Chris Joseph

Let me say that I’ve only dipped into Second Life, and found it much as I had expected - full of potential, so far largely unfulfilled, and generally of much more interest to those with masses of time to spend learning and building in the environment. But it’s hard not to laugh at this TIME article.

Firstly - as second-lifers will be quick to point out - Second Life is not a website, but an application that runs over the net. I’m not sure why this slipped under their editing radar, particularly as one of their gripes is ‘it runs on free software you have to download’ (not software you have to download! Surely everything should come preloaded on your system and require no further effort on our part? And at least, please, can we pay for our downloads?!)

My favourite of their stated gripes is that “there are crazy people around every corner — disruptive types that spread graffiti and get in your way and throw you off your groove”. Hmm, not like the internet (or life) in general then? Roll on Second Life: Police State.

The criticism that really bugged me here is this:

Fans praise Second Life as a virtual hangout where you can meet and chat and buy sneakers and real estate (that’s fake stuff for real money) and dance and go bowling and have sex — suggesting that “virtual humans” doing “human things” online in Second Life is somehow less pathetic than, say, cooking Kaldorei spider kabobs or making magic pantaloons in World of Warcraft.

Let’s forget for a moment all the items that would presumably be included under this definition of ‘fake stuff’ - webspace… virtual (TIME) magazines… music?… but the most irritating part of this criticism is the classically retrograde suggestion that online pursuits - of any nature - are ‘pathetic’. Thanks for the flashback to the early ’90s, TIME.

As a side note, it’s interesting to note that another of their worst websites of 2007 is MySpace: which happened to be one of their ‘coolest’ websites of 2006. Their reasoning is that

It seems the community has become infested with marketers and other opportunists who create false profiles and essentially spam other users, all under the guise of “making friends.”

Yes, yes. Terrible behaviour. That never happened in the early days of MySpace, and this sort of thing never happens on other social networking sites. Good to know TIME isn’t just jumping on any (anti-)bandwagons that come along, particularly since a publishing competitor (Rupert Murdoch) took over the site (and in case you are under the impression that I’m a big MySpace fan - please read my February post about MySpace’s ‘mymoviemashup’).

Eyebeam Fellowships
http://www.eyebeam.org/production/artists_fel.php

Overview of Eyebeam Fellowships

The application process for Eyebeam’s 2007/08 Fellowship program is currently open. The deadline for applications is August 6, 2007. All applicants will be informed of their application status by October 1, 2007. The program duration is for 11 months, running from November to September.

Fellowships will be offered in the R&D OpenLab, the Production Lab and the Education Lab. The focus of the Fellowships varies depending on the tools and skills available and the creative objectives and philosophy of each Lab. Up to five Fellowships will be granted for 2007/08.

For all of the Fellowships we are seeking applications from artists, hackers, designers, engineers and creative technologists to come to Eyebeam for a year to undertake new research and develop new work. The ideal Fellow has experience working with and making innovative technological art and/or creative technology projects and has a passion for collaborative development. Fellows will bring this experience and working approach to their own independent projects, projects initiated by other Residents or Fellows and projects conceived collaboratively during the Fellowship period.

Fellows are selected from an open call. International applicants are welcome to apply although we do not have the resources to provide travel or accommodation. We are happy to work with selected applicants, where required, to help them to secure funds to cover these expenses. International Fellows are responsible for securing their own visas for the Fellowship period.

Fellows receive a $30,000 stipend and health benefits during their stay. They are able to take on additional external teaching or consulting work, but there is an expectation that Fellows will be working at Eyebeam a minimum of four days a week.

Collaborative partnerships at Eyebeam will be fostered though group critiques, discussions and projects, within and between the lab environments and residency programs. Fellows also benefit from critiques, lectures and workshops by external practitioners chosen for their relationship to subjects and projects being worked on in the Labs. All Fellows are encouraged to share their skills and knowledge with the larger Eyebeam community by conducting formal and/or informal workshops with others in the Labs as well as possible workshops open to the public. There are also opportunities to develop work for performance, events, seminars, exhibition or other public programming in the Eyebeam galleries (and beyond) during the term of the fellowship.

Core to our principle at Eyebeam is the brokering of relationships between artists, hackers, coders, engineers and other creative technologists and the contexts we provide. The intention is to foster and facilitate relationships whereby technologists and artists can come together to germinate and hothouse their ideas, develop new processes and create new works through a period of immersion in a social context which is rich in technology, expertise and ideas.

Read more

Download

391.org dadacast #11

14m17s. By 391.org, Anarchy Ass, Escha, babel, Ronnie The Bull, zedex and Justynn Tyme.

391.org - 391 countdown (Smelly Feet mix) (0:00 - 0:05)
Anarchy Ass - Pope On A Rope (0:05 - 1:33)
Escha/babel - Music For Schools Programming Clocks (aka Snowboard Beatbox) (1:33 - 4:16)
Ronnie The Bull - Old Man Burns (4:16 - 8:34)
zedex - The Dead Manta Ray (8:34 - 10:21)
Justynn Tyme - Freeze Basics (10:21 - 12:19)
Escha - Noiret (Pfeifer mix) (12:19 - 14:17)

http://tinyurl.com/25jd2r

Work by:
Carlo Zanni - Ebay landscape
Jimpunk - gLynch_N4
MTAA - onKawaraUpdate (v2)
Andy Deck - Wildlife Offline
0100101110101101.org - patch-2.4.19

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference
Thursday, May 29-Sunday, June 1, 2008
Vancouver, Washington

Sponsored by Washington State University Vancouver
& the Electronic Literature Organization

Dene Grigar & John Barber, Co-Chairs
http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/dtc/elo08.html ( website, coming August 8 )

Producing a work of electronic literature entails not only practice in the literary arts but sometimes also the visual, sonic, and the performative arts; knowledge of computing devices and software programs; and experience in collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and hybridity. In short, electronic literature requires its artists to see beyond traditional approaches and sensibilities into what best can be described as visionary landscapes where, as Mark Amerika puts it, artists “celebrate an interdisciplinary practice from a literary and writerly perspective that allows for other kinds of practice-based art-research and knowledge sharing.”

To forward the thinking about new approaches and sensibilities in the media arts, The Electronic Literature Organization and Washington State University Vancouver’s Digital Technology and Culture program are inviting submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference to be held from May 29 to June 1, 2008 in Vancouver, Washington.

Read more

DIGITAL BROADWAY is now seeking applications to its DIGITAL COMMISSIONS.

Broadway Cinema and Media Centre Nottingham has launched DIGITAL BROADWAY, its new exhibition programme of digital art and moving image. Broadway now has 4 distinct areas to exhibit moving image artwork within the building:

The Glass Screen - Large scale projections on the glazed front of the building. Viewable from the street and inside the Mezzanine bar.

The Bar Screen - large projections in the popular ground floor cafe bar space.

The Small Screens - an LCD screen network located around the building.

Cinema Screen - Monthly screenings of artists’ film and video (last Tuesday each month)

We are looking to commission exclusive art work for Broadway’s Bar Screen and Glass Screen.

6 x Glass Screen commissions at £1000 each. The work will be shown for six weeks.

8 x Bar Screen commissions at £500 each. The work will be shown for four weeks.

These commissions are possible with the assistance of Arts Council England funding.

We are also looking to curate a wide range of new and existing artists’ film and video, short films and networked art works on the Small Screens and welcome your submissions Cinema Screen.

DIGITAL BROADWAY’s visual direction is ambitious and iconic and we are interested in work that goes beyond the cinema screen, animates the widely used public building and creates links between the cinema, moving image and digital art.

Please visit the Broadway website for more: https://www.broadway.org.uk/digital_arts

You are open to apply for more one than one Call for Entries separately, but can only be selected for one.

Deadline: 1 August 2007

Places are available for the Methods Network funded workshop on

REAL TIME COLLABORATIVE ART MAKING

Date: July 20th 2007
Venue: The Birmingham Institute of Art and Design
Organiser: Dr. Gregory Sporton

This workshop is focused on developing and applying technologies in the Visual and Performing Arts, exploring technologies that can be adapted for use in the arts and networking technologies being developed for use in the blurred area between the visual and performing arts.

The workshop is geared for artists and academics in the visual and performing arts who are interested in the potential of networked technologies as a creative platform. The workshop will support and encourage work in this area, introduce some of the technologies and demonstrate applications. This is a free workshop but registration is required and numbers are limited, so please register as soon as possible.

More information and a link to the registration form is available at: http://www.biad.uce.ac.uk/vru/collaborativeart/index.php

http://www.shadoof.net/in/?riverislandQT.html

riverIsland is a navigable text movie composed from transliteral morphs with a few interliteral graphic morphs. It is a spatialized aural poetic environment in which you may also investigate procedures of textual transformation associated with translation, which are here proposed as transliteral.

riverIsland has been rewritten for QuickTime, June 2007 - Version 1.0

Please contact John with comments, bug reports and suggestions.

Peter Traub blogs about geotagged audio on Networked_Music_Review:

“If you were to make use of geotagged audio, what would you use it for? What kind of interfaces into a geotagged audio database would interest you?”

[Respond here http://tinyurl.com/3cy7a9]

for remix_runran, from fine print

flash source: morefineprint.fla (84KB)