Video Vortex Reader II :: Call for Contributions — DEADLINE: May 10, 2010.

In response to the increasing potential for video as a significant form of personal media on the Internet, the Video Vortex program examines key issues that are emerging around the independent production and distribution of online video content. With the rise of YouTube and alternative platforms, the moving image on the Internet has become expansively more prominent and popular. As a wide range of technologies is now broadly available, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension.

Following the success of the first Video Vortex reader (published late 2008, second edition, 4000 copies in total), recent Video Vortex conferences in Ankara (Oct. 2008), Split (May 2009) and Brussels (Nov. 2009) have sparked a number of new insights, debates and conversations regarding the politics, aesthetics, and artistic possibilities of online video. Since these issues develop with the rapidly changing landscape of online video and its use, we want to open up a space once again for interested people to contribute to this critical conversation in a second issue of the Video Vortex reader.

POSSIBLE TOPICS

Taking its lead from the first Video Vortex reader, and based on the issues raised at the latest three Video Vortex conferences as well as recent developments, possible topics include:

• Theories of online video and Web cinema
• Politics of online video
• YouTube and the state of contemporary visual culture
• Database aesthetics
• Video art meets web aesthetics
• Autonomous participatory culture for art and activism
• Artist engagement with ‘user-generated-content’ sites: content and architecture
• Changing modes of video distribution and what this means for artists and activists
• Open-source and open-content initiatives
• Alternatives to proprietary standards
• Censorship and YouTube
• The ethics and politics of indigenous knowledge and online video
• The use of online video within government practices (election campaigning, censorship etc.)
• Democracy, citizen journalism and online video
• Social Cinema
• Educational practices and online video in the classroom
• New and changing economic models
• Google, YouTube and the economics of online video
• Commercial objectives imposed by mass media on user-generated and video-sharing databases
• Effect of ubiquitous online video practice on cinema, television and video art.

WE INVITE

Internet, visual culture and media scholars, researchers, artists, curators, producers, lawyers, engineers, open-source and open-content advocates, activists, Video Vortex conference participants, and others to submit materials and proposals.

FORMATS

We welcome interviews, dialogues, essays and articles, images (b/w), email exchanges, manifestos, with a max of 8,000 words. For scope and style, take a look at the previous INC readers (Video Vortex Reader, Urban Screens, Incommunicado Reader, MyCreativity Reader) and the style guide here.

This publication is produced by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and will be launched early 2011.

DEADLINE: May 10, 2010

SEND CONTRIBUTIONS TO: rachel(at)networkcultures(dot)org

ABOUT THE READER SERIES

The INC reader series are derived from conference contributions and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. They are available (for free) in print and pdf form here.

The Studio: 19 Years + The Power Tool by Jon Brunberg :: February 25 - March 21, 2010 :: Opening and Conversation (Jon Brunberg & Catrin Lundqvist @ 6:15): February 25; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Moderna Museet, Box 16382, 10327 Stockholm, Sweden.

The Power Tool is an internet-based art work that offers you the possibility to measure your individual power. The piece is process-based and in continuous progress. Jon Brunberg has sharpened the tool for this exhibition, for its visitors, and their decisions regarding their own power. What is power? How powerful are you? With the power tool you can measure and analyse your power and compare your ranking with other users. Issues of individual power are a relatively new phenomenon, connected to ideas about individuality versus collectivity that are representative of our time. Who decides who has power? Can power be quantified? Metaphysical issues emerge as you start to answer the tool’s questionnaire.

Jon Brunberg’s art revolves around individual, collective and political power. He uses digital media to produce video sequences and internet-based systems and images.

19 years shows collective manifestations from 1989 to 2007, as dots on a world map, in 30 seconds. The starting point of the art work coincides with the year when the Berlin Wall fell. Early that year, the Muslim world was shaken by Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which caused widespread protests in many countries, including India and Pakistan, and in the early summer the Tiananmen Square in Beijing was the centre of the world’s attention. At a fast pace, 19 years presents one-day events in which thousands of people have participated in protest actions that were intended to be peaceful, although some of them escalated into riots or even led to coups d’état.

The Gothenburg Riots of 2001 are, of course, featured, along with the enormous demonstrations that took place on February 15, 2003, when the West was preparing to invade Iraq. The whole world protested on an unprecedented scale against the war plans, but to no avail. It may seem as though some of the events have gone unnoticed, although they were significant on a local level, for example when China put the lid on after the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Although peaceful manifestations resumed after some time, few details reached the world and were rarely reported in the press, which has been Jon Brunberg’s main source. If you wish to learn more about his research methods and definitions, visit www.jonbrunberg.com/19y/.

Arrested Time by Nathaniel Stern with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger — An exhibition of works combining contemporary technologies with traditional drawing and printmaking methods curated by Jo-Anne Green :: February 26 - April 3, 2010 :: Opening Reception: February 26; 5:30 - 8:30 pm :: Greylock Arts, 93 Summer Street, Adams MA.

Nathaniel Stern’s Given Time simultaneously activates and performs two permanently logged-in Second Life avatars, each forever and only seen by and through the other. They hover in mid-air, almost completely still, gazing into one another’s interface. Viewers encounter this networked partnership as a diptych of large-scale (8 feet tall) and facing video projections in a real world gallery, both exhibiting a live view of one avatar, as perceived by the other. To create a visceral aesthetic, these custom-designed and life-sized “bodies” are hand-drawn in subtly animated graphite and charcoal. The audience is invited to physically walk between them; they’re able to hear and see them breathing, witness their hair blowing in the wind, pick up faint sounds such as rushing water or birds crying out from the surrounding simulated environment. Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and time’s inevitable flow.

In Distill Life, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger approach both old and new media as form. They permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. They incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking - including woodblock, silk screen, etching, lithography, photogravure etc - with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images as multidimensional. Their juxtaposition of anachronistic and disparate methods, materials and content - print and video, paper and electronics, real and virtual - enables novel approaches to understanding each. The artists work with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from artificial landscapes to socially awkward moments.

With Arrested Time, Green curates an exhibition of Stern’s solo and collaborative work that explores the juxtaposition of old and new media, and illuminates the possibilities and limitations of both. The works hover between stasis and motion, texture and light, line and pixel, past and present, paper and screen, surface and depth, one artist and another.

http://nathanielstern.com
http://jessicameuninck.com

An audio recording of my talk at the "Biopolitics of Popular Culture" meeting in December is now available, so I've gone ahead and uploaded the presentation to slideshare.

It's a ~25 minute talk, and it should be relatively easy to follow along while listening to the audio.

Audio: MP3

The talk I gave at the State of Green Business Forum last week is now available on video.

Runs about 22 minutes.

(There are some inexplicably lengthy shots of the static presentation images, but other than that, it looks pretty decent.)

The talk I gave at the State of Green Business Forum last week is now available on video.

Runs about 22 minutes.

(There are some inexplicably lengthy shots of the static presentation images, but other than that, it looks pretty decent.)

Para/Site Art Space is honored to present two exhibitions in its Hong Kong Venue: FAX & Move On Asia: The End of Video Art. These exhibitions are the result of collaborations between Para/Site Art Space and iCI/The Drawing Center (New York) and LOOP Alternative Space (Seoul).

FAX invites a multigenerational group of artists, as well as architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers, to conceive of the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing. Faxes by nearly 100 artists sent to the initial showing of FAX at The Drawing Center will form the core of the exhibition, including seminal examples of early telecommunications art. Each institution on the tour will invite up to twenty additional artists to submit works, which will be presented at all successive venues. These works may be transmitted to each participating institution’s working fax line throughout the duration of the exhibition. The active accumulation of information-received in real time, in the exhibition space-will include drawings and texts, and even the inevitable junk faxes from telemarketers and local businesses as well. All the transmitted pages will be archived or displayed together with the active fax machine, which may produce new faxes from invited artists at any moment. The result-an ongoing cumulative project-is a show concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation. Here, reproducible yet erratic production via the fax machine displaces traditional notions of the hand‚ still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and foregrounds the role of drawing as a generative process. The 18 artists added to the Hong Kong touring are: Nadim Abbas, Huang Xiaopeng, Rem Koolhaas, Lam Hoi Sin, MAP Office, Sanna Marander, Erkka Nissinen, Prachya Phinthong, The Propeller Group, Qiu Anxiong, Pedro Reyes, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Nestor Torrens , Wan Qingli, Adrian Wong, Doris Wong, Magdalen Wong , Morgan Wong Wing-Fat.

Curator: João Ribas
Curator in Hong Kong: Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya

The exhibition and the accompanying catalogue were made possible, in part, by members of the Drawing Room, a patron circle founded to support innovative exhibitions in The Drawing Center’s project gallery; and by support to iCI from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and iCI Benefactor members Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson.

Move on Asia: The End of Video Art
Main curator: Jinsuk SUH (Director of Alternative Space LOOP in Korea)
Organized by: Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul) in collaboration with Para/Site Art Space

Move on Asia is one of Korea’s leading videoart initiatives. It started 2004 in Seoul, arranged by Asian curator networks. Each year, the Asian curator networks nominate experimental artists and opens single channel video exhibition. The selection includes artists from Korea, Japan, China, Australia and Southeast Asia.

Hong Kong joined this last edition for the first time in 2009, with the participation of Para/Site Art Space in the programme. Representing Hong Kong are local artist Hung Keung and curator Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya.

The exhibition gathers some of the most exciting videoart from Asia, under a new theme every year. In 2009 the general theme confronts us the idea of the end of Video Art and the appropriation of genres that are connected to the filmic and documentary fields. Have the boundaries of video art vanished? What is left from the changes that videoart has undergone over the last decade? The exhibition includes 19 curators and almost 30 artists from the region.

Last month, I was interviewed for the syndicated "Living on Earth" program (typically heard on NPR stations) on the subject of geoengineering. That interview was run this past weekend, and is now available -- with transcript -- at the Living on Earth website.

(Direct link to the MP3.)

YOUNG: What do you think is the likelihood that we might need a geo-engineering approach?

CASCIO: I think it's more likely than not, unfortunately because...

YOUNG: Now wait a minute, you spent all this time telling me how it's a disaster, now you're saying we might have to use it?

CASCIO: Well, yes. It's because over the past few decades we simply have been ignoring the problem of global warming. We're in a situation where we simply no longer have the best option available to us. The best option would have been to deal with this 20 years ago.

And so, what we're stuck with [is] a selection of less good options. Are we talking rapid decarbonization and what that's going to the economy? Are we talking about making major changes to our energy infrastructure? Useful, but again, disruptive. These other alternatives are so seemingly unpalatable. It's very likely that we're going to be stuck in a situation where we will feel ourselves forced to take radical action.

Emphasis in that last paragraph on the "seemingly," btw.

Last month, I was interviewed for the syndicated "Living on Earth" program (typically heard on NPR stations) on the subject of geoengineering. That interview was run this past weekend, and is now available -- with transcript -- at the Living on Earth website.

(Direct link to the MP3.)

YOUNG: What do you think is the likelihood that we might need a geo-engineering approach?

CASCIO: I think it's more likely than not, unfortunately because...

YOUNG: Now wait a minute, you spent all this time telling me how it's a disaster, now you're saying we might have to use it?

CASCIO: Well, yes. It's because over the past few decades we simply have been ignoring the problem of global warming. We're in a situation where we simply no longer have the best option available to us. The best option would have been to deal with this 20 years ago.

And so, what we're stuck with [is] a selection of less good options. Are we talking rapid decarbonization and what that's going to the economy? Are we talking about making major changes to our energy infrastructure? Useful, but again, disruptive. These other alternatives are so seemingly unpalatable. It's very likely that we're going to be stuck in a situation where we will feel ourselves forced to take radical action.

Emphasis in that last paragraph on the "seemingly," btw.

IEET's Mike Treder interviewed me on Bloggingheads.TV this week, and the video is now available. It runs about 45 minutes.

Egad, it's depressing. Sorry about that.

First time I've done one of these, and something that leapt out at me was that I can't seem to sit still. So, question for the viewers -- should I try to make a point of keeping still during something like this, or is being more "animated" a good thing?

IEET's Mike Treder interviewed me on Bloggingheads.TV this week, and the video is now available. It runs about 45 minutes.

Egad, it's depressing. Sorry about that.

First time I've done one of these, and something that leapt out at me was that I can't seem to sit still. So, question for the viewers -- should I try to make a point of keeping still during something like this, or is being more "animated" a good thing?

For Nothing by Pedro Torres :: January 7-17, 2010 :: AntiFrame - Independent Curating Project, Apartado 108, 2736-180 Cacem, Portugal.

Pedro Torres presents at Round Corner, the sound-installation For Nothing, based on the work by Samuel Beckett Texts For Nothing.

Pedro Torres entices us to hear voices that plunge into the emptiness. Murmured vocal blows. Spoken murmurs, whispered, hard to save. Like the sound. Like every other voices we hear and don’t want to hear, the inner voices that usually chase us and betray us too often. Is there infinitude of muted sounds that elude us: either because we don’t pay them the due attention or just because our hearing ability is formatted between the 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz? And it is this formatting when inconsciently unformatted anguishes us. Then we hear what we don’t want to, what we didn’t ask to, what we, now, try to forget. Does Memory have a voice? Is music audible in the pauses? Does Trauma have to be silenced?

Texts For Nothing by Samuel Beckett emerges in a pos-war context. Both the historical expansions and contractions are dangerous. All the time architecture has in its present state what it was in the past, obviously not in its original form but in one gained along numerous incorporations in formed later analysis. Maybe because of that Theodor Adorno hasn’t defended so much « (…) the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past. » (in Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 242.)

The past appears invisible therefore untouchable – like the voices we hear. But they both exist and will always exist here and there. Regardless of each others’ past, particularly of the visitor’s, Pedro Torres asks you to try to listen the inaudible because:

«Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I’m far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That’s where I’d go, if I could go, that’s who I’d be, if I could be.» (Samuel Beckett, Texts For Nothing).

Claudia Camacho

Pedro Torres | (Glória de Dourados, Brazil, 1982) works with video, sound, installation and photography. Graduated by the São Paulo University (ECA-USP), he participated in solo and group exhibitions in Brazil, Spain, France and Germany. He spent five months in an artistic residence in Berlin (2007/08) after receiving a visual arts scholarship for an artistic production at the Fundación Marcelino Botín (Santander, Spain) in 2006/07. He is represented in the Fundación Marcelino Botín and MadridAbierto (sound-art) collections. Nowadays he lives and works in Barcelona. For Nothing is his first exhibition in Portugal (www.pedrotorres.net).

Curated by: AntiFrame –Independent Curating Project presents itself in the international artistic panorama as an ambitious and conscientious initiative for curating and promotion of artistic projects.

One Part Human :: January 9 - February 13, 2010 :: Opening: January 9; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 31 Mercer Street, New York City.

One Part Human brings together artists who explore the tension between human and technological capabilities in today’s scientific society. The exhibition includes two remarkable motorized sculptures by Canadian artists who have not exhibited previously in New York: Perfect Vehicle by Simone Jones and Robotic Chair conceived by visual artist Max Dean and realized in collaboration with Raffaello D’Andrea and Matt Donovan. Brian Knep, an artist in residence at Harvard Medical School, will exhibit photography and high definition video related to the microscopic worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, one of the most studied multi-cellular organisms in the world

Simone Jones’ Perfect Vehicle (2003-2006) is a three-wheeled machine, eleven-feet long, that contains sensors which monitor the breathing of its occupant to control its speed. A video of a filmed performance depicts its journey across the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Pathos surrounds the work as the vehicle inches its way across the surrealistic landscape, an anti-heroic and absurd gesture. Jones, who has been making kinetic sculpture since 1989, is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.

The Robotic Chair (1984-2006) by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea, and Matt Donovan is a generic wooden chair that has the capacity to totally fall apart, collapsing with great force, and put itself back together with seemingly persistence and determination without human intervention. As a stand in for the human body, the chair, and its cycle of falling and recovery, evokes existential themes relating to fragility and resilience. Exhibited internationally at art institutions and technological gatherings, the chair was aired on the Discovery Channel and on YouTube, inspiring impassioned responses. Dean, who has created more than thirty-five years of significant work, has said of his invention: “I thought I was making a sculpture, and I realize that we have created a performer.”

Brian Knep challenges the limits of science to retain the sublime awe of the unknown. His new series of digital images depicts microscopic worms, created in the laboratory and unseen by the naked eye, as they negotiate fabricated environments – labyrinths and other meditative structures, buildings that suggest futuristic intergalactic worlds, and the outline of a male and female figure lifted from the plaque attached to the Pilgrim spacecraft to communicate with other forms of life. The male figure gestures with a Namaste greeting that means “the divine in me greets the divine in you.” Images of hair are also evidence of a human presence that both grace and spoil the C. elegans micro-cosmos. Knep exhibited installations of video projections that require audience participation in his first exhibition at the Feldman Gallery in 2007.

PlayLab: Laboratory of Experimentation with Video Games :: January 21-24 + February 4-7, 2010 :: Medialab-Prado, Plaza de las Letras, Calle Alameda, 15, 28014 Madrid :: Call for Collaborators for Selected Projects — Deadline for Registrations: January 20, 2010.

Collaborators can join any of the developing teams that will carry out the selected proposals, depending on their particular interests and skills, thus contributing with their knowledge and skills and at the same time learning from the other group members and from the leading tutors: Mar Canet, Antonin Fourneau, and Abelardo Gil-Fournier. Directed by Flavio Escribano.

What is PlayLab? PlayLab aims to explore the context of games and video games as a space for creativity, experimentation, learning and reflection. Selected projects aim to experiment with tangible interfaces, real objects as elements of a virtual game, board games with augmented reality, interactive sound spaces, viral games, etc.

The workshop includes lectures by Mar Canet: “The video game is a laboratory” (January 21 at 7:30pm) and Abelardo Gil-Fournier: “Events. The game condition on the news” (February 4 at 7:30pm).

In collaboration with Arsgames. With the support of PlayStation®

MindTouch by Camille Baker — part of Unity Exhibition 09 :: December 17, 2009; 5:30 - 6:30 pm :: London University and online.

Come and play with your mobile phone or join us online. Making live, collaborative streaming video collages/ mixes, you can VJ with your friends remotely and stream the mix back to your phone… with your smartphone, vj with the world!!

There will be two groups live in London and the remote online or mobile participants. The live setting is a party context and the remote group can see what’s going on through the live mixed videos or contribute your own.

Digicult DATA - Sincronie Festival 2009 curated by Marco Mancuso :: December 15, 2009 — Lecture by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand: 7:30 – 8:30 pm :: Screening of Hidden Worlds: 9:00 – 10:00 pm :: screening :: Performance by 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid: 10:00 - 11:00 pm :: Teatro Arsenale, Milan.

Digimag presents DATA, the third meeting of the Sincronie Festival of 2009. The event will be an encounter with two Soviet artists, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, who will talk about their artistic production on the brink between art and science, and will exhibit their live performance 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid. The event will be enriched by the projection of the video screening Hidden Worlds, where a series of audiovisual works have been selected that investigate the relationship between audiovisuals and science.

Sincronie is a contemporary and experimental music event that began in 2003. As with the previous editions, this edition is also developed on a theme, which in 2009 was the relationship between music and numbers. From this year, Sincronie is broadening its activities by proposing a three-concert event with international guests, preceded by a series of introductive meetings that are true Listening Workshops. The workshops will then continue throughout 2010.

To stay true to the theme dictated by Sincronie 2009, Marco Mancuso has structured the DATA event like a reflective critique on the existing relationship between contemporary art and science and their rapport with digital, electronic and analogical technologies, on the basis of mathematical processes, numbers, logic abstractions and formulae. The event is centred on the work of the artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, pioneers of the creation of sensorial environments where chemistry, physics and philosophy meld together, in relationship with the analysis of human perception of such phenomena. After presentation of their work, which will take place at 7.30 PM, there will be a video screening at 9 PM entitled Hidden Worlds dedicated to some examples of artists who work on the rapport between sound and image, through different techniques, that are generated by physical, chemical-physics, mathematical, electromagnetic and nanometric phenomena. The evening will conclude with the audiovisual performance 10000 peacock feathers in foaming acid where Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand will make laser projectors and soap bubbles interact to create immersive and organic images.

The Psychophysics of Force Field Tailoring
Lecture by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand
Introduction by Marco Mancuso / Digicult

Immersive art-science is a form of creative expression that aims to rise above the notion of art as representation, in favor of multi-sensorial experience. Instead of creating mere objects of aesthetic seduction, it invites audiences to transcend the limits of habitual perception. Immersivity awakens a synesthetic awareness of both physical and mental space. A myriad of vibratory phenomena, customarily beyond the observer’s reach, are rendered starkly tangible through careful psychophysical conditioning: ‘the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject’s experience or behavior, of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions.’ Force field tailoring refers to the efficacious structuring of spatio-temporal characteristics by means of interlocking energy fields. The resultant states of matter/energy can be further harnessed so as to incite specific sensory responses. Psychophysicists are empowered by formerly unimaginable instruments of detection and analysis, providing increasingly higher resolutions of multi-event, multi-dimensional interactions. Nevertheless, the ephemeral workings of consciousness have barely been punctured, and remain among the leading questions of modern science. It has become evident that despite its exponentially accumulative potential, science alone cannot fulfill this daunting pursuit. Because neuronal processes (like most of the physical world) lie beyond the human spatio-temporal scale, the origins of cognition must be explored through perceptual extension. The convergence of immersive art and psychophysical research has spawned this extrasensory intimacy and imbued it with limitless evolutionary possibilities.

Hidden Worlds
Videoscreening curated by Marco Mancuso / Digicult

The Hidden Worlds event pays homage to one of the most stimulating and obscure territories of artistic audiovisual contemporary research: that relationship between art and science. By staying true to the binding theme of the 2009 edition of the Sincronie festival – the rapport between music, images and numbers – the video screening collects over 10 works that induce the audience into a critical reflection on the existing relationship between contemporary audiovisuals and science in their rapport with digital, electronic and analogical technologies, on the basis of mathematical processes, numbers, logic abstractions, and formulae. A project that alternates its artists and avoids concentrating on a common aesthetic, on a possible expressive language or used technologies, but rather proposes a panorama of specific systems for sensorial perception, for emotional mechanisms of ’saturation’ induces through technical hybrids that expand the tradition of analogical experimental cinema and digital audiovisuals, more so now than ever before. For its entire duration, the screening takes the spectator through beautiful ‘hidden worlds’, made into monitors of the curiosity of artists and scientists for the expressive potential inside specific mathematical processes, as well as physical, optical, chemical and electromagnetic phenomena. From the studies on ‘cymatics’ (the science that studies the shapes made by waves, in other words the frequency that can be vibrational, sound or electromagnetic) by the scientist Hans Jenny (Cymatics SoundScapes) as a theoretical-experimental basis for audiovisual compositions by Alvin Lucier (The Queen of South), to the representation of electromagnetic phenomena in action on the Sun’s surface by a Semiconductor (Black Rain), the passage between audiovisual work from the duo portable Palace seems to be short, where in their first work present in the event (Camera Lucida) they study the chemical-physical reaction of photoluminescence, whereas in the second contribution (10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid) they analyse the potential of optical phenomena generated by laser lights. And again, if the work on ‘chemical-grams’ of the video makers Jurgen Reble (Materia Obscura) underlines the structures that come from the chemical corrosion of film, as the work by Victoria Vesna (Blue Morph) glorifies the larval evolution of the geometric shape of the Blue Morpho butterfly with nanometric investigation techniques, the product by Lia & @C (int.16/45//son01/30X1, those of Carsten Nicolai (Spray) and Karl Kliem (Vienna Concert - Excerpts), are based on the software representation of interference phenomena, beats, accumulation and Moirè (the optical illusion generated by geometric sequences of interference phenomena). And finally the pioneer works (that aren’t included in the screening) by Mary Ellen Bute (Abstronic) and John Whitney (Permutations) represent one of the first testimonies of the direct rapport between experimental cinema and maths, the video by Thorsten Fleisch (Gestalt), which constitutes a recognition of the quaternion world (four-dimensional fractals) visualised in a three-dimensional space, and the work of art by John Campell (LI: The Patterns of Nature), evidences the geometric structures spontaneously present in Nature, all represent the perfect example of how Hidden Worlds wants to be a testimony of a deep critical conviction: contemporary audiovisual art today, more than in the past, has the technological instruments and the ethical duty to confront itself with the empirical world around us and the ‘natural’ technologies within it. Technologies that should be collected, observed and learned to control, just like man has shown that he can do with light, sound, images and space

Video program:

- Hans Jenny – Cymatics SoundScapes: Video 4 (1967 – Sui)
- Alvin Lucier – The Queen of the South (1972 - Usa)
- Semiconductor – Black Rain (2009 - Uk)
- Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand – Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Observatory (2006 – Rus, Bel)
(sound by Richard Chartier & Taylor Dupree)
- Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand – 10000 Peackock Feathers in Foaming Acid (2009 - Rus, Bel)
(sound by Francisco Lopez)
- Jurgen Reble – Materia Obscura: Part 5 (2009 - Ger)
- Victoria Vesna – Blue Morph (2006 - Usa)
- Lia - int.16/45//son01/30×1 (2005 - Au) (sound by @c)
- Carsten Nicolai – Spray (2006 - Ger)
- Karl Kliem – Vienna Concert: Excerpts (2008 - Ger) (sound by Jan Jelinek)
- Thorsten Fleisch – Gestalt (2003 - Ger)
- John Campbell – Li:The Patterns of Nature (2007 - Usa)

Out of screening: John Whitney (Permutations), Mary Ellen Bute (Abstronic), Joost Rekveld (#37), Roiji Ikeda (Formula), Sachiko Kodama (Breathing Chaos)

10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid
Live performance by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand

A vacuum or semi-vacuum encased within a gravity and temperature sensitive elastic skin – the scenario of an early universe, a soap bubble, and later, that of a biological membrane. By researching the behavior of soap films, a vast variety of optical, mathematical, thermodynamic and electrochemical discoveries have been made since the time of the Renaissance. One of the earliest means of analogue computing was the soap film calculator (19th century), which tackled geometric problems of minimal surface area. Soap film soft drives are currently being used for blackhole and superstring modeling. In 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid, Domnitch and Gelfand use laser light to scan the surfaces of nucleating and dissipating soap bubble clusters. Unlike ordinary light, the laser’s focused beam is capable of crawling through the micro and nano structures within a bubble’s skin. When aimed at specific angles, this penetrating light generates a large-scale projection of molecular interactions as well as mind-boggling phenomena of non-linear optics. Bubble behaviors viewed in such proximity evoke the dynamics of living cells (the lipid membranes of which, are direct chemical descendants of soap films). At the Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow, researchers Y. Stoilov and A. Startsev have recently discovered that a laser beam traversing a soap film can unexpectedly branch out into micron-thin channels (spatial polariton solitons) that neither diverge from their paths nor interfere with one another upon intersection. These optical tracks, which serve as light-confining waveguide antennae, are molded and elongated by the laser emission. Presumably, the laser dielectrophoretically maximizes the membrane’s refractive index to the point of internally focusing the light. The system behaves like ‘a powerful optical computer with a gigantic parallel processor, consisting of billions of laser-guiding cells’ (Stoilov; Phys.-Usp 47, 2004). In contrast to former soap film explorations by scientists, mathematicians, and artists (the likes of which have included Newton, Chardin, Plateau and Rayleigh to name a few), here, a warped, ‘impossible’ space-time is invented: the laser’s multi-angular paths through numerous bubble surfaces project a dense layering of diverse scales, speeds and vanishing points. The title of the work stems from the Chinese expression, ‘the ten thousand things’, signifying the varifold of cosmic phenomena. Though it may become as thin as a single molecule, all ‘the ten thousand things’ are refracted through the sensitive skin of a soap bubble.

MindTouch by Camille Baker, SMARTlab Digital Media Institute:

The intention of this project is to contribute to performance technology studies by investigating ‘liveness and presence’ within the context of a specific networked, mobile media performance research project, currently underway, in order to uncover any new understandings that may have emerged from the use of new wireless and mobile technologies.

This project explores ideas of non-verbal transference, telepathic collaboration, and the participant as performer, using biofeedback and mobile phone technology under meta-goals of studying “liveness” within mobile networked environments.

This project involves creating a mobile networked performance that utilizes a database of archived of streamed and/or archived video clips created by video enabled mobile phones, to then be retrieved, streamed and remixed during a live visuals performance(s). The event or events will form a performative, collaborative, non-linear narrative montage or remix, that will possibly be streamed back out to anyone’s phone and the internet, and then archived. These events will be starting in London, UK in July + October, Vancouver in Aug/Sept, and possibly Perth and Asia next year.

Participants are considered the performers / collaborators in creating clips for several live’mixed? events and a unique performances from the mobile video archive, to help type of collective consciousness. The participants invited to participate in the video blogs are asked to explore their own consciousness, non-verbal emotional / affective senses and dream states, embodiment, communication, using of mobile media tools to express themselves non-verbally.

This research explores mobile video/media on phones for their immediacy, low quality - imperfectness, but spontaneity, at the speed of thought - with its rewriting, superimposing, and remixing of ideas, flashes and clashes of images and emotion, layering of meaning and stream of consciousness and equivalent - or simulation of telepathy and collective, if chaotic intelligence.

This project explores concepts such as: live versus simulated/virtual, liveness, presence, internal / non-verbal expression, body-machine interfaces and sensors, media art and performance practices that investigate role of performer versus the experience of the viewer, the participation of the audience in networked mobile media performances, current explorations in mobile media performance practices, social aspects and site-specificity of networked performance events, networks, locative media and wireless devices in media performance practices, live / performance art history and practice, VJing or live cinema practice, media art reception and interactivity, social mobility practices and more. More >>

"Sixth Sense," my interview with NPR's On the Media, talking about augmented reality, went live this weekend. Here's the audio:

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(MP3 download also available.)

"Sixth Sense," my interview with NPR's On the Media, talking about augmented reality, went live this weekend. Here's the audio:

<object width="350" height="36"><param name="movie" value="http://onthemedia.org/flashplayer/mp3player.swf?config=http://onthemedia.org/flashplayer/config_share.xml&amp;file=http://onthemedia.org/stream/xspf/144823"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://onthemedia.org/flashplayer/mp3player.swf?config=http://onthemedia.org/flashplayer/config_share.xml&amp;file=http://onthemedia.org/stream/xspf/144823" id="OTM_Mp3_Player_144823" name="OTM_Mp3_Player_144823" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" wmode="transparent" height="36" width="350"></embed></object>

(MP3 download also available.)

The mission of the Media Fragments Working Group, part of the Video in the Web Activity, is to address temporal and spatial media fragments in the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). It involves breaking up video so you can link to points in the timeline (deep hyperlinking), enabling video to be broken up into parts. See this.

From - Use cases and requirements for Media Fragments: Audio and video resources on the World Wide Web are currently treated as “foreign” objects, which can only be embedded using a plugin that is capable of decoding and interacting with the media resource. Specific media servers are generally required to provide for server- side features such as direct access to time offsets into a video without the need to retrieve the entire resource. Support for such media fragment access varies between different media formats and inhibits standard means of dealing with such content on the Web.

This specification provides for a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media fragments on the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). In the context of this document, media fragments are regarded along three different dimensions: temporal, spatial, and tracks. Further, a fragment can be marked with a name and then addressed through a URI using that name. The specified addressing schemes apply mainly to audio and video resources - the spatial fragment addressing may also be used on images.

The aim of this specification is to enhance the Web infrastructure for supporting the addressing and retrieval of subparts of time-based Web resources, as well as the automated processing of such subparts for reuse. Example uses are the sharing of such fragment URIs with friends via email, the automated creation of such fragment URIs in a search engine interface, or the annotation of media fragments with RDF. This specification will help make video a first-class citizen of the World Wide Web.

The media fragment URIs specified in this document have been implemented and demonstrated to work with media resources over the HTTP and RTP/RTSP protocols. Existing media formats in their current representations and implementations provide varying degrees of support for this specification. It is expected that over the time, media formats, media players, Web Browsers, media and Web servers, as well as Web proxies will be extended to adhere to the full requirements given in this specification.