The Temporary Travel Office produces a variety of services relating to tourism and technology aimed at exploring the non-rational connections existing between public and private spaces. The Travel Office has operated in a variety of locations, including Missouri, Chicago, Southern California and Norway.
Is MySpace a Place?
Networked Performance pointed me toward an interview (download in PDF)with Networked Publics speaker Henry Jenkins and Networked Publics friend danah boyd about Myspace. The site, popular with teenagers, has become increasingly controversial as parents and the press raise concerns about the openness of information on the site and the vulnerability this supposedly poses to predators (Henry points out that only .1% of abductions are by strangers) and the behavior of teens towards each other (certainly nothing new, only now in persistent form). In another essay on Identity Production in Networked Culture, danah suggests that Myspace is popular not only because the technology makes new forms of interaction possible, but because older hang-outs such as the mall and the convenience store are prohibiting teens from congregating and roller rinks and burger joints are disappearing.
This begs the question, is Myspace media or is it space? Architecture theorists have long had this thorn in their side. "This will kill that," wrote Victor Hugo with respect to the book and the building. In the early 1990s, concern about a dwindling public culture and the character of late twentieth century urban space led us to investigate Jürgen Habermas's idea of the public sphere. But the public sphere, for Habermas is a forum, something that, for the most part, emerges in media and in the institutions of the state:
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people's ...
SWITCH: Issue 22
HI everyone. Just wanted to announce the new issue of SWITCH:
SWITCH : The online New Media Art Journal of the CADRE Laboratory for
New Media at San Jose State University
http://switch.sjsu.edu switch@cadre.sjsu.edu
SWITCH Journal is proud to announce the launch of Issue 22: A Special
Preview Edition to ISEA 2006/ ZeroOne San Jose.
As San Jose State University and the CADRE Laboratory are serving as
the academic host for the ZeroOne San Jose /ISEA 2006 Symposium,
SWITCH has dedicated itself to serving as an official media
correspondent of the Festival and Symposium. SWITCH has focused the
past three issues of publication prior to ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006
on publishing content reflecting on the themes of the symposium. Our
editorial staff has interviewed and reported on artists, theorists,
and practitioners interested in the intersections of Art & Technology
as related to the themes of ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. While some
of those featured in SWITCH are part of the festival and symposium,
others provide a complimentary perspective.
Issue 22 focuses on the intersections of CADRE and ZeroOne San Jose/
ISEA 2006. Over the past year, students at the CADRE Laboratory for
New Media have been working intensely with artists on two different
residency projects for the festival – “Social Networking” with Antoni
Muntadas and the City as Interface Residency, “Karaoke Ice” with
Nancy Nowacek, Marina Zurkow & Katie Salen. Carlos Castellanos,
James Morgan, Aaron Siegel, all give us a sneak preview of their
projects which will be featured at the ISEA 2006 exhibition. Alumni
Sheila Malone introduces ex_XX:: post position, an exhibition
celebrating the 20th anniversary of the CADRE Institute that will run
as a parallel exhibition to ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. LeE
Montgomery provides a preview of NPR (Neighborhood Public Radio)
presence at ...
Art & Mapping
The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) has released a special issue of their journal, Cartographic Perspectives:
Art and Mapping
Issue 53, Winter 2006
Edited by Denis Wood and and John Krygier
Price: $25
The issue includes articles by kanarinka, Denis Wood, Dalia Varanka and John Krygier, and an extensive catalogue of map artists compiled by Denis Wood.
[-empyre-] Liquid Narrative for June 2006
Christina McPhee:
hi all, I am not sure we got this message out to Rhizome!
Please join our guests this month, Dene Grigar (US), Jim Barrett
(AU/SE), Lucio Santaella (BR), and Sergio Basbaum (BR) , with
moderator Marcus Bastos (BR), for a spirited discussion of "Liquid
Narratives" ----- digital media story telling with a dash, perhaps,
of 'aura' .
Here's the intro from Marcus:
The topic of June at the - empyre - mailing list will be Liquid Narratives. The concept of 'liquid narrative' is interesting in that it allows to think about the unfoldings of contemporary languages beyond tech achievements, by relating user controlled applications with formats such as the essay (as described by Adorno in "Der Essay als Form", The essay as a form) and procedures related to the figure of the narrator (as described by Benjamin in his writings about Nikolai Leskov). Both authors are accute critics of modern culture, but a lot of his ideas can be expanded towards contemporary culture. As a matter of fact, one of the main concerns in Benjamin's essay is a description of how the rise of modernism happens on account of an increasing nprivilege of information over knowledge, which is even more intense nowadays. To understand this proposal, it is important to remember how Benjamin distinguishes between an oral oriented knowledge, that results from 'an experience that goes from person to person' and is sometimes anonymous, from the information and authoritative oriented print culture. One of the aspects of this discussion is how contemporary networked culture rescues this 'person to person' dimension, given the distributed and non-authoritative procedures that technologies such as the GPS, mobile phones and others stimulate.state of the planet infographics
a small collection of beautiful information graphics documenting the current state of the planet.
see also gapminder & 3d data globe.
[seedmagazine.com]
FWD: LA - October Surprise Open Call
The October Surprise will converge artists, activists and community
members to celebrate our neighborhoods and strengthen creative,
grassroots power, using site-specific installations, interventions,
art, monuments, performance, and other events. Projects will be
situated throughout the neighborhood.
Where:
-We are calling for projects throughout Northeast LA
Re: jargon
there's something important to arguments about language, if not
"jargon," - "sincere commitment" may not be represented in a lexicon
based on fashionable exclusion and cultural currency. it's one thing to
develop complex language, and yet another to limit discussion via code.
of course, CAE's analysis of the frankfurt school's tactic of cloaking
political speech within esoteric academics presents another angle. but
i think "tactic" is a key word here... what's worse: manipulation
through aesthetics (socialist realism) or isolation through aesthetics
(academia)? or is the problem obfuscated by the (false) dichotomy?
ryan
> yeah, well, ja...mostly i agree with you about clarity in language...
> except that i am conflicted...
> what actually is "honest writing and utterance"? are we retreating to
> socialist realism? isn't abstraction in language as viable as
> abstraction in painting? adorno supported difficult writing as kinda a
> filter to winnow out those without sincere commitment to the effort
> of thought. clarity often comes at a price. and who's being "honest"
> about what? ain't nothin' said what does not have an interior
> presupposition or two...that is, an angle...a desire to sell. breaking
> words apart from convenience ought not be threatening.
> by the way, you've probly read orwell's homage to catalonia...his
> time with the anarchists in the spanish civil war...very cool- but, as
> an offset, you ought to wade through hugh thomas's the spanish civil
> war. orwell savages the commies in that conflict, but thomas provides
> a thought-rending explanation of their reasoning. this point being
> that no matter how much you think you know, it ain't ever enough. best
> wishes.
Art vs. Ashcroft Panel Discussion
July 26
Orlo Presents Art vs. Ashcroft Panel Discussion/ Keith Yurdana Closing
Party
Saturday, July 31, 7 p.m.
Orlo Exhibition Space
2516 NW 29th Ave Bldg. #9 Portland, OR
FREE
503-242-1047
"Art vs. Ashcroft," a community forum about recent attacks on
artists and their civil rights
On May 11, 2004 Dr. Steven Kurtz, a professor of art at University of
Buffalo and a co-founder of the internationally acclaimed Critical Art
Ensemble, woke to find his wife of 25 years dead of a heart attack.
The Quest for the Nonkiller App.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25WEAPONS.html?
th=&pagewanted=print&position=
The Quest for the Nonkiller App.
By STEPHEN MIHM
I recently was invited to the Pentagon to watch a film depicting field
tests of a new weapons program called the Active Denial System, which,
it occurred to me, could have been named by an unhinged cognitive
therapist. The live-action video opened on a vista reminiscent of Iraq
or Afghanistan. Scattered amid the scrub of a desert plain, angry
demonstrators howl unintelligible slogans and advance menacingly on a
handful of soldiers who nervously pivot their rifles back and forth
trying to deter the mob. For safety's sake during this test run, the
''crowd'' -- played for the most part by off-duty soldiers -- flings
bright green tennis balls at the uniformed servicemen instead of rocks.
As one member of the crowd hurls a ball, a soldier operating the Active
Denial System (it looks like a squat satellite dish) targets an unruly
protester in the weapon's viewfinder, squeezes a trigger that releases
a beam of energy and, in a split second, one ''civilian'' howls and
scampers away, fanning his rear end. Other demonstrators suffer similar
fates, yelping and fleeing in panic, as if they have encountered a wall
of invisible fire. After tumbling backward, the horde spins around,
pointing and hollering like a Stone Age tribe encountering modern
weaponry for the first time.
Re: Re[2]: RHIZOME_RAW: Re: After net.art on 1998, my personal view...
> only male eggs.
Art history's way ahead of you...