After 5 years of stitching and 2 years of touring the Nike Blanket Petition is in full view at the Museum of Contemporary Craft (MoCC) in Portland, Oregon – 9 miles from Nike Headquarters. The CEO Mark Parker has been invited and has politely agreed to visit the museum before June 11 – the last day to see the swoosh. It will continue to show at MoCC during the exhibition Gestures of Resistance (through June 26); however, after June 11 it will be in the Study Center looking like Nana’s afghan folded on her sofa. More about the exhibit here.

From 2003-2008, a diverse group of international knit and crochet hobbyists participated in a microRevolt project called the Nike Blanket Petition, a 15-foot wide handmade blanket of the Nike swoosh. Each 4 x 4 inch stitched square creates the Nike logo, acting as a signature for fair labor policies for Nike garment workers. Over the five-year period, virtual and hand-made squares were collected on tour, electronically and by postmail, representing over 30 countries. Continue reading

Huis Clos | No Exit – On Translation — Telematic performance with 6 performers :: May 29, 2010; 8:30 pm :: Netherlands Media Art Institute, Keizersgracht 264, 1016 EV Amsterdam. (Part of the Performmikka Internettikka event curated by Petra Heck)

6 Netartists will challenge one another into collective actions. What will happen when they will only use their mother tongue and code to communicate? — Annie Abrahams in Amsterdam (NIMk) will only speak Dutch :: Ruth Catlow in London will only speak English :: Paolo Cirio in London will only speak Italian :: Ursula Endlicher in New York will only speak German :: Nicolas Frespech in Montélimar will only speak French :: Igor Stromajer in Hamburg will only speak Slovenian. Continue reading

Charting Art’s Thoughts — by Chiara Passa — is a spontaneous neuronal network of thoughts. Thus, thoughts about digital art from ‘Hyperuranium’ have landed on a virtual map. The short (140 characters as twitter displays messages) art’s thoughts are generated from Twitter posts that match a database of keywords related to art. At every page’s reload, the earth’s map refreshes itself and tracks new words and phrases. Charting Art’s Thoughts is a circuit where random thoughts on new media art are shared on a map! This map is inspired from the ideasonair.net’s theory that says: “Ideas are in the air and the earth is spinning around, connecting with these ideas at various places. So an identical idea could land or be had in New York and Rome at the same time.”

Google earth plugin is required.

Tactics and Practice: New Media Drivers — A Pilot Seminar in New Media Arts :: June 1-5, 2010 :: Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, Trg Prekomorskih brigad 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

New media arts. Whether you make it, curate it, present it, write about it, teach it, programme it, or shape it in some other way, its constantly evolving technologies, a tendency to venture into unknown territories and mingle with diverse disciplines, and a predisposition for critical self-reflection and social discourse fuse new media arts into a fast-paced field that demands frequent updating of the drivers that operate its machinery.

Thus, the 5-day free pilot seminar Tactics and Practice: New Media Drivers aims to refresh and expand the new media arts educational offering in Slovenia and provide useful tools and insights into the field for creators at various stages in their careers. Continue reading

Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art — Book Launch :: June 3, 2010; 6:00 – 8:00 pm :: Innovation Centre, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Procter Street, London, UK.

With the impact of surveillance on urban space, architecture, and citizenship this collection of essays helps us to understand the times we live in through art practices that consider the practical and theoretical status of surveillance through works that span the 70’s to the present day by artists from South Africa, Germany, Poland, Mexico, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. Their work addresses complex issues such as resistance, censorship, state control, civic liberties, human rights, CCTV and the use of digital software in strategies of counter-surveillance which propose new spectatorial positions, individual empowerment and entertainment. Continue reading

InterAccess, Year Zero One, and the Subtle Technologies Festival present Contingent Ecologies: Investigations at the Edge :: until June 12, 2010 :: Reception: June 4; 7:30 pm :: InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Toronto, Canada.

Three visionary projects explore and re-imagine our future ecologies: API Arctic Perspectives Initiative by Marko Peljhan + Matthew Biederman :: The Green Corridor Project by Noel Harding + Rod Strickland :: Velo-city by Chris Hardwicke.

Bike thoroughfares in elevated tubes snake across the city. A once barren stretch of highway has been transformed into a green corridor with vegetation-covered bridges, river turbines and green roof elevations. Mobile live/work environments powered by renewable energy sources are developed collaboratively by architects and northern communities. Continue reading

Rob Myers Reviews Jaron Lanier’s book ‘You Are Not A Gadget’, Furtherfield.org:

Jaron Lanier’s book “You Are Not A Gadget” is a timely polemic, a cry of the soul in an increasingly soulless Web 2.0 world. I found reading it a frustrating and inspiring experience. For every time I wanted to throw the book at the wall in exasperation there was a time where Lanier spoke to a part of me that the cultural transition from 90s cyberpunk to 2010s cyberpreppy had optimised out.

Lanier is asking the right questions. What happens to our conception of what it means to be human when the way we represent our humanity is reduced to snippets of media on (micro-)blogs and social networking sites? How can we support a middle class of independent artists when the technology and economics of the Internet makes money directly only for the vectorialist media barons of Web 2.0? Will the technologically enabled troll class become a political threat akin to historical fascism? Continue >>

Electrified Salon: Hacking Public Space — Johan Pas and Alessandro Ludovico :: June 1, 2010; 8:00 pm :: Foyer Theaterzaal, Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium.

Occupied City. Artistic Actions in Urban Space: The Prehistory — Public urban space can be considered a battlefield of conflicting images and meanings. Artists have been using this aspect of the modern metropolis since the years of the early avant-garde. However, the street only became a real artistic platform in the sixties and seventies of the 20th century. Art historian Johan Pas will sketch an outline of the ways visual artists have been dealing with the urban fabric as a context for actions and interventions from the early 1960’s on. The focus will be on American and European artists associated with movements as happening, body art; conceptual art and performance. Their legacy can be read as the prehistory of contemporary urban art guerrilla. Continue reading

Upgrade! Paris: A reality by 1.0.3 (Adelin Schweitzer & Benjamin Cadon, Géographies Variables Residents) :: May 26, 2010; 4:30 – 6:3o pm :: Le 104, Paris, Atelier 11 (Part of “The Common Factory”)

The project “A reality” builds on an initial premise: there is not a reality but rather a set of paradigms that make consensus any time in history, territory, and for a specific social group. These systems of representation submit our perceptions and define our relationship to the world. Is human being capable of perceiving the world beyond the representation he makes? And if it is exempt from this illusion, even temporarily, would enable him to reclaim the real so sensitive? The instrument developed in this project, the prototype takes 01 more as the symbolic element of this utopia, a utopia in which a machine would avoid the constraints imposed by our senses to reality. Continue reading

AGENCE TOPO presents Web site launch of Geoweb and realtime telematic performance with Aether9 :: May 26, 2010; 6:00 pm :: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Saint-Laurent Blvd, Montréal.

Geoweb: A body of four web art projects exploring the thematic of the geographic web: Nowadays, popular cartographic and earth visualization tools have become an increasingly tangible component of how we experience the web. Moreover, the use of geolocalization systems is spreading and increasingly present in the digital world. Artists are appropriating these technologies to explore the will to “situate” and their projects question the new geographic consciousness brought about by these network practices. Continue reading