To my friends and net acquaintances:

You probably know my web site www.sporkworld.org. Now I will be launching
(in a few days) a companion "community site" (blog which welcomes
contributors) which will publish articles about the themes addressed on
Sporkworld. I am writing to you to ask you if you want to contribute to
this site by submitting articles. Note that I haven't yet officially
announced the site yet, so there should be few visitors and therefore not
many comments etc.

You can see new site at http://www.sporkworld.org//index.php. There are
probably still bugs in the interface and the site will acquire more features
as it develops. For example, I may add a way for users to upload images
into photo albums, discussion forums, news feeds, etc. There will also be
new articles appearing all the time, initially written by me but I hope
people (you!) will contribute articles in the future.

The first story on the front page of the blog tells about submitting
articles. I do not promise to publish everything you send me, but I am
eager to get as much material as possible, so I will strongly consider each
submission. There is no fixed article length-- the minimum is a few
paragraphs and there is no maximum. So far I have only five topic areas for
articles, but these will expand as the site matures.

The current topics are "Reviews" (of any kind of art or literature or music,
etc.), "Web Art" (reviews, opinions, technical explanations of how pieces
are made, nasty reviews, etc.), "Mental Health" (commentary or personal
stories), "Poetry" (reviews, analysis, discussion of issues that come up as
you write poetry, poetics and poetic techniques. Possibly even some
poems -- I am undecided on the latter.), and "The Daily Saga" (personal
stories and editorials about daily life, stories which reflect diverse
subcultures such as ethnic, socioeconomic and religious groups about which
readers may know little about, international stories reflecting daily life
outside the US in a way we cannot get from the news or stereotypes, pet
peeves and annoyances, discussions of various online communities, ranting
and raving, humor, etc.)

In addition, I have a topic called "Site News" which will contain posts
about this site or the main www.sporkworld.org site. This topic will feature
various works on the main site and describe (I cannot review my own works
but you can!) them, and may also have calls for participation in Sporkworld
collaborative projects and opportunities to get your work published on
Sporkworld. You are welcome to help me write the descriptions of works
already on my site (and you may include negative critcism!), but that is
probably a chore I will have to do.

If you are interested in writing any other type of article, please let me
know so I can add a new topic if I agree that it is needed. I will probably
add a "Politics" topic very soon.

There is a feature on the site to submit links for the links page. Please
submit your own links and links you like to it, especially links to sites
relating to the topics on the site.

If there are any bugs in the blog user interface or errors on the site,
please let me know and I will do my best to fix them. You may have to be a
little patient with me on this because I am new to blogging and the geeklog
software which I used to build this site. If anyone has geeklog experience,
I'd love to hear about it!

Thanks for reading this and I hope to hear from you soon!

Millie Niss
men2@columbia.edu

****************************************************

PS: I do recomend you visit and contribute to Niss' blog

Regina Celia Pinto
http://arteonline.arq.br/

LETTER OF INVITATION

We have the honor to invite you to participate of MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE
POESIA VISUAL E ELETRONICA (Visual and Electronic Poetry International
Exhibition), coming to be from 4th to 11th, November, 2005, in the city of
Itu, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

You can participate by sending two visual poetries, printed in colours or
black and white, in A4 format, to the following address:

Rua Goiania, 7 Alto das Palmeiras 13.301.341 - Itu - Sao Paulo - Brasil.

Deadline: October 23nd, 2005.

In case of having a site, we ask you to send the URL, a comment on the
content of your site (no more than 5 lines) and your email, in case of
wanting to contact the possible navigators of your site. These informations
should be sent to the following email: jlantonio@uol.com.br.

Best regards from Brazil

MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE POESIA VISUAL E ELETRONICA
VISUAL AND ELECTRONIC POETRY INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION

Hugo Pontes Jorge Luiz Antonio Roberto Keppler
curators

Academia Ituana de Letras London School

promotors

===================================================================

CONVITE

Temos a honra de convida-lo(a) para participar da MOSTRA INTERNACIONAL DE
POESIA VISUAL E ELETRONICA, a ser realizada no periodo de 4 a 11 de novembro
de 2005, no Museu da Energia, na Rua Paula Souza, n

[Please forward this call to appropriate lists and sites!]

Fake Art:
an exhibit of fake abstract art and fake art criticism
to be held in The Faketropolitan Museum of Art, a virtual museum which will
come to www.sporkworld.org in Spring 2006

Sporkworld.org will host a new collaborative exhibit of computer-generated
digital abstract paintings, to open in Spring 2006. The exhibit will
consist of computer-generated paintings which are different on each viewing,
accompanied by computer-generated art criticism, and a dynamically-generated
soundtrack made up of visitor comments about art, recorded in many
languages.

Artists may contribute to this project in four ways. The first two options
are for artist/programmers to contribute programs to generate paintings or
texts about paintings, while the third option simply requires recording your
voice. The fourth option is a call to photographers and visual artists to
create images of museum visitors.

Art Machine submissions may be created in Flash (preferred), Shockwave, or
another client-side web technology (by arrangement). Crticism Machine
submissions may be in Flash, Shockwave, Javascript, or PHP, or another
technology by arrangement. Contributions to the soundtrack should be
submitted in MP3 format if possible, and otherwise as WAV files. The images
of museum visitors should be in JPG or PNG format.

Sporkworld will provide the gallery environment in which the art is viewed,
which will have a button for each Art Machine and each Criticism Machine so
that users may see the machines generate new material. The art generated by
submitted Art Machines will be loaded into picture frames in the virtual
gallery, which users can walk through using a scrolling interface.

Please send questions and submissions to Millie Niss at men2@columbia.edu
before April 30, 2006.

1. Submitting an art machine

Web programmers are invited to submit web-based programs that produce a new
abstract composition each time the program is run. The resulting art can be
in any non-realistic, not strictly representational style, and compositions
may make use of images of recognizable objects if they so desire. The
composition should rely on some kind of random process, so that an infinite
(or at least very large) variety of compositions can be produced by each
program. Programs may attempt to imitate the style of a well-known artist
or may generate art in a style of their own. The goal of this project is to
produce compositions (really meta-compositions) that are attractive and look
like believable art. We are interested in programs which generate very
simple, spare compositions yet can produce a wide variety of different
effects, although programs which produce more Baroque, detailed, and complex
imagery are also sought. Your program may be designed to generate a
specific style of composition, so that the results look like variations on a
human-designed theme, or they may aim at generating the widest possible
variety of paintings. What we are not aiming at is results that look very
mathematical, like early computer graphics. Programmers should try to make
thier machines create art which looks organic, emotional,
deliberately-designed, hallucinogenic, harmonious, bleak, jarring, etc.
Programmers/artists should do as much thinking about design principles as
about mathematics or programming. We would like to see works which have
algorithms specially designed to produce aesthetically pleasing (by whatever
standard) compositions, but we also would like to see what kinds of
compositions can be produced by very simple-minded programs.

Examplea: A very simple art-generating program might put a random number of
overlapping squares on the canvas, in various orientations. This is easily
made more flexible by making the squares come in different colors, putting
them on painted backgrounds, allowing shapes other than squares, etc. etc.
Bear in mind that this sort of thing is the most basic possibility. (But
simple programs may be best at producing consistently pleasing paintings or
at imitating the style of a known painter. For example, it is not too hard
to see how to make some kinds of fake Mondrian paintings.) More complex
programs might draw irregukar curved shapes, use patterns, incorporate
written words or small realistic images, or use complex gradients and
stacked translucent layers to create a more organic look.

Technical details: The most convenient format for submissions is Flash.
The program should produce a composition of 500 pixels wide by 375 pixels
high. The art machine should be smaller than 200 Kb if possible and smaller
than 100 kb if possible. This size refers to hiow much must be loaded at
one time to run the program once. It is acceptable for machines to use a
larger library of assets which are externally loaded, so long as only 200kb
must be loaded each time a composition is produced. The total size should
be under 2MB.

If the work is in Flash, it should have a function on its main timeline
called generate(), so that the main gallery movie (to be provided by
Sporkworld) can load the art machines into frames and display them, along
with a button for generating a new composition (which will call generate()).
Works in Shockwave are also easily accommodated.

We will make every attempt (assuming the art machine is practical and meets
the requirements) to accept art machines which use other languages and
technologies, athough artists wanting to do this should be willing to
research how their work can be controlled from Flash (e.g. via Javascript
and FSCommand, etc.). If you wish to do a work using a technology other
than Flash, please email men2@columbia.edu as soon as possible so that your
technology may be incorporated into the design of the gallery.

Please send a brief (less than one page; it could be just a sentence or two)
non-technical explanation of the algorithm your machine uses along with the
machine itself. Viewers of the Fake Art exhibit will have access to these
explanations if they want to see how a machine works, but the explanations
wikll not appear unless the viewer chooses to have the secret of any
particular machine revealed, and that will be possible only after the art
made by the machine has been shown.

2. Submitting an art theory/art criticism machine

This a call for programs which generate fake art criticism/art theory texts
to accompany the exhibit af abstract art. You may aim for a ridiculous
effect or try to make a machine that creates texts that someone might
actually believe were written by a curator, newspaper art critic, or expoert
on cultural theory. Machines can range from very simple (choosing a random
sequence of canned sentences from a list, if the list is long and
well-constructed) or may make use of sophisticated natural language
processing. The results do not have to make sense and may be poetic if you
so choose. The texts to be generated may be mock-academic and theoretical,
and may cite many sources, or may be more direct, such as explanations of
how the artist supposedly came up with the idea for the painting while
taking a bath or what the painting means politically, etc. Texts may purport
to quote various people (from expert art historians to the man-on-the-street
or a child at the museum) who give opinions on the art.

We are also very interested in machines that generate texts that purport to
be written by the artists themselves.

Technical details: If the machine is written in Flash, it should consist of
a 1 pixel by 1 pixel movie with a white stage, which will be hidden from the
viewer. The program will have a generate() function on its main timeline
that returns the generated text as a string of HTML. Alternatively,
machines may be written in the PHP server-side scripting language, in which
case the PHP page should return the HTML text via POST.

Please send a brief (less than one page; it could be just a sentence or two)
non-technical explanation of the algorithm your machine uses along with the
machine itself. Viewers of the Fake Art exhibit will have access to these
explanations if they want to see how a machine works, but the explanations
wikll not appear unless the viewer chooses to have the secret of any
particular machine revealed, and that will be possible only after the text
generated by the machine has been shown.

Advanced Option for Brave Programmers: You are challenged to make a
combined Art Machine/Art Criticism machine, in which the texts generated by
the Criticism Machine are based on the specific characteristics of the
particular composition that has been generated by the Art Machine.

3. Contributing to the soundtrack of museum visitors' conversations

The digital exhibit of Automatic Abstract Art will be accompanied by a
soundtrack made up of overlapping voice samples. The soundtrack is designed
to simulate the sound of a large crowd visiting the exhibit. The crowd will
have sophisticated art connoisseurs in it, but also small children, people
who hate art and are being dragged to the museum by thier parents or spouse,
people who make fun of the art, people who make stupid comments about art,
people who are very emotional in their response, etc. Some comments may not
be directly related to the art: you can record a child begging to go home,
someone asking where to find the restroom, someone who has just stepped on
someone else's foot, guards telling visitors not to touch the artwork, etc.
Voices may include fragments of guided tours or lectures about the
paintings.

We are to imagine that this exhibit takes place in a museum in a major world
capital, where there are many tourists. Accordingly, we would like to
gather voices speaking as many languages as possible. Your sounds may
contain sound effects other than voices but the sounds should complement the
voices.

Please produce your sounds in MP3 format (if possible) or WAV format.
Sounds should be no more than 1 minute long (many should be shorter), but
you may submit as many sounds as you want.

4. Submitting museum visitor images

Images of the visitors to the virtual gallery are also sought. These should
be photographs or drawings in JPG or PNG format with a resolution of 300
across by 500 high. Ideally, the people should be on a white or transparent
background so that they can easily be cut out and placed in the gallery.
Images of many kinds of people in many kinds of clothing are desired. You
may also send nude visitors, so long as they are not engaged in explicit
lewd acts. You may include typical tourist trappings in your images (guide
books, cameras, etc.) or instead send sophisticated artistic-looking people,
or bored groups of schoolchildren, or any other people whom you would like
to see in the Faketropolitan Museum of Art, a museum with free admission
that does outreach to all elements of the local community and has an
international reputation. Images of museum guards are also welcome.

Regina Celia Pinto

http://arteonline.arq.br
http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm
http://bigsheep.blogspot.com

New Works:

http://arteonline.arq.br/ducks/
http://arteonline.arq.br/eva/

Dear all,

To comemorate the new season of the year, the Museum of the Essential and
Beyond That" is launching a new gallery:

TRIPS, at:

http://arteonline.arq.br, click on easy navegation - map and look for TRIPS
or at: http://arteonline.arq.br/museu/reformas/corte1.htm

(available popup windows will be needed and the better resolution is 1024 X
768)

Concept:

As you certainly know, the concept of TRIP is very wide:

A going from one place to another; a journey.
A stumble or fall.
A maneuver causing someone to stumble or fall.
A mistake.
Slang.
A hallucinatory experience induced by a psychedelic drug: an acid trip.
An intense, stimulating, or exciting experience: a power trip.
Slang.
A usually temporary but absorbing interest or preoccupation: He's on another
health food trip.
A certain way of life or situation: "deny that his reclusiveness is some
sort of deliberate star trip" (Patricia Bosworth).
A light or nimble tread.

A device, such as a pawl, for triggering a mechanism.
The action of such a device.

(http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=trip)

So that we have already new works showing TRIPS under different focus:

Isabel Aranda - Yto. CL > "Responsabilidad en los hechos" - a trip to the
sad times of Pinochet dictatorship.

Joeser Alvarez > "Windmills" - useless to fight against wind mills...
(also at the video room)

Millie Niss > "Tabitha takes the train to Toronto" - You are invited to
travel with her in this creative train!

Patrick-Henri Burgaud > "Elegie", a love and romantic trip (written in
French, this work received a good critic in the French newspaper le Monde)

...And some works selected among the museum's collection:

Regina Vater > "Winter Poems", a flying bed and its amazing poetry...

Marcelo Frazao, Paulo Villela and Regina Celia Pinto > "Boundaries" ,
through this work you are invited to visit the ancient docks distrit of Rio
de Janeiro .

Regina Celia Pinto> "A Trip to Paradise", where you will know the Brazilian
archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. That is a very good trip to you do in a
true way.

Regina Celia Pinto> "Magic Walls", a surrealist trip - a true trip of the
imagination, almost a delirium..

DURING THIS FALL (OR SPRING - southern Hemisphere) , THIS GALLERY IS
RECEIVING NEW WORKS OR LINKS TO WORKS THAT EXPLORE THE CONCEPT OF "TRIP".
PLEASE, SEND YOURS TO arteonline@arteonline.arq.br

Regina Celia Pinto

http://arteonline.arq.br
http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm
http://bigsheep.blogspot.com

New Works:

http://arteonline.arq.br/ducks/
http://arteonline.arq.br/eva/

Dear Rhizomes,

I would like to invite you to visit my new work - Two "Ugly" Ducklings - at

http://arteonline.arq.br/ducks/ .

This work was done to the new Isabel Aranda's project - "pulses del hambre"
(press of hunger) - (http://www.pulses.yto.cl ), for which you are all
invited to participate.

'Two "Ugly" Ducklings' is a portion of a true history that I will tell you
completely in my next electronic artist's book. The ducks have been
characters of my last works. They appeared in "Alice in the Wonderbalcony"
( http://arteonline.arq.br/alice/ ) and in "ManyFaces of Eva" (
http://arteonline.arq.br/eva/ ), in this last one through Marcelo Frazao's
image. I hope you appreciate to see them again in my new work.
There you will know a little bit more of their history.

Constructive comments or questions about 'Two "Ugly" Ducklings' will be
welcome.

All the best,

Regina Celia Pinto

http://arteonline.arq.br
http://arteonline.arq.br/library.htm
http://bigsheep.blogspot.com

New Works:
http://arteonline.arq.br/ducks/
http://arteonline.arq.br/eva/