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

READ ON »


TEXT a::minima Feature on Molleindustria


Download PDF file

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)
OPPORTUNITY

JOB OPPORTUNITY - Transart Institute


Deadline:
Thu Jul 05, 2007 21:27

Transart Institute has two faculty last minute cancellations for
their summer residency in Linz/Austria due to illness.

The two courses planned are:

Session 2: July 18-22: Seminar
Archive/Database/Interface: Between Artworks and Institutions
http://transartinstitute.org/Pages/Summer_MFA.html#Anchor-14210

Session 3: July 24-28: Studio Workshop
Transformative Practice - Frames of Action
http://transartinstitute.org/Pages/Summer_MFA.html#Anchor-Book-23240

We have complete syllabi for these courses but we are open to new
syllabi and/or changes, we only ask that you consider the reading
lists the students have completed in anticipation of the course.
Classes meet three hours (4 units) per day.

The two reading lists are at:
http://transartinstitute.org/Pages/ReadingLists.html

The sessions take place in Linz, Austria. The honorarium for each
course is 2000 EUR.

Along with the seminar is the possibility of accompanying ten
students with their research papers by email. The honorarium for this
would be an additional 3000 EUR.

With the workshop is the possibility of mentoring students working on
their independent art projects through the year. The program pays
mentors 500 EUR per project, per student.

Please contact cella@transartinstitute.org with a short proposal for
the course you would like to teach, a 1-2 paragraph bio and a CV.


EVENT

CALL FOR ENTRIES - music videos for backup_festival 2007


Dates:
Tue Jul 31, 2007 00:00 - Tue Jul 03, 2007

// CALL FOR ENTRIES: music videos
// 9th backup\_festival, October 18 -– 21, 2007 in Weimar
// Deadline: 31st of July 2007

This year, once again, we are looking for young film makers and media creatives interested in submitting work for the international category of the backup.clipaward and who would like the chance to win an award from the 3750 Euros worth of prizes we have on offer.

By awarding the backup.clipaward, the backup\_festival offers an overview of current developments within the field of international music video culture and provides a public forum for experimental music video screenings. Particular emphasis is put on music videos
which create an extraordinary symbiosis of film and music by using different forms of visual communication and production techniques.
It


OPPORTUNITY

JOB OPPORTUNITY - MEDIA STUDIES POSITION


Deadline:
Mon Oct 01, 2007 00:00

// MEDIA STUDIES POSITION
// Media and Society
// Deadline: October 1, 2007

The Media Studies Department at the University of San Francisco invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level, anticipated to begin Fall 2008. Responsibilities include teaching two undergraduate courses per semester, plus one additional course over two years (2-2-2-3 over two years), and an active program of research and service. The successful candidate will be qualified to teach at least two of our introductory and core courses (Introduction to Media Studies, Media Institutions, Media Audiences, Media Stereotyping and Violence, and Communication Law and Policy) as well as courses related to the candidate's specialty. Expertise and interest in teaching basic digital communication practice will be a plus as will an emphasis on race/ethnicity and international/global issues. The Department is seeking an individual who is able to work with diverse students and colleagues. Ph. D., or equivalent advanced degree in a related field, plus a record of teaching, professional experience and research, or other relevant creative activity, are required. Applicants should submit, by October 1, 2007, a letter of application, curriculum vitae, graduate transcripts, brief description of research plans, evidence of teaching ability (including sample syllabi, student evaluations, and a statement of teaching philosophy) and three letters of recommendation to: Dr. David Silver Media Studies Search Committee Media Studies Department University Center 538 University of San Francisco 2130 Fulton Street San Francisco, CA 94117-1080 We encourage minority and women candidates to apply. USF is an Equal Opportunity Employer dedicated to affirmative action and to excellence through diversity. The University provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants with disabilities upon request. The University of San Francisco is a Jesuit Catholic university founded in 1855 to educate leaders who will fashion a more humane and just world. Candidates should demonstrate a commitment to wo!
rk in a
culturally diverse environment and to contribute to the mission of the University.


EVENT

Dislocate 07 - Exhibition and Symposium - Tokyo


//Dislocate 07: ART, TECHNOLOGY, LOCALITY
// Exhibition, Symposium and Workshop series
// 24th July - 5th August
// Tokyo and Yokohama

Ginza Art Laboratory (Wednesday - Sunday 3-8pm)
Koiwa Project Space (Tuesday - Sunday 2-7pm)
ZAIM 28th & 29th July 11am-4pm - Symposium and Workshops

Opening Event Koiwa Project Space 24th July 7pm; Performance Event ZAIM 29th July 6pm

All Events are Free.

The city is no longer built of concrete, a static posture no longer endures. Our surroundings have become a malleable space which can be warped, spliced and expanded at will. We no longer stand in one place alone, a mass convergence of coordinates is taking place beneath our feet. As we traverse these points of perpetual motion we are enclosed by structures of elsewhere, met with the sliding walls of other places which lead us through a never ending maze. Shrouded in alternative layers of space, we escape to another confinement through the mesh of new media.

As our presence is extended by the veins of technology our sense of space is transformed, our nervous system stems through endless reaches of universal skin. Our eyes see through a thousand windows, each with a different view, a collision of a multitude of global sounds meets our ears, our fingers pass beyond tiers of materiality.

But can we see what is before us? Are we listening to the resonance of our surroundings? Can we feel the texture of this place?

Engaged in distant or imaginary space, we flick through the channels with our remote control and choose when to plug in when to switch off. But as we are absorbed by these electronic pulses are we disappearing from the here and now?

Personal technologies offer a kaleidoscopic sensation of a multi-layered existence, but perhaps may also provide a microscope by which to examine the place which we are in at this moment.

Dislocate 07 - Festival for Art, Technology and Locality

Dislocate brings together a group of over 30 international artists in an exhibition, symposium and workshop series in Tokyo and Yokohama. Considering the spacial and social dislocation which can occur through technology, these artists are investigating how new media can be rooted in its specific location and form a meaningful relationship between ourselves and our surroundings.

Dislocate aims to explore the potential new media has to increase our awareness of our environment, enhance participation in our locality and community and transform our perceptions of the space we inhabit.

This project presents cutting edge approaches to new technology art but with a view to seeing beyond the technology itself, examining what lies past the screen.

Dislocate prompts us to reconsider the alternative uses of the personal technologies which surround us, not merely offering an escape route from our current situation but also a tool to actually confront this very location.

With an endless array of spaces available to us, we can select our contexts of participation like the channels of a television. We may be highly active in an online space, engrossed in our constructed personal space, but by choice or otherwise we may distance ourselves from our immediate surroundings. We are presented with the freedom of ‘unlimited’ possibilities and yet are we making these decisions consciously or are they occurring without thought?

Dislocate considers the very integration of new media with the environment and this might be utilized to consciously reconnect with our location, seeking to explore, question and debate how can technology be used to heighten our engagement with our surroundings instead of isolating us from our immediate space. When numerous places converge in one site, how do we navigate such space? How does our interaction within a given space formulate identity and how can this be communicated effectively to elsewhere?

These are some of the questions which will be raised through the Dislocate events.

Exhibition: Taking place over two sites, of contrasting locality, this exhibition aims to present a particular relationship to its surroundings, revealing new perspectives of our immediate space, engaging with and investigating this site while also fusing with spaces beyond. Works include a city wide game in which teams play against each other with their mobile phones, an exploration of the streets led by the beat of your heart, architecture which responds to environmental conditions and emotion mapping of the urban landscape.

Symposium: Christian Nold, Active Ingredient, Dan Belasco Rogers, Taeyoon Choi, So Hyeon Park, Erik Pauhrizi, Augmented Architectures, Sascha Pohflepp, Miguel Andres-Clavera and Inyong Cho

Dislocate presents an international symposium with confirmed delegates from UK, Germany, Republic of Korea, Indonesia and Japan further contributing to the discourse surrounding the interplay of art, technology and location.

This symposium aims to explore what is meant by ‘locality’, how does new media impact upon our notion of space, our interaction with our surroundings, and how this can be used to transform communities, both virtual and physical. The conflicts and integrations which emerge as separate spaces collide in one site will be examined raising concerns of homogenization and de-contextualisation alongside the awareness of local identity and culture. This will include a scrutinization of sensitive, meaningful exchange between different localities facilitated through new media and the manifestations which reconnection or further connection with our environment can take.

Workshops: In a series of workshops participants will have the opportunity to engage further with some of the Dislocate artists and investigate with them in an active form of research and collaboration. The focus of these workshops will be upon the exploration of the surrounding environment, investigating its many layers and connections with other spaces. Workshops will enable direct participation and engagement with the locality and may also draw attention to our simultaneous interaction with elsewhere.

Workshop leaders include Christian Nold, who will present his bio-mapping project, allowing participants to create emotion maps of their travels through the city by the use of bio sensors. Erik Pauhrizi will lead a workshop exploring lo-tech solutions to advanced mobile and locative media.

Performance: Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic; Naoko Takahashi; Musashino Art University Media Art Students.

All events are free
If you wish to attend the symposium or workshops please email info@dis-locate.net with your name and contact telephone number

Artists Include:

Active Ingredient www.i-am-ai.net
Christian Nold www.softhook.com
Dan Belasco Rogers www.planbperformance.net/dan/
D-Fuse http://www.dfuse.com/
Taeyoon Choi http://tyshow.org
So-Hyeon Park
Erik Pauhrizi http://butonkultur21.org/
Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic http://syntfarm.org/projects/btc/
Yuko Mohri http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~moo/
Augemented Architecture http://www.augmented-architectures.com/
Stanza http://www.stanza.co.uk/sensity/index.html
Disinformation

For more information please contact Emma Ota: info[at]dis-locate.net

Participating Artists: Active Ingredient, Christian Nold, Dan Belasco Rogers, DFuse, Taeyoon Choi, So Hyeon Park, Erik Pauhrizi, Stanza, Yuko Mohri, Ryosuke Akiyoshi, Disinformation, Augmented Architectures, Martin Callanan, Frank Abbott, Sascha Pohflepp, Andreas Schlegel and Vladimir Todorovic, Mouna Andraos, Miguel Andres-Clavera and Inyong Cho, Laurent Pernot, Esther Harris, Andreas Zingerle, Julian Konczak, Genevieve Staines, Marco Villani, So Young Yang, Liu Zhenchen, Nisha Duggal, Lori Amor & Kevan Davis, Maria Raponi, Lisa Mee, Leo Morrissey, Cary Peppermint & Christine Nadir, Anne-Marie Culhane, Jomi Kim, Harry Levene & Jon Pigrem, Naoko Takahashi, Son Woo Kyung.

Dislocate is supported by The Asia-Europe Foundation, The Sasakawa Foundation, The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and Arts Council, England


EVENT

Relocating Literature within Networks, Technologies, + Media Studies


// Re-Mediating Literature
// Utrecht University
// July 4-6, 2007

Recent developments in digital and electronic media have stimulated new theoretical reflections on the nature of media as such and on the way in which they evolve across time. The aim of this conference is to examine how recent technological changes have affected the 'old' medium of literature.

Multimedial and interactive texts, digitalized archives, cyberpoetics, and technological innovations such as foldable screens: together these have influenced the production and reception of literature, along with the ways in which we think about writing and reading. These ongoing developments call for a critical examination both of the relations between literature and the new media, and of the relations between literary studies and media studies.

The concept of 'remediation' in our title thus has a double thrust. Firstly, it refers to the transformative exchanges between literature and the new media: how has digitalization affected literature as a cultural medium? Secondly, 'remediation' indicates a relocation of literary studies within the broader field of (new) media studies: how could literary studies profit from the various analytical tools developed in (new) media studies and, conversely, how could our understanding of earlier phases in the evolution of the literary medium contribute to our understanding of present developments? By working on both these issues, we hope to relocate the place of literature within the milieu of modern media networks and technologies, but also to relocate the aims and practices of literary studies within the field of media studies.

Main themes:

A. New technologies and literary practices - the state of the field: will literature continue to develop as a schizophrenic medium, a hard medium of printed matter and an unstable medium of electronic data at the same time, or will it fork out in one of two directions? How is digitalization affecting reading practices and the circulation of literary texts? What new forms of intermedial and multimedial literatures are emerging?

B. Literature and the new media - the longer view: what new light do recent developments throw on the history of literature as a cultural medium and, conversely, how might insights from the history of the literary medium contribute to our understanding of recent developments? How can literary history be rewritten in conjunction with such media technologies?

C. Media compatabilities and competitions: new media hardly ever completely subject and annihilate older media. Rather, the two tend to co-exist, each taking on different tasks and responsibilities (cf. film and the novel in the earlier twentieth century). At the same time, however, they often interrupt and compete with each other (cf. television and the digital in the later twentieth century). How can this duplicity or compatability and competition be mapped and analyzed, and which are the insights that such analyses might yield into media formations as techno-cultural formations?

D. Disciplinary relocations: will literary studies become a branch of media studies in the foreseeable future - and if so, how? Will literary studies profit from such a relocation and how will this relocation affects its objects and methodologies?

Keynotes:

Marie-Laure Ryan: "Self-Reflexivity in Net-Art" - Self-reflexivity is widely considered by cognitive scientists a distinctive feature of the human mind. It is therefore not surprising that this fundamental thinking process should manifest itself in most human artistic and intellectual projects. The postmodern fascination with self-reflexivity can be attributed to the sense of pastness that permeates turn-of-the millennium culture. But self-reflexivity could also be a response to the curiosity aroused by the development of a new medium in search of its cultural function. By filling the World Wide Web with images and inverted images of its own utilities and by often making these utilities dysfunctional, Net.art invites us to reflect on the kind of immersion in digital culture that fools us into thinking that we fully control the technology that supports it.

Samuel Weber: "'Seagulls': A 'Script-Image' of Walter Benjamin" - No writer-critic of the 20th century was more attentive to intermedial questions than was Walter Benjamin. One of the forms this attention takes is his notion, and practice, of the "Schriftbild". This talk translates and reads this as a 'Script-Image' (Schriftbild). A Script-Image is both a written image, and one that "scripts" a scenario. This presentation will address one particular staging of a script-image: the short piece entitled "Seagulls" (Mvwen), one of five that Benjamin wrote in the summer of 1930 during a three-week trip to Scandinavia and then published under the title, "Nordic Sea" (Nordische See). (An English translation will be made available).

N. Katherine Hayles: "Narrative and Database: Remediating Literature Through Data" - Recently several theorists have proposed that database is replacing narrative as the dominant cultural form, among them Lev Manovich and Ed Folsom. This presentation will argue for that narrative is essential for human communication and culture, but it will also acknowledge that contemporary narratives are transforming through the impact of data. Remediation here implies that the feedback cycle described by Bolter and Grusin in Remediation can also be understood to take place through different cultural forms as well as through different media, where the dynamics are informed not by the hypermediation / transparency dialectic they describe but rather by the circulation through narrative and data.

Jan Baetens: "Novelization and Intermediality" - This paper tackles first of all the major characteristics of the novelization, a very popular although badly known example of intermediality in 20th Century storytelling (not "the film of the book", but "the book of the film"). Il will give a broad historical survey of the genre, which is actually as old as cinema itself, so to speak. In its second part, the paper tries to define what is really at stake when we study this genre, and why it can be interesting to focus closely on such a "minor", and often espised, practice. Finally, this paper presents a short analysis of one or two case studies, among them the novelization of Jacques Tati's "Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot" by Jean-Claude Carrihre, a famous French screenwriter (his collaboration with Bunuel is still very famous) and author of various novelizations since his first attempt in the late fifties until today( cf. Goya's Ghosts, 2006).

Joanna Zylinska: "Logos bio-ethikos: What If Foucault Had Had a Blog?" -This paper focuses on one particular domain of contemporary media culture which blurs the boundary between the literary and the literal:blogging. Arguing that blogs aim at creating an experience of total life by building intricate systems of connections between online and offline spaces, personae and narratives, I will explore the extent to which practices facilitated by blogging can be interpreted in terms of bioethics. However, bioethics for me is not limited to the study of ethical issues arising from the biological and medical sciences. Rather it becomes a broadly conceptualised ethics of life, which requires judgement on what we understand by life in its different forms, and on what our position as those who deem themselves to be human is in this bioethics. Interestingly, Foucault associates the practice of self-writing precisely with an ethos of life. The keeping of individual notebooks focused on the recollection of the past is for him a matter of constituting a logos bioethikos for oneself, an ethics quite explicitly oriented by concern for the self toward objectives defined as: withdrawing into oneself, getting in touch with oneself, relying on oneself, benefiting from and enjoying oneself. This phrase logos bioethikos provides a key for my ereading of bioethics as a practice of good life, always on the way to becoming-a-good-life. But I suggest Foucault has in mind something much more material and direct than just a story about one s life and about how it should be lived: this practice of self-writing is actually said to produce a body. Drawing on Seneca, Foucault claims that writing transforms the thing seen or heard into tissue and blood. From this perspective diaries and blogs are not just commentaries on someone's life, already lived to this point but also somehow more real outside its narrative; rather they are materialisations of it, as I will argue in this paper. In doing so I will show that in blogging this material!
isation
occurs very much through an enactment of a different, more embodied, aware, and lively relationship with technology.