The 2nd Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium opened June 21 and continues through July 11 in Beijing. Hosted by Tsinghua University and co-presented by numerous new media organizations around the world, the event theme, “In the Line of Flight: Transcending Urbanscapes,” takes on the rapid changes, anxieties, exhilarations, and disjunctions that modernization and new media are bringing to Chinese culture.
Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database
The MIT Press has just published on DVD the first collection of work by the The Soft Cinema Project, headed by Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky. Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database includes three narratives, “Mission to Earth,” “Absences,” and “Texas,” that explore the storytelling possibilities of “(soft)ware cinema.” This first release drew on numerous talents, including DJ Spooky, Scanner, servo, Andreas Angelidakis, Schoenerwissen/Office for Computational Design, and Ross Cooper Studios.
Call for Contributions: Cultural Futures
Cultural Futures: Place, Ground and Practice in Asia Pacific New Media will take place in Hoani Waititi Auckland/Tamaki Makaurau, December 1-5, 2005. This event, affiliated with the International Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA 2006), will include a symposium, exhibitions, and workshops aimed at developing international awareness of local work in new media arts, and to link international practices in new media arts to dialogues in Aotearoa’s cultural identity. The organizers invite submissions of new media texts in any genre of less than 1,500 words/2 MB. A book or themed journal issue is also under consideration. The deadline for submissions is August 30, 2005. For more information, visit the Cultural Futures website or send inquiries to the the organizers.
Blogwalks
One of the ideas that emerged out of the Blogtalk 2.0 conference in July 2004 was Blogwalking. Blogwalks are face-to-face conversations that provide smaller-scale opportunities for weblog researchers and practitioners to meet and talk on a more informal basis. So far, there have been eight Blogwalks in cities around the world. Blogwalk 9.0 will take place in Innsbruck, Austria, and two more Blogwalks are tentatively planned in coming months for Dresden, Germany and Salzburg, Austria. Participation is by invitation only. If you are interested in joining upcoming Blogwalks in Dresden or Salzburg, or would like to propose other cities for future Blogwalks, visit the Blogwalk site.
Dakota
The pounding vortex of Dakota reworks Cantos I and II into a furiously driving, but still legible, loop of animated text. Young Hae-Chang’s piece seems to please everyone: It was shown at the Whitney Museum and is taught in college classes, but it also has made its way onto more popular Flash forums. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
&NOW
&NOW / Lake Forest Literary Festival
April 5-7, 2006, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL.
Proposal Deadline, October 15, 2005
andnow@lfc.edu
The second iteration of &NOW: A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art, merged with the second annual Lake Forest Literary Festival (LFLF), will be held on April 5-7, 2006 at Lake Forest College, 30 miles north of Chicago.
This three-day festival will celebrate contemporary aesthetic practice in its most inventive forms: writing, visual, and multimedia art that is aware of its own institutional and extra-institutional history, that is as much about its form and materials-about language-as about subject matter.
&NOW/LFLF will bring together a range of writers and artists interested in exploring the possibilities of form and the limits of expression; writers and artists working to emphasize text as a medium and as an influence.
Read more &NOW
if:book Blogging Transliteracies
The folks over at if:book are blogging live from the Transliteracies conference. The first post includes a discussion by Alan Liu, laying the purpose of the project and some of the questions it intends to explore.
I’ve started a project (combining humanists, social scientists, and computer scientists) called Transliteracies to look into “online reading.” It’s my hypothesis that there are hidden complexities and intelligences in low-attention modes of browsing/surfing that we don’t yet know how to chart. Google, after all, is making a fortune for algorithms enacting this hypothesis. Or to cite a historical googler: Dr. Johnson, sage of the Age of Reason, was famous for “devouring” books just by browsing them instead of reading “cover to cover.”
Trópico on Computer Games and/as Literature
Today in Trópico — the Brazilian online magazine of Art, New Technologies, Cinema, and Culture — there’s an interview with ELO board member Noah Wardrip-Fruin by CÃÂcero Inácio da Silva. A broad range of perspectives on digital media (literary, ludic, and simulation-oriented perhaps chief among them) are employed for discussing computer games.
riverIsland
John Cayley’s work often employs a technique he calls “transliteral morphing.” This is a letter-by-letter morphing that transitions from one text to another, much as graphical morphing moves points in space so as to transition from one image to another. riverIsland is composed of two loops of poems, one horizontal and one vertical, and the reader can use on-screen arrows or QuicktimeVR movies in order to trigger movement along these loops. When the reader indicates that a move should be made from one poem to another, the appropriate transliteral morph is performed by the computer. See the Directory entry for more information about this piece.
M/C Media and Culture: ‘print’
M/C Media and Culture has just released its latest issue, entitled ‘print’, edited by Glen Thomas and Jaz Choi. The issue gathers eight essays that examine the relations between print culture and new media forms. The featured article is Bethaney Turner’s “Information Age Guerillas: The Communication Strategies of the Zapatistas”.