Chris Joseph

New articles, reviews of projects on Furtherfield.
http://www.furtherfield.org

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Edward Picot.
Review by Marc Garrett.

Edward Picot’s visually playful, web art interpretation of Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is a curious artwork for many reasons. Once you have visited the work it lingers in the mind and on each return it maintains a strong freshness. So what is it in this work that compels me to re-experience its particularly strange and magical reasoning?

It consciously acknowledges the original spirit of the text, whilst introducing a response that at the same time attempts to deal with what these words may mean today. This interpretation of the poem not only gives us the opportunity to appreciate how special the original work is by following the text, whether in order, or haphazardly, but it also creates a moment in time that opens up a rare experience of two creative minds as a kind of collaboration.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=285

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Summerbranch Exhibition at TheSpace4 gallery, UK by Artists igloo.
Review by Rob Myers.

Summerbranch is a hyperreal cross-media woodland environment created by Igloo during a residency at Artsway Gallery in the New Forest during 2005. Installed across the three rooms of TheSpace4 gallery in Peterborough from 14th July - 9th September.

“The use of multiple media to present the virtual scene as a complement to the recording of the real scene creates a hyperreal landscape. The reality of this is altered, but not interrupted, in the VRs by the motion-captured dance of moss-covered dancing female forms if you can find them among the foliage. Layer upon layer of invocation of nature, technology and mystery building up to produce the final effect of the work which consists as much in what is absent as in what is present in it. This experience of the work is hard to put into words, which for a piece of art is a strong sign of its effectiveness.”
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=286

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_Reality Mapping: Navigating the Social-Nodes_
Article by MEZ (Maryanne Breeze).

Web 2.0 is based on a collusive tapestry of adjoining social nodes. Social Networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Orkut, Liveleak, YouTube, Twitter and Pownce aren’t prefaced on pre-set connotative connections maintained through historicized emotional depth or satisfied by biological drives. Friends aren’t friends as we have come to know them: there is no establishment of shared geophysical experiences, no cathartic or chronologically defined friendship markers evident. What’s important is [inter]action and the quantity of it - the residual volume of contact and the fact of shared connection minus a meatbody context. Identity is constructed in these friendship pathways via the idea of notations; of naming labels, of icon attribution, and of clustered info-snippets streamlined through an interface designed for momentary persona snapshots.
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=281

Don’t just Do It Yourself (DIY) Do It With Others (DIWO), is Furtherfield’s second venture on the theme of DIWO. If you are interested in contemporary shifts in regard to curators, artists and organisations exploring activities and theories around co-curation, collaboration, co-production as a creative behaviour and practice. Then contact us as soon as possible, because we only have a few spaces left for the networking event.

Please RSVP.
To find out more and book your place please email Lauren Wright.
lauren [at] furtherfield.org

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Don’t just Do It Yourself (DIY) Do It With Others (DIWO)
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http://www.furtherfield.org/diwo_networking.php

HTTP Gallery, Sunday 7th October, 12-6pm
Unit A2 Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Road, N4 1NY

A networking day all about how artists work collaboratively with each other and audiences in the co-production of artworks or events as a central part of their practice. The event is open to artists, curators, musicians, writers, programmers, activists; thinkers and doers of all kinds.

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What Will Happen?
The event kicks off with presentations by artists Saul Albert, Ele Carpenter, Adnan Hadzi, Emily Druiff and Lottie Childs, who work with different models of participation and engagement. Discussion and debate will be encouraged in response to each presentation. After refreshments follows an audiovisual performance by Chinese digital artists 8GG, ‘the air been broken’, a new commission by Folly. For the rest of the afternoon visitors are asked to show-and-tell each other what they do. All visitors are asked to bring some representation of their own projects to promote and to share with other potential collaborators. These can take the form of drawings on paper, objects, a digital artefacts, a scientific prototype- whatever it takes. We will round off the event with an ‘open mike’ session of quickfire presentations; any visitor can present their own or other’s work, offer their services and skills to another project or make a request for help with completing their own project.

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Because of limited space we can only accommodate 40 visitors for this event. Please book your place by emailing Lauren - lauren [at] furtherfield.org- first come, first served. Projectors and wireless access to the Internet will be provided, please let us know if you have any other special requirements please contact us.

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When and where?

Sunday 7th October 2007, 12-6pm

HTTP Gallery
Unit A2 Arena Design Centre,
71 Ashfield Road, N4 1NY
Tel +44 20 8802 2827
Parking Facilities available also.

For maps and information about getting to HTTP
http://www.http.uk.net/docs/gettingto.shtml

Read more

http://www.ioctsalon.com

Thursday 1st November 2007, 6.00pm - 7.30pm (doors open at 5.30pm for drinks)

at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK (see http://www.ioctsalon.com/directions.htm for map and directions)

This event is free of charge and open to the public.

Manolis Kelaidis is a designer and engineer who likes his books to be made of paper. His recent work looks into the future of the traditional book as an interface to access digital content. He is a lecturer at the Royal College of Art and a Fellow at Imperial College’s Tanaka Business School in London. His previous work ranges from designing art exhibitions for Sony to researching at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich.

The blueBook project makes printed pages digitally interactive by embedding circuits in each page printing text with conductive ink. When you touch a “linked” word on the page your finger completes a circuit, sending a signal to a processor in the back cover which communicates by Bluetooth with a nearby computer, bringing up information on the screen.

Links:

Outline of the blueBook project at booktwo.org

Discussion of the project at the Institute for the Future of the Book

blueBook photos on flickr

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The IOCT Salon ( http://www.ioctsalon.com ) is managed by Chris Joseph, Digital Writer in Residence at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University. This residency is funded by Arts Council England: East Midlands.

For further information about the IOCT Salon please email Chris: info /at/ ioctsalon.com . To be notified of future events please join the mailing list on the Salon website.

The IOCT Salon is held at and staged by De Montfort University and the Insitute of Creative Technologies, and is supported by Arts Council England and the Literature Development Network.

A friend directed me to some very interesting visual poetry work by the artist Justin Quinn - http://www.mmgalleries.com/artists/quinn.html

Justin’s artist statement:

The distance between reading and seeing has been an ongoing interest for me. Since 1998 I have been exploring this space through the use of letterforms, and have used the letter E as my primary starting point for the last two years. Since E is often found at the top of vision charts, I questioned what I saw as a familiar hierarchy. Was this letter more important than other letters? E is, after all, the most commonly used letter in the English language, it denotes a natural number (2.71828), and has a visual presence that interests me greatly. In my research E has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet. It now replaces the other letters and becomes a universal letter (or Letter), and a string of Es now becomes a generic language (or Language). This substitution denies written words their use as legible signifiers, allowing language to become a vacant parallel Language— a basis for visual manufacture.

After months of compiling Es into abstract compositions through various systemic arrangements, I started recognizing my studio time as a quasi-monastic experience. There was something sublime about both the compositions that I was making and the solitude in which they were made. It was as if I were translating some great text like a subliterate medieval scribe would have years ago—with no direct understanding of the source material. The next logical step was to find a source. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, a story rich in theology, philosophy, and psychosis provides me with a roadmap for my work, but also with a series of underlying narratives. My drawings, prints, and collages continue to speak of language and the transferal of information, but now as a conduit to Melville’s sublime narratives.

www.arcipelagofilmfestival.org

The 7th edition of Short.Web - International On-line Competition is near to its conclusion. In fact, who’ll vote in the next 24 days will make the difference to decide the winners of this web contest, which is part of ARCIPELAGO - International Festival of Short Films and New Images.

Brought to you for the first time in collaboration with FASTWEB, the competition includes 29 short films - from all over the world - that can be viewed and voted until October 15 at the Url www.arcipelagofilmfestival.org/cortoweb.

The Net audience’s most acclaimed short film will be awarded with a Euros 1,500 prize, offered by Fastweb. Short.Web 7.0’s winner will be announced on October 21 in Rome, in the framework of Digital Party - UFO07, the digital pavillion of CINEMA. Festa Internazionale di Roma (RomeFilmFest). Starting from that date, the results of the votations will be also published on ARCIPELAGO’s website.

Please, notice that it’s not possible to vote the same short more than once, and that to be able to express your preference you must see the film until the end of the streaming. You can then assign your score to a maximum of 5.

Watch and vote them all!

Enjoy your (web)screenings…