nettime ISEA2008 air deadline - 30th of june
Dear Nettimers, the deadline for the ISEA2008 Artist in Residency call is coming up on the 30th of June. the exhibition part of the symposium is focusing on initiating the production of at least 20 new projects which would constitute the major exhibition. (there won't be any other calls for the exhibition) Artists have a great opportunity to work with some of the labs from National University of Singapore that will support the production of the projects. information about the participating labs: http://isea2008.org/air2.html we are welcoming project proposals that address any of the 5 themes: http://isea2008.org/themes.html please distribute the call to any potential participants, and if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us. http://isea2008.org/contact.html thanks.. best wishes, v vladimir todorovic tadar.net syntfarm.org/projects/btc/ rastergroup.com/projects # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Gnat swarming behavior
(This strongly relates to the construct of avatars in Second Life; think of the gnats as prims. Their homeostatic behavior is amazing. Hieroglyphs of an ancient species... Also check http://nikuko.blogspot.com ) Gnat swarming behavior The following video was made about 100 meters from the Jordan River trail in Salt Lake City (West Jordan / Midvale), Utah. The site is a pond per- haps one or two acres across; there are numerous birds (swallows, swifts, red-wing and yellow-head blackbirds, etc.) around. When I first saw the gnats, near sundown, they swarmed in a typical ellipsoidal fashion, i.e. similar to a free-falling water balloon in slow motion. I noticed several columns forming; in a short while, they became vertical, long and narrow. They swayed and held shape. In gnat swarms, males and females behave differently; in one of the vertical columns, a roughly spherical 'head' is visible to one side, and I wonder if there might be sexual differentiation here. What is fascinating to me is the relationship of millions of gnats to an over-arching geometry; this parallels slime mold behavior to some extent. I've seen lots of gnat swarms before, but nothing like this. We're leaving the Salt Lake City area today, so I have no time to investigate this further at the moment (we're leaving today), but I'm interested in any further input, images, videos, you might have. http://www.asondheim.org/gnats.mp4 Radio 'Radio' - modified recording in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir building; note the laptop in the foreground which controls and monitors the organ, light- ing, recording, etc., as far as I can tell. http://www.asondheim.org/radio.mp4 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Essay, minus poor translations of punctuation.
This is my draft-in progress on the exhibition. Please mind the missing references. They aren't entered yet, and the text is posted only for timeliness. In regards to the upcoming Automatic Update exhibition at the MoMA NY, there seems to be a great deal of question about a number of issues. These are; the re-writing of history, the relevance of net-based art, the perception of popular culture, and the role of the New Media movement/Genre in the contemporary scene. What seems to be a key dialectic about the state of New Media as force in contemporary art derives from two poles; one from the MoMA colophon about the Automatic Update show; The dot-com era infused media art with a heady energy. Hackers, programmers, and tinkerer-revisionists from North America, Europe, and Asia developed a vision of art drawn from the technology of recent decades. Robotic pets, PDAs, and the virtual worlds on the Internet provoked artists to make works with user-activated components and lo-res, game-boy screens. Now that new media excitement has waned, an exhibition that illuminates the period is timely. Automatic Update is the first reassessment of its kind, reflecting the artists' ambivalence to art, revealed through the ludicrous, comical, and absurd use of the latest technologies. [1] The other comes from the near-historical perception of the New Media community as ââ¬Åart ghettoââ¬Â, residing in festivals/enclaves such as DEAF, ISEA, Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH [2], and others. As an aside, this writer would like to remind the MoMA that there have been other retrospectives of New Media [3], but not of this profile. What is ironic about Automatic Update is that it suggests that New Media's time has all but gone, and that New Media artists have ambivalence to art in general. Perhaps this is evident from Roland Penrose's assertion of Rauschenberg's heritage to Dada [4], and Rauschenberg/Kluver's role in constructing key discursive threads in contemporary technological art through Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) [5] that would spawn many tech/art event/sites, including New Media. The questions posed by Automatic Update are many. First, is New Media a genre that is quickly being assimilated/deconstructed by the contemporary, or is its death, to paraphrase Twain's commentary on his obituary in the NY Times, highly exaggerated? Secondly, does this body or work aptly represent the waning dot-com/New Media era, and does it represent the material/info culture that is reflected in the work? What are the linkages between the assertions of interactivity and response as absurdist reactions through technological art? Before continuing this analysis of the exhibition, I want to frame the argument of this essay more explicitly. On the CRUMB New Media discussion list, Christiane Paul noted that most of the works in this exhibition are from internal collections [6], which is a point well taken. Even with this taken into account, there seems to be a dys-connection between the absurdist practices of the artists in context with how they fit with other contemporary threads, the role of interactivity in the exhibition, and the locating of curatorial focus in context of the conceptual grounding of the show in terms of Automatic Update being representative of the dot.com era, which apparently is congruent with that of the historical framing of New Media. Lengthy sentences aside (which, by the way, coincide with early New Media works like Amerika's Grammatron [7] and Davis' world's first collaborative sentence[8]), my analysis is not so much a critique, but query into the dialogue between the contemporary and New Media worlds and how their memetic trends translate. First of all, let us look at some dates where we may frame some of the considerations of art terminology and economic trends. The dot.com crash can be located in March/April 2000, when the tech-heavy NASDAQ stock exchange dropped from the 4300's to the 1400's [9]. Conversely, the beginning locates somewhere in the mid-90's, with the 1995 IPO of companies like Netscape. This coincides with the rise of the Web in 1994, and the founding of Rhizome.org in 1996 by Tribe Galloway [10], which also follows with the online publishing of many of Lev Manovich's essays that would become The Language of New Media [11] in 2001. If Automatic Update is loosely suggesting the era of New Media to be approximately 1996-2000, then it may also be ironic that Manovich's book may be an encapsulation of the time, being released the year after the genre's implied apex. However, pre-Web, (let's say, 1995) there was the era of Cyberarts, as this was the common parlance for digital/computational art. For example, Compu- Serve Magazine published an issue in 1994 on the subject [12], and the creation of Mondo 2000 in 1989 [13] to the staff's proclaimed end of cyberpunk in 1993 with the release of the Billy Idol album (or possibly the founding of WIRED
nettime Virtual Dreams, Real Politics
Virtual Dreams, Real Politics http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/ http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalisation/visions_reflections/virtual_politics ?What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people in world history.? - Marshall McLuhan, 1969. In 1961, at its 22nd Congress, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union formally adopted the goal of spreading the benefits of computerisation across the whole economy. Over the next two decades, the information technologies being developed within the Russia?s research laboratories were going to create a socialist paradise. Ever since the 1917 Revolution, totalitarian Communists with a big C had drawn ideological sustenance from their self-proclaimed role as the vanguard of proletarian communism with a small c. Under Stalin, the horrors of forced industrialisation were sold to the Russian population as premonitions of the promised land of socialism. Ironically, it was the successful completion of this task which posed a potentially fatal existential dilemma for the totalitarian system. Having successfully identified communism with the factory, the Communist Party was now making itself obsolete. According to its reformist faction, the vanguard had to move on to tackling the tasks of the next stage of its world-historical mission: building the ?Unified Information Network?. Computers should be placed in every factory, office, shop and educational institution. In this Russian vision of the Net, two-way feedback between producers and consumers would calculate the correct distribution of labour and resources which most efficiently satisfied all of the different needs of society. Even better, this technological revolution also promised to democratise an undemocratic society. In his leader?s speech at the 22nd Congress, Khrushchev assured his audience that - after decades of purges, wars, corruption and austerity - the promised land was within sight. By the 1980s at the latest, the inhabitants of the Russian empire would be enjoying all the wonders of cybernetic communism. Across the Atlantic, the CIA had watched the rise to power of the post-industrial reformers in the East with growing concern. Embracing their opponents? analysis, its analysts warned the US government that the technological race to develop the Net was becoming the key contest which would decide which superpower would lead humanity into the future. Back in 1957, America had suffered a major setback in the propaganda struggle when its Cold War enemy succeeded in launching the first satellite into space. Determined to prevent any repetition of this humiliation, the US government had quickly set up ARPA: the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Next time, America was going to win the hi-tech race. Responding to the CIA?s briefings, the Kennedy administration sent ARPA into battle against the cybernetic Communist enemy. Bringing together the top scientists in the field, the agency coordinated and funded an ambitious programme of research into computer-mediated-communications. In 1969, overtaking the Russian opposition, its team created the appropriately-named first-ever iteration of the Net: ARPANET. From the outset, the US government was convinced that this contest was much more than a test of scientific virility. The two superpowers were competing not only to develop new technologies, but also, more importantly, to decide which side had the most advanced social system. In 1964, a multi-disciplinary team of intellectuals led by Daniel Bell was given a large grant to invent the Anti-Communist vision of the non-communist future: The Commission on the Year 2000. Luckily, these experts were able to find exactly what they were looking for in Marshall McLuhan?s bestselling book Understanding Media. Just like Marx, this prophet had also foreseen that the next stage of modernity would sweep away the most disagreeable manifestations of capitalism: national rivalries, industrial exploitation and social alienation. As in proletarian communism with a small c, peace, prosperity and harmony would reign in the global village. What made McLuhan so much more attractive than Marx was that the knowledge elite ? not the proletariat - was the maker of history. In 1966, three years before its first hosts were connected, the Bell commission persuaded itself that the arrival of the Net utopia was imminent. Just as McLuhan had foreseen, the limitations of industrialism were about to be overcome by the wondrous technologies of the information society. Best of all, 1960s America was already entering into this post-capitalist future. J.C.R. Licklider ? the founder of ARPA?s project to build the Net - had long been arguing that the primary purpose of computer-mediated-communications was facilitating the idiosyncratic working methods of the scientific community. Instead of trading
