School of Arts and New Media, University of Hull, Scarborough Campus, United Kingdom.

Immersive virtual worlds have grown enormously in popularity in recent years. The most popular of them, Second Life (SL), which was developed by Linden Labs in 2003, now has 1.4 million users. Although the exact number of active SL users is not known, there is no question that there has been a dramatic growth in users of virtual worlds in general: according to Castranova (2007), total registrations to virtual worlds were well over 100 million as far back as 2007. Continue reading

Made Real: Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern :: May 27 – June 25, 2011 :: Furtherfield Gallery, London
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Road, London.

Networks — social, political, physical and digital — are a defining feature of contemporary life, and yet the exact forms and operations can seem nebulous and hard to grasp. For this exhibition artists Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern bring new kinds of interactive arts objects into existence, taking these networks as their artistic materials and play-spaces. Three works are shown for the first time in the UK: Wikipedia Art, a collaborative work “made” of dialogue and social activity; Given Time, an Internet artwork that creates a feedback loop across virtual and actual space; and Playing Duchamp, a one-on-one meeting and game between an absent artist and viewer/participant. Continue reading

Upgrade! Boston: Patrick Lichty :: March 15, 2011; 7:00 pm :: MIT Media Lab (E14), 6th Floor, Room 633, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts (map).

Patrick Lichty is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, animator for The Yes Men, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. He began showing technological media art in 1989, and deals with works and writing that explore the social relations between people and media. Venues in which Lichty has been involved with solo and collaborative works include the Whitney Biennial, Turin Biennial, Maribor Triennial, Performa Performance Biennial, Ars Electronica, International Symposium on the Electronic Arts (ISEA), and TED Conference. Continue reading

somatic SENSOR :: January 21-22, 2011; 8:30 pm :: Highways Performance Space, 18th Street Arts Center, 165118th Street; Santa Monica, CA + Attend in Second Life.

Highways Performance Space Artistic Director Leo Garcia presents somatic SENSOR, curated by Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, and Dino Dinco. Emerging out of queer experience, the works in somatic SENSOR move along lines of flight exploring desire, technology, the erotic and the viral. Rejecting control society to find new forms of relationality, somatic SENSOR includes performances, digital and networked media, drawing and soft sculpture to open borders between realities and bodies. Continue reading

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China – living in between Real and Unreal by Xiaoying (Juliette) YUAN — Presentation for “Making the Reality Really Real,” the 11th Consciousness Reframed International Research Conference, November 4-6, 2010, Trondheim, Norway.

Introduction: The current presentation, as part of author’s PhD research on the topic of “Media Arts and Human Ecosphere”, focuses on Chinese artists’ research on the theme of “Reality”. Continue reading

LPDT2 is a reworking of Roy Ascott’s 1983 work La Plissure du Texte (The Pleating of the Text) in Second Life. [via Network Research]