Chris Joseph

Call for Proposals: New Forms Festival 2007

The New Forms Festival is an annual cross-disciplinary festival exploring installation, performance, music, film, and electronic arts.

The theme for NFF07 is Re-Use. To use something again, often for a different purpose and usually as an alternative to throwing it out. NFF 07 looks at the ideas of reuse in the media arts. These forms have been able to come from different areas all around us. Whether involving the recycling of equipment, the change in its use, reprogramming material, the sample and mash-up of sound/images and reconstruction of ideas; the concept of reuse has become one of the major entities behind invigorating, changing, and growing media and electronic arts.

Over history art has always seen recontextualization at its very core. Warhol once asked if there was ever really an original idea. Shakespearean tales become modern films, ancient sounds become electronic music anthems. Pop culture drives home sounds and imagery that have changed, grown, and evolved over time. Within this we have seen our cultures mix, grow, and shape shift as ideas get recontextualized and reapproapriated from generation to generation, and culture to culture.

For Re:Use NFF is looking for pieces that challenge these models and trends, recognizing shifts that have taken place as well as new and innovative works that re:use works on formats and in ways not yet seen. As the amount of information we receive on a daily basis increases at a pace far faster that at any other time in history, NFF 07 will become a platform for this mixed media world, and a indicator of what might lie ahead in the years to come.

Read more

for remix_runran, from featuring… from anthra_X

flash source: bacillus_anthracis.fla (84kb)

In October last year a group from the Children’s BBC (CBBC) came into the IOCT to see the space, meet some of the people using it, and have a quick viewing of Inanimate Alice 3. They were a very friendly and on-the-ball group - and they mentioned a CBBC project which has been announced today on BBC News called CBBC World. Think Second Life designed for kids, without any of the money or trading aspects… they are very keen that the environment will be safe for kids, with no chatrooms or facilities for building new parts of the virtual world which could then be abused by users.

It is expected to go live in the summer, with a full launch in the autumn to coincide with the CBBC relaunch.