Chris Joseph

PLAYABLE MEDIA — A NEW RESEARCH FOCUS AT UC SANTA CRUZ DIGITAL ARTS AND NEW MEDIA MFA PROGRAM

UC Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an MFA for artists working with computer games, software toys, interactive fictions, rhetorical simulations, and related playable forms. The university’s Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program has added “Playable Media” as a research focus for its collaborative faculty-student projects. Applications to the DANM MFA program for Fall 2009 are being accepted through February 15, and are encouraged from the broad diversity of artists who create work that invites and structures play.

The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research. At the core of the diverse DANM curriculum are collaborative research projects, in which small clusters of students work with professors on artistic, technical and theoretical research. Over the course of three quarters, these groups engage in the development of faculty-initiated research in one of four focused areas: Mechatronics, Participatory Culture, Performative Technologies, and Playable Media. These collaborations result in publications and exhibitions. In this intensive two-year program, students also take core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts, culminating in the development of individual thesis projects. These works are premiered in the program’s annual MFA exhibition. The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) is the terminal degree in the field of digital media arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and research.

In the Playable Media collaborative research group, MFA students will work with UCSC’s strong faculty in this area to understand and create new ways for computer games and related forms to engage audiences, make arguments, tell stories, and shape social space. Ongoing Playable Media work combines game design and artificial intelligence research with writing, art, and media authoring.

The Playable Media-focused Digital Arts and New Media MFA joins UCSC’s two previous degree options in this area. UCSC currently hosts the first computer game undergraduate major in the University of California system: a B.S. in computer game design through the Computer Science department. Active PhD research is also taking place in Computer Science, where students are developing underlying technologies for new genres of computer game play. It is expected that some DANM Playable Media students will collaborate with students in the existing programs in order to create projects more ambitious than would otherwise be possible.

The first Playable Media collaborative research group will be launched in 2009 under the direction of Noah Wardrip-Fruin (co-creator of the virtual reality literary game Screen, co-editor of MIT Press books such as Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media). Other UCSC faculty in this area include Michael Mateas (co-creator of Independent Games Festival finalist Facade and the interactive film generator Terminal Time), Warren Sack (creator of the argumentation game Agonistics and the social technology Conversation Map), and Jim Whitehead (founder of the UC system’s first game degree, developer of novel techniques for game level generation).

More about DANM:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/

More about Playable Media:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/PlayableMedia

Application information:
http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/ApplicationInfo

Open Call for participation

Media and video artists all around the world are invited to send video art for the second editon of crosstalk video art festival that will be held in Budapest on June 23 - 28, 2009.

crosstalk video art festival is an annual video art exhibition, that seeks to uprise people awareness for video as a form of art that is inserted in their life more than it’s noticed. crosstalk video art festival brings to Budapest contemporary art scene a prospective: intertwines people thought art and urban environment. Taking video art projections into the main square of Budapest, crosstalk video art festival aims to create an interlock network of viewers and artists in which new forms of embodiment emerges throughout the experience of connecting art and the city. More about crosstalk video art festival, go to: www.crosstalk.hu

There are no entry fees!

Submission Deadline: March 22, 2009

Temporary Art Show http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/TAS2.html - deadline Friday 13th February 2009

North http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/north.html - deadline 13th March 2009

Call for work on/with beer mats http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/beer.html - deadline 10th April 2009

DIY http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/DIY.html - deadline 12th June 2009

Salon Show http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/salon.html - deadline 10th July 2009

Changeover http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/changeover.html - deadline ongoing

Please also see information for exhibiting artists: http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/info.html

Temporary Art Space is an unfunded, artist-run project with a lifespan of six months, situated in the magnificent Grade 1 listed Piece Hall in Halifax and co-directed by Alice Bradshaw, Bob Milner, Tom Senior, Kevin Boniface & Georgia Boniface.

We are also looking for volunteer Temporary Art Space Assistants: http://temporaryartspace.co.uk/jobs.html

For information about the space, the building & the location see http://www.temporaryartspace.co.uk/

FutureEverything and Futuresonic

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Looking back on 2008, and forward to 2009 and 2010.

Beginning in 2010 there will be a major new adventure, and the artistic programme for the 2009 festival looks to be the strongest yet.

http://www.futuresonic.com

Read more

Turbulence Commission: “Without A Trace” by Jody Zellen
http://turbulence.org/works/without_a_trace

In July 2007, Jody Zellen began saving the daily online version of the comic strip “Real Life Adventures”, removing the text so that all that was left were the empty thought bubbles. She has also been tracing the print version of the New York Times every day, often combining the front and back of a single page (by holding it up to a window). “Without A Trace” takes the idea of this daily ritual as its point of departure.

Each day for a year, a comic image, a trace drawing, and three words from the original comic strip will be randomly selected from an archive. These will be juxtaposed with live text and image feeds from the New York Times online.

A trace is an action. A trace is what remains when almost everything else disappears. “Without A Trace” draws from an archive of traces, presenting them with ephemeral data to provide a fleeting memory, challenging the title and the notion, without a trace.

“Without A Trace” is a 2008 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

BIOGRAPHY

Jody Zellen works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists’ books that explore the subject of the urban environment. She employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations. Recent solo exhibitions include Fringe Exhibitions, Paul Kopeikin Gallery, LAXArt, and Pace Digital Gallery (2005). Her net art projects have shown in festivals and exhibitions such as Stuttgarter Filmwinter, 9th Japan Media Art Festival, Arte Nuevo Interactive, File, Recontres Internationales, and Net_Condition. Zellen is currently a Visiting Artist at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

For more Turbulence commissions, please visit http://turbulence.org

New on vispo.com:

ENDEMIC BATTLE COLLAGE AND OTHER 1987 APPLE BASIC POEMS
by Geof Huth
http://vispo.com/huth

From Jim Andrews:

Endemic Battle Collage and other 1987 Apple Basic Poems is a suite of programmed, animated poems by Geof Huth. This work is discussed in Chris Funkhouser’s landmark book Prehistoric Digital Poetry. Because this early Huth work is digital and from 1987, it’s been unavailable for many years. You can view the work as video at http://vispo.com/huth or download an emulator and view the poems through the emulator. Also included on vispo.com are writings by Geof Huth about these works and about digital poetry more generally. And an introduction by me to the project.

This is some of the earliest programmed+kinetic visual poetry created. This Huth work and bpNichol’s related First Screening at http://vispo.com/bp exude the sense of excitement Nichol and Huth felt at this incunabular point in the intersection of visual and digital poetry with the cinematic.