Chris Joseph

Description

Open Ear wish to announce Snd:arc- (Sound and Architecture) a free evening of open air live sound art and visual experimentation, featuring performances by a number of artists including Mr Paul Adams who will be performing with his new audio/visual software Pac / resenv.

The event, one of the first of its kind in the Broadstairs area, will be taking place in the space of the open courtyard at Canterbury Christ Church University at the Broadstairs Campus, Kent, England from 8pm on Friday 11/05/07 (weather permitting or be postponed until Friday the 18/05/07).

Please contact Broadstairs Campus closer to the date to verify that the event will be happening (t: +44 (0)1843 609120, e: broadstairs [at] canterbury dot ac dot uk).

Call for works

Sound and Visual Artists are invited to contribute to Snd:arc- (Sound and Architecture) a free evening of open air live sound art and visual experimentation. The event will be curated by Paul Adams and Garrett Lynch as part of the non-profit audio / visual organisation Open Ear (http://openear.wordpress.com/). We are seeking in particular artists who can work with the outside space in a live context; this can range from approaches such as the projection of visual based works on the building fascias through to site specific responses recording and manipulating the surrounding architecture and environment. Individual performances can last up to 30 minutes and will take place in the courtyard of Canterbury Christ Church University, Broadstairs Campus, Kent, England from 8pm on Friday the 11th of May.

As we are non-profit based organisation and the event is free we are unable to offer any individual payment but will provide access to a limited supply of equipment (please include a list of requirements in your proposal and we will attempt to cater for this), suitable refreshments and possibly accommodation if required. This event is run by Open Ear as part of an initiative to bring new forms of live audio / visual art to an area currently undergoing a cultural regeneration.

Please email short proposals with a list of required equipment (no more than one page) by Friday 27/04/07 as word / pdf / rtf / txt document (not pasted into the email) to:

Paul Adams: paul.adams120 [at] googlemail dot com
and
Garrett Lynch: garrett [at] asquare dot org

For further information regarding the event or Open Ear, please see our weblog at: http://openear.wordpress.com/

The location

Canterbury Christ Church Broadstairs campus, Kent, England, situated on the east coast of Kent, approximately 30 minutes from Canterbury, opened in 2000 with a wide selection of higher education courses. The campus is committed to the arts and cultural regeneration of the area and regularly host’s events, exhibitions and performances on site.

Directions: http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/broadstairs/about/maps.asp

This is a general call for submissions to Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Convergence is published by Sage Publications, and is one of the longest-standing journals in new media studies.

Regular readers and subscribers will know that, apart from two annual special issues, Convergence publishes two numbers a year which are open to any submissions that fall within our remit. This is an open call for papers for Volume 14, number 2, which will appear in May 2008. For this issue, papers would need to be submitted by 30th May 2007.

Read more

Writing Technologies is an online international, peer-reviewed journal. It launches in April 2007, with a special issue on writing’s technological locations, and will appear twice a year.

Submissions are invited for vol. 1.2, to be published in October 2007, and for subsequent issues. We welcome submissions which explore any dimension of the relationship between literature, technology and culture. For further details about the journal, please go to:

http://english.ntu.ac.uk/Writing/cfp1.htm

For submission guidelines, please go to:

http://english.ntu.ac.uk/Writing/sub.htm

Call for Submissions
Dislocate 07 - Exhibition and Symposium - Tokyo
23rd July - 5th August
Ginza Art Laboratory
www.dis-locate.net
mailto:info@dis-locate.net
Deadline for proposals 7th May

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for remix_runran, from Do You Remember (For Alison Knowles) by Emmett Williams

source code: dyrfak.fla (37KB)

ARTRADIO Open Call

Cornerhouse, Manchester’s international centre for contemporary arts and film, announces an open call for audio, for ARTRADIO- Cornerhouse’s temporary radio station, broadcasting in FM and online through late June to August of 2007.

Deadline Friday 27 April 2007, 12noon

ARTRADIO is calling for open submissions of existing audio work of a diverse variety, for example;
• digital sound productions from the broad spectrum of experimental music and sound
• field recordings / found sound
• sound performance and event archives
• cultural interviews, radio plays and works
• sounds and shows for breakfast.

Read more

Following on from the last post, yet another occasion for Brits to vote en masse for a competition that we all claim to hate anyway.

The lineup looked like the roster for the next ‘celebrity’ reality TV show, but arguably contained some semi-decent musicians - Big Brovaz, Justin Hawkins (ex-Darkness) and even Brian Harvey (ex-East 17/E-17). And yet the eventual winners were the truly truly appalling Scooch, who might have a chance of winning the Eurovision Song contest if they undergo a complete change of concept, band name, singers (I use the term loosely), and song.

However there was some fun to be had when two different acts were simultaneously announced as the winners on live TV. Great stuff.

By the way - having been out of the country for a few years I have to admit that I did somehow miss the tuneless shenanigans, ‘nul points’ schadenfreude and obligatory Terry Wogan commentary of the Eurovision night itself. But I’m slightly confused - wasn’t the competition rebranded a few years back to become the ‘Song For Europe’? Whatever happened to that? A google search suggests that (curiously) only Malta are using that name this year.

More at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/eurovision/2007/mymu/index.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6463147.stm?ls

My friend Emma Jenkinson has a piece ‘Mentor and Mother’ in the latest Saatchi Showdown.

I had no qualms about giving her piece a 10 rating - I do genuinely like it, as I do her work in general (see www.emmajenkinson.co.uk and www.flickr.com/blindfoxaroo for more). This Saatchi piece is classic Emma - great visual design and use of colour, a sense of humour that some might call left-of-centre, and a seemingly endless fascination for wallpapers, tiles and other textures that seem to belong to some bygone era.

If you aren’t familiar with the Showdown, it’s billed as a giant online talent contest for artists. Anyone can submit their work, and the winner receives £1,000 and a three month showing in the Saatchi Gallery when it opens in West London in October. The Showdown site launched at the end of February and apparently had over 35 million hits within a week. Every fortnight a ‘finalist’ is chosen, then the twelve finalists compete for the top prize (the runner-up receives £750, and presumably a fair bit of publicity too).

Saatchi’s own influence on the contemporary BritArt market has obviously been profound (for anyone living under an artistic rock for the past decade, his travelling exhibition Sensation brought Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas amongst others to national and international prominence), but he certainly has as many detractors as admirers, and the Showdown is a great example of why. Firstly the title - sure, nice alliteration, but ’showdowns’ have that connotation of confrontation that some might consider out of place in art (especially at a time when there is so much serious confrontation elsewhere on the planet). Then the very notion of artists competing against one another… art lowered to the level of a Reality TV show?

But I have to admit that as much as might want to dislike it, I can’t. It’s a very British affair - we Brits seem to like voting on anything and everything except at times when it might possibly be useful (e.g. elections), and that’s one of the reasons Reality shows with public voting do so well here (another reason is that these shows provide exactly the kind of endless mind-fodder that tabloids exist on/for, but that’s another rant).

Saatchi is quoted as saying “Showdown is a great way for artists to have their work shown to a wide audience; it’s very hard for most artists to get their work widely seen and this competition gives thousands of artists the chance to have their work seen by a global audience.” I agree with most of this - it does give a lot of artists the chance to use the revered/reviled Saatchi name in their favour. I don’t actually think it is that hard for most artists to get their work widely seen anymore, but I’ll forgive that hyperbole - as long as Emma wins.

Public Pages is an exhibition of Text Art and Visual Poetry bringing together contributions from poets, artists and makers of works which explore the visual and cultural impact of the word, the sign, and the slogan in public space. Intended as a complement to the academic conference Poetry and Public Language, this exhibition brings together works which engage with the placement and displacement of text on the page, that articulate the two-dimensional surface, that integrate visual and textual elements in a composition and consider the page as a public space, addressing a public and entering into public debate.

The exhibition invited responses from poets, artists, writers, makers, to the possibilities of the restrictions of a one-page work. The works are presented here in digital form, and a selection are printed as larger scale works shown in the gallery spaces of the Portland Square Building at Plymouth University.

Public Pages is curated by Mark Leahy.

The Boston Cyberarts Online Gallery have been kind enough to make me their current featured artist with my participatory video piece, ‘Eisenstein’s Monster’. The Boston Cyberarts Festival takes place from 20 April - 6 May at museums, galleries, theatres, universities, and public spaces in and around the Boston area.

Make your own video monsters - ‘Eisenstein’s Monster’ is a participatory video piece, a tongue-in-cheek coupling of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and the montage theories of Sergei Eisenstein.

In the interactive version the participant is invited to create life with the press of a button, then shape and twist their creatures to their whim. Biological life is transformed through the digital (in this case, digital video and Flash) and back through choices of the biological user to become new biodigital lifeforms.

If user input is impossible or not desired, there is an ‘autoplay’ version where the computer plays God.

While the piece is intended to be light-hearted, our collective fear of science playing God lurks here, as it did in Shelley’s original.