Chris Joseph

From Paul D. Miller:

“Sound Unbound is an anthology of writings about contemporary art and digital media that I put together for MIT Press this year. The book just came out, and it has essays and interviews with people as diverse as Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Chuck D, Pierre Boulez, Saul Williams, Jonathan Lethem, Bruce Sterling, Daphne Keller (The Senior Legal Counsel to Google), and even some occasional Nettime contributors like Naeem Mohaimen, Erik Davis and Ken Jordan. The basic idea of the book was to figure out a way to get people out of the deeply Eurocentric discourse around digital media, and to build a bridge between contemporary practice and multimedia theory. One could argue that the book is a manifesto for a kind of fragmentation - contemporary media is rife with what some like to call the ‘logic of addition’. Sampling, collage based narratives, and the basic sense of “urban youth culture” and its cousin, web browsing are two epiphenomena that go with things like ipods, mobile phones, webcams, laptops, satellite television, web 2.0: The dj mix grows like wild plants without deep roots (rhizomes) in the spaces between older forms of mass media (newspapers, film, radio and television). Fox News, NBC, CNN etc compete with Arab satellite channels, bloggers and civil journalism, hypes emerge online, Youtube and Twitter turn everybody into a media producer. But deeply rooted trees are not that easily overgrown. The media have become individualized and fragmented and specialized and opened up. That’s what the book is about. It’s 36 essays and interviews about the culture of paradox we inhabit now. Here’s a remix of the introduction to the audio companion to the book. It’s based on research into Sub Rosa Record’s archive. The audio companion has rare material from Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Iggy Pop, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud, Kurt Schwitters and others. The small fragment I’ve included here was written when I was in Antarctica earlier this year shooting a film about the sound of ice.

Check it out!”

Sound Unbound: edited by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky
MIT Press 2008

www.soundunbound.com

Read more

JIP - JavaMuseum Interview Project
http://jip.javamuseum.org

a) Alan Bigelow (USA)
http://jip.javamuseum.org/jipblog/?page_id=93

b). Ethan Ham (USA)
http://jip.javamuseum.org/jipblog/?page_id=94

c) Hyeseung Yoo (South Korea)
http://jip.javamuseum.org/jipblog/?page_id=96

The Sound of eBay - an UBERMORGEN.COM project
http://www.Sound-of-eBay.com

Forget the technology,
it’s lustful entertainment, baby!


ABSTRACT

How does it really work?

We generate unique songs by using eBay user-data. You simply enter any eBay username (your own or someone else’s) and add your email address so we can notify you as soon as the song is ready for downloading. Then click „generate“ and our robots sprawl out into the net to collect data. Then the robots bring back the data to our sc3 supercollider soundgeneration-engine. Finally, the complex software-machine starts generating a score-file which is then transformed into your unique but uniform song and presented in teletext porn style! We sell out your human needs digitally…

Read more

An interview with Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow from Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery on Digicult / Digimag.

Txt: Marco Mancuso / Eng: Francesca Magnaghi

Let’s talk again about Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow , two people that don’t need to be introduced in the context of networking and mailing list about new international media art. Marc Garret and Ruth Catlow promoted many on-line debates, through not only their channel, NetBehaviour , many art networking projects, and they’ve been working for ten years on their project Furtherfield.org . They already wrote an important text of reflections and theories about art, that was published on Digimag 33 - April 2008 . And they promised us to be interviewed; let’s see what they answered.

English Version:
http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1205
Italian Version:
http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1183

Two new reviews on Furtherfield by Rob Myers.

http://www.furtherfield.org

Abstract Hacktivism: the making of a hacker culture.
A book collecting two essays by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas transforms the concept of “hacktivism” with well-argued historical analysis and a number of informative case studies.

“Hacktivism” is a cool-sounding portmanteau word combining “hacking” and “activism”. Activism means political organisation and activity directed toward particular issues. Hacking can mean either “creative mastery and reworking” or “breaking and entering” of various systems, usually computer systems. The latter is more properly called “cracking”. Hacktivism tend to mean cracking rather than creative hacking. This means that hacktivism usually identifies at most a negativist posture of technological resistance to socioeconomic ills.
Permlink - http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=307

Big Buck Bunny. The Blender Foundation.
Big Buck Bunny is the second short 3D computer animated cartoon from the Blender Foundation. The Blender Foundation produces these films to stimulate development of and promote use of their popular eponymous free software 3D modelling and rendering package.

The Foundation’s first film, codenamed Orange, was “Elephants Dream”. This was in the European experimental stop-frame animation tradition, a dark Gilliamesque fantasy with two men trying to escape a threatening clockwork labyrinth that may or may not really exist. The character and scenery designs were excellent, and the film as a whole was very atmospheric. The quality of the facial animation and the comprehensibility of the plot were criticized, though. And the full release of the soundtrack for the film was not Free due to being limited to noncommercial use. These minor criticisms aside, Elephants Dream was a very successful production.
Permlink - http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=306

New Media Scotland’s new Twitterist-in-residence, Netwurker Mez will begin her stream of tweets from the 1st July.

_Event Info_

Host: New Media Scotland
Type: Music/Arts - Jam Session

_Time and Place_

Start Time: Tuesday, July 1, 2008 at 12:00pm
End Time: Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 12:00pm
Location: http://twitter.com/mediascot
City/Town: Edinburgh, United Kingdom

_Contact Info_

Email:hello [at] mediascot.org

_Description_

“Mez does for code poetry as jodi and Vuk Cosic have done for ASCII Art: Turning a great, but naively executed concept into something brilliant, paving the ground for a whole generation of digital artists” (Florian Cramer).

We are proud to announce our second Twitter artist residency is Australian-based artist Netwurker Mez.

The impact of her unique code/net.wurks [constructed via her pioneering net.language "mezangelle"] has been equated with the work of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, and Larry Wall.

Mez is also an online journalist + constructor of _Augmentology_ [see: augmentology.com].

* To follow Netwurker Mez’s tweets visit: http://www.twitter.com/mediascot
* To read her own meta_tweet commentary regarding the Residency follow:
http://www.twitter.com/netwurker

Limited availability Netwurker Mez t[weet]shirts will be released daily from
the 1st - 31st July.
http://www.mediascot.spreadshirt.net

–
: http://augmentology.com
: http://knott404.blogspot.com
: http://netwurker.livejournal.com

From Sofia Oliveira:

“TODAY is a piece of generative design for mobile phones.

It’s an application that visualizes personal mobile communication. It sits on the periphery of the machine, monitoring our connectivity through the number and type of calls we receive, subtly displaying them back to us, in the form of a generative graphic. Here, the visual result is a figurative and seemingly abstract picture – the story of your day. Some days will be really colourful and wired, others quieter and more reflective, either way the resulting visuals will always be personal, unrepeatable and unique.

What lies at TODAY’s core was the idea of using personal data as the basis for an aesthetic system, while providing individuals with a visual diary of their communication patterns.

It’s an intimate piece that ‘lives’ in your pocket.”

It’s freely distributed for Symbian phones at today.cada1.net

Credits:
A Project by CADA – www.cada1.net
Idea and Design: Sofia Oliveira/Jared Hawkey
Symbian Programming: Heitor Ferreira
Site Developer: Damian Stewart
Second phase of development funded by: DGArtes, Ministério Cultura, Portugal

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

———————————-

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 )