ana otero
Since 2003
Works in Barcelona Spain

BIO
Ana Otero holds a M.A. in Museum Studies by the New York University, a Postgraduate Degree in Curatorial and Cultural Practices in Art and New Media by MECAD/ESDi and a B.A. in Audiovisual Communication by the Universistat Autonoma of Barcelona.

During seven years Ana was the multimedia art director for the broadcasting company based in Barcelona Media Park (now Teuve). Simultaneously to her professional career, Ana co-founded the collectives J13 (1998-2000) and no_a (2000-05) focus on the experimentation of art and new technologies.

In NYC, Ana worked on art education through new media for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, as part of Rhizome where she curated the online show “Google Art, or How to Hack Google” and participated in the site redesign, collaborated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in the online curatorial-educational project Museum as Hub and as web manager for Art21, a non-profit organization focus on contemporary art.

Jeremy Blake, 35, Artist Who Used Lush-Toned Video, Dies


Jeremy Blake, an up-and-coming artist who sought to bridge the worlds of painting and film in lush, color-saturated, hallucinatory digital video works, has died, the New York City Police said yesterday. He was 35 and lived in the East Village in Manhattan.

[More...]

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Call for Projects VIDA 10.0


VIDA 10.0 is an international competition created to reward excellence in artistic creativity in the fields of Artificial Life and related disciplines, such as robotics and Artificial Intelligence.We are looking for artistic projects that address the interaction between "synthetic" and "organic" life". In previous years prizes have been awarded to artistic projects using autonomous robots, avatars, recursive chaotic algorithms, knowbots, cellular automata, computer viruses, virtual ecologies that evolve with user participation, and works that highlight the social side of Artificial Life.

Please find the call for projects here http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/vida/english

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TEXT a::minima Feature on Molleindustria


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Molleindustria is a project that takes aim at starting a serious discussion about social and political implications of the videogames. Using simple but sharp games we hope to give some starting point for a new generation of critical game developer and, above all, to test pratices that can be easly emulated and virally diffused. So far we have published nine games (four of them are available only in italian), some theoretical essays and other web-based project like Mayday NetParade or where-next.com.

A spectre is haunting the net: the spectre of political games. Small and viral online games able to spread dissonant messages. They emerge and disappear in the ever-changing world of the blog, forum and mailing lists. Sometimes they are blended into the undeground gamedesign scene, sometimes they pop in the glossy pages of popular magazines, sometimes they are disguised as works of art.

I’m talking about a spectre because political games don’t exist, or better, they have always existed: every video game - as every cultural product - reflect author’s ideas, visions and ideologies. Every video game is essentially political.

Why super Mario is a plunder? Has anybody ever seen him fixing a pipe? He probably fit better into the shoes of a rampant Wall Street broker, a social climber who attack every being that comes across his path. His eternal dissatisfaction, his continuous run, his orderliness in killing enemies sounds suspicious. In the typical level-based structure of arcade games we can recognize some qualities of the yuppie ideology: success is like a ladder that gets harder and harder to climb. There are many partial achievements but the whole plan is often difficult to understand. Individualism, competition an accumulation of useless points are constant. It's the neo-liberal short-sightedness, the means that becomes the ...

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Philip Ross, nature networks


Philip Ross was one of the artists featured in Rhizome’s Networked Nature exhibition earlier this year. His work consists of designed and constructed controlled environmental spaces which:

nurture, transform, and refine a variety of sculptural artifacts much as one might train the growth of a Bonsai tree.

Two works which look particularly spectacular on his website and employ ideas of networks are Junior Return and Jarred In.

Junior Return

Junior Return (image above) is:

a self-contained survival capsule for one living plant. Four blown glass enclosures provide a controlled hydroponic environment; one holds the plant, another the water reservoir for the plant, the third holds the electronics and pump that control the plant's resources, and the last for the rechargeable battery that gives the energy required to keep the plant alive in this container. An air pump goes off for a few seconds every minute, supplying air to the plant and to the water reservoir. A digital timer counts down from sixty to zero, displaying the time left until the pump will activate. Then, with little notice, a few bubbles appear in the water, the only indication that anything is actually going on.

The latest 'version' of Junior Return is titled Clone Army which consists of ighteen of the small hydroponic units networked together in different formations.

Jarred In

Jarred In (image above) is a sixteen feet tall and twelve feet wide hanging garden installation.

In this garden pairs of plants are housed in life support pods suspended from a chandelier like armature. The roots of the plants swim in illuminated, water filled boxes. Water is pumped up from tall Plexiglas reservoirs resting on the ground. The reservoirs are attached to a central pod on the ground, referred to by the folks at The Exploratorium as "mother ship" and housing six Dwarf ...

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Discussions (26) Opportunities (30) Events (90) Jobs (2)
EVENT

New Media Caucus at the 2007 College Art Conference


Dates:
Wed Feb 14, 2007 00:00 - Thu Dec 07, 2006

The 95th Annual conference will take place from February 14th to 17th at the Hilton New York in Midtown Manhattan.

Here are a few crucial dates for your calendar:
December 13th is the deadline for Early Bird Registration for the
Conference (this can be done on-line at http://
conference.collegeart.org/2007/register or via mail).

Thursday, February 15, 12:30-2pm, Trianon Ballroom, Hilton NY
New Media Caucus Juried Session:
Panel Title: "Can Geeks be Humanists”
Panel Chair: Marcia Tanner, Independent Curator and Writer, Berkeley,
California

A common perception among artists, curators, art historians, art
critics, and art audiences outside the new media art community is that
artists using contemporary technologies create work that
alienates the viewer and conflicts with the humanist legacy of
Western art and other cultural and aesthetic traditions. This notion is all too often reinforced, superficially at least, by much of the new media work produced.

This panel will address and challenge those assumptions with
presentations by artists whose work and practice consciously extend and amplify humanist aesthetic traditions. In the subsequent
conversation, panelists will be invited to explore the definitions and
appropriateness of those apparently oppositional terms -- “geeks” versus “humanists” -- and consider a third: that of “artist.“ They will discuss those characteristics of new media art that seem to justify the charges against it -- notably in terms of communication with and/or reception by traditional art audiences and critics -- and whether these concerns should matter to anyone now, particularly to the artists themselves.

With some Papers and Panelists:
Intimacy in New Media Art
Andrea Ackerman, artist, theorist, psychiatrist, New York, New York

Claudia Hart, Pratt Institute, New York; Lehman College, City
University of New York

Beyond Functional: Embedding Responsive Art into Human Systems
Sabrina Raaf, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago

Animate Objects, and the Evocation of Empathy
John Slepian, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT

The Beautiful and the Terrifying
Gail Wight, Stanford University, California


EVENT

Proyecto Paso: Live Stream Performance


Dates:
Sun Dec 03, 2006 00:00 - Sun Dec 03, 2006

:::::::sunday 03/12/2006:::::::::

Seville 7 pm; Salvador 3 pm; Tempe 11 am

Performance taking place simultaneously in 3 different places (USA, Salvador, Spain) where 3 dancers interpret the Declaration of Human Rights.

In Sevilla the 3 different streams will be processed in realtime on a the main screen and streamed: http://www.proyectopaso.net/live.html

You can participate by posting text which will be processed in the main screen too.

More info: http://www.proyectopaso.net/

Proyecto Paso is part of the 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIACS2) activities.
More info: http://www.fundacionbiacs.com/site_en/index.htm


EVENT

NEURoTICA: bio


Dates:
Fri Nov 24, 2006 00:00 - Tue Nov 14, 2006

NEURoTICA: bio
CCCB - Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona
Barcelona - Spain
Friday 24th November, 2006 at 7.00 pm

"[Contemporary man] is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food - and, above all, a large array of neuroses."
(Jung, 1964:82)

Neurotica is a research project that examines the anxieties of contemporary society, generated by the rapid advances made in science and technology, and looks at the way individuals and the community is coping with these innovations and their offshoots. The project has been designed and initiated by Capsula http://www.capsula.org.es/, an investigation group based in Barcelona, Spain, launched by Monica Bello and Ulla Taipale that generates cultural products exploring the interrelations between arts, science and nature.

The first phase of Neurotica is exploring society’s perception of biotechnology and the hopes and fears associated with it. The project will be launched by a conference presented at CCCB, Center of Contemporanean Culture of Barcelona on 24th November 2006. During the event Californian based artist and inventor Natalie Jeremijenko will present her views on these issues, followed by the interventions and comments of Dr. Alfonso Valencia, a biologist and head of The Spanish National Center of Biotechnology and Dr. Fabio Tropea, sociologist and language analyst.

The conference is part of "NOW - Meetings in the present continuous" http://www.cccb.org/now/ang/index.htm at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB). NOW is a project that reflects on the present on the basis of the scientific, technological, artistic, social and spiritual transformations taking place at the start of the 21st century. It aims to bring together local and international agents promoting a change of paradigm in current society.