Robots and Avatars :: Call for Proposals — Deadline: September 7, 2011.

Robots and Avatars is an intercultural, intergenerational and interdisciplinary exploration of a near future world consisting of collaborations between robots, avatars, virtual worlds, telepresence and real time presence within creative places, work spaces, cultural environments, interactive entertainment and play space.

Robots and Avatars will present two Development Commissions and additionally a minimum of six existing works as an Exhibition in 2012. Lead producer and concept developer of this EU Culture project is body>data>space and the partner for the commissions is National Theatre in London. Continue reading

[Journal of Journal Performance Studies by Nicholas Knouf] [nettime] Some More Nuanced Thoughts on Publishing, Editing, Reading, Using by Gary Hall:

Keith was asking for references to research on academic journals. In addition to those already mentioned, one piece I’ve found helpful is Ted Striphas’s (2010) ‘Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing’, Communication and Cultural/ Critical Studies, 7 (1), 3-25. There’s an ‘open’ pre-print version here.

I’m singling this piece out in this context because it’s particularly interesting with regard to some Taylor & Francis/ Informa’s geo-political connections. For instance, writing in 2008, Striphas details how: Continue reading

Everything Must Go! Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield — An exploration of art and commerce through gift and barter economies — Give One, Get One Free :: until August 31, 2011 :: 24 Eagle Street, North Adams, Massachusetts.

As part of DownStreet Art, Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield will manufacture large quantities of small electronic art works that they will give away free of charge through their pop-up “store” at 24 Eagle Street in North Adams, MA. Each work of art will feature an object that has been gifted by the public to the Hatfields.

Give One, Get One Free: The Hatfields seek interesting items, curiosities, toys, trinkets, memorabilia, and other objects that can serve as a focal point for these works. Continue reading

West: Seven Sunsets :: Live until August 2, 2011. You will need to download the Field Broadcast Pinger to view the seven broadcasts. This will sit in the bottom right hand corner of your desktop and when a broadcast goes live it will ‘ping’ loudly and display the incoming broadcast in a window in the middle of your screen.

Field Broadcast is a live broadcasting network/ project/ platform/ contraption that enables artists to make artworks that forge a direct link between the place they are broadcasting from and their audience. The broadcasts are received live through a downloadable application allowing an event to be dispersed through the internet to a global audience. Continue reading

The Importance of Being Earnest, or Not by Christopher Collier, Mute:

One of Guy Ernest Debord’s major achievements was to know with both admirable poise and impeccable timing, the importance of a doctrinal earnestness, but likewise the value of an a certain tactical expediency. Debord already? And its only the first paragraph. Are we not bored with Debord? As the Situationist International (SI) somewhat paradoxically maintained, boredom is counter-revolutionary, and yet it was boredom, they informed us, that was integral in the production of a contemporary revolutionary subjectivity. Boredom they said, produces a more generalised and generalisable alienation, emerging not from a proletariat alienated from the products of labour power, but from all those who would create life itself, alienated precisely by labour from their species-being, as playful, creative, collective subjectivities, as homo ludens. Continue reading

MRI Scanner Inspires a Multimedia Performance — Composers Mira Calix and Anna Meredith have come up with pieces of music which are inspired by the sounds of a MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scanner.

Fellow Prisoners by John Berger, Guernica, July 2011: The best way to understand the world, writes Berger, is not as a metaphorical prison but a literal one. And what better way to inspire solidarity than seeing ourselves (them) as fellow prisoners?

[…] “What is being lived today is new because of its relationship with space.

It’s here that the thinking of Zygmunt Bauman is illuminating. He points out that the corporate market forces now running the world are ex-territorial, that’s to say “free from territorial constraints — the constraints of locality.” They are perpetually remote, anonymous and thus never have to take account of the territorial, physical consequences of their actions. Continue reading

Gabrielle de Vietri

[Adam Greenfield @ Systems/Layers Walkshop] Some implications of networked sensing for privacy in public space: Toward a taxonomy of public objects by Adam Greenfield:

[…] “My feeling is that the complexity of this terrain is such that abstract principles and so-called “best practices” aren’t particularly likely to be useful in guiding us toward better decisions unless they’re firmly grounded in a concrete consideration of some present-day actualities. In our attempt to think more clearly about these issues, therefore, we start by considering five real-world informatic systems, all developed and deployed in the past three years. These are arrayed along a spectrum of concern, from a sensor I think of as self-evidently non-threatening, to something I believe the privacy community particularly — and advocates of high-quality public space in general — ought to be deeply troubled by…”