Chris Joseph

www.zebrastraat.be

At the occasion of the Update III exhibition that is organised as a Biennial event at the Zebrastraat Gent, the Liedts-Meesen Foundation will award for the second time, a work by a living artist distinguishing himself or herself in the field of digital art. This award will consist of a cash purse and a showcase in the Update IV to be held in 2012.

Entry forms and guidelines available at http://www.zebrastraat.be
http://www.zebrastraat.be/kunst_3_91.html

Deadline November 1 2009- Final Deadline

The upcoming exhibition, Update III (in 2010), will be held in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, under the artistic direction of the exhibition’s commissioner Christine Van Assche.
At the same time, the 10 works selected for the Liedts-Meesen Foundation award will be exhibited and integrated into the publication accompanying the exhibition.

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The submission platform of ISEA2010 RUHR is now open at

http://www.isea2010ruhr.org/submissions

ISEA2010 RUHR is the 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art, a major conference and exhibition event for art, media and technology, scheduled for 20-29 August 2010 in the German Ruhr region (Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, a. o.).

We invite proposals for conference papers, artist presentations, exhibition projects, live performances, and art projects in public space.

Visual artists, musicians, dancers, designers, engineers, software artists, researchers, theorists, media activists, and hybrids of these, working with recent technologies and exploring the artistic, creative and critical potentials of digital and electronic media, should submit their projects or papers online by 15 September 2009.

All submissions will be evaluated by an international jury. The results of the jury process and invitations for ISEA2010 RUHR are expected by the end of 2009.

Please note that all submitted information can be edited and completed until the submission deadline. Detailed information about the submission process can be found at:

http://www.isea2010ruhr.org/submissions

Contact: call [at] isea2010ruhr.org

ISEA2010 RUHR is a project of the European Capital of Culture, RUHR.2010, and is hosted by Medienwerk NRW. ISEA2010 RUHR is organised under the auspices of the ISEA Foundation and is funded by RUHR.2010, the State Chancellory of North Rhine Westphalia, and the City of Dortmund.

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ISEA2010RUHR – 20-29 aug 2010 – http://www.isea2010ruhr.org
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ISEA2010 RUHR c/o HMKV | Guentherstr. 65 | D-44143 Dortmund

SuperMassiveBlackHole is dedicated to the photographic imagery resulting from the time-based processes found in many interdisciplinary art practices today. The magazine seeks to engage and represent respective projects and ideas which utilise Photography (digital or analogue), New Media (high or low tech), and Performance (through documentation).

When: 1 August 2009 (theme: ‘Other Worlds’)

Check out more info at www.supermassiveblackholemag.com

PIXXELPOINT 2009 – CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
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ENTRY FORM (PDF): http://www.pixxelpoint.org/entryform2009.pdf
DEADLINE: September 30th 2009, arrival date.

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Once Upon a Time in the West

We keep on talking about “new media”, while in actually fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, lighter versions of a technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which was able to regenerate itself thanks to the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

Yet, while we got used to innovation and the day-after rhetorics, we have never got used to the loss of the past. We look back to what was new yesterday and is trash today, and we feel a deep sense of nostalgia. Commodore 64 and 386dx. The first Apple Macintosh. Bulletin Board Systems. Animated gifs. Glittering images. Web buttons. Super Mario. Doom. Napster. Jennicam. Mosaic. ASCII art. MIDIs and MOOs. Not to mention VHS, vinyl, audio cassettes, cathode tubes, portable radios, faxes. It is the kind of nostalgia that we feel for a relative who died young, once the pain abates: you are left wondering what kind of man he would have been. Or for someone that, once grown up, does not live up to his or her promise. Sometimes nostalgia develops into historical research, and becomes media archeology. We don’t look for the technologies that we once loved, but those we have never seen in action.

But in both the cases, in the artistic field this sentimental look at the past is producing some brand new, interesting stuff. Reviving dead media and obsolete technologies, retrieving and rekindling their aesthetics, making them do things they were never expected to do, and telling stories about them with other means is proving to be a sound artistic strategy – undoubtedly more so than “the exploration of the artistic potential of new media” which became the mantra of most New Media Art. This happens because, when you give up on the rhetorics of novelty, what is left on stage is the human element: the man of the past who domesticated the media, put his own life into them and was changed by them; and the man of the present, who looks back on that past with the same sentiment as the venerable Sergio Leone looked to the West.

On the occasion of its 10th Birthday, Pixxelpoint festival wants to explore this feeling. Clean out your attic, the folders you haven’t touched for years, GIF repositories, your university’s warehouse, and the dumps of Silicon Valley – or its small-town emulators. Get your hands on this stuff, and send us your finds. Any media is allowed, apart from new!

Domenico Quaranta, curator

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http://algumascoisas.com/recorder/

The aim of this project is the collaborative production of a sound recording to be featured in a radio, which will broadcast throughout the duration of an upcoming contemporary art exhibition and via the internet (all the pieces produced for the radio will also be featured on a CD that will accompany the exhibition’s catalog).

People from all over the world are invited to participate. Participation is extremely simple and consists in recording one’s voice saying, in one’s native language, the name of a well-known contemporary visual artist of the same nationality as the speaker’s followed by the propostion “by” followed by the speaker’s name followed by “dot com” (all translated to the speaker’s language). For a more thorough explanation, please see http://algumascoisas.com/recorder/