Powering Up/Powering Down

Powering Up/Powering Down is a 3-day conference with presentations, performances, readings, discussions, and workshops that explore polarities such as white/racialized, male/female, high/low tech, machine/body and limitations on access to knowledge, resources and equipment. The conference takes place January 30 – February 1 at UC San Diego. Participants include 30 artists and scholars, and admission is free.

William J. Mitchell reading

William J. Mitchell, head of the Media Arts and Sciences program at MIT, will be reading from his latest book, ME++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. The reading takes place Wednesday, January 28th from 6:30pm to 8:00pm at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Call for Proposals

The 2004 Museum Computer Network (MCN) Conference will take place November 10 – 13 in Minneapolis, and the theme is Great Technology for Collections, Confluence and Community. The Program Committee is seeking presentations that focus on: Collaboration & Confluence Management, Collection Information Management Membership, Cyber Communities Multimedia & Streaming Technologies, Digital Rights Management Preservation, Exhibition Technologies Point of Sale & eCommerce, Imaging Technologies Research & Evaluation, or Intellectual Property Standards & Interoperability. Proposals are due February 6.

Ygdrasil

The January 2004 issue of Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts is now available. This month’s anthology issue includes works by: Jack Wesdorp, Trevor Landers, Lark Beltran, Apryl Fox, Michael Raffaelli, Ben Passikoff, cathy hodsdon, Raghab Nepal, Rochelle Hope Mehr, Michael Levy, Alisdaire O’Caoimph, and Michael Estabrook.

New Reviews in Cyberculture Studies

New book reviews at RCCS include: Espen J. Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature reviewed by Vika Zafrin; David Kushner’s Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created An Empire and Transformed Pop Culture reviewed by Bob Rehak; and Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution reviewed by Edward Castronova and Aaron Delwiche.

Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling

Narr@tive: Digital Storytelling is a UC Digital Cultures Graduate Conference and Evening of New Media Student Readings that is co-chaired by ELO’s Associate Director Jessica Pressman and will be held at UCLA April 22-23, 2004. This conference questions how digital culture has transformed our practices of reading, writing, and thinking about narrative, in its broadest sense. Topics are to be addressed from a wide variety of disciplinary fields: literature and poetics, copyrights and archiving, e-journals and publication practices, code and linguistics, games and interactive narratives, and scholarship systems and networks.

The final event of the conference will be a reading of electronic literature showcasing student work as part of the HyperText reading series, sponsored by ELO and the UCLA Hammer Museum.