Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer enters its 5th year as a conference focused upon questions concerning the player. With current debates in the Games Studies considering the effect of gamification upon our conceptions of work and leisure, the increasing prominence of pervasive gaming, location-based gaming and ARGs, and the validity of procedurality as an analytical approach versus more player-centric models, such inquiries seem more pertinent than ever before. Under the Mask is a conference dedicated to understanding the many facets of the player; the psychological, political, social, cultural and historical aspects of the user and their interactions with both games (analog and digital) and the wider culture.

Under the Mask is organized by the University of Bedfordshire, UK, in association with the University of Hertfordshire, UK and the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. This year's keynote will be provided by DiGRA Vice-President Dr. Esther MacCallum-Stewart.

Possible conference topics include (but are not limited to):
• How is gaming situated within, and informed by, the player's everyday life?
• Procedurality versus the player; is it really a versus scenario?
• Gamification and its potential benefits and impediments.
• What theoretical perspectives are most productive? What are their limitations?
• What consequences are there to the increasing surveillance of players within online games?
• What role does sex and gender assume in game culture and community?
• Are there consequences of play for gamers, psychologically, politically, socially and culturally?
• The impact (or lack thereof) of gamer culture on traditional institutions, such as governments, NGOs, commercial and statutory institutions.

Call for papers:
• New methodologies or adapted methodologies for studying the player;
• Case studies of users in social settings;
• Case studies of social networking, gamification and alternate reality gaming;
• Case studies of the relationship between gender and games;
• Case studies of gamers in competitive/professional settings;
• Case studies of government, NGO and mainstream institutional gaming;
• Methodologies relating to Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology;
• Genre and its relation to player performance;
• The role of professional, casual and social gaming within game culture and
• Presentations/Analyses of fan fiction and fan art.

Abstracts of 250 words, accompanied by contact details and a brief biography to be received by the 16th March 2012 to: utmgamer@gmail.com

Call for Practice Proposals

As part of the conference, we are keen to support the practice of making games and game-related artefacts. If you have a game proposal you would like to run at the conference, or have any projects, works in progress, etc. you would like to display/have people play on the day, we would like to hear from you.
The deadline for practice-based submissions is 2nd May 2012. We will discuss submissions with you on a rolling basis up until this date.

Please email submissions to utmgamer@gmail.com

For further information, please go to:

http://underthemask.wikidot.com

Conference Organizers

Prof Luke Hockley
Steven Conway
Alison Gazzard
Gavin Stewart

Contact Details
c/o Gavin Stewart
A105
School of Media, Art & Design
University of Bedfordshire
Park Square
Luton
LU1 3JU

Join us for Being Social, our opening exhibition of contemporary artworks that explore how our lives - personal and political - are being shaped by digital technologies.

Furtherfield has established an international reputation as London's first gallery for networked media art since 2004. With this exciting move to a more public space we invite the public, artists and techies - amateurs, professionals, celebrated stars and private enthusiasts - to engage with local and global, everyday and epic themes in a process of imaginative collaboration and exchange.

Saturday 25 February 2012
1-4pm

Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park
London, N4 2NQ
T: +44 (0) 208 802 2827
E: info@ furtherfield.org
W: www.furtherfield.org/gallery

Dress code: sociable

Please RSVP by 17 February 2012 to info@furtherfield.org

For more information please download the press release (313kb)

http://www.furtherfield.org/gallery-files/Being-Social-Furtherfield-gallery-launch-press-release.pdf

or contact Alessandra Scapin on +44 (0) 2088022827 or ale@furtherfield.org

Furtherfield - A living, breathing, thriving network
http://www.furtherfield.org - for art, technology and social change since 1997

You are warmly invited to join us for a lecture by Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort University. The lecture is part of the university’s Professorial Lecture Series for 2011, showcasing and celebrating the academic activities of the university’s professors.

The lecture on Wednesday 30 November will start at 6pm and takes place in our Hugh Aston Building. Tea and coffee will be served before the lecture and a drinks reception will follow the lecture.

Parking will be available at our visitor car park and directions can be found at http://www.dmu.ac.uk/aboutdmu/campuses/maps/leic_campus.jsp

This lecture will explore the evolution of the landscape of cyberspace from its creation as an unpopulated wilderness through its exploration, colonisation, cultivation, settlement and growth, and offers some predictions for the future of this most exotic place.

Sue Thomas is Professor of New Media at the Institute of Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Art, Design and Humanities. She has written several books including the novel 'Correspondence', short-listed for the 1992 Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and most recently the 2004 non-fiction cyberspace travelogue 'Hello World: travels in virtuality'. She has written about computers and the internet since the 1980s and is now working on 'Nature and Cyberspace: Stories, Memes and Metaphors', a study of the relationships between cyberspace and the natural world, forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. She co-directs the influential Transliteracy Research Group and the DMU Transdisciplinary Group, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Further information about this lecture and others in the series can be found at www.dmu.ac.uk/events

Places for the lecture must be booked by contacting the Events Office on 0116 257 7452 or via email: eventsoffice@dmu.ac.uk. Alternatively, places can be booked online at www.dmu.ac.uk/events. There are limited places available, so if you are interested, do please book early to avoid disappointment.

Symposia 2011-2012

Symposium 1: Saturday 5 November 2011
Theme: what do we want from analysis of electroacoustic music and how might we get it?
Location: Institute of Creative Technologies, Gateway Street, Leicester

http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/info/contact.html

Time: 10.30-17.30
Chair: Simon Emmerson
Keynote: Michael Clarke (University of Huddersfield)

This is no ordinary Symposium. Invited speakers will give 10 minute (max) presentations with one slide (if needed); there will be much more time for discussion; the field has been divided into arbitrary cliché genres; we must start somewhere and these may well be critiqued; such as - post-concrète and the acousmatics; soundscape and real world reference; glitch, hacking, failure aesthetics; sound art, installation and the site-specific; algorithmic and interactive; live instrumental (mixed and live electronics); live post-instrumental (hardware hacking, found and constructed instruments); electronica/IDM related; audio in computer games; discourse analysis - any others?

Contributors include: Simon Emmerson, Leigh Landy, Pierre Couprie, Mike Gatt, John Dack, Katharine Norman, Owen Green, Manuella Blackburn, Andrew Hugill, John Young, Pete Batchelor, John Richards, Bret Battey, Neal Spowage, Ben Ramsay, Panos Amelides, Katerina Tzedaki, Simon Atkinson - and more

In an afternoon session Pierre Couprie will give a demonstration of the first beta version of the project software 'EAnalysis' and Mike Gatt will report on the wiki OREMA project he has created.

While entry is free and open, spaces are limited and should be booked -please email s.emmerson@dmu.ac.uk to register (not the IOCT please). Your participation assumes you are happy to be recorded.

Further details will be available one week before the symposium.

Bath Time is a one day exhibition on wed 28th sept as part of my Major Project for the MA in Creative Tech.

Showing at the new Interact Gallery in Fabrika, 68-70 Humberstone Gate, Leicester, LE1 3PL

An interactive moving image piece where reality tv meets portrait gallery.

Exhibition open from midday with drinks and talk at 7pm

Feel free to come and help "test the water"

Dave

Create a statue of yourself with kinect and 3D printers in the streets of Hackney
Red Market, Old Street (ex-foundry )

http://www.blablablab.org/

PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA 2011
International Competition for CyberArts
Honorary Mention

Be Your Own Souvenir connects street users, arts and science, linking them to under-lying alternative spaces and their own realities. The audience are released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.

blablabLAB

ES, 2010-1

Be Your Own Souvenir connects street users, arts and science, linking them to under-lying alternative spaces and their own realities. The audience are released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.

The user is both producer and consumer in this unique art installation and project. Be Your Own Souvenir invites the viewer to perform the role of and become a human statue, with a free personal souvenir as a reward: a small figurine of the participant, printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of their form, generated by the use of a structured light scanner.blablabLAB is a collaborative collective structured around transdisciplinary collaboration. They imagine strategies and create tools to make society face its complex reality (urban, technological, alienated and hyper-consumerist). It works without preset formats, approaching the knowledge generation, property and diffusion of it.
www.byos.blablablab.org

Fri 23rd: 16:00-20:00 in Shoreditch, Redmarket Square (Behind old Foundry)
Sat 24th: 16:00-20:00 in Shoreditch, Redmarket Square (Behind old Foundry)

What is meant by “digital archives” well, primarily archives, repositories, content management systems and other initiatives that collect or manage born-digital material. These initiatives don’t have to primarily collect born-digital materials…in fact they are more likely to only have some born-digital content as part of their mandate. Or, maybe they don’t really have a “mandate” at all…maybe someone will contribute their thoughts about managing their own personal digital content or social media presence. The thread ties the participants together is that they collect, manage, preserve, develop, use, think about or otherwise love born-digital content.

Do you create, manage, or use digital archives? Would you like to participate? Well then, drop me a line at gretchen[.]gueguen[@]gmail[.]com with your contact info and I’ll keep you up to date!

You could contribute in a couple of ways:

1. Create a blog post at http://dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com/ for the 6th of October (rather that writing it on October 6th, you can pre-write it to automatically post on the 6th as well) talking about some aspect of your work with Digital Archives on that day. It could be a really specific exploration of a single activity on that day. Or it could be a broader topic not really related to that specific day (What kinds of tools you could really use to process a born-digital collection).

2. Write a post to your own blog similar to that described above and post a trackback to the Day of Digital Archives blog

3. Tweet throughout the day about your work with digital archives using the #digitalArchivesDay hashtag

Even if you can’t contribute a post or a tweet, be sure to keep up with the blog on the 6th and join the discussion in the comments.

Gretchen Gueguen
Digital Archivist, Digital Curation Services
University of Virginia Library
PO Box 400114
Charlottesville, VA 22904

http://nnnnn.org.uk/

come along for an evening of (dis)information, possession trance, crash worship, life coding, rough music, electronic resistance, and contemporary folklore

live performances from:
CEMENTIMENTAL http://cementimental.com/
CHEAPMACHINES http://cmx.org.uk/
EVIL MOISTURE http://schoolofmeatcutting.free.fr/
JAMKA http://urbsounds.sk/
JONATHAN KEMP http://xxn.org.uk/doku.php
MARTIN HOWSE http://www.1010.co.uk/org/
NORIKO MATSUMOTO http://norikomatsumoto.jp/
RYAN JORDAN http://ryanjordan.org/
RYOKO AKAMA http://www10.plala.or.jp/ryokoakama/
TONESUCKER http://tonesucker.com/
XNAME http://xname.cc/

26/08/2011
20:00-late
nnnnn Unit 73a Regent Studios 8 Andrew's Road E8 4QN
free entry - all welcome

This exhibition is part of a Masters project that explores the interactive potential of advanced imaging technologies, analysing the creation and spectatorship of animated para-lenticulars created through an experimental art process.

The nine compositions displayed in the Cube combine non-standard lens-based media, lenticulars and collage to create works without precedent in the field of lenticular art. The visuals are based around the theme of movement and include subtle animation effects which are further enhanced by the experimental application of lenticular lenses. This gives an intensified viewing experience that prompts the audience to act and to move the body, enhancing the movement effect. Effectively, the audience co-creates the animation effect becoming a conscious co-author of the postmodern art project.

www.dominikadronska.co.uk

DMU Master's Showcase
"An Animated Print - An Animated Viewer" is showing as part of the DMUMaster's Showcase. work produced by current students on the innovativeMasters in Creative Technologies (MA/MSc), run from the Institute ofCreative Technologies at De Montfort University. Throughout the course,students develop and strengthen their individual creative technologiespractice, bringing together e-science, digital arts, design andhumanities to cross traditional disciplines and explore new ways ofworking.

For details about the IOCT Masters in Creative Technologies (MA/MSc), contact ssmith05@dmu.ac.uk or visit www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/masters

Hosted by FACT (Foundation of Art and Creative Technology) at Liverpool John Moores University

In partnership with LJMU; AND (Abandon Normal Devices); Crumb at the University of Sunderland; Lancaster University; Site Gallery; University of Sussex; University of the West of Scotland; Universiteit van Amsterdam; and the Database of Virtual Art at the Department for Image Science, Danube University

The Media Art History Board and Rewire Co-chairs would like to invite you to attend the latest international media art history conference, following Banff 2005; Berlin 2007; and Melbourne 2009. Rewire will increase the voltage and ignite key debates within the internationally distributed network of histories, and will illuminate the global phenomena of media art. by discussing new paradigms for media art histories including Science and Technology Studies and Cybernetics, the connections between such histories and those of new technologies and computing, the relations between media art and craft, media archaeology, and institutional and curatorial responses to media art.

Rewire will be supplemented with performances, book launches, workshops and special events, and runs concurrently with the AND Festival which will be hosted at numerous sites across Liverpool.

Chair: Mike STUBBS, Director at FACT
Co-chairs: Paul BROWN, Sarah COOK; Juan CRUZ, Charlie GERE, Andy MIAH, Ed SHANKEN, Laura SILLARS

Keynotes:
? Professor Andrew PICKERING of Exeter University, an internationally-known figure in Science and Technology Studies and author of The Mangle of Practice (Chicago University Press, 1995), and The Cybernetic Brain (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
? Professor Tanya HARROD, leading historian of the history of craft and author of The Crafts in Britain in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1999)
? Steve KURTZ and Shady EL NOSHOKATY. Kurtz is a founding member of the pioneering media art collective Critical Art Ensemble. El Noshokaty is an artist and academic.

Speakers:
Trish ADAMS, Alessandro ALFIERI, Jamie ALLEN, Patrick ALLEN, Pau ALSINA, Rosanne ALTSTATT, Perry BARD, Clarisse BARDIOT, Dorothy BARENSCOTT, Penelope BOYER, Victoria BRADBURY, Jo BRIGGS, Christoph BRUNNER. Patricia BUENO-DELGADO, Andrew BURRELL, Glòria Munilla CABRILLANA, Jackie CALDERWOOD, Vito CAMPANELLI, Natalia CANTÓ, Jon CATES, Karen CHAM, Paolo CIRIO, Kathy CLELAND, Leon CMIELEWSKI, Felicity COLMAN, Leonie COOPER, Sean CUBITT, Nina CZEGLEDY, Adson DA ROCHA, Michael DARROCH, Hamda DARWISH, Katie DAY GOOD, Annet DEKKER, Emile DEVEREAUX, Sara DIAMOND, Michael DIETER, Zara DINNEN, Diana DOMINGUES, Denise DOYLE, Vince DZIEKAN, Ernest EDMONDS, Francesca FRANCO, Darko FRITZ, Charlotte FROST, Gabriela GALATI, Antonio Bonome GARCIA, Petra GEMEINBOECK, Paul GIRARD, Michael GODDARD, Meredith GODLEY, Monika GÓRSKA-OLESINSKA, Susan GRABOWSKI, Beryl GRAHAM, Simone GRISTWOOD, Charlie GULLSTROM, Markus HAFNER, Simon HAGEMANN, Orit HALPERN, Ben HALSALL, Graham HARWOOD, Thomas HENSEL, Inge HINTERWALDNER, Nadav HOCHMAN, Vanina HOFMAN, Lissa HOLLOWAY-ATTAWAY, Kristen HUTCHINSON, Sharon IRISH, Robert JACKSON, Janis JEFFERIES, Alice Ming Wai JIM, Nigel JOHNSON, Stephen JONES, Marina Soler JORGE, Aleksandra KAMINSKA, Eva KEKOU, Gail KENNING, Jörn KETELSEN, Ji-hoon KIM, Harald KLINKE, Saskia KORSTEN, Guilherme KUJAWSKI, Machiko KUSAHARA, Katja KWASTEK, Maria LAKKA, Nicholas LAMBERT, Caroline LANGILL, Venus LAU, Stephanie LAUKE, Christophe LECLERCQ, Mike LEGGETT, Jonathan LESSARD, Jacob LILLEMOSE, Ana Gabriela Godinho LIMA, William LOCKETT, Alessandro LUDOVICO, Jung-Yeon MA, Elena MARCEVSKA, Janine MARCHESSAULT, Armin MEDOSCH, Chris MEIGH-ANDREWS, Gabriel MENOTTI, Cristiano MIOSSO, Kasia MOLGA, Rosana MONTEIRO, Josei NAGAYASSU, Frieder NAKE, Rachel O’DWYER, Elaine O’HANRAHAN, Margrét ÓLAFSDÓTTIR, Robin OPPENHEIMER, Karen O’ROURKE, Christian OYARZUN, Camille PALOQUE BERGES, Abraham PAREDES, Jussi PARIKKA, Karen PATTERSON, Christiane PAUL,Robin PECKHAM, Valentina PEÑA, Jeremy PILCHER, Morgan QUAINTANCE, Peter RICHARDSON, Ben ROBERTS, Janice ROBERTSON, Axel ROCH, Rebecca ROUSE, Rie SAITO, Chris SALTER, Rob SAUNDERS, Margaret SCHAVEMAKER, Jens SCHRÖTER, Theresa SCHUBERT MINSKI, Adele SENIOR, Mark SMITH, Morten SØNDERGAARD, Josephine STARRS, Jenny STEELE, Wanda STRAUVEN, David TEH, Daniel TEMKIN, Sarah THOMPSON, Jenny TILLOTSON, Heidi TIKKA, Sarah TODD, John TONKIN, Magdalena TYZLIK-CARVER, Rebecca UCHILL, Tomohiro UESHIBA, Eduardo VALLE, Silvana VASSALLO, Sander VEENHOF, Erandy VERGARA-VERGAS, Natasha VITA-MORE, Lioudmila VOROPAI, Pau WAELDER, Birk WEIBERG, Nina WENHART, Florian WIENCEK, Ewa WÓJTOWICZ,Ian WOJTOWICZ, Suzette WORDEN, Maria X, Andrea ZAPP

Special thanks to our International Advisory Committee and the Media Art History Board for their expertise and support.

Further information can be found at: http://www.mediaarthistory.org/
Details of the schedule and events available at:

http://www.mediaarthistory.org/?page_id=105