[…] It’s strange that it’s the 16th of the month (at least where I am), yet there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic responses to this so-called financial “crisis” — one that exists in a mythical realm of numbers- that- we- cannot- perceive, but that sadly has very real impacts on people. Responses by students, academics, and activists have not been limited to the resignation of acceptance, nor abstract theorizing in and of itself, but rather have taken, at times, forms of protest and occupation throughout the world, as well as direct actions against banking institutions. (See, in particular the story of Enric Duran here and here.) How then might we understand these actions within the context of our own theorizing activities? Continue reading

The Future of Creative Technologies Conference :: November 20, 2008; 9:30 am – 5:00 pm :: Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT), De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

This conference is an opportunity to discuss the latest trends and hear the views of three of the World’s leading authorities in digital creativity who are all Visiting Professors of the IOCT: Jim Hendler – leading scientist of the Semantic Web; the next step in web technologies; Howard Rheingold – world famous commentator on social media and virtual communities; and Lev Manovich – media artist, cultural analyst and the foremost theorist of new media.

Commissioned for Interact 15, Clouds of clouds — by Miguel Leal and Luis Sarmento — is a random generator of cloud images. Each new cloud is unique and indexed to a particular time (GMT) on a particular day. It was developed in Perl + MySQL; the database has more than 1,000,000 photos gathered from Flickr between September 10-13 2008, using Flickr API.

“This is randomness, and that is altogether different. If absolutely necessary, you can count the stars. A catalogue has been kept of them since Antiquity. But if you ask for a catalogue of the clouds, people laugh at you. There is no such term as cloud, defined as permanent, defined by its borders, by its terms or its terminations. [?] Clouds, whirlwinds, flows, noises, all primary masses without qualities.” — M. Serres. Continue reading