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]
W3C sides with Microsoft
Thu Oct 30, 3:34 AM ET
Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb News
A leading Internet standards body said Wednesday that
it has taken the unusual step of asking federal
officials to revoke a patent that the organization
claims threatens "substantial economic and technical
damage" to the Web.
The position of the World Wide Web Consortium places
the organization squarely behind Microsoft, which lost
a court battle in August against the patent holder, a
former University of California researcher.
In a letter to James E. Rogan, undersecretary of
commerce for intellectual property at the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office, W3C director Tim Berners-Lee
said, the group "urges the USPTO to initiate a
reexamination of the '906 patent in order to prevent
substantial economic and technical damage to the
operation of [the] World Wide Web."
If the patent is not revoked, the impact would be felt
not just by Microsoft, but by everyone who has created
Web pages and applications written for standards-based
browsers that use technology covered by the patent.
"In many cases, those who will be forced to incur the
cost of modifying Web pages or software applications
do not even themselves infringe the patent-- assuming
it is even valid," Berners-Lee wrote.
It's the first time the W3C has asked that a patent be
revoked.
U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906 covers technology that
enables a browser to call programs over the Internet
to display streaming audio and video, advanced
graphics, and other content within a single Web page.
The technology has become a standard within HTML, the
language used to write Web pages. The W3C controls the
development of HTML.
Michael Doyle, founder of Eolas Technologies in
Chicago, was granted the patent while he was an
adjunct professor at the University of California, San
Francisco. A federal court jury sided with Eolas in
its patent-infringement suit against Microsoft,
awarding $521 million to the plaintiff.
As a result, Microsoft has said it will make changes
in its Internet Explorer browser, which is used to
access the Web by 90% of computer users. Altering the
browser could force changes in a variety of popular
media software that leverage the application,
including Adobe Systems' Acrobat document reader,
Apple Computer's QuickTime video program, Macromedia's
Flash, and the RealNetworks music player.
In its letter to the patent office, the W3C maintained
that the Eolas patent is invalid because its ideas had
previously been published as "prior art." Prior art
wasn't considered in the Microsoft trial, nor when the
patent was granted, the standards body said.
Therefore, the patent should be invalidated.
If the patent is allowed to stand, the W3C said, it
would cause "cascades of incompatibility to ripple
through the Web."
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: Does Barney Wear Nikes?
> Brand shouldn't create a piece of work that only ends up putting the mental
> image
> of a swoosh into everyones head that hears about it.
i understand that thought, but i don't think one can simplify the issue into being against brands or not. and i certainly don't think that this work is "against the notion of a brand." but how else do you talk about the relationship between obviously mediated space and what is usually considered (falsely?) un-mediated space, esp if your after specific relationships? maybe there are better ways, but i haven't heard many yet.
But its 010101,
> so all
> the academics will marvel at how "punk" they are while everyone else
> in the
> world ignores it.
sure, i'm not much of a supporter of their work and have many problems with their general practice, which would be ridiculous to call "punk" - not to get back on that old subject ;) unfortunately (for me anyway) it seems the discussion gets stuck on how novel/original/cool the work is on some tautological level- what is just not persuasive or interesting to me. if people (whether academics or whomever) are talking about something, i think it's more interesting to consider why? who is the discussion serving, etc... i don't think the viennese audience was necessarily academic.
>
> If anyone can tell me what ideas this latest "Nike" piece has
> generated, I'd
> appreciate it, because so far the epiphany that it's produced for me
> is that
> large companys don't like it when you use thier logo without thier
> permission. Just as thier previous thefts of net.art sites were all
> about
> the insight that net.art is downloadable. And just like "life sharing"
> was
> all about the stunning conclusion that people can create an open ftp
> directory on thier computer. How punk(TM)!
again, i would generally agree with this assessment, but ask who cares? if the project doesn't do it for you, great. i'm certainly not going to take the position of defender of it or any other of 01's, but if we're looking for novelty, i'm not interested anyway. if you want to make it about "Art", you could place it in the historical tradition of art-legal disputes from Christo to Serra's "tilted arc." or even easier the tradition of "plop-art" in the public domain. hell, just call it process art and it's mediocrity becomes genre specific...
subRosa book launch at Bluestockings NYC
forward to anyone you
think
may be interested. Hope to see you there. in
solidarity and friendship,
Faith
Come celebrate the NEW YORK CITY launch of:
DOMAIN ERRORS! CYBERFEMINIST PRACTICES. A subRosa
Book. Edited by Maria
Fernandez, Faith Wilding and Michelle M. Wright.
Published by Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY, 2003.
Bluestockings Bookstore,
172 Allen Street, Manhattan, NY
212-777-6028
Sunday, November 9th, 2003, 7-9 PM
DOMAIN ERRORS! Co-editor, and subRosa member Faith
Wilding will be on
hand to
give a short presentation:"What is Tactical
Cyberfeminism? outlining
the
various areas of investigation of the book, and
showing examples of the
work of
subRosa--with video amplification.
Books and refreshments will be available.
Part performative intervention, part radical polemic
and activist
manual,
DOMAIN ERRORS! CYBERFEMINIST PRACTICES introduces a
diverse
international group
of feminist writers, artists, theorists, and activists
engaged in
formulating a
contestational politics for tactical cyberfeminism.
This recombinant
book
highlights productive intersections of feminist and
postcolonial
discourses
through critical analyses of the embodied politics of
digital culture.
Opening
areas repressed in previous cyberfeminist discourses,
the authors map
contemporary
social relations between women as they are mediated
and transformed by
digital and bio-technologies.
Advance readers say:
….These cyberfeminists take no prisoners as they
march through the
virtual
territories of postcolonial power vectors in an
attempt to establish
living
models of resistance. Lock and load, ladies!
--Critical Art Ensemble
This exceptional collection of writings and artist
projects PERFORMS a
resistant feminist politics. Charting new strategies
and practices, the
authors
imagine liberatory possibilities for our bodies,
identities, and social
relations
in the era of digitized networks and genetic
engineering. --Miwon Kwon,
editor, Documents
Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices.
subRosa: http://www.cyberfeminism.net
Paper, $15 USD, 6"x9", 288 pages, ISBN 1-57027-141-0
Information: http://www.autonomedia.org/domainerrors
Individual orders and course adoptions:
Autonomedia, Phone/FAX (718)963-2603; email:
orders@autonomedia.org
Regular Mail orders: PO Box 568, Brooklyn, NY.
11211-0568
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com
but does it contain GMOs?
Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
Sanyo Electric has developed an optical disc based on
a polymer derived from corn which, the company says,
is as sturdy as current plastic discs but will
biodegrade when disposed of.
The company, which is claiming a world first for the
technology, will begin selling its "MildDisc" in
December. It is initially targeting volume customers
producing prerecorded CDs, such as music CDs,
VideoCDs, or CD-ROMs, said Ryan Watson, a Tokyo-based
spokesperson for Sanyo, which is headquartered in
Osaka.
The discs have been designed to tackle a problem
common to many plastics upon disposal: If burned,
toxic gases can be released into the atmosphere
causing health and global warming (news - web sites)
concerns; but if buried, they don't break down,
causing a potential problem for future generations.
The MildDisc will degrade after a period of about 50
to 100 years and break down into water and carbon
dioxide, Watson said. This time span means users don't
have to worry about losing information during the
lifetime of the discs, he said.
Out on the Farm
The production process begins when Cargill Dow in
Nebraska converts corn into a polylactic acid. This is
done by milling the corn to separate out the starch
and then processing the starch to get unrefined
dextrose. Using a fermentation process similar to that
of beer production, the dextrose is converted into
lactic acid, according to the company's Web site.
The acid is converted into a polymer to form the base
of the optical disc by Sanyo in a process the company
developed with Japan's Mitsui Chemicals, for which the
companies have applied for patents, Watson said.
Sanyo estimates that around 85 corn kernels, each
weighing an average of 0.5 grams, are needed to
produce enough polymer for a single 4.7-inch optical
disc, so an average ear of corn can produce around ten
discs. The International Recording Media Association
estimates world demand for CDs at around 9 billion
annually, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (news
- web sites) estimates world corn production at about
600 million tons, so producing enough polymer to
satisfy the demand for discs would require less than
0.1 percent of the world's corn production.
Coming Soon?
Initially the company will focus on discs for
prerecorded applications, although it is considering
recordable and rewritable versions of the MildDisc.
DVDs based on the same technology are also a future
possibility, according to Watson.
When sales begin at the end of this year, the blanks
disc will sell in bulk for roughly three times the
price of current plastic discs. However, Sanyo
estimates it will be able to reduce this premium to
around 1.2 times as production ramps up and volume
shipments begin.
Cargill Dow is using the same initial process and its
own refining process to produce its NatureWorks PLA
polymer film. Several companies are using the film to
produce a range of goods including cartons, candy
wrappers, kitchen utensils, and acrylic sheets and fabrics.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: Does Barney Wear Nikes?
> This seems kind of weird. You're dissing Barney because of his lack
> of pop distribution, and you're holding the nikeplatz prank up as an
> example of well-executed pop distribution?
you got me there - that was bad rhetoric. but i wasn't dissing Barney (or didn't mean to come off that way) per se, well maybe a little. it isn't about pop distribution - as clearly neither examples are pop phenomena- but rather about what distribution there is does. and this goes to (sort of) what jim and marc mentioned in another post, the nikeplatz project did involve an audience in an unexpected and local manner that resulted in some heated discussion. obviously they're totally different initiatives, i just find one more interesting than the other. but it's not like Cremaster is being marketed, distributed, or celebrated as mass media. (and as trendy as anti-globalization may seem, just look around and tell me what trend is stronger. but i supposes we don't want critical civic thinking catching on.)
> Perhaps if John Grisham wrote a screenplay about the resultant court
> case, with Tom Cruise as Luther Blissett, then maybe.
sounds like a project to me...
>
> Until then, 9 out of 10 philistines prefer amazing visuals to
> anti-advertising faux happenings.
yeah, but do they choose Barney or Arnold?
ryan