Chris Joseph

http://lebusque.com/drawings/thisyear/buy.html

I wouldn’t normally post up things for sale, but this one is a definite exception. It’s a 30″x20″ Poster Print (76cm x 51cm) of Toni Le Busque’s ‘Saucy Bird’. Toni was a student on the Creative Writing and New Media MA at De Montfort, and one of her many talents is creating these amazingly dense and intricate black and white drawings. This is the first one available for buy - I have it on my wall and it looks fantastic. And no, I don’t earn any commission on them! See more of Toni’s work at lebusque.com .

http://artabase.net

Artabase is an innovative, Web 2.0, social networking website for the arts that allows Artists and Galleries to promote themselves and their Exhibitions, storing this information in an online database of art history.

The website is still at Beta version, but aims to become the world’s premier art archive.

Art Lovers can use Artabase to out what’s on in Galleries around the world, and to discover new Artists.

Users can sign up for a free user account, then

1. Create a free Artist profile
2. Create a free Gallery profile
3. Upload free Exhibition listings
4. Subscribe to free Arts Opportunities ELists

As we left Moscow on that plane I had no idea where we were going. It turns out my Mum and Dad had no idea either. We moved around. We stayed with friends. It took a while but finally we landed on our feet.

Sort of.

“And now I am going to die!” Attempting to impress my friends on the way home from school, I climb a rickety staircase outside an abandoned factory.

When it collapses beneath me, I hang on by my fingernails and haul myself up onto a ledge. But then I get stuck. There’s no way down. And I can’t go up. The only way out is through the scary factory, half-demolished and very dangerous. Can you help me? Can you find the way out?

My friends (I have friends now - yeah!!)love the stories I create; they want to tell their own, so I came up with a simple little tool to help them. It’s called iStori.es - all you have to do is load up your photos, add some words, music and sound effects and BOOM! you have your own interactive story….in minutes.

If you’re a student, go tell your teacher to check out http://www.iStori.es - it’s very educational! Hehe…

See you in Hometown, Episode 4 on http://www.inanimatealice.com .

Yours - Alice

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First reviews:

“Inanimate Alice serves as both entertainment and a peek into the future of literature as a fusion of multimedia technologies. The haunting images and accompanying music and text weave a remarkably gripping tale that must be experienced to be believed… Get ready for thirty minutes of multimedia bliss.” ( Jay is Games )

“Episode 4 of the super-stylish interactive story Inanimate Alice is out now. If you’ve never experienced it, interactive fiction is part story, part game. I’ve reported on Alice before because I think it’s unique and really beautiful. (Wait till you hear the music. I’m so into it. It’s like the soundtrack for a spooky-cool movie…)” ( Books, Inq. )

“Alice tells her story through moving snapshots, journaled words and haunting music… Alice is beautiful in that we start to forget that it’s a just a game and we began to connect with her, all her fears and hopes, and her joy too.” ( The Cafe in the Woods )

“I’ve just experienced the just-released “Episode 4: Hometown” of the haunting multimedia-interactive story, Inanimate Alice and can say that it is just as enjoyable and unique as the previous three.” ( educating alice )

“Inanimate Alice is a Learning Gem… With the release of Inanimate Alice Episode 4 ‘Hometown’ I am even more convinced that this type of multimedia story is the future of e-reading.” ( Learning Gems )

“Have you caught up with Inanimate Alice yet? It is digital storytelling at its most delicious.” ( CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus )

Interrupt 2008, to be held at Brown University from October 17-19, is a three-day festival of readings, performances, and symposia organized around the theme of “interruption” in digital art and programmable literary practices. Why “Interrupt”? In computing, a hardware interrupt request or IRQ is used to prioritize the execution of certain processes over others. It is a command sent to the processor to get its attention, signaling the need to initiate a new operation.

In the context of contemporary art, the act of interruption is a performance that redirects threads of process and lines of thought into fields of new expression. Interrupts trigger the moment when a process of creation yields a public manifestation. The cycle of ongoing work is paused by a challenge, calling for the attention of a provisional community: just as we read ICQ as “I seek you,” we can read IRQ as “I argue.” In this sense, interrupts articulate critical thresholds at which formal expressions are offered up to (or forced into) new circuits of communication, countering that which came before and making a case for new artistic and political futures.

We ask you to attend and participate.

Artists in Residence:
* Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries *

Confirmed Headliners:
* Alan Sondheim & Foofwa d’Imobilité *
* Laetitia Sonami *
* Eugenio Tisselli *
* Marko Niemi *

Details and arrangements to be confirmed:
* cris cheek *
* Abigail Child *
* Chris Funkhouser *
* Loss Peque?o Glazier *
* Talan Memmott *
* Bill Seaman and Penny Florence *
* Patricia Tomaszek *

Critics, theorists, artists and students who would like to attend are asked to contact John_Cayley (at) brown.edu. We will be organizing two or more round table sessions during the festival, and we invite brief presentations intended to spark critical discussions relating to the work of interruption within the context of digitally mediated language practices. Participants will also be invited to instigate discussion at these round tables.

If you would like to attend, and particularly if you have institutional backing, we ask you to consider supporting Interrupt with a registration contribution of $50 (checks only please) made out to ‘Brown University’ and sent to:

Interrupt 2008
Brown University
Literary Arts Program
Box 1923
Providence RI 02912

For letters of invitation, please contact John_Cayley (at) brown.edu. Register now.

To read more about what we mean by Interrupt and for other details about the festival – including the preliminary program, schedule, location, venues, and accommodation information – please refer to our website: http://interrupt2008.net

Organized and hosted at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design by graduates and undergraduates from Literary Arts, Modern Culture and Media, MEME, RISD D+M, and other departments.

Funding and support for Interrupt currently includes the following sources: Brown Creative Arts Council, the Literary Arts program, RISD Digital+Media, MEME, the Brown Graduate School, the Comparative Literature department.

Background behind Becks Canvas

Contemporary art is a living part of our cultural heritage. Encouraging raw ability and building a broader public appreciation of the diversity and excellence of artistic accomplishment is a vision which Beck’s has long supported.

To this end, we have championed talented artists without compromise for over 20 years. As a bold statement of commitment, Beck’s has given outstanding artistic talent a truly original canvas to work on. Our label. Collaboration over two decades reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of contemporary art; Gilbert & George, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Tim Head, Sam Taylor-Wood, Jake & Dino Chapman, and Tatsuo Miyajima to name but a few.

The result of these partnerships has not only been the creation of a unique library of contemporary artwork, but also providing a significant platform for emerging artists to reach a greater audience. This year we plan to take the project to a new level by literally placing contemporary artwork in the hands of the public.

2008 sees a landmark for the Beck’s art programme, with the launch of Canvas. For this very special project, we needed a very special partner. The Royal College of Art is a particular kind of ideas factory unlike any other. As the world’s only wholly postgraduate university institution of art and design, the college boasts a global reputation for artistic excellence and an unrivalled creative environment. College alumni and internationally admired artists Tracey Emin, Tim Noble and the Chapman Brothers all created Beck’s labels during the 1990s. Then, as now, Beck’s was striving to support those determined to express themselves creatively. A partnership with the College presents a great opportunity to achieve this goal.

Four young artists have been selected by a panel of judges from the Royal College of Art to showcase their art on the labels of over 27 million bottles to be distributed nationwide from August 2008. The first bottles to receive the new labels will be launched at an exclusive gallery exhibition to be held at the RCA.

In the endless state of motion that is contemporary visual art some elements remain constant, but never static. Beck’s Canvas marks an evolution of our ongoing support for emerging artists and our vision to bring inspiring and challenging artwork to a broader public.

Read more

http://www.webyarns.com/loveis/LoveIs.html

“Love Is…” is an attempt at a definition, and as with all definitions that try to explain what love is, precision is not possible, and perhaps not even desirable. This piece moves toward a definition of love in three stages: first through a standard, accepted lexicon; then via a series of individual expressions of love; and finally as defined within randomly selected statements about love provided by readers. The work is created in Flash and, at the end of the piece, offers viewers the opportunity to write their own definitions of love into the site. These definitions are saved in a database so the next visitor can view them as they are randomly displayed. “Love Is…” takes approximately five minutes to view.

http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/eread08/36.htm

Il faudrait is a meditation on a passage from Le livre des ressemblances 2, by Edmond Jabès which Sarah Jacobs first read in the translation by Rosmarie Waldrop.Sarah Jacobs is the author of Awa[y]]farer and Atrocious Books (under the name of A Singer).

A Wa[y]farer, Colebrooke Publications, 1998, ISBN 0527537 15
Atrocious Books, Colebrooke Publications, 2006, ISBN 9780952753797

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Sarah Jacobs is a sculptor whose work includes making objects, performance, installation, books on paper, and books in electronic form. She habitually makes use of everyday materials - plasticine and sticky tape, pdfs and powerpoint.

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QUAD is Derby’s new £10 million centre for art and film, currently under construction in the centre of Derby and due to be complete this summer, it will be an exciting and vibrant place to work. They are looking for the following new team members:

Technical Manager: £22-£24K
Accounts Assistant: £17-£19K
Administration Assistant: £14K
Development Assistant: £14K pro rata (2.5 days/wk, contract initially until March 2009).

Deadline for applications for all posts: Wednesday 11th June.

For an application pack, contact 01332 295858, amym [at] derbyquad.co.uk, or download details from www.derbyquad.co.uk

Transdisciplinary Digital Art. Sound, Vision and the New Screen
Digital Art Weeks and Interactive Futures 2006/2007, Zurich, Switzerland and Victoria, BC, Canada, Selected Papers
Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg
Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science, Vol. 7
Adams, Randy; Gibson, Steve; Müller Arisona, Stefan (Eds.)
2008, IX, 501 p. With online files/update., Softcover
ISBN: 978-3-540-79485-1

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.com

Amazon.ca

Springer.com

This volume collects selected papers from the past two instances of Digital Art Weeks (Zurich, Switzerland) and Interactive Futures (Victoria, BC, Canada), two parallel festivals of digital media art. The work represented in “Transdisciplinary Digital Art” is a confirmation of the vitality and breadth of the digital arts. Collecting essays that broadly encompass the digital arts, “Transdisciplinary Digital Art” gives a clear overview of the on-going strength of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic and artistic research that makes digital art perhaps the defining medium of the 21st Century.

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Announcing the Spring 2008 issue of New River Journal

The spring 2008 issue <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/08Spring/> of the New River Journal has recently been published. The Journal, the oldest literary journal devoted to digital writing, was last year selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its Internet Archive, a recognition both of the journal’s lasting value and a guarantee that all issues will be available for as long, at least, as the Library of Congress is in existence.

The New River Journal has for the last three semesters been student-edited under the guidance of Ed Falco, the journal’s founding editor (and recent NEA fellow). This semester marked the first time three students have been involved, with editing duties split between Carrie Meadows, Lauren Jensen, and Weston Cutter, each of whom are MFA students in the English Department at Virginia Tech.

“The New River is one of only a few journals in which the boundaries of digital writing are consistently pushed,” said Carrie Meadows. “Digital writing offers some of the most interesting and unique pieces of literary art—fiction and nonfiction, poetry and work that’s basically genre-less—available, and we’re really proud to be part of the still-developing tradition.”

With five works of digital writing, the latest issue of the New River Journal features work by digital writers both well-established and new to the field. Caren Beilin and Jennifer Smith’s “Animals Are Placebos,” is a collaborative work pairing an explosive new talent in fiction and a sure-handed digital manipulator. Sara Bailey’s “Factography,” is a rich, narrative-driven piece that harkens back to classically linked hypertext stories.

Aya Karpinska’s “fps” is a haunting text experience, allowing the user some measure of control while simultaneously forcing certain aspects of the piece on the reader. The examination of that split in agency—between reader and ‘author,’ or even the piece itself—offers an intriguing view of one of the fundamental aspects of digital writing.

Travis Alber’s “Dandelion Chance” presents itself as something of a mix between digital writing and a more mixed-media, video-based art. Pushing the boundaries of what digital writing might be, Alber’s work presents the reader a cohesive experience of a fractured and fracturing media experience.

Daniel Howe and Feliz Molina’s “Roulette” is a digital work of daring potential, allowing the reader both to ‘create’ the text but also to erase and recreate the text with each mouse click. The establishment and disappearance of the text speaks to the malleable nature of both narrative and the reading experience itself.

“We’ve been really lucky to receive so many interesting, great pieces for the journal,” Lauren Jensen said. “Despite hypertext’s decade-and-a-half past, digital writing is still sort of whatever the writers and artists decide it is.”

New River Journal:
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/

Contact:
Weston Cutter (wlcutter [at] vt.edu)
Carrie Meadows (carriemeadows [at] vt.edu)
Lauren Jensen (lauryn33 [at] vt.edu)