CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES

DRHA 2010 Conference: Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts
Sunday 5th September – Wednesday 8th September 2010
Brunel University, West London
www.drha2010.org.uk

CONFERENCE THEME: Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity

The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/sensing technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies. At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies.

The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. This year’s conference is hosted by Brunel University, West London. It will take place from Sunday 5th September to Wednesday 8th September 2010. It will be held across various innovative spaces, including the newly expanded Boiler House laboratory facilities, housed in the Antonin Artaud Building, and state of the art conference facilities plus high standard accommodation.

We invite original papers, panels, installations, performances, workshop sessions and other events that address the conference theme, with particular attention to the ‘Sensual Technologies’ focus. We encourage proposals for innovative and non-traditional session formats.

DRHA 2010 will include a SecondLife roundtable/discussion event, led by performance artist Stelarc, which will enable international participants to present performative work via Second Life. For this event, we particular encourage submission of Machinima works that can be screened as part of this panel. Short presentations, for example work-in-progress, are invited for poster presentations. Anyone wishing to submit a performance or installation should visit http://www.drha2010.org.uk for information about the spaces and technical equipment and support available.

All proposals – whether papers, performance or other – should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA 2010.

The deadline for submissions will be 31 March 2010. Abstracts should be between 600 – 1000 words.
Letters of acceptance will be sent by 15th of May 2010, when the conference registration will be opened.
Please see http://www.drha2010.org.uk more information and a link for online submission.

Aaron Koblin will be featured in an exhibit for Rhizome at the New Museum in New York.
April 17th, 2010
http://rhizome.org/sevenonseven/

“Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new –be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine– over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th.”

Art

• Cao Fei
• Evan Roth
• Aaron Koblin
• Monica Narula
• Ryan Trecartin
• Tauba Auerbach
• Marc Andre Robinson

Technology

• Jeff Hammerbacher
• Joshua Schachter
• Matt Mullenweg
• Andrew Kortina
• Hilary Mason
• Ayah Bdeir
• David Karp

This Friday, March 12th, Kokoromi presents, One Button Objects, a collection of playful circuit hacked creations inspired by the Gamma4 theme, at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts from 6PM-9PM.
more…

Kokoromi is pleased to announce the six brand-new One Button Games, chosen from over 150 submissions(!), for this year’s Gamma:

Silent Skies by Spyeart
Poto & Cabenga by Honeyslug
4Fourths by Mikengreg
B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now) by Copenhagen Game Collective
GAMMA IV – THE GAME by cactus
Faraway by Steph Thirion

This year presented a significant curatorial challenge, given the exceptional quality and diversity of submissions to Kokoromi’s “one-button games” call. The six games choosen demonstrate creative approaches to the one-button restriction, AND are tailored to the unique challenges of Gamma’s “new arcade” format.

It appears to be a regular art show – but look closer. The pictures are moving.

Walking by a flat screen of what looks like rippling pools of mercury, a Webcam picks up and replays human movement in the silvery waves.

On another wall, digital artist Aaron Koblin uses a laser to scan visitors and rotate their projected 3-D images on a screen, using the same plotting technology he created for Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video.

The futuristic displays draw a Saturday-night crowd to a renovated porn palace in the Tenderloin, where since last year, a group of people in their 20s and 30s has been exploring the intersection of programming, politics and art with their new digital Bauhaus: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Blending two of the Bay Area’s biggest strengths – information technology and artistic creativity – Gray Area has pushed San Francisco to the front of the digital art movement, showcasing new ways to visualize the enormous amount of data now available on the Internet.

San Francisco arts officials have Silicon Valley dreams for Gray Area, hoping it can turn a downtrodden section of the Tenderloin near the Warfield and Golden Gate Theatre into a world-class technological arts district.

“We don’t think of ourselves as artists,” said 27-year-old founder Josette Melchor, who opened the space in October. “We are technologists, researchers, designers, coders and hackers. We exist in that gray area between art and information.”

Yes, their innovative coding and electronic data mapping make pretty pictures – showing, for instance, time-lapsed flight patterns at SFO bursting like multicolored fireworks – but their work also asks civic questions.

Why is there a disproportionate amount of crime in the Tenderloin? How have the 409 historic landmark buildings in the Tenderloin been used over time? Where are all the cabs?

“Data as a medium has never been accepted before as part of the artistic mind-set, and we want to be a space for experimenting with this new model,” Melchor said.

It took about $800,000 to renovate the 4,600-square-foot space on Taylor Street into a sleek studio/art hub/think tank, most of that coming from the building’s owner, who was eager to bring Generation 2.0 into a neighborhood crowded with SROs, liquor stores and all-night massage parlors.

Melchor, who takes a minimal salary, and 15 volunteers have been working hard to get Gray Area off the ground.

Their annual $240,000 budget is supported by private donations; 600 memberships, which range from $50 to $10,000; and class fees. The syllabus includes coding as well as soft circuitry sewing – a combination of fashion design and electronics where students learn such skills as sewing LED lights into backpacks and programming them to flash when their cell phones ring.

Gray Area is fundraising for an additional $1 million to open a sound media lab in a former bar and pawnshop next door, in partnership with San Francisco’s Recombinant Media Labs. A Gray Area cafe will replace the liquor store on the corner.

Later this month, Melchor plans to open Archetype boutique on Market Street to sell Gray Area books, prints and “programmable wearables.”

Gray Area opened at about the same time that socially conscious coding was making its debut. In 2008, the New York Museum of Modern Art premiered “Design in the Elastic Mind,” which delighted visitors and critics for its look at the momentous social, scientific and technological changes ushered in by the Information Age.

The show included “Cabspotting,” a program created for the Exploratorium by Stamen Design in San Francisco, which uses GPS data and yellow dots to trace Yellow Cabs moving across San Francisco. A version of it is on display at Gray Area.

Meanwhile, the Radiohead video, which Koblin launched on Google code as an open-source project, was a big hit. He persuaded his employer, Google, to open the data so anyone could build on his technique and share their creations through social networks.

“Digital art is really coming into its own right now, and you can finally find art schools teaching code,” said Robert Hodgin, whose studies of magnetism are part of the current “Transpose” installation at Gray Area.

One of his pieces demonstrates the exploding computerized nebulas that he and a collaborator made for iTunes’ latest visualizer.

“They just get it here,” Hodgin said. “Digital artists need a new type of gallery, one with enough outlets, projectors and people who know how to deal with computers crashing.”

Digital creators, who spend so much time alone behind computer screens, also need a place to collaborate face-to-face, Melchor said.

Gray Area is hosting six entrepreneurs from Palomar5 – a six-week innovation camp in Berlin that drew 28 young thinkers from around the world to devise new working environments for the digital generation.

On a recent weekday at Gray Area, the group was thinking about ways to blend old and new media.

Ideas included scanning and electronically sharing notes that readers write in the margins of their books, and creating information screens at newspaper stands that collate Internet data for those who don’t have digital access.

“Not only is art something you hang on the wall and enjoy,” Melchor said, “it’s a tool of social change.”

Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Original Article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/09/DDDA1C6KED.DTL

+dialog symposium series
presented by RML SF, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and Phasor~

Friday, March 19, 2010
7-9 PM
Gray Area
55 Taylor St. San Francisco
Suggested Donation $5-10 – No one turned away for lack of funds.

The RML SF +dialog symposium series fosters discussion and interaction between audiences and artists, authors, theorists, educators, and producers of cutting-edge work.

This first edition traces the history of the most important song in computer music through two groundbreaking renditions. Max Mathews, the father of computer music, and new media artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, will give presentations about their interpretations of the classic song followed by a open discussion moderated by digital arts technologist Barry Threw.

Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when Max Mathews made an IBM 704 at Bell Labs play a 17 second composition on the Music I program.

In 1962 Mathews synthesized the music for the song “Daisy Bell”, originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, as an accompaniment for a vocoder speech synthesizer created by John L. Kelly. Arthur C. Clarke, then visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility, saw this remarkable demonstration and later used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey” as the swan song of the dying computer, HAL9000.

In 2009, the online work Bicycle Built For Two Thousand by artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey took this first recording and created a crowd-sourced rendition using a custom tool made in Processing. Comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service, participants were asked to listen to a short sound clip and record themselves imitating what they heard. The result was a reconstructed version of the song as rendered by a distributed system of human voices. Instead of programming a computer, they used a computer program to stitch together a cross section of humanity.

Max Mathews
Max V. Mathews worked in acoustic research at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1955 to 1987 where he directed the Behavioral and Acoustic Research Center. This laboratory carried out research in speech communication, visual communication, human memory and learning, programmed instruction, analysis of subjective opinions, physical acoustics, and industrial robotics.

From 1974 to 1980 he was the Scientific Advisor to the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Paris, France. In 1987 Mathews joined the Stanford University Music Department in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as Professor of Music (Research) where he developed a new pickup for electronic violins and a real-time computer system for music performance called the Conductor and Improv Programs and a 3D MIDI Controller called the Radio Baton.

At Bell Labs in 1957, Mathews demonstrated synthesis of music on a digital computer with his Music I program. Music I was followed by Music II through Music V and GROOVE, all were involved in the composition and performance of music on and with computers. These programs have been influential in the development of computer music. For this pioneering work he has been called the “father of computer music,” and most recently, “the great grandfather of techno!”

Max Mathews has conducted research on computer methods for speech processing, human speech production and auditory masking, and developed techniques for computer drawing of typography. The developer of “Music V” synthesis software and “Groove,” the first computer system for live performance, he is also the inventor of the Radio Baton, a computer-driven device that allows the user to conduct their own orchestral performances from MIDI files stored in the computer. Many multimedia patching languages such as Max/FTS, pd, jMax, and Cycling 74’s MaxMSP was based on Mathews’ ideas for a flexible, user-patchable sound generating system.

Mathews is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Acoustical Society of America, the IEEE, and the Audio Engineering Society.

Aaron Koblin
Aaron Koblin is an an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns. Aaron’s work has been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation’s first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Currently, Aaron is Technology Lead of Google’s Creative Lab where he helped to launch Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing JavaScript work by designers from around the world.

Daniel Massey
Daniel Massey (b. 1982, Mexico) is an artist, designer, and programmer based out of San Francisco, CA. Daniel’s recent work seeks to instigate new modes of collaboration, creation, and transformation by approaching technology as inherently malleable. His projects take on varied forms, from immersive installations and web-based work, to live visuals and music. Daniel earned his MFA in Digital Arts & New media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was part of the Yahoo! Design Innovation Team and is now a resident artist at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

Speaking of Ferrofluid…check out this lecture at Parsons in New York. Its broadcast live on Ustream if you are unable to attend in person:

Parsons Art, Media + Technology presents: STREAMING CULTURE_Current Research lectures

FRIDAY March 12, 2010 @ the Kellen Auditorium
Parsons the New School for Design
66 5th Avenue, ground floor
6:30pm

All events are free and open to the public.

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/parsons-the-new-school-for-design

Organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor (UCLA) and Director of Research, Art, Media & Technology, Parsons The New School of Design

March 12, 2010, 2009: Sachiko Kodama, Media Artist. Introduced and hosted by Katherine Moriwaki, Assistant Professor of Media Design, Parsons the New School for Design

LECTURE:
Internationally renowned media artist Sachiko Kodama will present her work in a talk that covers her artistic process, the background of her magnetic ferrofluid artworks, current artistic activities (including ‘Device Art’), and her thoughts on the relationship between art and technology.

BIOGRAPHY:
Japanese female artist Sachiko Kodama was born in 1970. As a child she spent a lot of time in the southernmost part of Japan. This area is rich in tropical flowers and plants, edged by the sea, and washed with warm rain. Sachiko loved art and literature from an early age, but also had a strong interest in science. After Graduating Physics course in the Faculty of Science at Hokkaido University, In 1993, Sachiko matriculated in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Tsukuba, studying Plastic Art and Mixed Media. She received Ph.D. in Art.

In 2000, Sachiko began work on a ferrofluid art project that she named “Protrude, Flow”. The dynamic movement of liquids is the theme of this project. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica Center/Linz, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Wexner Center for the Arts/Columbus, Skirball Cultural Center/Los Angeles, The National Art Center/Tokyo, Reina Sofia National Museum/Madrid, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

1970 Born, Kagoshima, Japan
1993-2000 Art & Design, University of Tsukuba
2002 Awarded grand prize at the 5th Media Art Festival
2009-2010 Stayed in NY with a grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs

Sachiko Kodama’s HP
http://www.kodama.hc.uec.ac.jp/
http://www.sachikokodama.com/

Upgrade! NY presents:
Collaborative Futures Book Launch & Talk
a book about free collaboration written collaboratively in 5 days

The event will take place in NYC (at Eyebeam – 540 W 21st Street) but you can watch the live video stream on March 4 at 7:30PM (EST) and participate in the discussion!

About the project:
Over 5 days in mid January 2010 the Transmediale festival locked 6 writers and 1 programmer in a Berlin hotel room to collaboratively write a book about the future of free collaboration; the authors started with only the title, and ended the week with a book.

Transmediale Artistic Director Stephen Kovats will be on hand to join Eyebeam Senior Fellow Michael Mandiberg and Eyebeam Honorary Resident Mushon Zer-Aviv, to talk about the process of writing the book, and some of their discoveries in the collaborative process. Stephen Kovatz will also talk about the ‘Futurity Now’ concept of TM10 in general and particularly in the context of the Collaborative Futures book sprint.

This will be your first chance to get your hands on a dead-tree version of the book. Books will be for sale for $15 at the event, but you can pre-order now for $12 and help make the print run possible. Click here to pre-order!

The “Collaborative Futures” book sprint was facilitated by Adam Hyde (FlossManuals.net) and authored by Mushon Zer-Aviv, Michael Mandiberg, Mike Linksvayer, Alan Toner and several additional collaborators using the Booki software (booki.cc) by Aleksandar Erkalovic.

This talk is a window into governance in the 21st century. A key figure in the successful Obama campaign, Beth Noveck is extending the techniques of that success into making the government transparent, accountable, and more participatory. Those who worry that the US government is broken can learn here of work to not only repair it but improve it.

[Tickets are still available for this evening's Seminar at the Herbst; the walk-up line is pay what you can and you will be seated in the theater right away.]

“Transparent Government” Beth Noveck, Herbst Theater, Civic Center, San Francisco, 7pm, TONIGHT, Thursday 4th. The show starts promptly at 7:30pm.

A Live Audio Stream of the Seminar is now available to Long Now Members – you can tune into this Seminar live at 7pm Pacific Time.

A Note from Stewart Brand:
“President Obama’s first executive action was the Open Government Memorandum calling for more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government. It is likely that one of the longest lasting effects of the current administration will be how much it changed the culture of Washington by opening government data and pioneering innovations in policymaking.

As the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and leader of the President’s Open Government Initiative in the White House, Beth Noveck is in the forefront of the Federal government’s implementation of these changes. On leave as law professor at New York Law School and a visiting professor of communication at Stanford University, she lectures on intellectual property, innovation and technology law. She is also the Founder of the State of Play conferences.

Noveck just released her latest book Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful.”

The Lab is seeking visual art, literary, and performance submissions for a group exhibition uncovering the shadow side of art.

Of particular interest are proposals that investigate negative astral correspondences in art history. We are looking for two- and three-dimensional pieces, video, installation, interactive, and experimental works involving anarchic local counterculture rituals, nihilist esoterica, and a generally arcane aesthetic.

Deadline: June 1, 2010
More Info here.

To celebrate the arrival of their Gamma game event in San Francisco, art game collective Kokoromi is teaming up with Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion to launch a call for ONE-BUTTON OBJECTS. This call seeks to inspire unique hardware/software hacks that integrate playful, one-button interaction within a standalone machine or device. The curators are seeking circuit-bent gadgets, retro-fitted consoles, mechanical constructions, custom electronics, and other one-off creations.

During the week of the Game Developers Conference, the Game Objects will be featured in an exhibit at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. A selection of these Objects will be shown at the opening night Gamma party, alongside the software-based Gamma4 one-button games, on March 10th at the Mezzanine in SoMa.

The deadline for submissions is this Friday (March 5th).
Read more here.