unmediated

This is a call from the French based Audio in art research group "Locus Sonus" to participate in their streamed soundscapes open web- mike project.

A Book Event with Joline Blais, Alex Galloway, and Jon Ippolito

at the New Museum Store
556 West 22nd Street, New York City

Friday, September 8, 2006 -- 6:30-8:30pm

A brief dialogue between the authors will touch on such questions as the
place of art in larger society, the history of community design as an
artistic practice, and the role of games in digital culture. The
conversation will be followed by refreshments and a reception for the
authors.

featuring:

"Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture"
by Alexander R. Galloway
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/galloway_gaming.html

"At the Edge of Art"
by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito
Thames & Hudson, 2006
http://www.thamesandhudson.com/en/1/9780500238226.mxs

via Rhizome:

Rhizome and the New Museum are pleased to present "Art, Play, and
Community," which will celebrate the release of Joline Blais and Jon
Ippolito's "At the Edge of Art" and Alex Galloway's "Gaming." Both
ground-breaking books explore new media art as an expanded field, that
interacts and enliven disciples from design to art to video games to
science.

According to "At the Edge of Art" by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito,
art's recent eruption in fields as diverse as artificial life, computer games,
and community activism reveals a seismic shift in the role it plays in
society. No longer content to sit on a pedestal or auction block, these
works infiltrate stock markets, sway court cases, and network bedrooms.
Alex Galloway's "Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture" takes an in-
depth look at one of these 'edges' to probe the cultural history and activity
of videogames, laying the foundation for critique that recognizes their
distinct mechanisms and politics.

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, ReBlogged by Paddy Johnson on Sep 4, 2006 at 12:26 PM

Mejan Labs has just opened Art & Activism, an exhibition featuring artists and organizations using technology to communicate a political message.

The works presented include:

vaticano.org, by 0100101110101101.ORG. In december 1998 the net artists published a spoof version of the official Vatican web site. At the time most visitors didn't know that the Vatican, being legally a state, owns its own national domain name extension ".va", and therefore many of them digited the ".org" one that the net artists had bought. The copy site was aesthetically identical to the real one but with slightly modified contents (for example, they added lyrics from pop music groups.) For 12 months, thousand of people visited the vaticano.org without realising the prank. At the expiring of the first year of contract, Network Solutions prevented the renewing of it.

Feral Trade where Kate Rich trades coffee over social networks. The project operates largely outside commercial channels and makes a direct intervention into the business of grocery running, using the surplus freight capacity of commuter, vacation, migration, cultural and other social movements for the underground distribution of goods. The Feral Trade Courier is an online database that helps organise shipping information, facilitate communications between suppliers, couriers and buyers, and assemble documentary product-packaging which report on the origins, transport and social connections of the feral trade product.

The artists group C6 will show Want & Need, a project where the audience can SMS their wants and needs, which will be screened in the gallery. The work asks if people aren’t mixing up they actual needs with what they want to have.

Glyphiti, by Andy Deck, is an online collaborative drawing project. Visitors are invited to edit and add graphical units or 'glyphs', which compose the image, in real time.

Emails with false reviews, press releases etc sent by Heath Bunting as part of a net art action.

The show runs until October 8 at Mejan Labs, Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm Sweden.

Vial Spectre.

Leonardo, as part of its collaboration with the Creativity and
Cognition Studios of the University of Technology of Sydney
(http://www.creativityandcognition.com) is pleased to bring to your
attention:

***********************************************
CREATIVITY & COGNITION 2007
Seeding Creativity: Tools, Media, and Environments

June 13-15, 2007
Washington DC, USA
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/CC2007/

Sponsored by ACM SIGCHI
***********************************************

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: December 15, 2006
Author notification: February 19, 2007
Final formatted papers due: March 19, 2007

We cordially invite submissions focusing on creativity support tools
for individual and group creativity, bridging among technology,
science and arts to find common themes for user interface and new
media design, and producing rigorous research with innovative designs
and carefully conceived evaluations.

The conference aims to bring together researchers from different subject areas (e.g., computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia and semantic web technologies) and foster discussions about ongoing research.

The goal of Technology in the Arts is to be a resource for the arts community, sparking dialogue around the role of technology in our planning and programming, discussing best practices as well as lessons learned, and providing hands-on, practical skills where possible.

Technology in the Arts will bring together the full spectrum of organizations within the arts, from the local to national levels, to examine the commonalities that exist in useful technologies as well as the opportunities for partnership.

A forum for focusing on creativity support tools for individual and group creativity, bridging between technology, science and arts to find common themes for user interaction and new media design.

New Media Lab

Africa's first-ever major blogging conference, The Digital Citizen Indaba (DCI), will take place Sept. 14-15 in Grahamstown, South Africa. The event is hosted by the New Media Lab (a project of the School of Journalism & Media Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa). It's part of the Highway Africa 2006 effort.

to Dictionary.com, an indaba is "a council or meeting of indigenous peoples of southern Africa to discuss an important matter."

This indaba aims to bring bloggers, citizen journalists, media practitioners, industry experts, and representatives from civil society all under one roof. It will feature a diverse range of speakers and media professionals from across the globe.

The goal of the event is to "equip Africans with skills related to new media which empower them and the organizations they work for by creating a long-lasting and long-reaching digital voice." The conference also will tackle issues concerning Web 2.0, citizen journalism, intellectual property rights, online ethics and activism.

This indaba also aims to facilitate networking among fellow Africans in the hope of promoting further collaboration on the continent and build a strong online community.

Just a reminder: 3pointD will be at the Eyebeam OpenLab in Manhattan tomorrow evening, August 10, from 6-9pm, to take part in the Metaverse Roadmap pre-release party, which Electric Sheep Jerry Paffendorf has titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Metaverse but Were Too Afraid To Ask. “The night consists of presentations and conversations about the metaverse space (video games, virtual worlds, CAD, maps, and web apps) coming out of and inspired by the Metaverse Roadmap Project,” Jerry writes on his blog, where the final liine-up of presenters can be found. I’ll be in conversation with noted Second Life resident Prokofy Neva, dicussing the convergence or collision, depending on your point of view, of real life and virtual life in terms of business, culture and political issues in places like Second Life and There.com. What are the the relative merits and pitfalls of RL businesses, people and uses increasingly entering virtual worlds? Does a line in the virtual sand need to be drawn around metaversal
spaces? Should be segregated into “virtual” and “mirror” worlds, never to meet, or can a single metaversal space possibly contain the multitudes necessary for a peaceful co-existence of the two paradigms? We’ll take a flyer at some answers to these and other questions and let the audience get involved as well. Good fun, and tasty food for metaversal thought. See you there.

3pointD, culture, events, governance, metaverse, virtual worlds

Conflux, the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, will take place in Brooklyn, NYC, September 14-17.

At Conflux, participants turn NYc into a playground, a laboratory and a space for the development of new networks and communities. All events are free and open to the public. They include walks and tours, lectures, workshops, street games and tech-enabled expeditions, interactive performance, public art installations, movies, etc.

I’ve spotted a few interesting projects in the programme:

2.4GHz scape (image on the left), by Sawako Kato, will let audiences experience the realtime sonification of 2.4GHz signal (spectrum used for WiFi, microwave ovens, bluetooth, baby monitors, cordless game controllers etc.) around the place. People will also be invited to join the soundscape using their laptop or bluetooth devices such as the mobile phones to make the signal interference.

The Anti-Advertising Agency’s Portable Sound Units are small sound-systems triggered only when pedestrians pass by them. They playback on-the-street interviews with the public about their opinions on outdoor advertising. Sara Dierck, Michael Dodge, and Steve Lambert from the AAA conducted hours of audio interviews about issues surrounding outdoor advertising with the public but also with selected individuals in the fields of advertising, conservation, and social criticism. They compiled and edited down the interviews into very short clips that raise questions about the role of advertising in culture. During Conflux, the units will be temporarily installed in various locations around the festival and area streets.

AAA Portable Sound Units

Also on the programme: Sue Huang’s Street Cut-ups that uses text found on the street and remixes it to find surprising new meanings; Caroline Woolard will affix ’seats’ into the u-channel of the no parking and stop sign posts implanted in the sidewalk; Toby Lee and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga will invite you to freeze for 5 minutes; etc.

Another Glowlab production: The Drift Relay , a collaborative psychogeographic experience in the form of a 24 hour relay-style exploration of San Jose, will kick off next week at ISEA: Tuesday, August 08, 10am - Wednesday, August 09, 10am.

Originally from we make money not art at August 5, 2006, 04:00, published by Marisa S. Olson

This fifth Media in Transition conference, then, aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices.

DigiBytes. A competition for 'little movies' to help celebrate:
Metro Screen Is 25 | we're celebrating | you're invited September 15–22

DigiBytes is an opportunity to encourage and reward creative work specifically made for mobile phones and the web.

DigiBytes is calling for both narrative and non-narrative entries and does not stipulate a theme.

Selected entries will be exhibited during Metro Screen's 25th Birthday celebrations September 15–22, 2006 and on the Metro Screen website.

Think bold striking images, stills, voice overs, music, less is more, the simpler the better.

Maximum duration 2.5 minutes.

1st prize: $500 voucher for Metro Screen [equivalent to a weekend hire of a production kit or around two days in an offline suite].
2nd prize: $300 voucher for Metro Screen
3rd prize: $100 voucher for Metro Screen

As this competition forms part of Metro Screen's 25th Birthday celebrations entry fees are waived. Multiple entries are accepted.

Mobile content development is a growth area with endless possibilities for the arts and technology to work together. As the functionality of mobile phones grows so too does its broad range of creative applications.

Entry deadline Friday August 25, 5pm.

For an entry form and information on how to enter contact David Opitz on
02 9361 5318 or d.opitz@metroscreen.org.au or metroscreen.org.au

Originally from Rhizome.org Raw at July 26, 2006, 17:24, published by Greg Smith

Type announcement, opportunity
Genre work
Keywords video, exhibition

What happens when you take cinema out of the confines of the movie theater, wrench the film reel off the projector, and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? Live cinema.

O'Reilly's Open Source Convention 2006 (OSCON) runs July 24-28, 2006, in Portland, Oregon. Hundreds of sessions, tutorials, activities, and events, are scheduled for this year's OSCON. Here's the Schedule.

This year's conference is dedicated to extending the dialogue between the creative open source community and the "traditional" software development industry.

More than 2,000 open source developers from around the world will gather at the Oregon Convention Center, reports The Oregonian.

"This is sort of the alumni party for open source," said Nathan Torkington, who is jointly chairing the conference's program lineup. Diverse programming communities come together, Torkington said, to share war stories and pool hard-won knowledge. This is OSCON's fourth year in Portland, with developers lured back by the city's vibrant open source community, said Torkington, who flew in from New Zealand to help organize this week's conference.

"Portland has made a great effort to attract what I guess you call the creative class," he said. "Open source definitely falls into that. There is a huge community of developers here."

Oregon is home to several open source initiatives, including the Open Source Development Labs in Beaverton, which promotes adoption of the open source Linux computer operating system. OSDL developers will be among those leading OSCON sessions this week.

IBM and Intel both base their Linux development work in Oregon, as well. Linux was created by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer programmer who moved to the Portland area in 2004 and oversees the operating system's development from a computer in his basement.

On Tuesday, the latest draft of the "General Public License" -- a free software license widely used to govern uses of open source software -- is due to be released. The GPL's new draft is being coordinated by the Free Software Foundation; its general counsel, Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, will address the conference Friday afternoon.

New to OSCON this year is the O'Reilly Radar: The Executive Briefing, where Tim O'Reilly and Matt Asay will give a limited number of attendees an exclusive opportunity to hear from and meet with innovators, entrepreneurs, and companies that are currently on the O'Reilly Radar.

FOSCON is a free and fun gathering of Ruby fans held in the evening during O'Reilly's Open Source Convention. The speakers will be discussing a wide range of topics of interest to the Ruby community. And in case that wasn't enough, pizza will be provided!

FOSCON is sponsored by CD Baby: a little CD store with the best new independent music and Planet Argon: Ruby on Rails Development, Consulting & Hosting. It will be hosted by Portland-based Free Geek.

Blue Oregon adds:

In May, CNN International visited Oregon to film a special segment on the global emergence of open source and proclaimed "Portland, Oregon is the unlikely capital of a global software revolution. The revolution is called Open Source."

The piece, which aired in Asia just weeks before Governor Kulongoski's recent economic development mission to Japan, featured interviews with Oregon open source luminaries, including Dan Fry of IBM, Stuart Cohen of OSDL and Linux creator Linus Torvalds. (The transcript of the Torvalds interview is available here.) CNN also spotlighted some of the many area open source community groups, including the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs (POSSE) and Free Geek.

Many of Oregon's open source companies and organizations will be on display at OSCON. In addition to speakers from Beaverton's Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), representatives from POSSE, the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL), Portland State's computer science department and the Software Association of Oregon (SAO) will man booths on the exhibit floor. The Beaverton-based incubator Open Technology Business Center (OTBC) and many of its growing roster of resident companies will also be exhibiting. (That list includes the new U.S. offices of Headwest and Innoopract, which came to Oregon from Singapore and Germany, respectively.) The O'Reilly event also includes among its sponsors the industry analyst firm The 451 Group, which recently relocated its open source practice head to Portland.

Among the annoucements; Socialtext, the first Wiki company, released Socialtext Open at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention today. Available for immediate download, Socialtext Open is the first open source wiki with a commercial venture as its primary contributor. Over 2,000 businesses run Socialtext Wiki products today as a hosted service or appliance. It's available for immediate download on SourceForge.

Psst! Pass It On... "is a series of short animated films created in collaboration by a select group of motion graphics artists from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Berlin."

Liquid Fridge presents two workshops on mash-ups of art forms with each other and technology, with presenters Chris Csikszentmihályi from MIT (USA), Ralph Borland, Charles Lee-Thorp, Blaise Janichon and Martin Sims.

Composing, nurturing, collecting, maintaining, and making associations within information; the environments and related tools in which these activities take place; and the theory behind these activities and environments.

The4thScreen: a global fest of art & innovation for mobile phones focuses on the emerging cultural, technological and social phenomenon of mobile phones.

"We are at the moment when everybody, from the media moguls to Vietnamese peasants - artists, hackers, activists, businesses and governments are trying to grasp the impact, the power, of this new phenomenon.... trying to claim a part of it. There is still a lot of space for great ideas, to fulfill dreams and real needs. I hope the Festival will serve as a catalyst and influence this process... "

Tamas Banovich, festival director

Connecting over 2 billion users, more than twice as many as the Internet, covering every country of the world, the mobile network is bridging the digital divide.

With the mobile phone, the power is in your hands. From concept to creation you can share your visions, impact your world and reach millions.

Artists, designers, technologists, and all creative thinkers are invited to submit their creations, inventions and revolutionary ideas in one of two categories:

1/ Moving images - including videos, animations, and games made specifically for mobile delivery.
2/ Wise technologies - including SMS based projects, sound, software art, software and hardware projects proposing new or extended use of mobile devices.

The4thScreen is a platform where you can influence the future of this new medium, exchange your ideas over the boundaries of your culture and participate in the global village.

What will you bring to The4thScreen ?

The 2nd pictoplasma conference is just around the corner and for a second time, Berlin is about to mutate into the world’s capital of contemporary character design.

We look forward to welcoming you at the official conference exhibition openings on Wednesday the 11th of October. The “Character Walk” will take you through more than 20 galleries, project spaces and locations throughout the city centre of Berlin-Mitte. Scheduled high points include new work by Australian design collective Rinzen, exhibitions by Nathan Jurevicius and Derrick Hodgson, a two-man show by Gary Baseman and Tim Biskup and a birthday party for Emily the Strange given by Rob Reger himself. Leave your mark in the “Colour Me, Pictoplasma!” walk-through colouring room, meditate in front of the bunny mandala, enjoy selected “Characters in Motion” screenings on the big screen and dance your socks off to character visuals galore.

The conference per se kicks off first thing on Thursday and will keep you on your toes until late Saturday night. In the mornings, we’ll be celebrating the Pictoplasma Animation Festival with cinema screenings of the latest work by David Shrigley, Shynola, Trunk, Saiman Chow, Airside, Motomichi Nakamura and many more…

The marathon continues with lectures and presentations by international artists such as Tim Biskup (USA), eBoy (GER), Nathan Jurevicius (AUS), Akinori Oishi (JP), Pete Fowler (UK), Rob Reger (USA), Fons Schiedon (NL) and Ian Stevenson (UK), and some old friends such as Rinzen (AUS), Friends With You (USA) or Furi Furi (JP), who will update us on their latest activities.

In the early evenings - before character visuals and performances by Airside (UK) or Motomichi Nakamura (USA) start vying for your attention - we’ll be doing some serious talking with the speakers in open panel discussions. All this plus workshops, doodle seminars and a grand character Karaoke finale with the pictoOrphans will guarantee you some serious sleep deprivation.

Originally posted by exiledsurfer from del.icio.us/exiledsurfer, ReBlogged by exiledsurfer on Jul 19, 2006 at 11:46 AM

Antimatter exists to provide a public platform for underground productions of film and video -- imaginative, volatile, entertaining and critical works that exist outside of the mainstream. It is a forum for innovative and radical ideas overlooked or margi

Playful Interaction and Goal-Oriented Gaming

Game/Play: Playful Interaction and Goal-oriented Gaming Explored Through Media Arts Practice ::
The exhibition opens at two different venues, in the UK and then joins, to tour as a single touring show. Game/Play is a networked national touring exhibition in the UK, focusing on the rhetorical constructs game and play. This collaboration between Q Arts, Derby and HTTP Gallery, London provides a basis for exchange and interaction between audiences, artists, curators and writers through the exhibitions and networked activity.

Enjoy the Ermajello performance of Plankton at Q Arts :: test drive Mary Flanagan's [giantJoystick] at HTTP :: view the works and connect and collaborate with visitors in both :: galleries in the online :: multiuser spaces of Furtherfield's VisitorsStudio and Endless Forest by Tale of Tales.

Projects fall under three main categories: installations, independent video games, and online (networked) artworks. Game/Play opens at two venues, HTTP Gallery and Q Arts. Curated by Giles Askham, Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow, Corrado Morgana & Louise Clements.

Game/Play Artists: Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, Jetro Lauha, Julian Oliver, Kenta Cho, Mary Flanagan, Low Brow Trash, Paul Granjon, Simon Poulter, Giles Askham, Jakub Dvorsky, Long Journey Home, PRU, Q Club, Furtherfield, Tale of Tales.

Game/Play Writers: Giles Askham / Jon Bird / Peter Bowcott / Javier Candeira / Rebecca Cannon / Ele Carpenter, Ruth Catlow, Louise Clements, Mary Flanagan, Marc Garrett, Keiron Gillen, Mark R Hancock, Martijn Hendriks, Pat Kane, Ana-Marija Koljanin, Maaike Lauwaert, Corrado Morgana, Patrick Lichty, Christiane Paul, Thomas Petersen, Andy Pollaine, Jonathan Willett.

HTTP Gallery
Saturday 22 July 7pm – 9pm.
Unit A2, Arena Business Centre,
71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY

Q Arts:
21 July 6.30pm – 8.30pm Q Arts – Gallery
35/36 Queen Street,
Derby, DE1 3DS

a continuously touring festival without beginnings or endings

the horse bazaar has a 20m long video screen of 6 tiled projectors on a dataton system. Amazing place, which i was in australia, man

The Acceleration Studies Foundation is wrapping up its work on a first version of the Metaverse Roadmap, a document designed to look ahead at the next 10 years of the metaverse, and to be updated along the way. (I participated in the meetings that gathered thoughts for the Roadmap back in May.) To celebrate, the ASF is holding a pre-release party at EyeBeam in New York City on Thursday, August 10. The party is free and open to all, but space is limited, so RSVP on Jerry Paffendorf’s Sheep blog to reserve your ticket.

EyeBeam, of course, is the cool hacker’s collective (actually, it “engages cultural dialogue at the intersection of the arts and sciences,” but we know what they’re really up to over there) that produced the OpenGL Extractor, which let’s you export stuff from virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and even 3D-print your avatar — and which has caused a lot of agita among some SL residents concerned about its use as an IP-stealing device. Mike Frumin, who helps run the place, has been a great friend of various metaversal initiatives, and was kind enough to help Jerry secure the space for the party.

I’ll definitely be there — which is good, since part of the event involves an on-stage conversation between me and Prokofy Neva, who’s consistently been one of the most outspoken monitors of the metaverse, and who brings a unique and important viewpoint to the development of Second Life culture, technology and society. Let me know if there are any topics you’d like to see discussed during the event and I’ll see if I can get them in. See you there.

culture, events, metaverse, Second Life, virtual worlds, World of Warcraft

Futuresonic celebrates this year its 10th anniversary with an amazing line-up of performances, exhibitions and events across Manchester city centre. This festival of electronic art and music will take place on July 20-23. That's very soon (only got my ticket yesterday!)

There will be the Social Technologies Summit, a series of conferences that explore "a whole new way of doing things in the air". I'm particularly thrilled at the idea of making a fool of myself at the Social Art panel. How will i not? I'll be speaking with two persons i admire a lot: super clever Jose Luis de Vicente, critic and curator of major new media art festivals (Sonar, Art Futura, OFFF, etc.) and Anthony Dunne (his name has been mentioned about 100 times in this blog, he's Head of Interaction Design, Royal College of Art and the author of Design Noir, the Secret Life of Electronic Objects (together with FIona Raby) and Hertzian Tales. i nevertheless think that he should be fined for having such an annoying website).

Other talks include:
- a keynote by Toshio Iwai himself;
- Collaborative, Creative and Commercial Digital Mapping with another favourite of mine, Masaki Fujihata, but also Richard Peckham, and Steve Coast.
- Contested Spaces and RFID with a talk by Professor Tim Cresswell followed by a discussion of one of the most contested technologies of modern times, RFID. A session featuring Inke Arns, Rob van Kranenburg and Drew Hemment.
- Iterative Architecture (Built On An Internet Of Things). With speakers like Tom Carden, Matt Webb and Stanislav Roudavski this session should be both fun and brain-challenging,
- Social Music with Atau Tanaka, Last.fm, Share NYC.

There's more: two Urban Play exhibition. One is dedicated to mobile, locative and mapping technologies, the other to Musical Instruments. Both run from July 20 to 29 at the Museum of Science and Industry.

ROOMIKS CUBE is a multichannel panoramic A/V performance. Part of the ongoing MUX A/V series, this rare event is a collaborative effort between live video performance artists C-TRL Labs and NY based electronic composer Caural.

Through its programme of presentation, debate and play WLT explores how technologies enable and enhance creative engagement.

ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art)2006, an international conference held in conjunction with ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of art on the Edge, will be held in San Jose, CA, August 7-13 2006. Both events are “situated at the critical intersection of art and technology.” ISEA2006 re:mote is a symposium within ISEA2006 and is issuing a Call for Proposals.

ISEA2006 re:mote, August 10-12, 2006

International new media art discourse is stimulated by festivals and events like ISEA2006 which form temporary cultural centers to represent, present and discuss networked and digital technologies. However by forming temporary centers we also tacitly create a notion of a periphery - with temporary centers also come temporary peripheries. In new media culture this is a paradox as much new media art, theory, and discourse reflects on the network itself and the elusiveness and redundancy of centers and peripheries.

ISEA2006 re:mote attempts to dissuade us from imposing these distinctions by providing a platform for artists, commentators, curators, performers and theorists to participate in ISEA 2006 via online and pre-recorded media.

ISEA2006 re:mote Open Call

ISEA2006 re:mote is inviting media spaces and individual artists, theorists, and curators from around the world to speak or perform via remote technologies to the audience at ISEA. Presentations to be directed at the four themes of ISEA 2006. Participants are invited to present or perform on topics included within the ISEA symposium, and onsite audience interaction with the presenters is also encouraged. ISEA re:mote will focus on presenting media spaces and people that would otherwise be excluded from presenting their work at ISEA due to financial, political, or logistical reasons. [More….]

Originally by Helen Varley Jamieson from Rhizome.org Raw at July 5, 2006, 00:53, published by Marisa S. Olson

Type opportunity, announcement
Genre event
Keywords conference, broadcast, art world, access, globalization

Generator.x is a conference and exhibition examining the current role of software and generative strategies in art and design

hey ho lets go

Workshop: Near field interactions
This is a call for proposals for a workshop on user-centred interactions with the internet of things at Nordichi 2006, October 14 and 15, 2006 in Oslo, Norway.
http://nordichi.net.dynamicweb.dk/

The user-centred Internet of Things
The so-called ‘Internet of Things’ is a vision of the future of networked things that share a record of their interactions with context, people and other objects. The evolution of networking to include objects occupying space and moving within the physical world presents an urgent design challenge for new kinds of networked social practice. The challenge for design is to overcome the current overarching emphasis on business and technology that has largely ignored practices that fall outside of operational efficiency scenarios.

What is imminently needed is a user-centred approach to understand the physical, contextual and social relationships between people and the networked things they interact with.

The mobile device as early enabler
The mobile phone is likely to play a key role in the early adoption of the internet of things. Mobile devices offer ubiquitous networks and interfaces, enabling otherwise offline objects at the edges of the network. Near Field Communication (NFC: http://www.nfc-forum.org/aboutnfc/) is a mobile technology that has been designed to integrate networked services into physical space and objects. NFC introduces a sense of ‘touch’, where interactions between devices are initiated by physical proximity.

In use, the mobile phone brings with it a history of personal and social activities and contexts. It is in this evolution that we see user-agency and social motivation emerging as an interesting area within the internet of things.

Workshop goals
In this workshop we intend to build knowledge around the hands-on problems and opportunities of designing user-centred interactions with networked objects. Through a process of ‘making things’ we will look closely at the kinds of interactions we may want to design with networked objects, and what roles the mobile phone may play in this.

We will focus on the design of simple, effective and innovative interactions between mobile phones and physical objects, rather than focusing on technical or network issues.

The primary questions for the workshop are:

What kinds of common interactions will emerge as networked objects become everyday?
What role will the mobile phone have to play in these interactions?
How do we encourage playful, experimental and exploratory use of networked things?

Some secondary questions are:

What interaction models can we bring to the internet of things? Do the fields of embodied interaction, tangible, social, ubiquitous or pervasive computing cover the required ground for designers?

What new kinds of social practices could emerge out of the possibilities presented by networked things?

How will the physical form of everyday objects and spaces be transformed by networks and near field interactions? How this would be reflected in users’ behavior?

How can the design of physical objects help in overcoming potential information or interaction overload, and how does search or findability change when in a physical context?

How can we move beyond commonsensical features such as object activation or findability?

What kind of user-communities will co-opt the technology and how will they hack, adjust and re-form it for their needs?

Workshop structure
Each workshop day will begin with a keynote presentation from invited experts. On the first day, participants will each give a short presentation of their position paper, no longer than 5 minutes.

Then groups of 3-4 people, each with different skills and backgrounds will then work on concepts, scenarios and prototypes. Prototypes may take the form of physical models, scenarios or enactments. We encourage the use of our wood, plastic and rapid prototyping workshops to create physical prototypes of selected concepts. We will provide workshop assistants for the creation of physical models.

Outcomes
The outcomes should be in a range of implementation styles allowing for a variety of outputs that speaks to a wide audience. A report will be written on the workshop, and published on the Touch project website and in other relevant channels.

Call for participation
The workshop is open to participants from human factors, mobile technology, social science, interaction and industrial design. Practitioners and those with industrial experience are strongly encouraged. Prior research work on embodied interaction, social and tangible computing would be particularly relevant. Participants will be selected based on their relevance to the workshop, and the overall balance of the group. Space is limited to 25 participants.

Call for short position papers
Application is by position paper no longer than two pages. The position paper can be visual or experimental in design and content. The themes should cover an issue that is relevant to the design of interactions with everyday objects.

Deadline for papers is 1 August, selected participants will be notified on the 9 August. The workshop itself is October 14 and 15, 2006.

Papers and any questions should be submitted to timo (at) elasticspace (dot) com before 1 August.

Organisers
Timo Arnall is a designer and researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design (AHO). Timo’s research looks at practices around ubiquitous computing in urban space. At the moment his work focuses on the personal and social use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technologies, looking for potential interactions with objects and city spaces through mobile devices. Previously his research looked at flyposting and stickering in public space, suggesting possible design strategies for combining physical marking and digital spatial annotation. Timo leads the research project Touch at AHO, looking at the use of mobile technology and Near Field Communication.

Julian Bleecker is a Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division, part of the USC School of Cinema-Television. Bleecker’s work focuses on emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, particularly in the areas of pervasive media, mobile media, social networks and entertainment. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in computer-human interaction. His doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Santa Cruz is on technology, entertainment and culture.

Nicolas Nova is a Ph.D. student at the CRAFT (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) working on the CatchBob! project. His current research is directed towards the understanding of how people use location-awareness information when collaborating in mobile settings, with a peculiar focus on pervasive games. After an undergraduate degree in cognitive sciences, he completed a master in human-computer interaction and educational technologies at TECFA (University of Geneva, Switzerland). His work is at the crossroads of cognitive psychology/ergonomics and human-computer interaction; relying on those disciplines to gain better understanding of how people use technology such as mobile and ubiquitous computing.

Technorati Tags: blogjects, conference, design, innovation, mobile, motility, RFID, sensors, spimes, transdisciplinary

Two Sites, Two Cities

FurtherNoise.org Presents: Month Of Sundays Live A/V Internet Mixing. Featuring John Kannenberg & Glenn Bach. Open Mix led by Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett (Furtherfield & HTTP). Post performance soundscapes by Alex Young (Furthernoise). Date & Time: 16.00 - 18.00 hrs BST; Where: E:vent - 96 Teesdale Street, London E2 6PU.

As part of the Month Of Sundays series of live A/V internet performances Furthernoise.org is hosting this unique event featuring a cross continent A/V performance by Chicago based John Kannenberg mixing in real time with Glenn Bach who will be performing from his home in Long Beach, California. The performance is based on their Two Cities project, which began in 2003 using sounds, photos, objects and data collected on Glenn and John's daily walking commutes to compare and contrast the environments of their respective hometowns.

It will take place in the online file mixing platform Visitors Studio
and projected, amplified into the gallery space from www.visitorsstudio.org

Come and join us at E:vent: Bring your laptops and media files and collaborate. Following the performance, Furtherfield artists Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett will lead an open mix where audiences both online and in the gallery can join in by uploading and mixing their own audio & visual files in an open collaborative mix. Files can be mp3, swf, flv and jpg and must be a maximum of 2OOK.

There will also be free refreshments and post performance Soundcapes by Alex Young who's album 'Helicoids' is the new net release on Furthernoise.org.

As well as being shown at E:vent, the afternoons performances will be also broadcast, in real-time, online:- at The Watershed Media Centre, Bristol. The Point CDC Theatre, New York.

Curated by Roger Mills. Furthernoise & Visitors Studio are Furtherfield.org projects, supported by Arts Council England.

BIOGRAPHIES

Chicago-based sonic and visual artist John Kannenberg works with a variety of themes including primal natural forces, spirituality and mindful contemplation, melancholy and nostalgia, abstracted narrative tales, and the confluence of sonic and visual art. His major appearances include the Spark Festival 2006 (Minneapolis), so.cal.sonic 2005 (Long Beach), ISEA 2004 (Tallinn), and the Placard Festival 2003 (New York). John is the creator and curator of Stasisfield.com, an experimental music label and digital art space presenting works by a diverse collection of artists from around the globe.

Based in Long Beach, California, Glenn Bach is an active multidisiciplinary artist influenced by the act of mindful walking and environmental sound, Bach has performed at Field Effects (San Francisco), the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, and the Schick Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, NY) and has curated a house concert series, Quiet (2003), the week-long so.cal.sonic festival (2005) and is the founder of the research group Pedestrian Culture. His current project is a poem sequence, Atlas Peripatetic, inspired by an extensive mapping of sounds on his morning walk.

Ruth Catlow is an artist and works as co director of Furtherfield, formed and run in partnership with artist, Marc Garrett since 1997. Ruth works with networked media in public physical spaces and on the Internet. exploring net art with new communities (of artists and audiences) with less reliance on existing, traditional art world hierarchies, developing independent grass-roots expression and representation. She is exploring the potential of current network technology for promoting distributed creativity which raises a whole series of issues by giving rise to a more permeable boundary between established arbiters of culture, artists and audiences radically changing the life of the artwork in the world, and the ways in which people come across it.

Marc Garrett is an Internet artist, writer, street artist, activist, curator, educationalist and musician. In a constant state of being renascent. He share's no allegiance to any one form of art or expression. 'For me, art, or rather creativity, is an intuitive strategy that involves learning, questioning, progressive thought and putting playful explorations into action'. Emerging in the late 80's from the streets exploring creativity via agit-art tactics, Marc declares his own and humanity's seemingly perpetual dysfunction. Consciously using unofficial platforms such as the streets, pirate radio, net broadcasts, BBS systems, performance, intervention, events, pamphlets, warehouses and gallery spaces. In the early nineties he was co-sysop with Heath Bunting for Cybercafe BBS.

The international symposium on wikis is taking place in Denmark in August this year.

The invited talk lineup is excellent: there will be talks by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Angela Beesley (“How and Why Wikipedia Works”), Doug Engelbart and Eugene Eric Kim (“The Augmented Wiki”), Mark Bernstein (“Intimate Information”) and Ward Cunningham (“Design Principles of Wikis”).

Like the first year, there’s a research paper track, panels (“Wikis in Education” and “The Future of Wikis”), and workshops. There will also be an Open Space track throughout the meeting.

Today (June 19) is the last day for early registration. The chair, Dirk Riehle, informs me that “you can register but don’t have to pay right away. So even if you are waiting for travel permission from your boss, you can already register and pay later (or cancel with no hassles).” Which I’m going to do right away, as a matter of fact. :) The registration page is here.

O'Reilly's Media Where 2.0 conference is where it's at for location-based developments. Check out the Schedule, Speakers, Events, Wiki, Blogs and Sponsors.

Announcements this week include Skyhook Wireless which announced the launch of their Skyhook Developer's Network. The Developer's Network will allow solution providers to build location-based products without the need of additional hardware such as a GPS.

WiFiPlanet says the software developer's kit will target applications written in the C programming language to run on Windows operating systems, including Windows Mobile handhelds.

The cornerstone for the Skyhook Developer's Network is the Developer's Dashboard, a web-based support infrastructure that will give LBS developer's access to the Skyhook software-only positioning APIs and software code, documentation, release notes, community forums and technical support.

Their applications include a Skype E911 Plug-in, Location-Based Search, Navigation and Sharing, Location-based sticky notes, Photo tagging with EyeFi and area/code Big Games.

Skyhook's service can act as a virtual GPS, providing latitude and longitude in standard NMEA format. That allows developers to leverage location interfaces that they have already developed. Skyhook says it gives developers the ability to add auto-location query functionality and incorporate a complete location profile -- latitude, longitude, full street address -- through a simple API.

Skyhook's main competitor is probably Navizon, which uses a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular towers.

Related DailyWireless articles include; City Clouds: Becoming The World Cup.

The Lovebytes International Festival of Digital Art and Media takes place annually in Sheffield, UK, during March/April, bringing together leading computer programmers, graphic designers, film-makers and musicians from all over the world.

The Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards are a celebration of the very best in citizen journalism in the UK over the last 12 months.

As Jordan Nealy blows out four candles on her birthday cake in South Carolina, Irina Slutsky interviews a technology executive in Texas, and Helene Cardona recites a poem from a train platform in Los Angeles.

What's the common thread between these seemingly unrelated acts? They're all early April entries on three different video blogs, and together they illustrate the diversity emerging from the flourishing world of video blogging, which will take center stage this weekend in San Francisco at the Vloggercon conference.

What: Two days of discussion and hands-on learning focused on improving audio, video and Flash storytelling skills.

Who: Journalists charged with producing multimedia content for online news publications. Whether you are a complete newbie, somewhat trained, or pretty good and want to get better – this workshop will have something for
you.

When: August 11-12, 2006

Where: Minneapolis, University of Minnesota School of Journalism

Why: If you don’t know that, you probably don’t need to come!

How: Mornings, we'll talk about how to get things done. Topics include what we know about digital storytelling use and usability, online storytelling concepts, tools and training, working with your newsroom. Afternoons, there
will be 3 hands-on learning tracks: Audio slide shows, video and Flash. Each participant can follow 2 of 3 tracks (one per afternoon).

Faculty: Joe Weiss – Raleigh News and Observer Online, Mindy McAdams – University of Florida, Nora Paul – University of Minnesota, Regina McCombs – StarTribune.com

Hosted by: University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Institute for New Media Studies and Minnesota Journalism Center, StarTribune.com, and NPPA Region

Cost: $90 including continental breakfast and lunch both days. (Optional third day, if there is enough interest, will be an additional $50.00)

Limited to the first 50 completed applications

If you’d like to join us in August, get your application in now…sign up at:
www.multimediaproducers.org

Movement / Mobility 2.0

Aula 2006 is an event (Wednesday, June 14) about the direction society, culture and technology are heading in. The theme Movement points to mobile 2.0 (mobility meets web 2.0), the overlapping of the physical and the virtual, and the social movement-like nature of new technologies. On a personal level, movement is about not staying still but taking action to shape the big global issues we face in the future.

We'll hear about movement from Clay Shirky the New York University professor who coined the term social software, Alastair Curtis the new Head of Design at Nokia, Martin Varsavsky founder of the global Wi-Fi network FON, and venture capitalist Joichi Ito who has invested in several successful second-generation Web companies including, SixApart and Technorati.

Movement also means a section of a piece of music, and the gathering will include interventions in music and dance. This event will be less of a conference, more an intimate gathering of people to discuss, detail and experience critical topics.

The event will take place at Bio Rex theatre in Helsinki. Attendance is free and open to the public - no advance registration is required. It is also possible to attend the dinner following the event at restaurant Via. Table reservations must be made in advance. After dinner, the event will continue with movement on the dance floor at Ahjo club in Hotel Klaus K to beats by Jukka Perko and Samuli Kosminen.

For enquiries, please contact Andreea Chelaru at andreea[at]fjord.fi.

Though we wish we could accommodate everyone in person, we won’t be able to but that doesn’t mean you can’t be a part of the fun. We will be video streaming both rooms on Sat/Sun, including an IRC chat. You can also come to all our outside events and parties where most of the schmoozing happens anyway. Hell, make your own event and post it on the wiki. This is our conference to make.

zork + voip + asterix + festival, if you can think it up, it's possible to execute

Join Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer) from 1-5pm for a public workshop presenting and field-testing AIR (Area’s Immediate Reading), a work in progress being developed as the 2005 Social Sculpture Commission awarded by Eyebeam and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

[CALL FOR PARTICIPATION]

MOBILE ASIA COMPETITION 2006: ORGANIZED BY ART CENTER NABI, SEOUL, KOREA :: The progress of mobile technology characterized by mobility, connectivity, and dispersion seems to resonate with the diasporic experiences of Asians who are mobile, dispersed yet connected with each other through socio-cultural dynamics and relations. With the mobile market and its culture expanding beyond Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan to the Southeast Asia, the need should be raised for reflecting upon the currency of culture and the urgency of new identities that are evolving with mobile technology in Asian region.

Mobile Asia Competition 2006 hosted by Art Center Nabi pays attention to the role of media makers and artists in articulating and expressing the Asian mobile cultures. Artists and media makers always appropriate and challenge the given technology through creative ideas and critical practices to broaden the space of possibilities. Especially, the recent emerging ubiquitous mobile environments requires both popular sentiment and critical thoughts. Mobile Asia competition 2006 investigates the new forms of Asian identities and cultures in the creative works of artists and designers who dare to experiment, play, and wrestle with the mobile technologies.

CATEGORY

1. Works made to be viewed and experienced on mobile devices
(1) Game, Interactive Art
(2) Screen-based arts : Animation, Motion Graphic, Documentary, Music Video, Narrative film, etc.

2. Works made by mobile phones such as camera phone, video phone.

3. Idea proposal for wireless art projects on the theme of ‘connectivity and social network’. Art project that expresses the theme of social network and connectivity while exploring new and artistic ways of using diverse personal media such as mobile phones, laptop, PDA and internet network.

PRIZE: The total award money is US $20.000 and the selected works will be exhibited in various on and offline venues.

Category 1 & 2 (Mobile content): US $10.000

- One winner from each category will be awarded with $5000.
- The works by winners and other selected works will be screened and exhibited at Art Center Nabi, ResFest Korea 2006 (digital film festival), and Korean mobile phone service including DMB channel.

Category 3 (Wireless art proposal): US $10.000

- One winner will be awarded with $5000.
- Additional $5000 and technical support will be offered for the realization of the proposal if the work is decided to be realized for the exhibition at Art Center Nabi.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

.Category 1 & 2 seek for completed works, and Category 3 for project proposal.
.Projects that are under development will also be considered for Category 3.
.Project proposal should relate to the theme and topics of the Award
.The works that are already presented or won in other competitions are not eligible for entry.

_HOW TO SUBMIT

.All submissions should be processed through the official online platform.
.Biography, project proposal, and other supporting materials (image, sound, movie files) should be uploaded in appropriate format indicated in each section.
.However, the works applying for Category 1 & 2 should be sent via registered mail in the format of CD-Rom, DVD, Mini DV tape with a copy of filled-out online registration form printed from the website.

Please go to http://www.nabi.or.kr/pages/submission.asp to complete your submission. (all submissions)

Mail address (Category 1 & 2 only):
Art Center Nabi [Att: Mobile Asia Competition 2006]
99 Seorin-dong, Jongro-ku, SK bldg. 4th fl.
Seoul, Korea
110-110

_IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for Submissions
.Category 1 & 2: August 31, 2006
.Category 3: July 31, 2006

Notification of winners September 15, 2006

CONTACT: For more information, please visit www.mobileasia.org.
Or contact at mobileasia[at]mobileasia.org

Art Center Nabi
99 Seorin-dong, Jongro-ku, SK bldg. 4th fl.
Seoul, Korea
110-110
www.nabi.or.kr

"Culture, Commerce, and Public Media: A New Forum for Creators" addresses how commercial and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media can make their materials—current productions, and legacy content—more openly available. June 5-6, 2006.

Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions

Keynote: The Naked Interface - Liberating Brain, Body and Digital Interactions by Luke Williams: Friday, July 21, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm.; Webvisions 2006, Explore the Future of the WebJuly 20 to 21, 2006 at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.

Throughout the electronic age, people have become accustomed to interacting with digital media indirectly, mediated through screens and peripheral devices. But now, as digital technology becomes invisibly embedded in everyday things, the "feeling" of everyday things is also increasingly becoming embedded in digital technology.

In many senses, physical objects are becoming more important. In an immediate way, they can help us define new systems of relationships with digital information. This presentation will examine how perceptions and gestures formed through our experiences with physical products can effectively bring liberty to the relationship between brain, body and digital media interface.

What the audience will learn: :: How patterns and archetypes from product design now frame new ways for people to orientate themselves around information. :: The principle of stimulating one sense through another to create multi-sensory interactions. :: New developments at the collision point between "real world" objects and "digital interfaces" – the touch screen.

The main goal of the workshop is to develop an understanding of how mobile devices (particularly mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs) can be used as interaction devices. We will provide a forum to share information, results, and ideas on current research in this area. Furthermore we aim to develop new ideas on how mobile phones can be exploited for new forms of interaction with the environment. We will bring together researchers and practitioners who are concerned with design, development, and implementation of new applications and services using personal mobile devices as user interfaces.

little reminder for any infosthetic developer out there: for the first time, an 'infovis art exhibition' will be organized at the IEEE Information Visualization 2006 Symposium this year (Oct 29 - Nov 3, Baltimore). the deadline for entries is June 30.
"this exhibit aims to examine the merging of artistic intention & visualization technique, & is looking for artwork that reveals data patterns in aesthetic, innovative ways."
any questions can be directed to the organizers via email.
[computer.org]

ISEA2006 Early Bird Registration is only $250.00

Seven days of art and interconnectivity
ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006
Downtown San Jose; August 7-13, 2006.

1. Keynote: Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi, India http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/CV.html
2. Almost 200 artists from around the world exhibiting and presenting
3. 70 papers and artist presentations during the symposium.
4. Talk-back live and really gain the benefit of the collective knowledge.
5. Workshops and Tours: Wetware Hackers, Free Soil, IBM/Almaden Research Labs, Landstream, From Crisis to Bliss, Computer Vision for Artists, San Jose Remixed-Open Source Interactive Narrative, Signal Process-Sound in Open Space, Transparent City, Social Memory-Documenting ISEA2006.
6. See Survival Research Labs LIVE! Legendary!
7. See Peter Greenaway LIVE! VJ Tour – Tulse Luper

http://www.metroactive.com/metro/05.17.06/isea-0620.html

ISEA2006 Early Bird Registration is only $250.00!!!

Click Here to Sign Up

http://01sj.org/content/blogcategory/121/130/

And A FREE COPY of Leonardo, journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, will be distributed to every Early Bird registrant of the ISEA conference (through June 15th). Leonardo 39:4 will be devoted to the work of the seven Pacific Rim working groups, featuring new media educational programs and artists from the Pacific-Asia region. The print issue of the journal, due to be released in conjunction with the symposium, will include statements by artists as well as articles by cultural theorists looking at issues germane to the seven working group topics, plus introductory texts by the working group chairs.

Visit http://01sj.org/ to register.

National Day of Out(R)age | Save Access

Not only are the telcos giving over your call records to the NSA but public access and the like are in trouble with National Video Franchising legislation in consideration by Congress being pushed by the telcos.

VOiP Monitor is live from ISPCON (Schedule, Exhibitors & Press Releases).

 

ISPCON, the leading event for wired and wireless ISPs, kicked off to a great start yesterday as industry luminaries spoke to packed rooms in five instructive and profitable session tracks, the first of two keynote sessions received excellent response and the exhibit hall opened its doors. ISPCON Spring 2006 is being held in the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, MD, and will continue through Thursday, May 18.

To begin the day, speakers from a variety of aspects of the Internet held general sessions on a number of topics including dial-up, Ethernet, SARBOX, wireless, Exchange hosting services, VoIP and CLEC strategies.

The general sessions are split into five tracks including: Access, Services, Strategy, Operations and Business. The first round of sessions has had extremely positive feedback and the remaining speakers are sure to maintain that momentum in the remaining two days of the conference.

The opening keynote session, entitled "Muni Networks: Partnering for Affordable Broadband," was delivered by Bill Tolpegin, vice president, corporate development and planning, municipal networks division of Earthlink Inc., and Raghu Rau, senior vice president, global marketing and strategy, Motorola Networks. These two industry leaders discussed their own partnership in municipal wi-fi, and how the Internet industry can collaboratively drive the use of wireless networks and affordable broadband.

The second keynote is titled "Neutrality Reality" and will be delivered by David S. Isenberg (blog), principal of isen.com LLC. In what is sure to be a profoundly enlightening and entertaining keynote, Mr. Isenberg will address what lies ahead for the Internet industry and economy as the issue of network neutrality looms.

The exhibit hall opened at 3:00 p.m. with the energetic buzz of over 70 exhibitors from all facets of the industry. Corporate host Motorola, who also sponsored the ISPCONNECT attendee communication system, displayed prominently in the center of the room. Other exhibitors included everyone.net, Verio, PEER 1, Sendmail Inc., Mirapoint Inc., Tucows Inc., Hostopia and Web Host Industry Review, among many others.

 

The Early Bird Gets the Discount!

Coming to San Jose, California, August 7-13, Seven Days of Art and Interconnectivity: ISEA2006 Symposium Registration Launches 33% discount for Early Bird Registration through June 15th. Registration: Hotels: Press Release.

Early Bird registrants also receive 20% discount on ticketed events including blockbusters like Peter Greenaway, Tulse Luper Live VJ version, Survival Research Laboratories, Builders Association/dbox, Super Vision, and Ryoji Ikeda's North American premiere of data.matrix.

The most progressive artists, cultural producers, media theorists and curators from around the world will be gathering in the birthplace of computing innovation - Silicon Valley - to share and discuss the latest ideas and practices about art and digital culture.

The ISEA2006 Symposium is taking place in conjunction with the inaugural ZeroOne San Jose: Global Festival of Art on the Edge and offers attendees an immersive, interactive, exposure to the art, ideas, theories, and new developments in the field of interactive media and digital art as it relates to the symposium themes of Community Domain, Interactive City, Transvergence, and the Pacific Rim.

Online pre-symposium paper abstracts and a pre-publishing model for Symposium presentations and participation, allows the public to join the discussions online both before and during the Symposium. This innovative structure is designed to enable lively, free conversations across disciplines, ideologies, and philosophical frame-works.

For One Week Only ISEA Registrants will have the first opportunity to purchase event tickets - tickets that are sure to sell out - in advance of General Public ticket launch. May 12 - May 19th, ISEA2006 Registration

Click Here to Sign Up.

About the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts: The Inter-Society for Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies. The ISEA Symposium is an international conference on electronic art that is held every two years in different locations around the world and attracts attendees from over 50 countries. The Thirteenth International Symposium on Electronic Arts is being held in San Jose, California, August 7-13, 2006, in conjunction with the inaugural biennial ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.

About: ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge is an innovative, ground-breaking biennial art festival in the Silicon Valley designed to show exhibits, performances, workshops, and events that have been created using the newest developments in contemporary art practice. The festival's themed projects examine and reflect issues and experiences of everyday life. Artistic and revolutionary digital culture elements are woven throughout. A serious art event, ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge provides academics, artists, and technology enthusiasts an inside look at new territories in creative imagination and inventiveness. However, the event is also designed with facets of learning, play, and virtual technology that make it an enjoyable experience for families, students, teens, underground culture enthusiasts, and explorers of new millennium digital culture alike.

Many thanks to our sponsors: Adobe Systems, City of San Jose, San Jose State University, Comerica Bank, IDEO, Montgomery Hotel-Paragon Restaurant, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Knight-Ridder, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, Sun Microsystems Inc., Flora Family Foundation, Arts Council Silicon Valley, IBM, Intel Corporation, DIVCO, Inc., and all the individual contributors and volunteers that make ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006 possible.

Steve Dietz
Director, ZeroOne: The Network
Director, ISEA2006 Symposium +
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge: August 7-13, 2006

Following up on my previous post about upcoming conferences, here’s another batch of conferences of interest to GTxA readers.

ACM Multimedia 2006 Interactive Arts Program
ACM Multimedia is the premier annual multimedia conference. The ACM MM Interactive Arts Program brings together the arts and multimedia communities to explore, discuss, and push the limits of both multimedia technology through the arts, and the arts through multimedia technology. They’re looking for both papers and interactive art exhibits. ACM MM will be held in Santa Barbara, California (USA), October 22-28, 2006. Submissions due June 1.

Future Play 2006
They’re looking for both paper and game submissions. The keynote speakers are Ken Perlin (NYU) and Don Daglow (Stormfront Studios). Future Play 2006 will be held October 10-12 in London, Ontario, Canada. Submissions are due July 28.

Gathering of Animated Life-like Agents
GALA 2006. The place to present your interactive virtual character in action! Special track and Jury Award of 350 euro for students. On-line showcase for the best entries in three categories. GALA 2006 will be held as part of the IVA 2006 conference in Marina del Rey, California (USA), August 21-23. Submissions due June 15.

Just got this info from Nick Fortugno at gameLab on what looks like a great game festival -- they are looking for submissions for those of you interested in Big Games!

MISSION
The Come Out & Play Festival seeks to provide a forum for new types of public games and play. We want to bring together a public eager to rediscover the world around them through play with designers interested in producing innovative new games and experiences.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
Come Out & Play is the first festival dedicated to street games. It is three days of play, talks and celebration, all focused on street games. The festival will have a headquarters in downtown Manhattan where participants can learn about upcoming games and see documentation of completed games. The games themselves will be run in a variety of public locations around New York City. From massive multi-player walk-in events to carefully constructed play performances, there will be something for every type of player. Throughout the festival players and designers will have the chance to interact during games and panels and jointly conceive the future of this growing form.

Mark Jenkins, the Wooster Collective, the Graffiti Research Lab, and Geek Graffiti.

Eyebeam and the Wooster Collective present a night of technology based graffiti projects. Mark Jenkins, the Graffiti Research Lab, and students from the Parsons Geek Graffiti course show a range of experimental work in new materials and techniques for urban communication.

Monday, May 22nd
5:30 – 8pm
Eyebeam
540 W. 21st Street,
New York, NY 10011

Originally from Wooster Collective / A Celebration of Street Art, ReBlogged by Joel Holmberg on May 16, 2006 at 03:19 PM

[bliki | What is a bliki?]

7th Annual Organizers' Collaborative
Grassroots Use of Technology Conference
Saturday, June 17, 2006 -- 8:30 to 5:30
U of Massachusetts, Boston
Wheatley Hall - Snowden Auditorium-Register

Schedule

We aim to present tools that make the sometimes challenging tasks associated with nonprofits and organizing much easier to accomplish, so that our groups and movements can better achieve their goals.

presentation at this conference will be delivered by folks from the Citizen Action Team., who used grassroots technology to organize aid for hurricane Katrina relief victims.

CONFIRMED WORKSHOPS
Here are the workshops confirmed as of 5/9:

o register your domain name and find a place to put your web site -- Jamie Mcclelland, May First Technology Collective
* Technology Decision-Making for the Non-Technical Executive -- Alissa Fencsik, Harbinger Partners
* Changing the Look and Feel of Your Content Management System -- Ben Dimaggio, IT Consultant
* Simple, Cheap and Secure Options for Credit Card Donations -- Dan MacNeil, Community Software Labs
* Getting Your Message out in the Age of Spam -- Panel convened by Jamie McClelland of MayFirst
* Effective websites for community groups: tips and tools using Plone, an open source CMS-- Nate Aune, Jazkarta Consulting
* Moving from the desktop to hosted web publishing: a case study in coordination of a multi-state grassroots campaign -- Cliff Graves and Josh Myles, IT Consultants
* Helping Your Computer System Grow Up -- Adam Frost, ComputerCareAndLearning.com
* Organizer to Organizer: What do you do with all that data in the database -- Sarah Bennett with Eric Weltman and Amy Mello
* Tech Workers Unite! Organizing the people who make technology happen -- Jennifer Doe, Mass Jobs With Justice
* Leveraging your Members for Political Change -- Marc Eisenberg and Steve Daigneault, Kintera

Second Life Virtual Festival

While E3 rages on over Stateside, here in the UK it's wellies and arm-waving in the Dundee sunshine: Radio 1's One Big Weekend, all weekend, all free, all festival fabulous: starting tomorrow. And if you're nowhere near Dundee or didn't get a ticket, you can still join in, because the Radio 1 team have only gone and built a virtual festival in the also-free Second Life:

Every virtual festival-goer will get a wee digital radio to take away with them, which will broadcast Radio 1 in-game, wherever you are.

There's also, I hear, these Radio 1 teeshirts for your avatars. And dancing. And a chance that you could appear on-screen at the actual festival - the jumbotrons may or may not take screengrabs of the in-game festivalgoers.

Obvious disclaimer: I work for the BBC, and I work with the guys who made this happen, and I TOTALLY {heart} them. This blog is still all my own opinions and not necessarily those of my employer. Disclaimer over.

If you're in there, say hi! Just load up SL, search for Radio 1, and head over - but not now, because it opens tomorrow morning, GMT. Or IM me, and I'll teleport you there: Crystaltips Pavlova. [Posted by Alice on Wonderland] [Related]

On Monday, May 15, the Online News Association will begin accepting entries for the 2006 Online Journalism Awards.

Deadline for entries is June 15. In yesterday's ONA newsletter, outgoing ONA executive director Tom Regan emphasized that there will be no extensions this year. So if you want to enter, make sure you get your entry form in on time!

Note that the entry form is not yet online, but will be available shortly on the ONA site.

Paid Content is again updating its list of media conferences. Panels for all!

Hope to see you there.

Technorati Tags: omds, beyondbroadcast

I'll be in Boston this Thursday eve - Sunday for Beyond Broadcast and OMDS II. If you're attending and would like to chat, email me at elichapman at gmail dot com. I'm looking forward to finally meeting Terry Heaton and having half the unmediated crew in my hometown. Hopefully we'll make it to The Publick House.

This Refresh! archive forms a unique educational resource for new media practitioners, historians and learners. Recognizing the increasing significance of media art for our culture, the Refresh! conference on the Histories of Media Art discussed for the first time the history of media art within the interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts of the histories of art.

Leonardo/ISAST, Banff New Media Institute the Database for Virtual Art and UNESCO DigiArts collaborated to produce the first international art history conference covering art and new media, art and technology, art-science interaction, and the history of media as pertinent to contemporary art.

Call for Participants

Mobile Processing Workshop: INTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS FOR MOBILE PHONES WITH FRANCIS LI--Lisbon, Portugal, 15 - 19 May 06, Espaço Atmosferas, Rua da Boavista, 67, Lisbon.

The mobile phone has reached a level of adoption that far exceeds that of the personal computer. As a result, they are an emerging platform for new services and applications that have the potential to change the way we live and communicate.

Mobile Processing is an open source project that aims to drive this innovation by increasing the audience of potential designers and developers through a free, open source prototyping tool based on Processing and the open sharing of ideas and information. This workshop will introduce the Mobile Processing project and prototyping tool and provide hands-on instruction and experience with programming custom applications for the mobile phone.

Contents:

- Introduction to Mobile Processing, phone hardware and development platforms.
- Survey of projects with the phone as both the platform and subject for new forms of interactive applications and electronic art.
- Basic programming and prototyping concepts with 2D graphics and animation.
- Phone input/output handling including keyboard, camera, sound and vibration.
- Internet networking. Parsing and generating XML-formatted data.
- Text messaging and Bluetooth networking.

The workshop will be practical and at the end every participant will develop a personal exercise.

Equipment

Windows highly recommended, but Mac OS X is acceptable, with built-in or USB Bluetooth adapters recommended. Mobile phones with support for Java and Bluetooth recommended.

Participants are encouraged to bring their laptops.

Schedule

20 hours: 5 sessions X 4 h
15 to 19 of May 06 - 18h-22h

Target

Basic programming skills, familiarity with Processing recommended but not required.

About Francis Li: San Francisco, USA, Author of Mobile Processing. He is an interaction designer and software engineer with a passion for working with emerging technologies. In both academia and industry, for both research and production, has participated in the design, development, and evaluation of interactive systems with a focus on user interface design and human-computer interaction. Has a Masters in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and a B.A. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Price and Inscriptions: 250 euros

Inscriptions: visit www.atmosferas.net/mobileprocessing/index_en.html

Sponsor: Movensis
Support: www.etic.pt

About Atmosferas, Digital Arts Center: Atmosferas is a digital arts center involved in the production of experimental new media projects. Atmosferas commissions experimental projects, organizes workshops and conferences about current themes on the front line of the creative uses of the new media, created a TV show about electronic arts and promotes an yearly ideas competition.

Atmosferas - Rua da Boavista 102 - 2º,1200-069 Lisbon, Portugal
tel. +351 213213040 info[at]atmosferas.net

Privacy is a complex and often abstract topic: this symposium will address "visual privacy," a subset of the much broader topic of data privacy, and bring together experts from a range of perspectives.

Filed under: Culture, Simulations

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The Maker Faire brings thousands of hackers, knitters and robot builders together, proving that a thriving DIY movement is poised to take back the freedom to tinker and mod. Commentary by Jennifer Granick. This column is available as a Gallery: Maker Faire 2006.

Vloggercon
VLOGGERCON 2006 is the intersection between media-makers and technology. A space for dialog and interaction. Of creation and collaboration. A media village born on the internet, and making camp for one weekend in San Francisco.

Coming up quick!

25-28 may in milan, electronic culture and media event

Encompass is about the world’s finest independent new music, music related art and music technology. It’s also about a carefully curated programme of talks and films.

Something a little different for E3 week: In the wake of the world's largest trade show on electronic entertainment - where are the women and what do they want? Public conversations about girls and games, women's participation in game design and play with speakers from Europe, Asia and North America.

More info here: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~conferences/ggconference.htm

"The Wealth of Networks" Booklaunch with Yochai Benkler

Eyebeam April 14, 2006 - 6-8PM 540 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011 http://www.eyebeam.org

Please join Yale Professor Yochai Benkler for the launch of his new book, "The Wealth of Networks," exploring how a new form of distributed collaboration is transforming the world economy. In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge and cultural production are changing and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves.

The evening starts at 6pm with wine, cheese, and informal conversation. At 7pm Jonah Peretti, Eyebeam’s Director of R&D, will introduce Benkler and give a quick tour of important and emerging open source and collaborative projects. Then at 7:15pm, Benkler will give a brief talk presenting the core ideas of his new book.

"The Wealth of Networks" examines distributed collaboration’s transformation of the world economy, heralded by innovations such as: 1) Open Source software like Linux and Apache that have surpassed commercial software made by huge corporations 2) A free, collaboratively authored encyclopedia called Wikipedia that rivals Encyclopedia Britannica, and 3) Volunteer research projects like NASA Clicks that are as accurate as the work of paid scientists.

Benkler does not see these projects as isolated examples, but rather as exemplars of an emerging mode of economic production. His book shows why labor done outside the constraints of free markets and giant corporations can still have a huge impact on the economy and social relations. He argues that a “third mode of production” offers the promise of a more free society, but only if we make the right collective decisions.

"The Wealth of Networks" will be available for purchase in the Eyebeam bookstore the night of the event. This event is open to the public free of charge.

- EYEBEAM 540 W. 21st Street New York, NY 10011, USA http://www.eyebeam.org

Originally by Amanda McDonald Crowley from Rhizome.org Raw at April 11, 2006, 08:53, published by nicholas economos

Type calendar, announcement
Genre theory, participatory, event
Keywords social space, network, labor

The cable industry this week gathers in Atlanta for their annual National Show, and much of the rhetoric you can be sure will be aimed squarely at the telcos. Reuters tags the telco video threat somehow at $64 billion. Among the progress reports expected at the show, Sprint/Nextel will highlight their plans to offer wireless phone services through cable outfits.

Exploding Television

Exploding Television is a live internet broadcast during Rotterdam Film Festival. Talks, Workshops, documentation of the Exhibition, and Artist Works can be seen in the archive.

See the streaming video of the DIY_tv session focusing on the growing phenomenon of independent microTV broadcasters.

The Italian microTV movement, Telestreet, started as a loose group of TV micro-broadcasters that first went to air in Italy in 2002 in a neighborhood station based in Bologna. These loosely affiliated broadcasters share an enthusiasm for exploring the socializing power of free-to-air video (TV) broadcasting. Often their content is sourced from the independent content archives such as V2V and the Italian viral video distribution project NGV. However, in the words of their manifesto, "Television must be considered a new prosthesis and an extension of the net [...] the horizontally of the net must meet the 'socializing' power of television."

In the words of David Garcia "[Telestreet] are squatting the shadows or blank spots which terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach." They not only make their own content, but also their own transmitters and antenna. Dedicated to the socializing power of broadcast television, the project has provided an important inspiration for many Italian media activists, and has fueled a movement dedicated to the development of critical approaches to localized production and distribution of TV.

The Portable Film Festival call for entries is open until the end of May:

Compact, detachable, private and shareable, this is a film festival like no other. Film for Apple iPod. Film for Sony PlayStation Portable. Film for 3G Phones. Download them, take them away with you. Plug them into your friend's TV.

The International Portable Film Festival is calling for challenging and inspiring film and video content for pre-selection in the 2006 IPFF Competition which will take place in July 2006. This is the perfect forum for new ideas and new directions in film and we actively encourage those filmmakers who are unafraid to venture into the deep, beyond the known boundaries of film and the cinema, to submit. Those films that best express themselves through the portable medium will be considered for pre-selection.

Entry to the competition is free and is now open until the 28th of May 2006.

Prizes will be announced in late April. Films will be judged under the following categories:

DESKTOP EXPERIMENT
will explore new directions and innovations in animation, and digital filmmaking.

POSTCARD
will present short documentaries that look into the fascinations of real life on film.

NEW WORLD ORDER
will showcase short narrative films that charter new waters in brave new ways.

WATCH MY MOVES
will present independently produced music video clips that inspire this intriguing new genre of filmmaking.

GENERATIONAL EYE
will profile new work by filmmakers under the age of 18.

GENERAL
is open to all film submissions.

Films can either be posted through snail mail or compressed and uploaded onto the Festival website.

OFFF is spreading the work of a generation of creators that are breaking all kind of limits. Those separating the commercial arena from the worlds of art and design; music from illustration, or ink and chalk from pixels. Artists that have grown with the web and receive inspiration from digital tools, even when their canvas is not the screen.

The 7th International Symposium on Online Journalism will be held this Friday and Saturday (April 7-8, 2006) at UT-Austin. There will be a live webcasting of the event and people from around the world can submit their questions for the panels to onlinesymp@yahoo.com. Live news reports from UT-Austin students will be posted to the site during the two-day event. To view the webcast and the exciting program for this year go to: http://journalism.utexas.edu/onlinejournalism

Coming back for its second year as part of the Florida Music Festival, the 2006 Indie Film Jam is now a nationwide short film and music video competition.

50% conference, 50% unconference. Reboot 8 is coming...

The driving theme of reboot8 is renaissance. What (else) should we focus on?

• Ubiquitous Computing
• interesting people and interesting ideas
• thoughts about value based creation
• digital history bridging
• sociology
• people creating new open shared infrastructure
• thoughts on the super-empowered individual
• analog creatures in a digital world
• what are we building for our children? what will they build for us?
• Possibilities and barriers for use of social software in business
• More science and blogging (Hard blogging scientists - German)
• More on Social Innovation
• How to leverage web 2.0 to thwart attempts to restrict free speech?
• Less blog-centric, more internet... please?
• Seems like the Libraries are having lots of ideas in the user-participation area.
• How does TV and mainstream media view social software and user-participation - a threat or a possibility
• Potlatch^WP economy
• Identity management

: Day two at Digital Hollywood was a sunny, beautiful day. Some buzz and fallout from the Facebook valuation issues. BW is doing a followup to the story two days ago, and people here are still scratching their heads. I heard Greylock is one of the funders in Facebook's new round.
The other thing I am hearing is YouTube is being hawked around vigorously now...it has also closed a big round from what I hear at an "insane" valuation. Kinda ties in with the post Staci has below...if they take money from the big guys,they have to work with them now.
Another things which is getting some play is that Qualcomm has been hiring content producers in NYC and LA to develop original content to push through its mobile TV service MediaFlo, which will launch with Verizon later this year (hopefully). Officially, the company says that the BW story quote was taken out of context, slightly, and they are merely working with all different parties on the production part. That's a head scratcher for now...need to see how it will play out when the service launches.
On a potential competitor MobiTV, some people asked me what will their ultimate game be? The mobile video aggregation company is moving from just being on 3G systems to mobile TV streaming (DVB-H, DMB etc). Some rumors are they will do an IPO soon...my bet is someone like Yahoo would come in when they get serious about mobile content and video.
More thoughts later...
The Digital Hollywood coverage is sponsored by PaymentOne

"So assorted media types, old and new, are here to try and work out how user-generated media can be tapped in to, connected with, understood, and 'leveraged'. I hate that word, it smacks of exploitation. But hey-ho, the commerical impact of new media is big business. Well, that's the mission for today. Let's see if anyone here can make head or tail of it in one day. The clock's ticking."

DanMelinger posted a photo:

"Each year the Alliance for Community Media hosts an International Conference and Trade Show – four days of training sessions, workshops, trade show, and hospitality events. Attendees will receive up-to-date information and hands-on experience on subjects including engineering, production and technology, legislative and legal, management and administration, professional and volunteer development, community building, media literacy, and more."

The4thScreen.com :: global mobile media festival
This festival looks very interesting. They are pushing people to think about the phone in a different way, not just as a television that is carried in your pocket as it seems the providers are pushing for:
'The Fourth Screen' Global Mobile Media Festival will focus on the mobile phone as an emerging social, cultural and technological phenomenon.
We invite artists, technologists, and other creative thinkers to submit creations, inventions and concepts in two categories:
1/ moving images: videos made with mobile phone, movies, animation and games intended for mobile delivery
2/ wise technologies: software art, software and hardware that proposes new uses for mobile multimedia communication, applications that have positive cultural, social and economic impact in diverse cultures

a free webcast presented by Prof Ben Shneiderman, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland & inventor of the treemap metaphor.
title: "The Thrill of Discovery - Accelerating Information Exploration".
date: wednesday, march 29, 2006.
time: 11:00am - eastern standard time / 6:00pm - europe daylight time / 8:00am - pacific standard time.
[spotfire.com]

Yale University is throwing a conference on "Access to Knowledge" -- an umbrella term that encompasses the humanitarian, creative, entrepreneurial and scholarly elements of the copyfight.

This Thursday, March 16 at 7pm I will be presenting the souped-up 7 minute version of "Joywar" on a panel with Siva Vaidhyanathan, (author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity), Carrie McLaren (Stay Free! Magazine) and others in conjunction with:

Illegal Art
Art + Culture Center of Hollywood, FL
Feb. 4 - April 2, 2006
Curated by Carrie McClaren, editor of Stay Free! Magazine

Participating artists include Eric Doeringer, Tom Forsythe, David Byrne & Danielle Spencer, and others...

Illegal Art is a multi-media exhibition celebrating what is rapidly becoming the "degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas, but is now being used to stifle it. Loaded with gray areas, this exhibition explores whether intellectual property laws discourage the creation of new works and provokes the questions: Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the First Amendment and intellectual property law collide? What is art's future if the current laws are allowed to stand?

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist, ReBlogged by angus on Mar 14, 2006 at 05:57 PM

The Media Giraffe Project at University of Massachusetts at Amherst announces its summit:

"Democracy and Independence: Sharing News and Politics in a Connected World" set for June 29-July 1,2006, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It's a combination roundtable summit and think tank, workshop, conference . . . and rendezvous. We're bringing together ... thought leaders, innovators and doers in media, politics, education and technology.

Go here for more information.

The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression is currently in its 5th year. Researchers and musicians from all over the world gather to share their knowledge and late-breaking work on new musical interface design

Art, Technology and Popular Culture

The STRP Festival will take place between the 24th and 26th of March 2006 in the former industrial area, Strijp S, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. STRP is a festival at the intersection of art, technology and popular culture in the full context of all art disciplines. A festival where the public is treated to a broad palette of works through in-depth presentations and large spectacles, which provide an image of how visual art, design, stage arts, film, architecture and popular culture develop themselves through the means or appliance of both new and existing technology.

ROBOTICS: Amorphic RobotWorks (USA) - Inflatable Bodies, Robotlab (GER) - Juke_bots, Bill Vorn (CAN) - Hysterical Machines, Pascal Glissmann, Martina Höfflin (GER) - Electronic Life Forms (ELF), Garnet Hertz (CAN) - Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot #3, Gijs van Bon - Arabesk #23, Time's up/HRL (AUT), Bar Bot - Dr. Christoph Bartneck (GER) - eMuu, Robbert Smit, Graham Smith, HKU - Telemoby, Björn Schülke (GER) - Nervous, Markus Lerner, Andre Stubbe (GER) - Outerspace, Michiel van Overbeek - Nazarenos, Lara Greene (UK) - You Move Me, Fred Abels & Mirjam Langemeijer - Dirk.

INTERACTIVE ART: Marnix de Nijs - RMR (runmotherfuckerrun), C6 (UK) - Want Need, //////////fur//// art entertainment interfaces (GER) - PainStation, Marnix de Nijs & Edwin van der Heide - Spatial Sounds, Mateusz Herczka - 44\13, Debbie does art - Cockroachlounge, Walter Langelaar - SUB-OBJECT_2.1, Raymond Deirkauf, Beyond Expression - Ray's, Aldje van Meer en Radboud Mens - Realsound, Kim Boekhout van Solinge - Ruissimulatie, David Kousemaker - TouchMe, Prohaska, Sägmüller, Demblin (AUT) - Unplugger v1.1/Plug In to Black Out, Prohaska (AUT) - KRFTWRK, Crew (BE) - Degenerator 2.0, Paul Klotz - 3D-Quoter.

MUSIC: Dj's--Jeff Mills (DVJ-set, USA) - Derrick May (USA) - Daniel Wang (USA) - DJ Krust (UK) - Addictive TV (DVJ Set, UK) - Dick El Demasiado - Lady Aida - Steffi - Martyn (DJ Pan) - Robob - Rick Angel - Ari Daily - Caz One Live: Karl Bartos (Ex-Kraftwerk, GER) - Mouse on Mars (GER) - DMX Krew (UK) - Atom Heart (GER / CHI) - Octave One (USA) - Joris Voorn - Secret Cinema - Zeena Parkins & Ikue Mori (USA) - Beautyon (UK) - Daniel Wang (USA) - Kettel - Geigercounting - Dijf Sanders (BE) - Dexter - Like a Tim - Vert (GER/UK) - Drillem - Taeji Sawai (JPN) - Ella Bandita - Yutaka Makino (JPN) - RA-X and the Raiders of the Lost Cause - David Grubbs (USA) - Solid Decay - Hrvatski.

VISUALS: Live Cinema--Peter Greenaway (UK): Tulse Luper VJ performance - Skoltz Kolgen (CAN) - Telcosystems - Addictive TV (UK): The Eye of the Pilot - Boris en Brecht Debackere (BE): Rotor - Optical Machines - SXNDRX: Videoboxing; Video-art/art videoclips--Cinefeel: Music Videos - Addictive TV (UK): Mixmasters - Optronica (UK): Visual Music on the Screen - WORM: Live Cinema DVD 1 - NOTV: Visual Music 2 - Floris Kaayk: The Order Electrus; Vj's--VJ Oxygen others. Live visuals & presentations by Holland-Interactive. Special outdoor light installation by Har Hollands.

Films: Fritz Lang (GER) - Metropolis, Fred M. Wilcox (USA) - Forbidden Planet, Mamoru Oshii (JPN) - Ghost in the Shell 2, Het uur van de wolf - Op zoek naar een vergeten toepassing, Lesic, Lindgreen & Pancras, When I sold my soul to the machine, Len Lye (NZL) - Birth of a Robot, Lillian Schwartz (USA) - Pixilliation, Robert Seidel(GER) -Grau, Phillipp Hirsch (GER) - Inside, Alexander Rutterford (UK) - Gantz Graf, Alexander Rutterford (UK) - 3Space, Johnny Hardstaff (UK) - Future of Gaming, George Melies (FRA) - Le Voyage dans la Lune

OTHER: Theatre: Pipslab: The washing powder conspiracy, produced by Paradiso-Melkweg Productiehuis - Crew (BE): _U - Eboman: SampleMadnesS

Workshop: Ralf Schreiber, Tina Tonagel and Christian Faubel (GER) 'Chirping and Crawling' Robotworkshop

Lectures: Karl Bartos (Ex Kraftwerk, GER) - Bas Haring - Dirk van Weelde - Dr. Christoph Bartneck (GER) - Kees Tazelaar - Koert van Mensvoort Peter Verhelst (BE) - Hans Beekmans - Waag Society

STRP Foundation
P.O. Box 272 / 5600 AG Eindhoven / The Netherlands
Tel: +31 40 2367228 / Fax: +31 40 2377676

Newcastle City Council and AV Festival are supporting the 2020 project, bringing together artists from a vast array of backgrounds, all with the common goal of exploring the potential of live audiovisual performance in an artistic context.

MobileFest2006 is looking for mobile content submissions that explore the mobile lifestyle. The concept is most interested in content made for mobile devices, not so much made by them, although we certainly encourage you to push the envelope. Our criteria are extremely broad and we only ask that you keep word "mobile" in mind.

(The soundtrack in juxtaposition with the written copy is worth the clickthrough alone. -kc.)

Attention all producers, DJs, and remixers: the Copyright Criminals Remix Contest over at ccMixter has been extended by two weeks, to March 14

Games for Women, Games by Women
February 18, San Francisco

The half-day conference includes an opening keynote address, a post-conference networking reception and a recruiter Q&A with resume and portfolio reviews. Program topics include:
Keynote speaker Robin Harper, SVP of Community and Support for Linden Lab,will present "From the Virtual to the Real: How Second Life created an online world and community that strongly appeals to women, and how the virtual world has changed the real life of women participants."

Conference is 12 pm to 7 pm on Saturday, February 18
Fort Mason Conference Center, Landmark Building A
Attendance is $45 and space is limited.

www.WomenInGamesInternational.org

NODE.London [Networked, Open, Distributed, Events. London] brings about a citywide cluster of events to ‘mark the ascension of Media Arts as the popular culture activity for London’.

The AV Festival 06 complete programme has been publicly announced (today 19 January 2006). It is available as downloadable pdf.

br>Artifact is a festival for art and new media taking place in Belgium from the 13-18th of February.

Mobile Exposure 2006 is looking for works that address mobile culture and/or are made WITH or to be EXHIBITED ON mobile/handheld devices.

RESFEST showcases work in all genres and visual forms, shot or created in any format. The underlying guideline for submissions is INNOVATION. Entries should have been produced within the last two years.

"We will discuss the latest trends on technology, online media and social software; entertainment, fashion and design as well as arts & sciences and brands & consumer marketing."

21-22 january in paris is the avit france VJ conference...loads of great artists on the schedule and interesting conferences.

The Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism in partnership with the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation is accepting applications for this expenses-paid seminar that combines practical instruction in multimedia reporting with in-depth exploration of media convergence and other critical issues for online news operations.

Participants will get five full days of intense hands-on instruction on how to do multimedia stories for the Web...

(Continued at CyberJournalist.)

: Since this is something close to my heart (I've talked about the rise of the journalist-entreprenuer before), this is something I am happy to spread the word about (I won't be able to make it since I've committed to be in London for the OPA conference):
OJR 2006 is a free one-day conference for independent online journalists on March 3, 2006 at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. This conference is for writers and editors who want to share their passion for online media and learn from colleagues how to improve the quality, visibility and profitability of their work. Participants will gather in discussion sessions to share their recent work and to talk about how journalists can make their websites more engaging, informative and financially successful.
More information and the registration form are available at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/conference/

Calling All Independent Filmmakers in the San Francisco Bay Area — The Bay Area Video Coalition, Independent Television Service and the Center for Social Media are hosting an event on Friday February 24, 2006 on the topic of the fair use exception to American copyright law, and What Fair Use Really Means For Independent Filmmakers. Promising to expose the “secret side” of copyright, the event includes a showing of UNTOLD STORIES, a short video produced at American University’s Center for Social Media about the problem of rights clearance for documentary filmmakers, and a discussion with filmmakers, programmers, and legal experts about such topics as —

• What’s fair in quoting or appropriating something without paying for it?

• What are the implications of Fair Use on freedom of expression and distribution?

• How can I reduce production and legal costs and follow the law?

• How do I deal with the exploitation of my material?

• What is the best way to navigate the law safely?

Panelists will include:Patricia Aufderheide, Director, Center for Social Media, American University; Fred Von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Jack Walsh, independent filmmaker and Co-Director, National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture; Donald Young, Director of Broadcast Programming, Center for Asian American Media; Claire Aguilar, Director of Programming, Independent Television Service. The event is free; no registration required.

out (if you haven’t already) the Center for Social Media’s Documentary Filmmaker’s Statement of Best Practice in Fair Use. [Creative Commons: weblog]

BY CYNDI GREENING, PHOENIX, USA (CINEMA MINIMA) — I was so excited
to see a digital forum entitled HD for Indies. I thought, WOW, Mike Curtis is coming to Sundance. This will be AWESOME!! Alas, it was just a title that was the same as his site … it wasn’t Mike. So, those of you who frequent Mike’s site, don’t get confused by the listing! Herewith then, the Digital Forums of interest.

• Production Technology Now (Fri, 20 Jan, 11am) HD, production technology, formats, frame rates, editing applications and blowups. Simplifying the process. Moira Gunn, host of NPRs TECH NATION moderates.

• Cinema On The Move (Sat, 21 Jan, 11am)) New Mobile Technologies and the Next Wave of Filmmaking. A discussion about the alternate sources for cinematic product distribution including PSPs, cellular phones, games, laptops, PDAs. Walt Mossberg, Technology Columnist for the WALL STREET JOURNAL moderates.

• Podcasting, Vlogging and The Freedom of Speech (Sun, 22 Jan, 11am) The global forum for expression was revolutionized by internet blogging, podcasting and videoblogging. Marketing, advertising and distribution. Jason Calacanis of WEBLOGS, INC moderates. Now, the REAL question … why am I not on this panel????

• Creative Editing (Mon, 23 Jan, 11am) The Language of Moving Images. Crafting images and audio into a coherent story, well-paced, with dramatic rhythm and unique style. Jennifer Hilner, Entertainment Editor of WIRED magazine moderates.

• Faces in the Crowd (Tues, 24 Jan, 11am) Finding Your Audience in the Thousand Channel Universe. Exciting forum that details how filmmaker’s can find their target audience and “get eyes on their film.” Journalist and Author John Anderson moderates.

• Case Study: QUINCEANERA (Weds, 25 Jan, 11am) The miracle of independent filmmaking discussed and moderated by pioneering filmmaker Todd Haynes (FAR FROM HEAVEN). Worth catching to hear Haynes’ point of view.

• Case Study: PUCCINI FOR BEGINNERS (Thurs, 26 Jan, 11am) Effie Brown (REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES) moderates discussion of InDigEnt film.

• Stay-at-Home-Movies (Fri, 27 Jan, 11am) The Home Theatre Experience and the Future of Exhibition. Where have all the audiences gone? As more and more viewers shun the communal filmgoing experience, the unique challenges for distributors, filmmakers and technology experts are moderated by William Alpert of BARRON’S magazine.

Mashup Camp is officially on. Anyone interested in mashups, APIs and the web as platform should go visit MashupCamp.com to sign-up for what promises to be a great event next month. David Berlind is putting together this “un-conference about the un-computer” along with co-organizer Doug Gold. As David announced a couple of weeks ago:

My goal for Mashup Camp is to do the opposite of what all these other Web 2.0-esque conferences are doing. It won’t be invitation only. The pilot event will be modest in size guaranteeing intimacy and low or perhaps even no cost to attend (perfect for some of the people doing the real innovation on a low budget). And, it will involve a mix of open networking time, leader-facilitated discussions that address some of the most important issues and concerns that the API providers and the mashup artists actually need to work out, and fun (for example, a hottest mashup contest with an even hotter prize).

Attendees already signed-up include some of the major API providers (Amazon, Yahoo, Eventful, Salesforce), press (BusinessWeek), bloggers (TechCrunch), and lots of creative and interesting mashup developers. Got a cool mashup? Win prizes in the Best Mashup competition.

What kind of sessions to expect? Business models and where’s the money, best practices for mashups and for APIs, mashup standards and microformats, mobile mashups, venture capital for mashups, usability, and legal issues. You see something missing, then feel free to go over the Proposed Sessions Wiki and add another.

The cost? Free. Invitations required? No. But, space is limited to the first 250 who sign-up…

Code, Science and Content; Making Collaborative Creativity Sustainable

First Monday's tenth anniversary conference, 15-17 May 2006 at the University of Illinois at Chicago: Recent years have seen a strong interest among academics, policy makers, activists, business and other practitioners on open collaboration and access as a driver of creativity. In some areas, such as free software / open source, sustainable business models have emerged that are holding their own against more traditional, proprietary software industries. In the sciences, the notions of open science and open data demonstrate the strong tradition of openness in the academic community that, despite its past successes, is increasingly under threat. And open access journals and other open content provide inspiring examples of collaborative creativity and participatory access, such as Wikipedia, while still in search of models to ensure sustainability.

There are clear links between these areas of openness: open content often looks explicitly towards open source software for business models, and open science provides through its history a glimpse of the potential of openness, how it can work, as well as a warning of the threats it may face. Finally, open collaboration is closely linked to access to knowledge issues, enabling active participation rather than passive consumption especially in developing countries.

Despite these clear links, there has been surprisingly little thoughtful analysis of this convergence, or of the real value of the common aspect of open collaboration. In particular, while open source software - due to its strong impact on business and on bridging the digital divide - has drawn much attention, it may provide false hopes for the sustainability of openness in other areas of content that need careful examination. The conference - FM10 Openness: Code, science and content: Making collaborative creativity sustainable - provides a platform for such analysis and discussion, resulting in concrete proposals for sustainable models for open collaboration in creative domains.

The conference will draw on the experience of First Monday as the foremost online, peer-reviewed academic journal covering these issues since May 1996. Not only has First Monday published numerous papers by leading scholars on the topics of open collaboration, open access, and open content in its various forms, it is itself an example of open collaboration in practice: for nearly a decade, the journal has been published on a purely voluntary basis, with no subscription fees, advertising, sponsorship or other revenues. The success of First Monday is demonstrated by thousands of readers around the world, downloading hundreds of thousands of papers each month. This conference celebrates First Monday's tenth anniversary. The first issue of First Monday appeared on the first Monday of May 1996 at the International World Wide Web Conference in Paris. Altogether, 658 papers have been published in 115 issues, written by 783 different authors from around the world.

The conference is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (http://www.macfound.org/), the Open Society Institute (http://www.soros.org/), and the University of Illinois at Chicago

RecentChangesCamp is a conference in Portland, OR about "building communities worth having," both online and offline.

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will be having its annual D.I.C.E. Summit (http://www.dicesummit.org/) this February 6-10 at the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Henderson, Nevada. Key speakers this year include Richard Gariott, David Jaffe, Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, and Reginald Fils-Aime.

The Academy is looking for 4-6 students in the field of Interactive Entertainment to help with the event (travel expenses will be paid for). If you're interested, e-mail your resume to Geri Gordon Miller at geri@interactive.org.

See you at D.I.C.E.!

At this multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary symposium we shall attempt to investigate and analyse these new effects and the changed role of the image in society.

Vlogger Calendar 2006
All proceeds go to charity.

Sundance is doing a session on videoblogging/podcasting. hosted by Jason Calacanis. i really hope someone in this group goes. Im just waiting for the Jason Calacanis of videolbogs to pop up. a daily videoblog for every topic you can think of. Jay ____________________ PODCASTING, VLOGGING, & THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH
Sunday, January 22, 11 a.m.
Digital Forum - Shorts Theater
Sundance Film Center, Main Street Mall

The combustible mix of audio blogs and mp3 players known as ³podcasting² has been termed by some as ³the first great media breakthrough of the 21st century.² Combining the democratic ideals of inexpensive digital production, virtual community, content-on-demand, and freedom of expression; podcasting has emerged as an overnight success promising an endlessly varied universe of audio content to anyone who wants it at any time. But behind these ideals, podcasting also opens up a new market with unlimited possibilities with respect to audience penetration, frequency, consumer advertising, and target marketing. Is this a win-win situation for media companies and content developers alike, and where might it take us? Moderated by Jason Calacanis, internet entrepreneur and CEO of Weblogs, Inc.

On December 13 (6-9 p.m.), Artists Space and Pointed Leaf Press cordially invite you to the launch of Artbrain.org #3 curated by co-founders Warren Neidich and Nathalie Angles, and to the signing of the Earthling catalogue by Warren Neidich.

Created in 2000, Artbrain.org was conceived as an internet site to post works of visual art, film, writing, architecture, that interfaced with ideas generally considered the territory of Neuroscience. Quoted by Christiane Paul on the Artforum hotlist (Oct 2001), Artbrain.org does not simply illustrate scientific facts but attempts to produce a new paradigm in which cultural changes are paramount in new becomings of brain/mind/body.

New issue Artbrain.org # 3 presents the exhibition Conceptual Art as a Neurobiological Praxis, and the proceedings of two conferences: Movies, Buildings and Brains ( UCLA School of Art, Los Angeles, 2003) and The Phantom Limb: The Aesthetic, Cultural and Philosophic Implications (Goldsmiths College, London, 2005).

Artists and contributors to artbrain.org #3 are: Douglas Gordon, Jonathan Horowitz, Jack Pierson, SamDurant, Ricci Albenda, Beom Kim, Andrea Robbins, Thomas Ruff, Spencer Finch, Uta Barth, Rainer Ganahl, T. Kelly Mason, Mathew Ritchie, Grennan and Sperandio, Ann Lislegard, Eric Duyckaerts, Charline Von Heyl,Liam Gillick, Carl Fudge, Jason Rhoades, Historical Information Display, Tania Lopez Winkler and Markos Lutyens, Nicholas Wade, David McGonigle, Peter Brugger, Chris Frith, William Hirstein, Arnold Modell, Charles T. Wolfe, Vivian Sobchack, Nicola Diamond, John Welchman, Ralph Greenspan, Jonathan Green, Colin Gardner, Peter Zellner, Conerly Casey, Mark Cohen, MA Greenstein, Christiane Paul, Warren Neidich.

Warren Neidich is an artist and currently fellow at the Center for Cognition, Computation and Culture at Goldsmiths College. His work has been shown most recently at ICA, London, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Ludwig Museum, Cologne. Nathalie Angles is presently the Director of the International Residency Program at Location One, New York.

The Internet Identity Workshop presents an Informational Morning for Developers Hosted by Doc Searls, Mary Hodder and Kaliya Hamlin. Monday, December 12, 2005 9-12 noon, with lunch from 12-1 Canton Dim Sum @ 655 Folsom St in San Francisco. Cost $20 for lunch (PLEASE RSVP HERE as the Canton Restaurant has been kind enough to give us the space if we all have lunch there, but we need an accurate count by Sunday at noon). If you are a developer working on a application that has folks login - this is a morning for you. Doc Searls will begin the day giving an overview of the identity landscape. He and others will answer the question: * Why do identity systems matter when building new systems and tools? We are bringing together a spectrum of folks who have been working on developing identity systems and tools. Identity Developers will share their work, basics and best practices to date to get started exploring integrating identity into these applications. These include YADIS, LID, Open ID, i-names/XRI, SXIP, among others. Developers of applications who have included identity into their services and tools will share briefly how they've done it. Application developers will hear from and meet with identity developers to ask questions. Event Info Detailed Agenda and RSVP here.

This workshop intends to bring together researchers and developers from industry and academy to discuss the technological advances and challenges in providing IPTV services over WWW.

Please pass this on! We're trying to encourage the emergence of a community of videobloggers in Montreal.

Videoblogging is starting to take off. It's a powerful new way to find an audience and distribute your content. It's also entirely free: as long as you have a camera, the rest of the tools, from the editing to the publishing distributing to the storing of your content can be found for free.

We're putting the call out to artists, independent film-makers, activists, and geeks to start having monthly get-togethers to share information, content, ideas, and beer. Our first meetup is at La Cabane, 3872, rue Saint-Laurent, December 7th at 7PM.

Don't be shy if you're not a computer expert. People will be happy to answer questions and explain how the technology works.

Multimedia 2006 invites your participation in the premier annual multimedia conference, covering all aspects of multimedia computing: from underlying technologies to applications, theory to practice, and servers to networks to devices.

LEF + Art Interactive/CAA06

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: JANUARY 1, 2006 DEADLINE; BOSTON CAA CONFERENCE at ART INTERACTIVE GALLERY; co-curated by Legier Biederman and Dave Burns.

Works on video that convey and/or solicit embodied subjects and/or embodied responses, and thus potentially rupture and/or problematize the notion that acts of viewing cohere us as the discrete and transcendent origins of vision and knowledge.

As the speed and intensity of technologically mediated modes of being have accelerated in recent years, technology not only has transformed our ways of doing things, it has conditioned our experience of ourselves and our relationship with others profoundly. It has transformed the attitudes and practices of creative expression as well as the criteria we utilize to evaluate art and media. Questions that arise: What are the specific intersections among visuality, embodiment, and the technological in the history of Western Art? What place do artists' or art viewers' bodies have in the violently revised nexuses of power relations that arise with shifts in technological processes of imaging, communicating, creating, identifying, and knowing?

How do artists perform their embodiment as resolutely technologized--technologized in such a way that their flesh (or the flesh of the bodies of knowledge conveyed or solicited) takes its texture and materiality from that of the screen/projection? How might the performance of technologized embodiment take its depth from the profundity suggested by the puncture-wound opening of the screen/projection in the dark space of the gallery?

So, in contrast to theories of new media or interpretations of technologies that insist on the obsolescence of the body--its replacement with the pure information of digital screens or digital codes activated on these screens--how do experimental media works explore bodies for their capacity to activate rather than suppress the object or subject produced/reproduced? When considering "bodies" in this context, why is the physical human body always referred to as the ideal example? Cannot a body potentially refer to any vessel of knowledge or ideas and languages constrained by, often superficially, designed parameters? This exhibition will attempt to rethink bodies (human and inhuman bodies, bodies of knowledge, of thought, of discourse, or history, etc) and technology (the tools used to make or do or practice, but also recalling the Greek techne, the acts themselves) in the widest sense of the terms: "Technologized Bodies/Embodied Technology" is a direct call to bodies--somebody, any body.

Send to:
LEF Exhibition/CAA 2006
Legier Biederman
1021 York St
San Francisco, 94110

Any Questions? Contact:
Legier Biederman, bieder[at]humnet.ucla.edu
Dave Burns, pixelate[at]pacbell.net

WiMAX World, running Oct. 26-28 in Boston, opened [yesterday] with a flurry of announcements. It's billed as the world's largest exclusively WiMax show. The show features 160+ sponsors and exhibitors and 130+ speakers.

The WiMAX World program covers every aspect of WiMAX and mobile broadband trends over 3 days and is said to feature the largest exhibition in the world of wireless and mobile broadband solutions.

The seven main conference tracks include:

• WiMAX Business Track
• WiMAX Technology Track
• WiMAX and Wireless Broadband for Municipalities
• WiMAX and VoIP Track
• WiMAX Deployments- Case Studies
• WiMAX Broadband Backhauls
• WiMAX Ecosystem led by WiMAX Forum

(Continued at Daily Wireless.)

This afternoon starting at 4pm and all day tomorrow (GMT-4), unmediated is holding the first Open Media Developers Summit.

This summit bring together some key individuals and organizations working on open implementations of the technology that supports the current trends and those that will lead toward the future.

Overall it is hoped that by bringing these individuals and groups together on issues such as distribution and metadata standards while working together to avoid duplicity these technologies can be propelled and fulfill our common goals. Furthermore, we hope that face to face meetings will encourage collaboration, help to determine our overall future direction and ultimately create a sense of togetherness within the group.

We wish we could invite all of our readers to participate in person, but a live stream and chat will be available during the Summit. Please see the OMDS site for details.

Morgan Jindrich emailed to let us know about HearUsNow.org, and the Consumers Union's new animated music video, The Tower, a nice little ditty about why decentralization is good for consumers. Morgan says, "after (the video) is over a petition pops up on the screen - we are trying to get the FCC to hold public hearing before they rewire the media ownership rules (which they are planning to do in the near future - last time they tried this they skipped the part about talking to the people - so we are making sure that the people are heard this time around). "

The Annenberg Research Network on International Communication over October 7-8, 2005,held it's annual research workshop which focused this year on "Wireless Communication and Development: A Global Perspective."Papers and presentations found below.

Wireless Communication and Development

ACM SIGCHI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TECHNOLOGY 2006 is going to happen in June, 14-16 in Hollywood, CA:

The field of computer entertainment technology has aroused great interest recently amongst researchers and developers in both academic and industrial / business fields as it is duly recognized as showing high promise of bringing on exciting new forms of human computer interaction. Now deemed deserving of both serious academic research, as well as major industry and business uptake, techniques used in computer entertainment are also seen to translate into advances in research work ranging from industrial training, collaborative work, novel interfaces, novel multimedia, network computing and ubiquitous computing. 

The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, artists and designers and computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment. 

Prospective authors are now invited to submit Papers/Posters/Demos electronically via the conference website: 
http://www.ace2006.org by 15th February 2006

Why do I blog this? this conference is a very good event in the sphere of innovative gaming technology

The 10th Annual Webby Awards is now accepting entries. The 10th Annual Webby Awards marks the debut of three new blog categories – Business Blog, Political Blog, and Personal/Cultural Blog – and the first-ever category honoring Podcast Sites. With the public increasingly turning to the web for video coverage of major events, from Hurricane Katrina to the Live 8 concerts, The Webby Awards also is adding a special category for Best Use of Video or Moving Images.
Enter by Oct. 28 and get a discount.

:: Last Call for 2006 Independent Games Festival Submissions
Deadlines are drawing to a close for submissions to the 2006 Independent Games Festival (IGF), held in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Honoring innovation in videogames created by independent game developers and students, the event continues to grow and prosper--and the prizes just keep getting bigger. The event, which is slated for March 20-24, 2006 in San Jose, CA, is offering a $20,000 Grand Prize for the best game. As proof that there's no slowing down in the game development industry, the event has added a new modding competition, and mods can now be submitted for Valve's Half Life 2, BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, Epic Games's Unreal Tournament 2004, and id Software's Doom 3. The extra incentive is that there's a total of $10,000 in prize money for the best original modifications.

This year, more than $45,000 in cash prizes will be awarded to IGF competition winners for innovation in five areas: Visual Arts, Audio, Game Design, Technical Excellence, and Best Web Browser Game. Main competition finalists are eligible for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Independent Game of the Year and Audience Award. The IGF also plans to recognize 10 games for Student Showcase, including a new category for games created using middleware.

Deadlines for submissions to the modding competition are October 10, 2005; student submissions are due November 15, 2005. Visit www.igf.com for rules, deadlines and entry forms.

The American Marketing Association announced a series of seminars on how 'Consumer Controlled Media Is Re-Shaping Online Go-To-Market Strategies'.

October 28 - Chicago ; November 11 - Scottsdale ; December 2 - New York

Topics are ranging from Podcasting and RSS to Online Word-of-Mouth Marketing, Social Networking and Power Laws of the Internet. The seminars provide insigt in how to channel these new consumer-connecting media to benefit marketing organizations.

'Join Consumer Conversations' Howard Rheingold told attendees Wednesday at a conference in New York arranged by Havas media shop MPG USA. Refusal to join in such conversations carries its own risks: "There are companies today that are giants, but won't want to give up control, and will shrink because of it and go out of business," said Rheingold at the conference. (via MediaPost)

Come join the early pioneers of the Metaverse (3D World Wide Web) at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC): the first major offline gathering of Second Life (SL) users and residents. Through a mixture of demos, conversation and formal presentations, SLCC will explore the state and future of the Second Life platform. Whether you consider yourself an SL resident, casual user, or are interested generally in the fast growing possibilities of virtual worlds, you’ll find the SLCC to be an invaluable learning and networking event.

SLCC will be co-located with the State of Play conference on law and virtual worlds at the New York Law School. Consider attending both events for a full weekend of cutting-edge, high-level dialog around virtual worlds and online games.

"A two-day event on the campus of NC A&T State University, ConvergeSouth will focus on journalism and multimedia “web blogging” for everyone."

On the first weekend of October (1st and 2nd) the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures is taking place in London. This event will bring together individuals and groups from across the world working on projects such as free wireless networking, free of copyright mapping and open hardware. It is also part of a larger season of events based around alternative approaches to knowledge production and access and timed to coincide with the UK's hosting of a pan-European Creative Economy conference.

From Dan: "if you're interested, we're holding our first officially hosted Mobile Monday New York meeting at the AP. Free beer and wine too. Would love for you all to attend. (see below for details). And please pass this on to anyone who might be interested."

Date: September 19th , 7 PM – 9ish PM
Cost: Free
Theme/Topics: Mobile Communities/Social Networking
Planned Agenda:
- Quick welcome/intro
- Four 15-minute presentations
-> Socialight
-> WINKsite
-> NextBlast
-> Dodgeball (Google)
- Open discussion/networking with refreshments and snacks

Address:
Associated Press
450 W. 33rd Street (bet. 9th and 10th ave)
New York, NY 10001

Elective Affinities

...This international conference will explore the relations between word and image from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. Our title has been borrowed from Goethe's 1809 novel Elective Affinities. In the novel, the chemical term “elective affinities” extends to human relationships, both intimate and political. Like the alkalis and acids of which Goethe's characters speak, words and images, though apparently opposed, may have a remarkable affinity for one another. At the same time, as one of the characters in the book objects, such affinities are problematic, and “are only really interesting when they bring about separations.”

How words and images represent and whether they enjoy a harmonious kinship, engage in border skirmishes, or seek to annihilate one another, are not merely formal matters. The history of iconoclasm tells us about the ideological stakes of the debate. Contemporary discussions of memorialisation seem to demand multi-media expression, and urban inscriptions such as graffiti and mural arts express political positions. New technologies for meshing words and images – such as medical imaging, virtual archives, the Internet – will also be discussed. Among the themes of the conference are: the arts of the book; early correspondences; political inscriptions; sacred words, sacred images; scientific imaging; spaces, places; photographic texts. [via]

New Forms

THIRD INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON MOBILE MUSIC TECHNOLOGY, 2-3 MARCH 2006, BRIGHTON, UK.

Combining mobile technology and music promises exciting future developments in a rapidly emerging field. Devices such as mobile phones, walkmans and iPods have already brought music to the ever-changing social and geographic locations of their users and reshaped their experience of the urban landscape. With new properties such as ad hoc networking, Internet connection, and context-awareness, mobile music technology offers countless new artistic, commercial and socio-cultural opportunities for music creation, listening and sharing. How can we push forward the already successful combination of music and mobile technology? What new forms of interaction with music lie ahead, as locative media and music use merge into new forms of everyday experiences?

Following two successful workshops that started to explore and establish the emerging field of mobile music technology, this third edition offers a unique opportunity to participate in the development of mobile music and hands-on experience of the latest cutting-edge technology. The programme will consist of presentations from invited speakers, in-depth discussions about the crucial issues of mobile music technology, hands-on group activities and break-out sessions where participants can get valuable feedback on their work-inprogress projects. The invited speakers include Michael Bull (University of Sussex, UK), often dubbed by the press as 'Professor iPod' for his iPod and car stereo user studies that reveal fascinating trends for mobile music.

The workshop will take place at theUniversity of Sussex in Brighton, UK. Brighton is situated on the British 'Sunshine Coast' and easily accessible: only 30 minutes from London/Gatwick airport and 60 minutes from central London.

Don't miss this chance to help shape the mobile music landscape of the future!

CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

We invite practitioners, artists, designers and researchers from all areas, including music, technology development, new media, sound-art, music distribution, locative media and industry to register for this international mobile music workshop.

CALL FOR WORK-IN-PROGRESS

Are you working on a mobile music project and looking for feedback from like-minded people to help you to move on with your ideas? We invite submissions of work-in-progress projects exploring the topic of mobile music. Projects will be discussed, receive critical review as well as support with ongoing problems and issues. Your work should not be completed yet, but either be on-going or just about to get started. Potential projects could include but are not limited to mobile music systems or enabling technologies, interface design, on-going or planned user studies, ethnographic fieldwork, art pieces and other areas relevant to mobile music.

Submissions should include a presentation of the project, explain its relevance to the field of mobile music and describe issues and problems that could be discussed during the workshop. Please include a short biography with the submission. Accepted project authors will be given time to present and discuss their work and will receive feedback by smaller groups of workshop participants including specialists in the field. Authors are encouraged to bring material and prototypes to the workshop.

CALL FOR MOBILE PLATFORMS AND SYSTEMS

In addition to the presentations, discussions and project feedback sessions the workshop will also offer handson group activities to explore technological platforms. We are looking for mobile platforms, systems, installations, applications or devices that include music features or can be used for musical projects. The workshop participants will get hands-on experience with these platforms, so they should be suitable for groups of at least 8 people. This provides you with the opportunity to introduce your platform to experts and practitioners in the field of mobile music and to gain valuable feedback. We invite you to submit a platform description, explain how it can be used for mobile music and how larger groups can use it during the workshop.

Details are here.

Technologies of Memory

May 19-20, 2006, Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). The conference Technologies of Memory in the Arts focuses on art as a cultural and technological practice to process and construct the past in the present. Central questions to this conference are: How do art and artistic practices function as technologies of memory? How are cultural artefacts implicated in complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of recollecting and disremembering, of amnesia and anamnesia?

As a shared artistic and social practice, cultural memory links the present to the past. In doing so, cultural memory has strong ethical and political aspects. The arts are continuously engaged in non-linear processes of remembering and forgetting, characterised by repetition, rearrangement, revision, and rejection. In artistic representations new memories are thus constantly constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed by narrative strategies, visual and aural styles, intertextuality and intermediality, representations of time and space, and rituals of remembrance. These complex processes of representation are what we understand by the term 'technologies of memory'.

The contemporary fascination with history and memory is accompanied by developments in media technology that have simultaneously a petrifying and a virtualising effect. Both individual and cultural memory are increasingly mediated by modern technologies, which means that memories are not only recorded and recollected by media, but are also shaped and produced by them. The digital media, in particular, allow for new ways of storing, retrieving and archiving personal and collective memories, as well as cultural artefacts.

The conference Technologies of Memory in the Arts specifically addresses the material construction of cultural memory. It aims to explore procedures of memory in both traditional and new media as well as to investigate the role of digitalisation of art and culture in relation to memory. Generally, its focus is on the materiality of representation and on the relation between the medium and the construction of cultural memory.

Keynote speakers (confirmed):
- Marita Sturken (University of Southern California)
- Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)

We are especially interested in panel and paper proposals on the following topics:

- Mediated memories
- Narrative strategies
- Intertextuality / intermediality
- Music as memory work
- Urban space and spatial dimensions
- Tourism and heritage
- Musical subcultures as memory space
- Representations of memory in the arts
- Amnesia and anamnesia
- Icons of the recent past
- Rituals of remembrance
- Rituals, music and the shape of memory
- Nostalgia and pastiche
- Retro styles as forms of cultural memory
- Rewritings of the classics
- Digitalisation of archives
- Music/sound recordings and the technology of memory

Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2005.

More information and submission:
http://www.ru.nl/comparativearts/research/technologies_of/

Via an IGDA newsletter I just discovered the website and schedule for the first annual Game Writers Conference — a two-day event dedicated to the art and craft of game writing, October 26-27, co-located with the annual Austin Games Conference focused on MMOGs and mobile games, and the Women’s Game Conference on women in the computer and video game industry.

Confirmed presentations for the Game Writers Conference include Mark Laidlaw of Valve presenting “Gaming the Narrative”, Clint Hocking giving a case study for writers about the production of Splinter Cell, and a talk called “The Writer/Designer Tag Team” from the developers of Gears of War.

I’ve written them to try to get Façade a seat on the “AI for Writers” panel, hopefully it’s not too late to squeeze Grace and Trip in there.

(Continued at Grand Text Auto.)

Al Gore, chairman of Current TV and former Vice President of the United States, will deliver the keynote speech at The Media Center's Oct. 5 We Media conference at The Associated Press.

Yahoo! is a conference sponsor.

We are very excited by Al's participation because it will bring heightened interest to our conference, which is intended to be a major step in advancing The Media Center's mission to help create a better-informed society.

Al joins an amazing line-up of speakers, including:

Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist
Farai Chideya, Founder of Pop and Politics
Dan Gillmor, Author of "We the Media"
Andrew Heyward, President of CBS News
Larry Kramer, President of CBS Digital Media
Ana Marie Cox, Editor of Wonkette
Richard Edelman, President of Edelman PR
Tom Curley, President of The Associated Press
Nick Kristof, NYT Columnist
Watts Wacker, CEO of Futurist

See our full roster of speakers here.

In an eye-opening and inspiring exploration of the We Mediascape, the program will include sessions on "We Media and the Collaborative Society" and the "Business of Collaboration."

Media sponsors include: Ogilvy PR, Red Herring, Digital Media Wire, Producers Guild of America and Guidewire Group.

Full conference information here.

The Business of Social Media; October 17-18; Copacabana, New York City, NY.

Chris at Pixelsumo points out that tonight on Resonance FM, London's 24-hour art radio station, OpenLab is hosting a program on using free and open source software tools for music. Sounds like chat, discussion, and some live sets. 7 PM London time, but of course they've got MP3 and Real Audio streams, too, because the sun never sets on the British art music empire. I'll try to record it, so if you happen to miss it and want to hear it, contact me and I'll hook you up.

Listen to the show online

OpenLab info (London)

What's OpenLab you ask? It's a London-based collective of people using open source software for their art, complete with IRC chat, mailing list, workshops, and in-person get-togethers. Even if you're not in London, some interesting ideas there about how to put together such a group. (See also: ptop music collective here in NYC. Other groups?).

The third annual Machinima Film Festival will be held at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York 2005 November 12 Saturday. Machinima is movie making using real-time 3D game technology or virtual reality applications. An example of Machinima is RED VS BLUE. The one-day event will include screenings of Machinima films, workshops hosted by Machinima filmmakers, special presentations, talks with award-winning independent filmmakers, and seminars about Machinima production technique. Machinima filmmakers will be recognized for excellence by the 2005 Machinima Awards, which will be given at the Festival. Deadline 2005 October 6. [2005 Machinima Film Festival] [t d f | t d f]

Our friends in Europe are putting on a conference in Amsterdam next month.

It will cover two weekends to accomodate everyone who plans to come to town.
September 9th-11th and September 16th-18th.
Ryanne and I are thinking of going and spending the whole week as a vacation.

Here is where you can get the info. As far as I know it's free.
VlogEurope
VlogEurope Yahoo Group
VlogEurope Wiki

Just check out the Vlogmap to see all the european videobloggers popping up.

Portable Power 2005 claims to be the premier industry event for designers, developers and manufacturers of power supply systems, batteries, software, and microelectronics.

The event will investigate the unique power issues of handheld business and consumer devices, as well as battery and power technologies that make these small devices possible. The 2005 program will feature keynote speeches, feature presentations, educational sessions, and technical workshops on topics including:

• Countermeasures to battery counterfeiting
• Novel power management technologies
• Next generation battery technology
• Portable fuel cell technology
• Emerging applications for non-cell/non-computer VoIP
• Global supply chain
• Wide area data services/WiMAX
• New semiconductor structures

ory.aspx?symbols=CCN:100&story=200508041218_CCN_0804038n" target=new>It happens next month; September 18 - September 21, 2005 at The Palace Hotel, in San Francisco.

Sponsors of Portable Power 2005 include SANYO, Call2Recycle, HYB Battery Co., Nexergy, Portable Design China, Advanced Battery Technology, Advanced Fuel Cell Technology, analogZONE, Appliance Design, Bityard Magazine, Electronic Design, e-Power Magazine, Fuel Cell Magazine, Power Management DesignLine, Technology Review, Wireless Design & Development and Wireless Watch Japan.

We Media: Behold the Power of Us will take place October 5, 2005 at the headquarters of the Associated Press in New York. A quick synopsis:

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: More than a billion people are online. We Media brings together the trailblazers, leaders, movers and shakers of a movement that is connecting people everywhere. Their collective efforts are spawning new ideas, information, services and businesses utilizing the power of mass collaboration. What's happening? How are talent, resources and dollars from individuals and organizations worldwide gathering and being marshaled?

More info on the event is here | Click here to register.

Now, whether you can attend or not, we'd like to hear from you! What questions or issues would you like discussed by a particular participant? By all of the participants? Please post your comments below, and we will do our best to make as many of your voices heard as we can.

Kristin Thomson from Future of Music Coalition wrote to let us know about the FMC's upcoming Summit event. There's an impressive list of attendees (Senator Maria Cantwell, Michael Geist, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein) and the sponsors include ASCAP, BMI and the EFF. They've even got a nice discount attendee rate for students.

Everyone gathered in the main room at the conference center at the end of the day. Jory thanked everyone that helped put the conference together, the advisory board, even the "guy fridays" that helped with registration. There was a lot of applause for everyone, and later on Lisa Stone got a standing ovation.

Then Elisha led a wrap-up discussion about what participants learned from the conference, our "next steps," and any feedback about how to make the conference better the next time around.

There were some interesting ideas thrown around. Mary Hodder suggested putting together a list of women speakers so we have more visibility at tech and business conferences. Debi from Mobile Jones took that a step further and suggested that we "get women to smartmob the next male-dominated conference!"

Another participant said she felt that people often don't go beyond their comfort zones and tend to only read blogs written by people just like them. She suggested everyone "find five blogs by people that don't look like you and learn something about them." Someone else suggested that everyone identify three people they know and help them create and learn how to use a blog.

The only negative feedback was from one participant, who asked that next time around they don't put so many good sessions on during the same timeslot. That's positive when you think about it - there was that much good stuff!

All the sessions were recorded for later podcasting and there are a ton of people blogging at and about BlogHer so there's plenty for you to read and listen to.

The evening ended with a cocktail party sponsored by Yahoo! I mentioned to Lisa that the fact that so many people were hanging around afterwards and chatting was visual testament to how successful the event was. The networking and relationship-building outside the conference rooms are just as important as the sessions and speakers, especially at a conference like this.

Jet lag is starting to set in so I'm going to sign off and order some room service.

Vlog | SoHo | Round 2
Apple Store, SoHo, NYC
Sat. July 30, 7-8:30pm

Videoblogging is a new form of expression centering around posting videos to a website and encouraging an audience response. It is the next step from text blogging and podcasting. A community of artists, video editors, podcasters, bloggers, and software developers has formed around this new mode of communication. Join videobloggers as they show their favorite videos and viewing tools, discuss video blog creation, and share tips and techniques. Learn how you can create your own video blog for free!

This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.

WiebeTECH has announced the G505 Video Contest to recognize video editing work done on Macintosh G5 systems. Enter a video clip (up to 5 minutes long) of your video project edited on a G5. The winner will receive a G5JamPak, worth over US$2,000. [DIGERATI UNIVERSITY]

Via Cinema Minima

Cory Doctorow: The 2005 Machinima Film Festival has been announced for November 12, 2005, in NYC:

The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), an organization that provides advocacy, education and community for Machinima (filmmaking using real-time 3D game technology/virtual reality), today announced the 2005 Machinima Film Festival and the call for entries for the 2005 Machinima Awards (the Mackies). Sponsored by NVIDIA and the Independent Film Channel (IFC), the third annual festival will be held Saturday, November 12th 2005, at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

The one-day event will include screenings of Machinima films, workshops hosted by Machinima filmmakers, special presentations, talks with award-winning independent filmmakers and seminars about Machinima production techniques. The event will culminate in an awards ceremony where some of the best Machinima filmmakers will be recognized for their creative artistry in this new and powerful entertainment medium that's set to revolutionize the worlds of filmmaking and animation.

Wonderland)

Now that Esthr has announced it, I can finally blog Simon Grice's 'Personal Identity Summit' in London for Nov. 17-18.

Simon originally planned this event for last February, and then in Sept. - but he's finally settled on Nov. 2005 - as the beginning of a while new thing in London-town.

Simon's company - Midentity (where Esthr is an Angel investor) has a deal with British Telecom - and they're about to launch their services under the BT brand. I leave it to Simon to announce the servcies, but let me tell you - the world won't be the same.

I can't wait to see all sorts of gateways onto and off of mobile devices and see them tie into a DLA driven world.

See Russ! I DO think about mobile - in fact everytime I pick up my 6630. But we need entreprenuers like Simon - 'cause I can't do everything myself!

Midentity and Broadband Mechanics will be doing something together - which we'll let yah know about - once we've figured it out ourselves.

UPDATE: Simon has corrected me. Esthr got it wrong - and I jumped to conclusions. I'll repost this a bit later to remind folks - as more details are unveiled.

Via Marc's Voice

Educause is offering a free online seminar about narrowcasting: Narrowcasting 101: Using Blogs, Podcasts, and Videoblogs in Higher Education, Date: July 21, 2005, Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT. Registration is required. They have nice pages about podcasting and blogs, too: podcasting blogs...

A hybrid of film festival and music festival, Optronica is a brand new five day event focusing on the convergence of visuals and music.

The first edition of the STRP festival will take place in Eindhoven (Netherlands) between the 18th and 20th of November 2005. Its focus is on the commonalities between art, popular culture and technology. As part of the festival there will be performances, exhibits and presentations in a historical space. STRP will take place on the 'holy' ground of the forbidden city of Philips, where in the 20th century numerous technological innovations were made. A place where Einstein worked at one point and where one of the most ambitious amalgamations of the arts and technology took place: "Poeme Electronique," a collaboration between the architect LeCorbusier with architect/composer Iannis Xenakis, artist Jean Petit, composer Edgard Varese and filmmaker Phillipe Agostini. Coincidence or not, Dick Raaijmakers also was closely involved in this project. STRP gets its inspiration from this amalgamation of technology and art.

STRP Art & Technology Festival : Eindhoven, Netherlands

Yes, I know it's a bit past the date for submissions - but hey - you never know…

The Found Footage Festival is a one-of-a-kind event that compiles over an hour's worth of footage from videotapes that were found at garage sales and thrift stores, and in warehouses and trash bins throughout the country.

posted by yatta to unmediated film film.festival ... and others... bookmark this

RFID Keychain Detector

Zapped! Workshop by Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Heidi Kumao, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer): July 15, 2005 - 6:30 - 9:00pm at Eyebeam, NYC.

You may have heard the term RFID and possibly even brought one home unknowingly. But what exactly is a Radio Frequency Identification tag? Why are Wal-Mart, the Department of Defense and the Food & Drug Administration sinking big bucks into these little chips and paving the way for mass implementation? After a brief overview of the technology and its potential impact on our lives, each participant will receive a Zapped! RFID Kit complete with a colorful workbook and materials for the hands-on portion of the workshop. Preemptive Media will guide the group through building an RFID keychain detector that plays a jingle when a reader is within range and scanning the airwaves for data. Participants can program tags that "talk back" to a RFID reader uncovered by a Zapped! keychain. Registration fee is $25 general public, $20 for Eyebeam members. Sign up here.

Creative Arts & Sciences in Virtual Environments

Creative VR Futures: Creative Arts & Sciences in Virtual Environments, 22-23 July 2005--A two day symposium for professional artists, designers and creative practitioners offering a range of artistic presentations, demonstrations and hands-on experience of current immersive and augmented virtual environment research. The event will take an in depth look into current artistic applications and developments of virtual/mixed reality, ranging from telepresent networking, tele-immersion and collaborative VR interaction to both painted and virtual urban landscape panoramas.

Following the symposium participants will be invited to apply for one of two artist-in-residence opportunities at The University of Salford Centre for Virtual Environments for a period of six months to develop and showcase their work.

This two day event is free. For further information and symposium booking details please contact Nathalie Edwards on 0161 295 2801 or email n.j.edwards[at]salford.ac.uk

Friday 22 July, 9.30am to 5.00pm

Centenary Building Lecture Theatre, School of Art & Design, The University of Salford, Centenary Building, Peru Street, Salford, Greater Manchester, M3 6EQ

Presentation by:

Maurice Benayoun - Interactive Media Artist, Paris
Steve Benford - Mixed Realities Lab, University of Nottingham
Monica Fleischmann - Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen
Horst Hoertner - Ars Electronica Futurelab
Ben Johnson - Commissioned Artist for Liverpool Biannual
David Roberts - The Centre for Virtual Environemnts, Salford
Paul Sermon - School of Arts & Design, Salford
Anthony Steed - University College London
Wolfgang Strauss - Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen

Saturday 23 July, 9.30am to 5.00pm

The Centre for Virtual Environments, The University of Salford, Business House, University Road, Salford, Greater Manchester, M5 4WT

Presentations and Demonstrations of:

Fraunhofer/MARS, Bonn/Bremen - Introduced by Monica Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss
Ars Electronica Futurelab - Introduced by Horst Hoertner
World Skin - Introduced by Maurice Benayoun
UCL EQUATOR - Introduced by Anthony Steed
The Centre for Virtual Environments - Introduced by David Roberts

Support by The Arts Council England and The University of Salford

Presented in association with Futuresonic 05 http://www.futuresonic.com

The Blog Business Summit has posted their event details marked up with hCalendar.

I know this is a bit off-topic for HackingNetflix, but I'm helping host an OPML meeting in NYC on Tuesday, July 12th at 7pm. Dave Winer will be demonstrating his new OPML editor and he says we'll have a "conference-room style meetup to talk about OPML, publishing, knowledge, scholarship, news and the World Outline."

If you're wondering what OPML is, here's the Wikipedia page on OPML.

Here's the location of the meeting:

Steve Smith at Ritchie Capital has generously offered the use of their 38th floorconference room (great view of midtown skyscrapers, including the Chrysler Building). A fairly inspiring location. 747 Third Ave (at 46th).

Post your name in the comments before noon on Tuesday if you're attending. I have to give the list of names to security and if your name is not on the list they will not let you in the building (be sure to bring a photo ID, too).

E-mail me if you have any questions (mikek at hackingnetflix.com).

Still outraged by the criminal coverage of live8 event by MTV/VH1 ...

With their criminal (non)coverage of Live8 event last week, MTV and VH1 denied this generation of young people opportunity to engage in and create their own musical cultural signifier.

Text is here ...

via: Steve Garfield's "Off On A Tangent"

Videoblogging: Meet the vloggers

Apple Store SoHo
July 8th from 6:00 - 7:20 PM

Presenter:
Steve Garfield hosts videobloggers from around the country including Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson, Clint Sharp, Joshua Kinberg, Bre Pettis, Josh Leo, Adam Quirk, Andrew Baron, Christopher Weagel, and Schlomo Rabinowitz.

Topics of discussion:
Videobloggers show their favorite videos and viewing tools, discuss video blog creation, and share tips and techniques.

Hear how you can create your own video blog for free!

Videoblogging is a new form of expression centering around posting videos to a website and encouraging an audience response. It is the next step from text blogging and podcasting.

A community of artists, video editors, podcasters, bloggers, and software developers has formed around this new mode of communication. We are a group of people who use videos as a normal part of our blogging.

Speakers:
Steve Garfield - Welcome
Jay Dedman - I love you all, What is videoblogging?
Josh Leo - Show and tell, showing videoblogs
Joshua Kinberg - Watching video: ANT, iTunes
Ryanne Hodson - How to create a video blog, point people in the right direction, ex: freevlog
Bre Pettis - Show and tell, showing videoblogs
Adam Quirk - Vlogging without video cameras
Andrew Baron - Rocketboom: why I think Rocketboom is sucessful in terms of its growth rate
Christopher Weagel - Videoblogging allowing a much wider variety of content than anything mainstream
Schlomo Rabinowitz - Show and tell, showing videoblogs
Clint Sharp - Links as currency

7:00-7:20 Open for questions, show and tell, audience participation, etc...

Store Address:
103 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012
(212) 226-3126
http://www.apple.com/retail/soho/

After Party:
After the presentations we are going to go out and have some food and drinks. So stop by, let's meet each other and have some vloggy fun!

"COPYFIGHT abrirá durante tres dias diversas zonas de documentación y debate con el objetivo de contribuir a la información de productores culturales y consumidores. Ponencias y presentaciones, talleres de trabajo. programas de video, areas de descarga o una consultoría legal abierta al visitante se constituirán de manera descentralizada en tres jornadas centradas en areas de la creatividad como la producción digital, la música, la literatura y la cultura audiovisual."

Chuck Olsen, Videobloggers, and BBQ. What more could you ask for?

"Hey bloggers, videobloggers, podcasters, and media-curious!

We are holding hands with Vloggercue NYC and Vloggercue West to present Vloggercue Midwest on July 9.

Vloggercue started out as a BBQ gathering in New York, part of the "Summer of Vlog." Now we're gathering on the West coast and the Midwest at the same time, linked together through a Flash videoconference.

We'll play some selected videoblogs, show you how easy it is to set up your own, and announce a new Minnesota-themed daily videoblog. Oh yeah... we'll eat and drink and babble ot each other, too.

Geeky? Of course. Fun? Hell yeah. Educational? I'm afraid so - but mostly fun.

Registration is now open for the first Accessible Design in the Digital World Conference, taking place in Dundee, Scotland, on 23-25 August 2005.

The conference will explore the frontiers of inclusive design in the real world, by examining the challenges in both implementing guidelines andmeeting legislative responsibilities. There will be opportunities for discussion and debate among those at the front-line of design anddevelopment work and those providing guidance regarding accessible and inclusive design.

Piksel[1] is an annual event for artists and developers working with open source audiovisual software tools. Part workshop, part festival, it is organised in Bergen, Norway, by the Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK) [2] and involves participants from more than a dozen countries exchanging ideas, coding, presenting art and software projects, doing workshops, performances and discussions on the aesthetics and politics of open source. Piksel05 will take place in Bergen october 16. - 23. 2005.

For "organizers and activists using free and open source (F/OSS) online advocacy tools, and developers and designers building those tools"

A workshop I did notice at Ubicomp 2005: “Situating Ubiquitous Computing in Everyday Life: Bridging the Social and Technical Divide“:

A workshop to be held at UbiComp 2005, Tokyo, Japan, 11 September 2005. Sponsored by the Knowledge Acquisition & Projection Lab @ Indiana University. Organized by Michael A. Evans, Andy Crabtree, Mike Fraser, Peter Tolmie and Rick McMullen

Submission Deadline (Extended): 18 July 2005
Acceptance Notification: 25 July 2005
Final Version: 8 August 2005
Workshop Date: 11 September 2005

*Call for Position Papers*
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” (Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the Twenty–First Century")

If we take Weiser’s vision seriously, then it is clear that the ultimate challenge for ubiquitous computing is to weave or situate new technologies into the very fabric of everyday life. Despite a number of impressive efforts developing and evaluating prototype systems, many researchers will no doubt recognize that UbiComp demonstrations are nevertheless very ‘distinguishable’.
Such systems have yet to disappear or become an ‘unremarkable’ feature of everyday life - this, we suggest, largely being a result of where emphasis is placed in the development of ubiquitous computing systems. Although attempts have been made to understand he ‘fabric of everyday life’ of target users, emphasis to date has primarily been placed on demonstrating theoretical principles from computer science and the capabilities of new ubiquitous technologies. Given the nascent state of the field, this has been an understandable first phase of growth. Nonetheless, with the movement of computing research away from the workplace and its diversification into novel areas of everyday life, the time is ripe for serious reflection on the nature of everyday life and its importance to the ongoing development of ubiquitous computing systems.

Further details: www.pervasive.iu.edu/~kapl/ubicomp2005/

Why do I blog this? I think this workshop raised an important question often forgotten: how can ubicomp be situated in everyday life. That’s a tremendous issue: how can we engage users in using these technologies. That should indeed fits with their activities/habits/expectations/desire… easy to say but how do we actually do that?

I'm arranging a Boston videobloggers dinner on Monday night at Dogwood Cafe in Jamaica Plain at 7:00.

If you'd like to join us, let me know.

You don't have to be a videoblogger, we'll tell you all about it.

A two-day conference in London will bring together key players from across the interactive television field to discuss how to create more engaging services.

: This is the year of mobile video...at least in terms of activity among the industry players. It is still a conceptual play on a lot of levels, but at the the Mobile Entertainment Marketplace conference in London today, the whole Earl's Court conference hall was buzzing with, well, buzz about mobile video.
Our extensive coverage on our dedicated blog is here...
The MEM Conference coverage is sponsored by AG Interactive & Def Jam Mobile

The Mobile Imaging Summit conferences, now in their third year, are limited attendance events open to senior executives that bring together leaders of the imaging, information processing and telecommunications industries to foster revenue growth in the camera-phone ecosystem.

"CTC 2005 comprehensive conference will define your strategy for collaboration and evaluate the most appropriate tools and applications. Each of the conference tracks address the advantages and potential pitfalls, from both IT and business perspectives. The benefits of collaborative technologies can be significant, but only if they fit the needs of the business."

The GLS Conference will foster substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education.

>>> Media/blog junkies, don't miss this event!

CITIZEN MEDIA FAIR TO EXPLORE PEOPLE POWER AND THE MEDIA
Concerned about the news media? You are not alone. Americans all across the political spectrum are increasingly dissatisfied with - and distrustful of - the performance of local and national news sources. A Citizen Media Fair to be held June 4 from 1 to 5 p.m. at Hamline University’s Klas Center will bring together journalists, media activists and concerned citizens to talk about what citizens can do to increase media accountability, quality and diversity. The fast-paced program will feature panel discussions, hands-on workshops, screenings of documentaries on the news media, and a keynote address by Air America Minnesota talk show host Wendy Wilde.

PEOPLE POWER AND THE MEDIA
Saturday, June 4th
1 PM - 5 PM
Hamline University

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: WENDY WILDE [AIR AMERICA MINNESOTA 950 am]

PANELS
Holding the Media Accountable:
Gary Gilson, Minnesota News Council
Kate Parry, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Scott Johnson, PowerLineBlog.com
Rob Levine, Cursor.org

Making Your Own Media:
John Slade, Counter Propaganda Coalition
Janis Lane-Ewert, KFAI Fresh Air Radio
Chuck Olsen, director of Blogumentary
Pam Colby, Minneapolis Telecommunication

Plus workshops and more.

FLOSS Away Technical Constraints

Videotage FLOSS in Media Workshop--Speakers: Kam Wong (Assistant Professor of School of Creative Media, City University) and Annie Wan (Instructor of FLOSS in Media Work Shop); Date: 5 June 2005 (Sunday), 2pm; Venue: Videotage, Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon.

The limits of media art should not be the software license or functionalities created by software designers. Pure Data, free libre and open source software allow you to tailor your own software to match the requirements of your own art piece. FLOSS stands for free libre and open source software. Pure data, an excellent example of the FLOSS idea, is a programming language that can be used in a wide variety of multimedia creation. Annie Wan will touch on interactive installation, VJ performance, audio synthesis & analysis, motion detection and tangible media. You will be working on your own creative project, and you will have a chance to present your work at the party on 27 August.

Annie Wan is a young international artist specializes in audiovisual art and interactive art development, Her recent works have been shown in Sweden, Latvia, Germany, France, Norway, Singapore and Iceland. She will be a PhD candidate with scholarship and Top Scholar Award in DXARTS, University of Washington, Seattle. Check out www.slimboyfatboyslim.org for more information about Annie.

Videotage (literally merging the two concepts of "Video" and "Montage") is a non-profit interdisciplinary artist collective, which focuses on the development of video and new media art in Hong Kong. Founded in 1985, Videotage began as a facilitator for collaborative time-based projects. In a small shared office with two chairs and table, Videotage's support to artists came in the form of labour and equipment for production and post-production, and the exchange of ideas. Videotage has since expanded to include publications, education, exhibitions and screenings.

Via networked_performance

Lisa Nakamura is giving the talk Subjects & Objects of Interactivity: Racial Formation and Media Convergence at UC Riverside's Global Interface Mellon Workshop, this Wednesday (May 25) at 5pm. She'll discuss the interface-like logic of Jennifer Lopez's 2000 video "If You Had My Love."

I'm going to Gnomedex in June and will be in Seattle June 23-25th.


Any Seattle videobloggers want to get together on Jun 25, 2005 at 6:00 pm for an Eric Rice inspired VloggerLobbyBarCon?

Seattle Marriott Waterfront Lobby Bar

Seattle Marriott Waterfront
2100 Alaskan Way
Seattle, Washington 98121 USA
Phone: 1-206-443-5000

Human Interaction with Space

An invitation to researchers, faculty, staff, and graduate and PhD students to submit a letter of interest for a 4-day interdisciplinary workshop--Locative Media in the Wild--to be held July 20th- July 23rd*, 2005 at the Crooked Creek Research Facility in the White Mountains of Inyo County, California. Convened by Brett Stalbaum and Naomi Spellman, Interdisciplinary Computing Arts, University of California San Diego. Funded by the UCSD Center for the Humanities and the UC Humanities Research Institute the goal of this workshop is to share knowledge, methods, and tools between various research disciplines that have a focus on human interaction with space. Our hope is to identify common interests as well as blind spots among a range of disciplines, in order to enrich the various practices represented, and to inspire new areas of research. Four individuals will be chosen to participate. Each will be provided with overnight accommodations, all meals, travel expenses ($300 cap), and $500 compensation.

BACKGROUND The fields of cognitive science, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology, dance, art, computer science, the earth sciences, and geography are concerned with the negotiation of space. Recent advances in wireless telecommunications, sensor technology, and Geographic Information System tools have inspired a tide of experimental creative projects. These tools are being used to address how communication, navigation, and big data are played out in space. As the landscape and urban streets become the canvas for ubiquitous computing applications, what kinds of possibilities emerge? How can research across multiple disciplines enrich the various practices?

WORKSHOP GOALS AND ACTIVITY While the workshop is intended to yield useful tools and problem-solving methods for all workshop participants, we are most concerned with fostering an interaction among disciplines, and examining and expanding upon how researchers approach spatial problems. Discussion and facilitated activity will set up a framework for activity over the 3-day workshop. Participants will be asked to present and demonstrate their own approach to spatial problems, and to collaboratively address problems outside their discipline.

The problem(s) addressed will be culled from workshop participants. Possible approaches include but are not limited to: Geographic Information System software, GPS-enabled mobile phones, narrative strategies, social navigation, performance (performative engagement of surrounding), data visualization, and data mining. Mediated or unmediated, digital or analogue a variety of means to communicate with and through space will be explored. A people-centered approachwill be emphasized in a supportive and flexible environment. Results of the workshop will be made publicly available online. Results will serve as a basis for ongoing multi-disciplinary research in this area.

WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS Participants may be at any stage in their career, and do not need tobe affiliated with an institution, academic or otherwise.

WORKSHOP LOCATION The physical location should inspire activities with a range of possible scales, problems, methods, and outcomes. By placing the research group outside of a familiar context, participants will be encouraged to rely on each other to address problems that engage the surrounding. The Crooked Creek facility is located at 10,000 feet in the White Mountains in Central California. Facilities and labs include dormitory-style rooms, a weather station, a Geographic Information System lab, and high-speed telecommunications.

TO SUBMIT A LETTER OF INTEREST Please email a short letter of interest to naomi.spellman@gmail.com with "Locative Workshop" in the subject line. Attach your CV. Explain how your research activity or practice relates to this general theme. Include any specific information you deem relevant. Letters of Interest should be received by June 10, 2005. Questions should be directed to naomi.spellman[at]gmail.com or stalbaum[at]ucsd.edu.

*Date of workshop to be confirmed

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION An online discussion and bibliography hosted by Brett Stalbaum and Naomi Spellman, November 2004: Exploring and defining the social and cultural implications of Geographic Information System tools and computerized mapping in a multidisciplinary setting: http://34n118w.net/UCHRI/

ITP Spring Show 2005 Tuesday, May 10 and Wednesday, May 11 - 5 to 9pm both days - ITP, 721 Broadway, 4th Floor

more information at http://itp.nyu.edu/show

An exhibition of innovative student work including multimedia installations, physical computing and interaction design, sound and video design projects. All projects on display at ITP.

http://itp.nyu.edu/show/results.php

(Can't wait to see the work of Shawn's 'Producing Participatory Media' class. -kc. )

I suppose the day was going to come where the casual gaming market would get a conference of its own. It's nice to see that the day is in late July (July 19-20 to be exact). This conference is put on by The Games Initiative, who has put on various other conferences such as the Advertising in Games Forum and How to Break Into the Game Industry. Please go here for more info.

May 18-19, 2005
Jurys Great Russell Street, London

Wireline operators across Europe are calculating business models for the addition of broadcast, interactive and on-demand video services to their product portfolios. As voice and data services become further commoditised, the aim is to access new revenue streams and achieve effective differentiation. However, a number of challenges face operators. Revenue models, regulatory issues and ROI on infrastructure are key concerns.

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[This feed contains only short descriptions of the articles. To read the full article, please click through.]

Mediacast 2005 is hosting a free three-day conference in London in connection with the annual trade exhibition. The event will cover many aspects of digital television, including interactive and high-definition services, the telco video, voice and data triple play, and mobile video.

Via informitv news

Saturday at high noon join in of a day of workshops and lectures about tactical media making with some of the web’s most notorious pioneers and players. Join special guests from The Yes Men, the Electronic Freedom Foundation and creators of Subservient Chicken (Crispin Porter + Bogusky), Black People Love Us, Rejection Line, FundRace, How to Dance Properly, del.icio.us, Blogdex, Nike Sweatshop Email, Dog Island and Pizza Party to learn the tips and tricks to win the Showdown.

USC and EA are partnering to offer female students a scholarship to attend the Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp during the USC's Summer Seminars program.
From the press release:

The USC Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp is a 4-week program designed to help students pursue their dream of working in the video game industry. The single scholarship in the 2005 summer seasons will represent the first female registered student in the program, as the 2004 inaugural year featured an exclusively male student body. The scholarship includes free admission to the camp, room and board at USC, and three college credits for successfully completing the program.

Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp runs from July 3rd to July 30th. Deadline to apply for the scholarship is May 15th. It is open to any female high school junior or senior with a GPA of at least 3.5 and who submit both a written recommendation from a teacher and a 250-word essay on why they are passionate about video games. Applications should be sent to: ea-usc-scholarship@ea.com.

"We hope this scholarship not only provides an exciting opportunity for an inspired girl, but sends a broader message. EA wants to encourage girls to aspire for a career building games...and we hope the best and brightest continue their studies and find a future home in the industry," said Steve Seabolt, Vice President at EA.

Representing 39% of the gaming population, according to the Entertainment Software Association, women players are a growing force within the gaming community. EA is responding to this demand by encouraging and empowering young women to take the industry seriously and consider it for a future career. This scholarship is the first step in a larger program designed to encourage women to pursue their passion for gaming and enter the industry as professionals.

EA and USC have been working together in a number of different ways to ensure students are ready to enter the games industry with the knowledge and power to make a difference. "EA continues to support our engineering program at USC," said Dr. Anthony Borquez, Director of the Information Technology Program, which offers numerous courses on gaming. "Not only does EA provide us with game resources and guest speakers for our classes, but we also staff animators and engineers from EALA who teach classes in my program."

Applicants must have a cumulative B average, submit a letter of recommendation from a high school teacher and submit a 250 word essay "Why I want to grow up and make games." More information about the USC interactive entertainment summer camp program and EA scholarship can be found at: http://www.usc.edu/dept/admissions/programs/summer/seminars.shtml.

Via game girl advance

If you're in NYC, you definitely won't want to miss the Bent festival of circuit-bending music at The Tank on 42nd Street. Each day of the festival this week features workshops on how to warp common electronics from Walkmans to Game Boys into new musical instruments, and concerts of many of the leading musical practitioners of this art form.

By the way, signs I'm getting bogged down by writing work and a book that's months overdue? How about when the UK-based MusicThing is on top of the Bent Circuit Bending festival before the (cough, cough!) NYC-based CDM that's had this sitting in my inbox for a week. When MusicThing has a photo of my friend Patrick McCarthy (guitarist) right on the homepage, I know I'm behind!

That said, I will engineer a jailbreak soon to get out there and check some of this out, especially since is The Tank's swansong before the space gets hit with a wrecking ball. (Ah, NYC progress.) What are deadlines, anyway?

For more information on circuit bending if you're in the rest of the world that's not New York, check out Reed Ghazala's excellent Anti-Theory site..

Via createdigitalmusic.com

WORKSHOP
Call for Participation

Space, Place and Experience in Human-Computer Interaction

Interact 2005
13th September 2005, Rome

As HCI research engages with the new interaction paradigms of mobile, pervasive and ambient computing, new challenges for user-centred interaction design arise. This one-day workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary group of practitioners in order to share experiences, explore foundations, and discuss an agenda for research in space, place and the experience of pervasive and ambient technology.

Issues of interest to the workshop include but are not limited to:

* Theories and conceptual frameworks for analysing space, place and the contextualisation of interaction with embedded systems
* Place, non-place and interaction spaces
* Methods, tools and techniques for the experience-centred design of emplaced technology
* Case studies in the design and use of ambient and pervasive technologies.

We encourage participation from a wide range of disciplines and practitioners including HCI, interaction design, architecture, product design, computer science, psychology, social sciences, cultural and media studies.

All participants are invited to submit a 2-4 page position paper. These will be refereed by a small committee and around 16 participants selected.

The day will be organized to include 10-minute presentations and discussions.

Please submit position papers (as a Word or PDF file) to peter.wright@cs.york.ac.uk by 30th May Participants will be notified by 10th June.

Via Clippings.reblog

Goal of this workshop is to bring together experts on the semantic web, HCI, human language technologies, info viz, information retrieval, and knowledge-based systems to discuss how to bring the power of the semantic web to end-users.

Deadline: EXTENDED to April 25

How can traditional performance strategies blend with cutting-edge new media to create artistic forms reflecting today’s dynamic global culture? Join The Kitchen and the Summer Institute’s first invited international Artistic Director, Ong Keng Sen, for a multidisciplinary program exploring the relationships between ancient technologies, dramaturgy and game. Fully accredited by Sarah Lawrence College, this intensive three-week laboratory offers emerging artists the unique opportunity to develop work integrating video, theatre, performance, dance, sound, and text.

Through daily interaction with a select group of professional artists from Asia and the U.S., participants explore ritualistic techniques from ancient cultures within the rich landscape of interactive systems, game design and rules of play. Artist talks and mentoring sessions with industry professionals as well as access to The Kitchen’s extraordinary video archive of performance documentation enrich the curriculum.

Ancient Technologies, Dramaturgy, and Game

July 11 - 29, 2005
Application Deadline: EXTENDED to April 25

Artistic Director: Ong Keng Sen, THEATREWORKS AND
THE FLYING CIRCUS PROJECT, SINGAPORE

Fully accredited by Sarah Lawrence College.

Tuition: $2,800 (includes meal plan and laptop computer)
Partial scholarships available.
For more information please visit our website: www.thekitchen.org

This one day workshop on Multimedia and the Semantic Web aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the multimedia and Semantic Web domains in order to assist in forming bridges between the communities for mutual benefit.

RE:activism

RE:activism: Re-drawing the boundaries of activism in a new media environment

e in Budapest, October 14-15, 2005

Re:activism will focus on two closely connected subjects. On the first day, we gather to discuss the new dynamics of culture production. Digital networks allow the large scale cooperation of individuals with diverse motivational backgrounds. This cooperation often results in globally competitive ideas, (software) products, (social) services. Ad-hoc activist, expert networks can only consolidate themselves if the necessary legal, economic and technological frameworks are created or emerge from local interactions. We research into the political economy of peer production networks and examine how regulation in a post-Westphalian order can integrate these networks. We also discuss the potential conflicts between peer networks and contemporary social, economic, and legal institutions and examine how tradition emerges through open archives documenting these conflicts.

On the second day we offer a layered approach to activism when we examine activist practices and civic action groups in urban, local and global contexts. The general title of the day: Local and global activism in the context of new media covers the analysis of anti-globalization activist networks who often use the urban fabric as a battleground for their causes. We also try to grasp the conceptual framework that helps describing the emergence of local civic engagement and the civic uses of new media technologies. The special case of democratic elections also provide us the opportunity to dive into the forces that change contemporary political systems.

The conference is organized around altogether eight topics. Each day we have a morning session of keynote lecture by a lead researcher, we have three sessions of academic discourse, where distinguished researchers can present their work and have four panels in the afternoon with academic researchers, activists, artist who work in the field to share their values, evaluations, findings and proposals to each other.

The aim of the conference is to open up an open field of communication between academics and practitioners, eastern and western, European and North-American, groups and individuals all immersed in the field of activism.

See also call for papers.

Via Smart Mobs

Announcing the world's first Contagious Media Showdown. Do you have what it takes to corral enough traffic to win the cash prizes? Can you make the next Dancing Baby, All Your Base, or Star Wars Kid and ride into the sunset with the bounty? This is your chance to prove you are the best in the West.

July 30, Santa Clara. Open to both men and women, the conference will offer chance to talk about blogging and related social media tools - from a different perspective

From the USC Interactive Media Division comes Sims 2 University Movie Contest - meet Burnie Burns, win $5000: USC Interactive Media Division Weblog.

If you're in San Francisco, go check out Unmediated's Ryan Shaw's new work...

Organum: The Game is a collaborative video game in which three or more players sing into different microphones to control the three axes of movement (x, y, and z) on the game screen. Together, the players represent a grey sphere “character,” which they must navigate through an increasingly complicated path, hitting a series of targets as they travel through a luminous digital representation of the inside of the voice box.

More info here

Times:
Tuesday, 19 Apr 2005 to Saturday, 23 Apr 2005
12-6 pm, Admission Free
Reception: Saturday April 23, 6-8 pm
Admission Free

Location:
New Langton Arts
1246 Folsom Street (between 8th and 9th streets)
San Francisco, CA 94103-3817
415 626 5416

Today, I'll be at Harvard's Signal or Noise?, joined, I expect, by a cohort of bloggers. The first installment helped kick off the study of music and the law five years ago. Join us to see what we've learned (and not yet learned) since.

Switch coasts in a few weeks for the Stanford Center for Internet & Society's Cyberlaw in the Supreme Court, to hear how the Supreme Court might change the debate with its ruling in MGM v. Grokster.

Moore's Law turns 40 this month, so it's time for a look back at the "law" and the man responsible for it.

Cory Doctorow: Next Wednesday, as part of the festivities in Seattle's Computers, Freedom and Privacy confernece, EFF will host its Pioneer Awards, at 7PM at the Sci Fi Museum. Today, the org released the list of (very) distinguished winners for the year:

Dr. Patrick Ball is a leading innovator in applying scientific measurement to human rights. He directs the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) at Benetech (www.benetech.org), a nonprofit organization that combines the impact of technological solutions with the social entrepreneurship business model to help disadvantaged communities. He served as the catalyst behind two open source software tools for the human rights community, "Martus" and "Analyzer," which aid in the secure storage and analysis of data on human rights violations. He will be accepting his award from East Timor.

Edward Felten is a professor of Computer Science at Princeton University whose research interests include computer security and technology law and policy. He brings these scholarly interests to his work as an activist. In 2001, Felten and EFF sued the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Felten is also author of "Freedom to Tinker" (www.freedom-to-tinker.com), a highly regarded weblog exploring the ways government and industry attempt to limit technological innovation and what activists can do about it.

Mitch Kapor is President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a nonprofit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer app" that made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980's. In 1990 he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and served as its chairman until 1994.

This month's meetup is this Sunday, April 10 at 6:00 pm at Art Bar on 7th Ave

FMC's Kristin Thomson (via email): "On Tuesday, April 12, the Future of Music Coalition is hosting a one-day DC Policy Day, where we will apply a laser-beam focus on four critical topics emerging in the courts, Congress, and at the Copyright Office: (1) digital audio broadcasting and the future of radio, (2) low power FM and community voices, (3) health insurance and musicians, and (4) copyright in the courts and Congress, including discussions about the Grokster case and orphan works."

Via Copyfight

...should be fun. At New School University. April 9-10. Here are the details. We'll be selling magazines and other stuff in the tabling area so come out and say hi....

(Make sure to check out Jay Dedman's workshop on Videoblogging Saturday afternoon. -kc.)

Via Stay Free! Daily

Reuters has announced that it would host a debate next Tuesday, April 5 where the topic of discussion will be "the impact of blogs in journalism and the media."

Details as follows:

When: 6.00 pm - 8.30 pm, Tuesday, April 5th, 2005

Where: The Reuters Building, (42ND Street and 7th Avenue), 3 Times Square, 30th Floor, New York NY 10036

Panel convenes at 6.15pm, followed by open audience discussion and a cocktail reception.

Scheduled to participate:

Paul Holmes: Global Editor, General & Political News, Reuters

Stephen Baker: Senior Writer, IT Group, BusinessWeek

Jay Rosen: Author, Pressthink.org, & Associate Professor, NYU Dept. of Journalism

Bryan Keefer: Assistant Managing Editor, Columbia Journalism Review Daily

Garrett Graff: FishbowlDC.com, 1st White House Accredited Blogger

Dave Winer: Editor, Scripting News

John Fund: Columnist, OpinionJournal.com

Most importantly, the topics of discussion:

Are bloggers journalists? Should they be afforded the same rights as journalists?

With blogs central to the recent resignations of top journalists, is anyone holding the bloggers to account?

Do blogs have a vital role in the national debate?

Are they seeking the truth and exposing poor journalism? Or are they being used as campaigning tools to advance particular causes or points of view?

RSVP: Mediafolk wishing to attend should reach out to Sophie Brendel at +1 646 223 4331 or sophie.brendel (at) reuters (dot) com.

Via The Media Drop

NEXT FFF SCREENING! Friday March 25 at 8pm Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. --MM

Building on the success of the previous enhanced TV event in 2004, Junction is proud to present the second annual Enhanced TV Show, 2005.

The previous event brought together the key players within the industry and highlighted the need for further partnerships between the broadcast and production communities to push the technological boundaries. There were many useful insights offered, with numerous broadcasters and program makers offering their expert views on how the enhanced TV landscape is likely to be shaped.

Streaming Media East 2005: New York, NY
The exhibitors list has been published.. Some interesting things, like Webcast in a Box (although I think it is Real only). What I don't understand is why companies continue to market themselves and their products as "proprietary". For me, a streaming media professional, this means, stay away, far away..

Via sLop

Last year’s Big Story was blogs. The next big story is mobility, which is unfolding at lightning speed. So of course, The Media Center is all over it, and I hope you'll think about joining us.

Media Opportunities and Strategies for the Mobile, Broadband Generation will take place in Los Angeles, April 26 to 29, 2005.

This executive program will demystify mobile and wireless broadband, exploring the business opportunities, emerging technologies and new consumer behavior quickly evolving at the crossroads of media, technology and society.

And if you're a Trekkie, please note that we'll be visiting the Integrated Media Systems Center, part of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, where researchers will lead our group in a look at what's next in a world of ubiquitous broadband communications. I was told to seriously think Enterprise holodeck...

So far, the following people have confirmed they will serve as discussion leaders:
o Gilles Babinet, CEO, Musiwave
o Steve Cistulli, Panasonic Mobile Communications
o Rob Enderle, Columnist and President of the Enderle Group
o Scott Fox, CEO, Global View Partners
o Brian Gratch, Principal, Gratch & Associates
o Dewayne Hendricks, CEO, Dandin Group, Inc.; Member of the FCC Technological Advisory Council
o Susan Kaup, aka "Sooz"
o Susan Mernit, Senior Vice President, 5ive
o Andrew Nachison, Director, The Media Center
o Dean Newton, Vice President, Entertainment Media, Infospace Mobile
o Scott Rafer, CEO, Feedster
o Scott Smyers,Chairman & President,Digital Living Network Alliance; Vice President,Network and Systems Architecture Division, Platform Technology Center of America,Sony Electronics
o William Weiss, Chairman & CEO, The Promar Group

If you want to know more, go here.

Via editorsweblog.org

The second annual Interactive TV Advertising Show takes place on 24-25 May at Earl’s Court in London.

The first day will examine the impact that iTV advertising will have on branding, how campaigns are being benchmarked worldwide, and the impact that personal video recorders and video-on-demand services will have on advertising strategies.

The second day will focus on creativity, direct response and research, looking at how the medium is measured and how to create accountable advertising.

Speakers will include representatives of leading global brands, commercial television channels, airtime sales houses and platform operators, as well as those involved in the creation and production of interactive television adverts.

Via informitv news

List of Bloggie winners for 2005.

Cinequest, the Silicon Valley movie festival is open to one and all, even to film buffs nowhere near California. Thanks to a peer-to-peer movie-delivery system, many of the flicks can be watched online in near-DVD quality. [Wired News: DAT's Entertainment]

RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

Avid's Manager of New Market Development, Eli Chapman, will speak at the International Institute for Film Financing San Francisco Chapter Meeting 2005 March 16. Eli will discuss how emerging technology helps filmmakers and financiers identify the good, the bad, and the blockbusters in a world where anyone can make a movie. This can be accomplished by including the audience early on in the filmmaking process. Other speakers will treat:

• Hollywood Profits: The Big Picture — and the Small: Hollywood's continuing struggle with profitability is a systemic problem deeply rooted in the studios' legacy business model. This presents independent filmmakers and financiers alike with new entrepreneurial opportunities
• Frontiers of Film Financing: New Tax Incentives and Creative Financing Strategies. Glenn will explain new federal and state tax incentives and creative financing structures for independent filmmakers and their investors, as well as developing trends in film distribution
• The Filmmaker as Startup Entrepreneur: Key Lessons from Silicon Valley. What can a filmmaker learn from a successful entrepreneur? What are the compelling qualities a venture investor looks for in an investment opportunity?

[ RSS Feed for Cinema Minima

Via Cinema Minima

IP (Intellectual Property) and Creativity is a one-day conference (2005 March 16) which examines critical issues affecting the advancement of creativity in the United States. Learn about the complex issues surrounding IP, innovation and creativity and the potential impact on America's business and culture. Engage in the discussion on how to best encourage creativity and ingenuity within the United States by redefining the debate over protecting IP. Connect with the leaders in the intellectual property debate, including policymakers, media, think tanks, academicians and industry executives. Conference site. [Brian Flemming]

Via Cinema Minima

The 2005 San Francisco Flash® Film Festival finalists have been posted and People’s Choice voting is open. 15 categories including cartoon, art, motion control, 3d, etc.



Via Flashforward blog.

Via we make money not art

From Dr. Monica Divitini, Norway:

We are organizing a workshop that might be interesting for some of you.

Learning Communities in the era of Ubiquitous Computing
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~divitini/ubilearn2005/
Milano, 13 June 2005

in conjunction with the International conference "Communities and Technologies".

See also:
Ubiquitous and mobile computing for educational communities: enriching and enlarging community spaces, Amsterdam, 19 September 2003

Via All about Mobile Life

Topics to be covered include Computer Games, Digital media production, use of Computer Game Engines in film/TV production, linear and non-linear narratives and formats, realistic computer Graphics.

The deadline for applying for the Digital Communities award of Prix Ars Electronica has been extended to March 18. Real money involved!

For the second time in 2005, Prix Ars Electronica will honor important achievements by digital communities. This category focuses attention on the wide-ranging social impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in the fields of social software, mobile communications and wireless networks.

The "Digital Communities" category is open to political, social, and cultural projects, initiatives, groups, and scenes from all over the world utilizing digital technology to better society and assume social responsibility. It is meant to recognize the initiators and propagators of these communities as well as the developers of the relevant technologies, and to honor those whose work contributes to the establishment and proliferation of Digital Communities as well as provide understanding and research into them.

The prizes in this category will total 20,000 Euros: one Golden Nica (10,000 Euro), two Awards of Distinction (5,000 Euros each) and up to 12 Honorary Mentions.
Online submission here

Via Smart Mobs

You locals should check out the 12th Annual New York Underground Film Festival, from March 5-12 at Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave., at 2nd Street). I've gone the past three years now and always manage to find something weird and engaging. Fans of copyright infringement should take special note of these screenings:

PUTTIN' ON THE HITS
Sat 3/12 at 7 pm and Mon 3/14 at 5:45 pm - Includes several shorts: America's Biggest Dick (Brian Boyce, pictured, who we know and love), Manager's Corner (Skizz Cyzyk), PYT (Tara Mateik), Boxes Jesus and Sandwiches (Jennifer Matotek), 5 Video Hits (Kent Lambert), El Moro (Jim Finn) and Sans Simon (Cory Arcangel).

VIDEO WOW
Sat 3/12 at 9:30 pm and Mon 3/14 at 7:30 pm - More shorts. Lots of shorts. Includes: Big Screen Version (Aaron Valdez) and Set-4 (Jan Van Neunen)

JK!!!
Fri 3/11 at 9:15pm and Mon 3/14 at 11 pm - Features selections from the Found Footage Film Festival, including a racy short in which Arnold Schwarzenegger fondles a Brazilian escort, plus the Xtina parody Don't You Bring Me Down Today

Front page of yahoo, Pontiac car advertisement with image of camera phone and car: "SNAP A PICTURE OF ANY PONTIAC G6 ANYWHERE AND YOU COULD WIN $1 MILLION." Here's the contest page. Email your photo to win@catchag6.com

Things are getting interesting :)

Running March 2 though March 13, the Cinequest event is an independent film festival with a digital twist.

Commercial-free, DVD-quality downloads of many of the festival's feature films are available for online viewing, powered by a video-sharing system from Kontiki that uses peer-to-peer technology to deliver movies to desktops.

"Welcome to Mobile Entertainment Summit, the industry's leading conference and showcase of mobile entertainment from games to music to multimedia to messaging and marketing."

"Take advantage of the opportunity to meet and network with leading industry players making money in delivering wireless entertainment and mobile applications."

Aesthetics of Play is a conference to be held at the University of Bergen 14-15 October 2005, hosted by the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. The conference is arranged in collaboration with Norway’s first game-art exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall.

Via Diablog

Lawrence Lessig, fresh off his gig as Christopher Lloyd on West Wing, will be on C-Span Thursday, March 3rd 2005 as part of its Digital Future series. Spread the word.

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, is the author of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, published by Basic Books. He is an expert on the issues of copyright and "copyleft." He is the inventor of the revolutionary concept and application Creative Commons, which invites the right to use material under specific conditions.

The series "Managing Knowledge and Creativity in a Digital Context" will examine how the digital age is changing the most basic ways information is organized and classified. The goal is to educate the public on what the digital age means to their lives. The events will include a featured speaker, followed by a panel discussion, and a question and answer session with the audience at the venue, and C-SPAN television viewers who submit questions to the experts by electronic mail at digital@loc.gov.

[TiVo Link]

(If you're a true Lessig groupie, check out the Lessig/Jeff Tweedy event at the NYPL on April 7. -kc.)

Via 90% Crud

Tired of what you hear on the nightly news -- and the absence of women sources, speakers, pundits, and subjects? Ready to see progressive women's ideas and lives treated as if we matter?

Women and the Media (WAM), a conference sponsored by The Center for New Words and the MIT Program in Women's Studies, will take place March 18-20 at the Stata Center at MIT. Among the scheduled speakers are Holly Sklar and Betsy Leondar-Wright who will present a session on opinion writing. Given the recent dust-up between Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley, the timing of this is spot-on.

Go here for more info on WAM.

Via Clancy Ratliff, who also hosts the excellent resource, The Link Portal on Gender in the Blogosphere.

Via morph

The Media Center at the American Press Institute and The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University have invited leading thinkers on the vanguard of news, information and society, to contribute to discussions and dialog on the "mediamorphosis" of society. The gathering, Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good, will take place March 3 to March 5, 2005, on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Whose News? will address the future of news media, the changing relationships between media and the society, and technology's effect on news and information. Proceedings will be captured and published as part of our broader mission to foster a better-informed society in a connected world.

Via morph

If you haven't already, be sure to book your travel and register for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference March 14-17, 2005 in San Diego, CA.

Citizen engineers are throwing their warranties to the wind, hacking their TiVos, Xboxes, and home networks. Wily geeks are jacking Jetsons-like technology into their cars for music, movies, geolocation, and internet connectivity on the road. E-commerce and network service giants like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and Google are decoupling, opening, and syndicating their services, then realizing and sharing the network effects. Professional musicians and weekend DJs are serving up custom mixes on the dance floor. Operating system and software application makers are tearing down the arbitrary walls they've built, turning the monolithic PC into a box of loosely coupled component parts and services.

The Make Magazine crew will be there, details to follow on that. See you there!

Via MAKE: Blog

As a part of Location One's regular program "Open House Wednesday", I will speak next Wednesday:

*Crisis of Trust in the Media Landscape*
Drazen Pantic

Wednesday, February 23rd 2005
7 pm

The talk will be an elaboration of some ideas I tried to communicate at Voggercon: videobloggers have a HUGE chance to depart from the existing mainstream infotainment matrix and create new formats and new discourse, independent of the existing media structure... What is the difference between video on the Net and videoblogging?

A number of examples of new and creative use of video on the Internet by videobloggers, artists, video producers and journalists will be presented. Examples include recent conference in NY: Vloggercon 2005, the Youngest Videoblogger in The World, Momentshowing, Concrete TV, linuxvirgin (linuxvirgins will make a special appearance!!!) ...

Live broadcast available, as usuall at Location One site. Suggestions and examples are welcome ...

We invite you to submit a Project Proposal to present at the next NEW YORK Planetwork Monthly Forum:

Wednesday March 16th from 6:30* - 9:00 pm
26 Greene Street NY, NY 10013  212 334 3347
*please note NEW TIME*

If you, or a colleague are working on either developing a social networking project or using digital media, the Internet, or communication technologies to address ecological, social justice, distributed democracy, alternative currency, or independent media issues, we invite you to sign up to present in New York. Each roster selection is handled on a first come, first served basis, and is based on the quality and relevance of the project. To apply to present at the upcoming Planetwork monthly on March 16th, 2005, click here.
We will be graciously hosted by Location One, New York's premier convergence space for interdisciplinary, interactive art and new media.

For those not familiar with Planetwork - a brief mission statement: Planetwork illuminates the critical role that the conscious use of information technologies and the Internet can, and indeed must, play in creating a truly democratic, ecologically sane and socially just future.

Planetwork hosts Monthly Networking Forums in San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle. These informal events are designed to allow a growing community to connect and keep up with each other's work. For a sense of these forums and the projects presented click here

The format for the Monthly events in New York is as follows: presentations are selected from submissions made over the previous months. Each presenter gets 1 minute to describe their personal motivation for their project, 9 minutes to give an overview of their work, and 5 minutes for questions. The format is designed to encourage those not normally inclined toward public presentations to share their work, allow for the opportunity for community members to return periodically to update their work, and maximize time for community networking.

The schedule for March 16th is as follows:

6:30-7:00pm: networking & light refreshments*
7:00 - 8/8:30pm: presentations
8/8:30 - 9pm: networking and light refreshments
* a $10 donation to cover costs is appreciated.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Elizabeth Thompson

American International TOY FAIR™ is the largest toy trade show in the Western Hemisphere. More than 1,500 manufacturers, distributors, importers and sales agents from 30 countries showcase their toy and entertainment products.

(Over the years, I've started paying less attention to SIGGRAPH, COMDEX, and NAB and spending a lot more time combing through the goods being presented at CES, E3, and - via Yury Gitman - the International Toy Fair. Sometimes the best tools are toys. -kc.)

In Italy, the Fiscal Police are Rome's copyright hitmen for the IFPI (Europe's RIAA I believe). They bust clubs and online radio stations for spinning copyrighted music without a license. Last week they fined an Italian DJ 1.4 million euros (more than $1.8 million) for playing such MP3s at a popular club and possessing more than 2,000 mp3 music files suspected to be illegal downloads and 500 pirated video clips. Here's a bit of the article from IFPI's site, via Digital Wire:

Enzo Mazza, Director of the Italian recording industry association (FIMI), said: "We are pleased with the fine imposed by the Rieti Fiscal police. This DJ was touring clubs and making money out of the music he played - while those who had invested time, talent, hard work and money into creating the music in the first place did not get a cent. We hope this precedent will serve as a deterrent for those who are thinking of doing the same."

What happens when you get a group of smart people "together" to talk about something they are passionate about -- they can't wait to get started.

We invited Phil Meyer (UNC, Chapel Hill), Mary Lou Fulton (Bakersfield Californian), Stefan Dill (Santa Fe New Mexican) and Tim Porter (Tomorrow's Workforce) together for a discussion about the future of the newspaper business in today's digital world and beyond. The conversation is hosted by Jeff Jarvis (advance.net and Buzzmachine.com) and the conversation is already underway.

Join the conversation or just join us for the 90 minute webcast on Wednesday, March 9 at 2:00 p.m. eastern (yea, it's free). You can register at http://www.mediacenter.org/webcast/march/2005/.

Via morph

If you're in the Bay Area, here's an event worth checking out:

Berkeley Cybersalon: Television Goes Online
Sunday, February 20, 6 p.m.-8 p.m.
The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley

Speakers:

Kim Spencer, Executive Director, LinkTV
TBA, INdTV
Bradley Horowitz, Director of Media and Desktop Search, Yahoo!
Wendy Seltzer, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Via EventLab

T.Whid and M.River are inviting people to watch an online video performance for 31536000 seconds. That's one full year, if you have the time.

Going Glocal

RADIO TAXI is a Taxi Gallery narrowcast and webcast initiative. Taxi Gallery is literally a black cab situated in a council estate on the outskirts of Cambridge, England. Since Sept 2001, over 25 different artists have made new works in response to the specific context offered by the gallery and its location. Taxi Gallery is a project that reaches for an extended conversation with local, national and international audiences (via its website) in response to a broad range of challenging contemporary artworks, approaches and ideas.

The translocal or "glocal" philosophy of Taxi Gallery is reflected in the forthcoming RADIO TAXI project which will integrate a 3 mile radius analogue FM broadcast with a worldwide digital transmission via a server capable of handling multiple streams. RADIO TAXI will be a live(ly) mix of locally originated programmes and interventions (significant community involvement by neighbourhood residents of all ages will be developed, including several major projects with Coleridge Secondary School and an evolving radio club), a curated programme of invited sound works and a schedule of sonic art from all over the world.

Kirsten Lavers, cris cheek, (TNWK) and Simon Keep invite sound artists (including writers, poets, visual artists, musicians working with sound) to submit work for a short range FM and internet radio event in late May and early June 2005.

Submission Deadline: 1 May 2005-01-22 latest
Transmission Dates: 6pm 27 May – 6am 31 May (GMT) & 6pm 3 June – Midnight 5 June (selected highlights)
Queries to: info @ radiotaxi.org.uk

"Cellphones" is a new rock musical playing in New York written & directed by William Electric Black, where audience members get calls from the cast. (Thanks Anthony!)

Synopsis:

The war in Iraq and terrorists’ threats keeps America on constant alert. Homeland Security is not only the buzz, but the only place that’s offering a decent job. A new recruiting booth is about to open up at 7:00 am Monday, in Central Park.

booth opens, twenty strangers gather and wait in line. While they wait, they rock out about timely topics such as Britney Spears, botox, SUVs, MP3s, rap music, fast foods, low fat diets, saving Michael Jackson, gay marriage, the Internet, porn, soccer moms, Enron, Bush, Starbucks, Martha Stewart, weapons of mass destruction, and of course, cellphones.

Move over “Hair”--cellphones are now the rage. In fact, during/ the rock musical, audience members get calls from the cast.

The Game Developer's Conference is coming up - March 7-11 in San Francisco, California. You still have a chance to register early for the special deal.<

The GDC is one of my favorite events. It's an actual conference, unlike E3, which is more of a buzzbath and industry hoopla. The focus of GDC is, as the name suggests, game development - from design to production to marketing and selling. For the next week or so I and my cohorts will be writing about the highlights of this year's GDC and why you need to be there. Call it the GGA Guide to GDC 2005.

The most unpredictable - and thereby the most exciting - event is always the Experimental Gameplay demo, run by Jonathan Blow. It's a free-for-all of risky games, games that were developed with little commericalism in mind, all to test out a new mechanic or to make use of an interesting interface or just for the hell of it. It's open to everyone from game veterans to absolute beginners. It's exhilerating, fascinating, and totally impractical. I never miss it.

And, needless to say, I also never miss any time Will Wright speaks. He'll be talking this year about the Future of Content. It doesn't matter what he talks about, his lectures will always leave your mind spinning with about a billion ideas. You could write a book on every "talking point" he introduces.

And then there's Ernest Adams, iconoclast, rebel, free-wheeling intellectual. Some would add, crazy old coot (I mean that in the most affectionate possible sense, Ernest). He often relates videogame thematically to literary tropes or mytho-psychological undercurrents. You'll hate him or love him, but his remarks will always stimulate hours of relection or debate during the afterparties.

Via game girl advance

Podcastcon 2005 - the UK's first podcasting conference. Date and venue to be confirmed....

Via Strange Attractor

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2005
Will somebody please give me a view through iChatAV?
----
Taking Back Television: An Open Approach to the Development and Deployment of Next Generation Media
Tim Halle, Director, The Project for Open Source Media (POSM)

Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 4:40pm - 5:25pm
Location: California Ballroom B

Via sLop

Cory Doctorow: If you're in Toronto on Feb 11, you shoudl really check out this copyright and technology conference at the University of Toronto -- it looks wonderful.

The student-run Technology and Intellectual Property Group of the University of Toronto will present a one-day academic conference called "Sound Bytes/Sound Rights: Canada at the Crossroads of Copyright Law." In 2004, the Standing Committee for Canadian Heritage issued recommendations for changes to the Copyright Act broadening copyright protections. In the same year, the Canadian courts headed in the opposite direction by handing down important judgments recognizing user rights. The conference will be a forum for law students and academics as well as practicing lawyers, policy makers and those in the music industry to hear about and discuss the emerging legal framework for copyright law in Canada with a particular emphasis on music and entertainment law.

Speakers will include musicians Paul Hoffert and Neil Leyton, Michael Geist (Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and author of the "Law Bytes" column in the Toronto Star), Bob Young (co-founder of Red Hat Software), Sarmite Bulte, MP (the chair of the 2004 standing committee), lawyers Ron Dimock and Barry Sookman, Casey Chisick (professor of intellectual property law at the University of Toronto), and Graham Henderson (president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association). Also speaking will be William W. Fisher III, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and author of the new and important book "Promises to Keep: Law, Technology and the Future of Entertainment".

The conference will be held in Flavelle House, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, 78 Queen's Park, Toronto, on Friday, February 11, 2005 from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm. Lunch will be provided and a wine reception is planned. Admission is $30.00 for pre-registration, $40.00 at the door. Admission is free for college and university students but registration beforehand is essential.

Ted!)

Via Boing Boing

SXSW Interactive Conference is March 11-15

Activist Technology: Political activists are beginning to depend on technology, especially email and web-based tools (weblogs, wikis, forums, etc.), and we're seeing a community of developers who are focused on building social and political technologies that activists can use. This panel is a discussion of available tools vs. activist requirements: what's there, and what's needed.

• Kathy Mitchell, Consumer Union
• Dan Robinson - E-Volve
• Ren Bucholz - EFF
• Shabbir Safdar - Mindshare Interactive Campaigns
• Erin Rogers - Union of Concerned Scientists
• Amalia Anderson - League of Rural Voters

Deliberative Democracy and Interactive Technology: How can technology mediate discussions, and how do we avoid the "echo chamber" - how do we facilitate dialog between people with sometimes radically differing viewpoints? Can technology help overcome the current political polarization in the USA?

• Jerry Michalski, Sociate
• Kaliya, Identity Commons, Planetwork, and Integrative Activism
• Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy
• Lars Torres, AmericaSpeaks
• Nancy White, Full Circle
• Jed Miller, ACLU

Are Political Parties Obsolete? If, using Internet applications, we can form and sustain coalitions in a more ad hoc, distributed way do we really need political parties? Do parties, with their top-down "command and control" structures and commitment to specific ideologies, constrain democratic process?

• Dan Robinson, E-Volve
• Glenn Smith, Drive Democracy
• Jon Lebkowsky, Polycot
• Andy Rappaport, August Capital
• Christian Crumlish, author of The Power of Many

How to think about democracy and technology. Direct or "pure" democracy is often considered unworkable. It doesn't scale well, and it's difficult for the general population to make decisions that require specialized study. Its opponents relate democracy to "mob rule" or "tyranny of the majority." Do pervasive Internet connectivity and technologies for discussion, debate, and advocacy make the concept of pure democracy more viable? Will emerging social technologies facilitate a more democratic system of government? What is the appropriate role of technology in political campaigns, issues advocacy, and the election process?

• Jon Lebkowsky, Polycot
• Aldon Hynes - Center for Investigative Online Research
• Jerry Michalski - Sociate
• Mitch Ratcliffe - Internet/Media Strategies Inc.
• Rebecca MacKinnon - Blogger Corps
• Ethan Zuckerman - Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Via Clippings.reblog

First there was the trend to compact newspapers, and then an explosion of new titles to compete with free papers and attract young readers. But what will be the defining newsroom trends in 2005? The answer is certain to emerge at the 12th World Editors Forum, to be held in Seoul, South Korea, from 29 May to 1 June.

Among the topics to be examined at the Forum, the annual global meeting for senior newsroom executives, will be:
- The rise of the "citizen journalist." Call it what you will -- participatory journalism, public journalism or open source journalism -- it is becoming a clear that more and more readers are becoming involved in the news gathering and debating process. Conference participants will be able to discuss the subject with keynote speaker Dan Gillmor, ex-columnist of the San Jose Mercury News, major blogger and author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People."
- The risks and challenges posed by RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and news aggregators such as Google News and Google Alerts, in which general and personalised news is provided by machines, not editors. "Personalised news" has moved from being a slogan to reality, but very few newspapers are ready for this revolution. The session will feature Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix.net, Susan Mernit, a US-based consultant and former senior executive with AOL, and a representative from Google.
- An audit of changing formats. The rush to compact newspapers is well documented, but what is less clear are the results of the latest format and design changes. The WEF conference will examine the innovations that have worked and those that have not in a session featuring newspaper designer Mario Garcia and Didier Pillet, Editor of France's largest circulation general interest newspaper, Ouest France.

Hundreds of chief editors and other senior newsroom executives are expected to participate in the World Editors Forum, which runs concurrently with the 58th World Newspaper Congress and Info Services Expo 2005. The events are
the global meetings of the world's press, drawing more than 1,000 newspaper executives to a unique annual gathering organised by the World Association of Newspapers.

Via editorsweblog.org

The Video Blog Festival is dedicated to honoring videos that were shot for the purpose of showcasing it in blogs.

The Video Blog Festival is devoted to the "art" of making videos for video blogging, and not to the politics of what is the best video blog website around.

PLAN Pervasive and Locative Arts Network: A two day event bringing together leading international figures to review the emerging fields of locative and pervasive media...The event launches a new international network (PLAN), bringing together artists, activists, hardware hackers, bloggers, game programmers, free network builders, semantic web philosophers, cartographers, economists, architects, and university and industry researchers.

ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) London UK

Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd February 2005

10am-6pm (music 8pm-1am Tuesday only)

PLAN website: http://www.open-plan.org

It's Vloggercon Day at unmediated. Come on by the stream and IRC and check out the discussion.

As I understand it - Vloggercon is booked solid.

That's a trick many NYers do - make something look so coolio and exclusive that EVERYONE wants to attend.

:-)

Anyway - for those of you who can't get in - feel free to come to Katz's Deli Friday night at 7. We'll be holding a "micro-content" dinner - to dicuss how video blogging is part of the future - and ourmedia.org - which will be live - by then.

:-)

Meanwhile I'm so dam busy making that all happen and then I go to Blog Business Summitt - that I haven't had time to blog recently.

Sorry.

Jon Dube points to a group of bloggers and journalists who are gathering at Harvard on Jan. 21 and 22 for a conference on how journalism is being transformed by blogging, entitled "Blogging, Journalism and Credibility: Battleground and Common Ground." The invitation-only conference is being organized by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, the American Library Association's Office of Information Technology and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. However there will be a webcast so that people can participate remotely in the discussion.

I just added a link to a registration page, so all of you who are planning on going to vloggercon on Jan 22 in NYC can register now.

The blog also has a link that lets you see who is registered.

The blog is at:

http://vloggercon.blogspot.com

We've added a video blog post in the first post. Let us know what you think.

Jay is finishing up the information on all the sessions and should have those sections updated later this afternoon. He's doing a great job contacting all the session moderators.

So take a look and let me know any feedback you might have.

Thanks, --Steve

ALIVE@9th Street Presents "Storytelling and the Internet Age: New Media, Nonlinear Expanded Cinema, Flash Animation and Interactivity."

What do Java Script, Stock Market Ticker Tape Machines, Web Services and User driven interactive digital experiences have to do with storytelling? Find out the answer to this and more as storytellers and technoids who get your heart thumping and have you hanging onto the edge of your seat come together for the second program in the Ninth Street Independent Film Center's inaugural Forum Series ALIVE@9th Street.

Storytelling and the Internet Age takes a look into possibilities for the future of techno-storytelling. Join moderator Peter L. Stein (Executive Director, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival) for a evening with documentary filmmaker, writer and teacher Carroll Parrott Blue (recipient of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Online Award); Flash technology pioneer Louis Fox (founding partner Free Range Graphics); animation whiz, entrepreneur and activist Brad deGraf (credits include Jetsons: The Movie, Robocop 2); and acclaimed video and digital artist, and pioneer in digital innovation, Lynn Hershman-Leeson (Technolust, Conceiving Ada).

When: Wednesday, January 12, 2005, 7 pm

Where: 145 Ninth Street, 1st Floor Screening Room, San Francisco (between Mission & Howard)

Cost: $10 advance, $5 students, call (415) 552-5950.

UPDATE 12/31/2004: Vloggercon now has a process blog at http://vloggercon.blogspot.com/

Registration, schedule, and logistical info coming soon.

Hey guys--

what started as an offhanded comment by Shannon is now a reality.

Vloggercon 2005.

Shannon from LA is coming to NYC the 3rd week of january to do some work. so we said we'll have Vloggercon 2005 on saturday, January 22nd. whoever wants to come is now officially invited.

Andrew Barron of Rocketboom teaches at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan...and says we can get a room with a projector and wi-fi for the day. I imagined we'd organize some discussion sessions from 10am-4pm. Then, just eat and party the rest of the evening.

what i need to know is...who interested in coming? we can find you a free place to stay no problem.

Also, we need some discussion leaders. I imagine hour long sessions where we talk about the work we've been doing this year...showing videos...and figuring out what we can do next.

If you have an idea you want to lead us through, email me and we'll see if we can set it up. Everything is up for grabs. I just think it'd be a good time to come together and see what we've accomplished so far.

I look forward to meeting all of you who can make it.

Jay

For the last few weeks, I've been pondering putting together a blog "un" conference in New Jersey or New York - most likely the former, due to cost concerns, though. Obviously BloggerCon has been the "big" event for the last couple times around the block, and this isn't meant to be of that scale - though I wouldn't mind a few hundred people, of course.

At this point, I'm looking at late January/early-mid February, based on availability of locations, mostly. So far, I have received costs for holding such an event at my alma mater, Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ. It's easily accessible by car from the Garden State Parkway (exit 105, because you'll ask), and is a short trip from a fairly busy NJ Transit train station as well. This is in no way definitive, though. I'm also looking into some northern-NJ locations, and a few others here and there that have been suggested to me.

I'll be working on an "agenda" of sorts in the next week or two, and will gladly take suggestions on topics to cover and possible locations (especially if you have an "in") either in the comments or via email. Some ideas I'm tossing around are around blog ethics such as use of photographs and "fair use," hyperlocal blogging, PR and blogs, and more. I'd also like to hear from people who think they'd be interested in coming along, or helping out with some of the responsibilities. At this point, it looks like there will be some costs to hold an event, but I haven't ironed out how much they'd be exactly - it'll depend on sizing and location.

I have a few ideas on some people I'd like to participate and be session facilitators - some of you I've already chatted with about this, others may just end up with a note in your inbox one day soon. Just a warning =)

(Continued at The Media Drop)

Everybody is starting to smell money. The conferences, newsletters, analysts, PR flacks, marketing folks and everything that comes with a new fad - are here in force.



So here's a new conference called Syndicate - which I'm advising on - in NYC in May 17-18. If I have anything to do with it - it'll be coolio.



Can't guarentee that though. Since it's at the Time Square Marriot - perhaps we can tie in MTV and TRL - which is next door.

:-)

This one-day workshop will be held at the Urban Grind coffee shop in Portland, and will involve the participants in a process of design and appropriation, as a tool for reflection.

Focus will be placed on openness, transparency and adaptability. The day will be constructed as a series of design exercises intended to engage people in sharing and creating together. We invite participation from designers, technologists, sociologists, theoreticians, policy-makers, community builders; anyone concerned with the design and use of technologies in community settings.

Themes:

- designing for new and unexpected interactions in ubiquitous computing

- the role of users as collective re-designers

- open systems and adaptable products

- designing for appropriation or hackability

- designing the immaterial, particularly energy

David Gilbert, a professor at Marymount Manhattan College, writes: "Our Art Mobs team is using mobile text messaging and podcasting to allow people to experience art in a new way. Along with the Department of Art and the mobile arts organization YellowArrow, we are hosting a gallery event on Wednesday, December 8 (tomorrow), here in Manhattan to showcase our technologies."

ITP Winter Show 2004

Sunday, December 19 from 2 to 6pm
Monday, December 20 from 5 to 9pm

A two-day explosion of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

An oversized Greenwich Village loft houses the computer labs, rotating exhibitions, and production workshops that are ITP -- the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists uniquely dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds. A hands-on approach to experimentation, production and risk-taking make this hi-tech fun house a creative home not only to its 230 students, but also to an extended network of the technology industry's most daring and prolific practitioners.

Open House Wednesdays @ Location One

Open House Wednesdays continue this month with political theorist Jodi Dean

8 December 2004, 7-9 pm
Jodi Dean
Politics of Evil

Jodi Dean is a political theorist teaching and writing in upstate New York. Her books include _"Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace" and "Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy". She is currently thinking about fascism, consumerism, and the politics of enjoyment.

Public Knowledge and Yale’s Information Society Project have an event coming up this Friday:

Digital Mix – Don’t waste culture, recycle art!

[…] Digital Mix, a one-of-a-kind musical event, brings the avant-garde of music to the future of law in the digital age. The event is sponsored by the Yale Information Society Project, a center for the study of law and technology at Yale Law School, and Public Knowledge, a new public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant information commons. Digital Mix will celebrate DJ culture and raise awareness of the laws that threaten it to a new community- mixing musical performance with prominent speakers.

DJ Spooky, a virtuoso DJ and leading spokesman for the art and intellectual movement of DJ culture, will headline the event with a musical performance and presentation of his art. Mark Hosler of Negativland, a legend in the art of digital appropriation, will show video clips of recent Negativland projects and discuss his long experience with the clash of copyright law and art. Mike Godwin of Public Knowledge, a leading advocate of the public interest in information and cultural policy, will talk about the latest legal and legislative challenges to democratic culture. Finally, Nelson Pavlosky, of the Free Culture, will talk about the efforts of students across campuses to organize and support these issues.

I am extremely psyched to have been invited to speak at the Chaos Computer Club's 21st Chaos Communication Congress on December 27th to 29th, 2004 at Berliner Congress Center, Berlin, Germany. I will speaking on day 2. There are lots of really interesting speakers including Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia on day 1, Donatella Della Ratta about Arab media also on day 2. Also, don't miss the eight annual German Lockpicking Championships. Anyway, it looks like an amazing event so if you're in Europe and feeling materialistic and boring after Christmas, come on over to Berlin and join us. I heard there will be a gaggle of Wikipedians hanging out having a parallel developers meeting as well.

The 21C3 has a blog and a wiki. The schedule is available in various formats.

Comment - TrackBack

The Wi-Fi PLANET Conference & Expo takes place Nov. 30 through Dec. 2 at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

The three-day event features nearly 50 cutting-edge sessions with a pre-conference workshop on November 30 followed by two days of intensive sessions within the following tracks on December 1-2: Building the Network; Technical Topics; Wi-Fi Outdoors; Hotspot Central; RFID; Securing the WLAN; Wi-Fi Telephony & Convergence; and Special Interest.

You have just one month to get in paper or panel proposals for the mid-winter conference. Leonard Witt be hosting the conference at Kennesaw State University. Submissions can address any aspect of civic, or public, journalism, which now extends into citizen and participatory journalism. Yes, that includes blogs too.

(Continued at PJNet Today)

The DIY Film Festival has issued the annual call for entries. Dramatic, documentary, animation, student and comedy feature and short films made after Jan. 1, 2002 and shot in DV, Beta, HDTV, 16mm or 35mm will be considered. All entries must be created using commonly-available tools of independent filmmaking without financing from a major film studio or corporate backer.

From YellowArrow.org: YellowArrows are stickers placed throughout the world. Using the text message (SMS) service on your mobile phone, you can add and ask for messages referencing the unique code on each arrow sticker, as explained in stages at right. The system is currently compatible with all phones and service providers in the US as well as internationally with those networks under the GSM standard. Text messaging incurs a charge through your service provider.

The YellowArrow is coming to Boston!
Friday, Nov. 5: Public Art Installation and Party
9:30 pm and on, 33 Restaurant, 33 Stanhope St


The YellowArrow will create a one-night public art installation in and around 33 Restaurant in the Back Bay/South End. On a brick wall nearby, viewers will encounter a video projection of the images, texts and maps of all arrows placed in Boston.


Saturday, Nov. 6: Urban AdvenTour
10:30 am departure from Cambridge Bicycle (259 Mass Ave)
1:30 pm departure from Boston Bicycle (842 Beacon St)


For more info, go to yellowarrow.org. (Via Mauro Cherubini's weblog)

Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) is a biennial international festival for electronic art, presented by V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

TRAMJAM V.03- ROTTERDAM RUSHHOUR by Mumbai Streaming Attack is a multi-track- multi-driver mix hub streaming jam session of Rotterdam city vibe, orchestrated in sync with the city's tramlines' routing schedule. Play along November 12 if you're in Rotterdam. Mumbai Streaming Attack is a networked performance study group currently based at SNM/HGKZ in Zurich.

Also at DEAF04 (and simultaneously in New York, Brisbane, Linz, and Singapore) is media artist Zhang Ga's public art project The Peoples' Portrait, where five photo-capturing kiosks, including the location in the Times Square Alliance Information Center at 150 7th Avenue in New York City, are set up globally to capture a diverse range of people in their unique environments. Every few seconds, a central server will retrieve the portraits and display them first in time stamped order, then randomly from the archive.

ArtFutura's theme this year is Augmented Reality. It's taking place now in Barcelona [October 28th-31st]. The programme includes Howard "Smartmobs" Rheingold, Blast Theory who will perform Can You See Me Now?, the SimpleTEXT performance, Dublin s MediaLab Europe and Montreal s SAT will be showcasing installations and developing experimental projects, Richard Marks, creator of EYETOY, Greyworld, Fiona Raby, etc. (via we-make-money-not-art)

Take a look at the Billboard 2004 Digital Entertainment Awards Finalists for some odd pairing like Bram Cohen (BitTorrent) vs. Apple (and others) for Innovator of the Year, as well as some can-you-believe-their-mainstream-already categories like Advergame of the Year. I liked the selection of 'Live Phish' (which I believe was their live simulcast of their last live show to participating movie theaters) for Best Use of Technology by an Artist. It's also kind of neat to see that AOL's deal with WB and Warner Bros. TV to provide an online preview/version of "Jack & Bobby" (some new TV show) prior to its network debut was called Most Innovative Use of Technology for Advertising. I'm pretty sure AOL sent out a DVD (to NY Time Warner broadband customers?) of the Jack & Bobby preview before the show aired too. Hey, if Outfoxed can get theatrical distribution and DVD distribution AFTER giving away the film online and having people throw Outfoxed watching parties, TV shows better do something different.

Several groups of activist technologists who develop and deploy political tools joined in a nonpartisan gathering September 30 - October 2 to discuss the political use and relevance of SMS. The SmsSummit Wiki is loaded with information accumulated before, during, and after the meeting, including a Proceedings section and a set of use cases.

The Federal Trade Commission will host a public workshop, "Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Technology: Consumer Protection and Competition Issues," to explore consumer protection and competition issues associated with the distribution and use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. The workshop will be held December 15 and 16, 2004. It is free and open to the public.

A Federal Register Notice to be published shortly says the workshop is intended to provide an opportunity to learn how P2P file-sharing works and to discuss current and future applications of the technology.

This from the Civic Journalism Interest Group in the AEJMC Call for Paper Abstracts and Panel Proposals

This conference will be happening here at Kennesaw State University, and I will be helping to run it. Watch this site for more information in the future. Here is the information you need to know now:

AEJMC Midwinter Conference Feb. 11-12, 2005 Kennesaw State University Kennesaw, GA (20 miles north of Atlanta)

Submission requirements: Authors are invited to submit research paper abstracts or panel proposals to be considered for presentation at the 2005 AEJMC mid-winter conference. Submissions can address any aspect of civic, or public, journalism, which now extends into citizen and participatory journalism. Proposals may include work in progress. We encourage you to propose ideas that address civic journalism and issues of interest to other participating co-sponsors is encouraged. Graduate student submissions are strongly encouraged. Here are some specific guidelines for submission...
(Continued at PJNet Today)

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where Jeff Jarvis is blogging the show with his typical thoroughness.

The conference is keeping track of other coverage here -- and there's a ton.

Wednesday, October 6th, 2004 - 7 p.m. Jim Dempsey CDT

We resume our program Open House Wednesdays, a weekly series of talks by critical thinkers, with a discussion of the Patriot Act by Jim Dempsey, entitled, "The Patriot Act, Civil Liberties and the War on Terrorism".

Can the U.S. fight terrorism without surrendering privacy, free speech and other civil liberties? Have the PATRIOT Act and other counter-terrorism measures gone too far? These questions and others will be addressed by Jim Dempsey, xecutive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

October 13th, 2004 Chris Csikszentmihalyi MIT

Speaking about his current installations at Location One, "Skin" and "Control"

October 20th, 2004 John Perry Barlow Cognitive Dissident Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

October 27th, 2004 Media Spin and Politics in the U.S.

The amazing RESFEST Digital Film Festival comes to the Bay Area starting tonight with an opening program of shorts and a reception featuring a performance by the group Midnight Movies. (Click the image for a better view.)

"RESFEST 2004 kicks off with a survey of state-of-the-art storytelling that mixes animation, live action and graphics-oriented work, giving viewers a taste of the festival's unique blend of filmmaking techniques. See the retelling of the tragic fate of Oedipus in luxurious cinematic splendor redolent of '50s era epics--with a case of vegetables. See what happens when the inexorable thrust of time slows, then stops, allowing three characters to transcend their destinies in Daniel Askill's visually stunning philosophical mindbender WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE."

...and so much more eye/braincandy tonight and over the next few days. Of course, if you're not in the Bay Area, RESFEST 2004 is hitting more than a dozen other cities around the globe before the year's end.

A Gathering of the Tribes (tribes.org) magazine seeks submissions for a special issue focused on the evolving Sousveillance art movement. We are looking for contributions reflective of how the arts are affected by monitoring and surveillance (socially pervasive computing) that are affecting human liberties.

More info here. Submissions are due: Feb 1, 2005

On Thursday I'll be driving into San Francisco to attend the 2nd International Youth Media Festival at the Herbst Theatre. Young people will be showing off their movies, music, digital artwork and Web sites. The event is "created, produced and edited by teens across the globe."

(Continued at JD's New Media Musings)

Via TMCnet.com, Akimbo strikes VOD Deal with TBS, and is going to have programming from CNN, CNNfn, Cartoon Network, TCM, Boomerang. I have to say, Akimbo has done a great job of securing content for their service. With a few 100,000 subscribers, they'll be the same size as a small cable network with a fraction of the overhead. Take a look at their content.

About Akimbo: To receive the Akimbo Service, consumers must have an Akimbo Player, a home network and a broadband-Internet connection in their homes. The Akimbo Service won't tie up the computer and it won't tie up bandwidth. The Akimbo Player is an elegant set-top box that fits well in any home entertainment environment and can store 200 hours of video. It is simple and intuitive to use via an on-screen guide and a customized remote control. Using the Akimbo Guide, viewers choose their programming, which automatically downloads to the Akimbo Player, ready for watching whenever the viewer chooses...The Akimbo Service is $9.99 per month (and) will begin in just weeks.

From eHomeUpgrade, Intel Digital Home Fund Adds Five New Companies to Portfolio, by Alexander Grundner:

Intel has announced its latest round of funding in �Digital Home� technologies. Among the five lucky companies to receive investment capital from Intel's $200 million Digital Home Fund are Cablematrix Inc., a broadband network services software company, Mediabolic Inc., a developer of embedded software for consumer electronics devices, and Pure Networks Inc., a provider of consumer software and services for the digital home. BridgeCo AG, a digital entertainment networking solutions provider, and Envivio Inc., a broadcast and streaming media tools and systems company, received follow-on financing.

The funny thing is that the same technology for surveillance will end up in IT-based camcorders and be used by personal media management services to help us easily search and retrieve what we want from our videos. From facial recognition to pattern recognition, the emerging generation of media producing citizens will expect this kind of functionality from their media service providers.

Today, Vidient raised $6 million in an initial round of funding. From their site: Today there are over seven (7) million CCTV cameras in the United States, but who is actually watching all these cameras? Busy security guards are often too distracted to keep careful track of every action on every camera. And many cameras are not monitored at all. The SmartCatch software offers an accurate and effective solution to monitor, identify and track objects for security policy violations via your existing CCTV infrastructure...

(Our) algorithms are capable of performing complex behavioral analysis, tracking numerous objects and simultaneously identifying security threats in even the most complex environments, inside or outside, regardless of weather conditions.

Now this is a reason to go to San Diego in early October -- The National Association of Broadcasters is holding its annual Radio Show convention in San Diego on Oct. 6 - 9. The San Diego IMC along with Free Radio San Diego and other local organizations is hosting Media EmergenC, an independent media conference and convergence.

Media EmergenC looks a lot like the Reclaim the Media conference which I attended in Seattle back in 2002. Reclaim the Media was also held in response to the NAB Radio Show.

Given the involvement of Free Radio San Diego, I expect there will be some free radio action coincident with Media EmergenC. What would be great would be a mosquito fleet of micropower stations like what happened at Reclaim the Media.

Reclaim the Media was a ton of fun, and EmergenC looks like it will be similar. The car trip out to Seattle in 2002 with DIYmedia.net's John was long, but also a blast, but a car trip to San Diego from Champaign, IL would be even longer. I wish I had the time and cash to make the trip to EmergenC, but I think I'll just have to suffice it to enjoy the web stream.

Starting today at 2PM EST, the Unmediated crew is going to be webcasting The Weekly Show live from NYC. We'll be using Shawn Van Every's Interactive Tele-Journalism system, developed at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, (the same system we used for the Konscious.TV during the RNC) to allow you to chat and ask questions with the various thinkers and developers invited to participate. This week, members of Unmediated will be on, so come chat with us about the decentraliziation of media and emerging tools and processes. Dan Melinger just got back from Ubicomp in the UK (where he was presenting Socialight), so he'll be available to chat about what's new on the mobile social scene.

Today's show starts at 2PM EST and will last at least an hour. The show's homepage will only go live at 2PM, but access the show here: The Weekly Show

Congrats to Danny, Al, and Gena! A sample link from each of their entries:

Al's Body Electric

Gena's Teenagers reach out via weblogs

Danny's MyLifeBits

ITV Alliance is hosting Re-inventing Television Summit on the Queen Mary in Long Beach (Sep. 29, 30). They are offering a special NATAS Pass to independent producers and consultants that are not affiliated with a larger company. It costs $1,000 and includes all workshops, meals, overnight stay on the ship, and an annual membership to the ITA and NATPE. For more information, go to http://www.itvalliance.org/natas.htm.

The International Video Reporting Award is an international competition for short, innovative, non-fiction, digital filmmaking. The films must be helmed by a single person who is solely responsible for content, direction, camera, sound and editing, and who fully explores the creative dimensions of digital technology. The filmmaker should also be taking on the challenge of autonomous production and distribution. [Filmmaker.Com]

A little contest: if you want or need a Gmail invite, leave a comment that describes the future of media, entertainment, and communications in 5 links. Link to photos, searches, blogs, music. Link to thesis projects and startups. Link to unmediated. Link to the future. Link to anything. But only link 5 times.

Small print: Winners will be announced next Friday (September 17) morning. You can enter more than once and win multiple invites, but you need to leave the word 'greed' somewhere in each extra comment you leave. And make sure to leave an email so we can send you the invite if you win!

The American Press Institute's Media Center presents "We Media: The Impact of Participatory Media on Election 2004," a public webcast focused on the impact of new technologies and participatory media on the Nov. 2 U.S. elections.

Jason McCabe Calacanis, founder of the Weblogs, Inc. Network, hosts a high-level panel of media thinkers and leaders in this exploration of the intersection of media, technology and society.

(Continued at JD's New Media Musings)

I'm here in a quaint university town named Galway, Ireland - which is Europe's furthest west city. It's got some old Spanish ruins and lots of frsh faced Irish semantic engineers.


Our hosts are SWAD and DERI - and there are loads of semantic web/W3C types here - all discussing how they're using FOAF.
I'm here to talk about and show FOAFnet - an industry consortium we've got to support FOAF in commercial systems.
This is the first international FOAF confab. There's folks here from Japan, Arabia, Eastern Europe and all over Europe and the U.S.

We're at NYU assembling our interactive cameras and wearable computers for tonights Konscious Convention broadcast. We'll have four crews in the field, one in Madison Square Garden. Also, three of us from Unmediated will be at Manhattan Neighborhood Networks monitoring the four cameras in the field, and chatting with participants that want to ask convention attendees and protesters questions. You can watch and participate tonight at 7PM EST by going to www.Konscious.tv. You can watch a stream of the live broadcast over at MNN from 7 PM to 7:30 PM EST. If you live in the New York City Area, you can tune into MNN and watch the live broadcast on Time Warner channel 34 or 78, RCN Channel 110 and digital cable channel 107. For more info on the system we're using, developed by Shawn Van Every, click here
.

The Women's Game Conference focuses on women in the computer and video game industry. The conference program includes career paths for women in the industry, gender inclusive game design and women and girls as consumers of games.

The Women's Game Conference runs concurrently with the Austin Game Conference September 9-10, 2004 at the Austin Convention Center and is open to anyone interested in the game industry and game development.

A film festival for the cellular screen to showcase the video content and technology which will be on the next generation of mobile phones. Cellular video and flash entertainment is an exploding market worldwide. Zoie Films partners with Tin Can Mobile and Nokia to present this unique festival. [Filmmaker.Com]

">The Wireless4Development conference (3-10 September 2004, Djursland, Denmark) is an activist summit wherein WiFi hackers of all description can plot the downfall of the Man and the rise of the unthethered network.

The wireless4development seminar & workshop brings together many of the people who are doing exactly that. Using low-cost wireless technologies to bring Internet connectivity to parts of the world, and to parts of society, where there are no real alternatives. For one week in September, wireless and free networking activists from around the world, will meet up to share skills and experiences gained in some of the most remote regions of the world. Participants have experience from some of the most innovative uses of Open Spectrum (license-exempt) wireless technologies, ranging from wireless connectivity at the Mt. Everest Base camp, over pedal-powered connectivity in rural Laos, to connecting local radio stations across Mali. These projects illustrate the true power of low-cost, locally run wireless networks.

wireless4development will present workshops on a variety of subjects
related to wireless community networking, and brings experts from around
the world to discuss these subjects. Presentation subjects include
Voice-over-wireless, Solar- and Bicycle-powered wireless networking and
Mesh Network.

6th Annual Interactive TV Show Europe (Barcelona, Spain) - Key Speakers include: Michael Grade , Chairman, BBC; Michael Gass, VP Interactive, Canal + Group (France); Mike Bloxham , Director Testing & Assessment, Centre for Media Design, Ball State University (USA); Robert Leach , Head of Interactive Services, BSkyB; Emma Somerville , Head of Interactive Programming; BBC; Peter MacAvock, Executive Director, Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB Switzerland; Joan Majo , General Manager, CCRTV, Spain and Advanced Media Committee member, Rick Mandler , VP ABC Enhanced TV.

With all the attention blogging has gotten since the Democratic National Convention, our Exploring the Fusion Power of Public and Participatory Journalism conference today in Toronto could not be more timely.

Really what we will be dealing with is the quote below, that appeared in the Sunday New York Times. It's just perfect.

Orville Schell, dean of the graduate journalism program at the University of California, Berkley, when talking about blogs, said, �Obviously, the official media don�t quite know how to deport themselves in relation to blogs. If they adopt them, it�s like having a spastic arm�they can�t control it. But if they don�t adopt it, they�re missing out on the newest, edgiest trend in the media.�

Stay tuned, the conference starts just after noon Toronto time.

There's an upcoming mesh wireless conference in Boulder that's looking for papers on subject like Software Defined/Cognitive Radios, GPS, Galileo, Glonass Interoperability and standards, Effective Spectrum Management and Propagation Modeling in Urban Environment.

The ISART technical program committee is soliciting papers for the 7th annual International Symposium on Advanced Radio Technologies (ISART) to be held in Boulder, Colorado March 1-3, 2005. These papers will discuss new technologies, research and development, innovative ideas, enabling technologies, standards, protocols, business practices and policies, and government regulation for the purpose of forecasting the future development and application of radio frequency technologies into the next decade.

A new education and direct buying symposium series will show educators and the public how to harness the latest in digital technology. The Digital Lifestyle Expo (DLexpo) will kick off in Long Beach, California 2004 August 14-15, with shows following in New York City 2004 September 25-26 and Atlanta, Georgia USA 2004 November 13-14. The DLexpo is a "convergence program" that bridges the gap between low-cost professional equipment and solutions and individuals who never before could afford to utilize this type of equipment. [Editors Net]

We are pleased to announce the inaugural issue of PlaNetwork Journal, a quarterly online publication for in-depth articles by those engaged in applying new technology to benefit the public interest.

The influence of information technology on fields as diverse as environmental science, biology, ecological design, alternative economics, distributed democracy, social network theory, and interactive forms of art is transforming the landscape of the possible. Over the past four years, PlaNetwork conferences have been a meeting place for researchers, software designers, entrepreneurs, independent scholars, artists, and activists working at the intersection between technology and societal transformation. PlaNetwork Journal is a place where practitioners can present their work and ideas to those outside their own field who share their concern about the challenges facing the ecosystem and democracy.

Ken Jordan (editor) and Elizabeth Thompson (publisher)

Early registration for DIS 2004 just ended, but advance registration is open until July 18.

It looks like there will be some really interesting papers, and of course you can join me, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Lalya Gaye, Elizabeth Goodman and Dan Hill as we chat about Design for Hackability.

If that's not enough incentive, you can always go to check out the other interesting things in Boston and Cambridge - like the Stata Center, which Dan recently discussed in terms of adaptive design and I considered as an architecture of power.

A Portland Town Meeting on the Future of Media will be held in Portland, Oregon June 24, 2004, 5:30pm-9:30pm at the Oregon Convention Center.

This event is free and open to the public. It is presented in partnership with City Club of Portland, MIPRAP, Jobs With Justice, Communications Workers of America Local 7901, American Federation of Musicians Local 99, and the Mt. Hood Cable Regulatory Commission.

I just signed up to participate in Video Blogging Week.

That means one video blog post per day, starting on June 20th.

This is going to be challenging.

Not tomorrow, but next Saturday June 26 at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles from 10AM - 1PM:

Symposium on Copyright, Piracy, and the Future of Independent Filmmaking: The MPAA's screener ban was a wake-up call to the independent film community. With our future threatened, the community joined together and was eventually successful in defeating the ban in federal court. But policy is being created every day, at every level, that impacts the channels for distribution, access to independent films, and the protection of creative rights. This symposium (the first of two parts) offers a forum for critical analysis and debate about these important issues -- issues that are not easily or often addressed among the very people they impact most: independent filmmakers. Our goal is to form strategic alliances that will help us maintain and extend a production and distribution environment where independent filmmaking can continue to thrive. Part II of the Symposium will take place at the IFP Market in New York on September 26.

Join Lawrence Lessig, named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries and author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace examine copyright and anti-piracy policies affecting the motion picture industry today and the future of the independent filmmaker. Following a coffee break, a panel of experts and advocates will join him, including Robert Greenwald, (Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, Burning Bed), producer, director and documentary filmmaker.

$15, located at 7920 Sunset Blvd. @ Fairfax.

AP is carrying the story, abut new video dating service: "Comcast, the nation's largest cable company with 21.5 million subscribers, will test "Dating on Demand" in its home turf of Philadelphia in the next few weeks. About 600,000 of Comcast's 1.5 million customers in the Philadelphia market have digital cable".

From their press release:

The Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN), Prairienet, and Free Press invite you to join us for a national Community Wireless Networking Summit August 20-22, 2004 in Urbana, IL. "Making the Connection: The 2004 National Summit for Community Wireless Networks" will focus on grassroots action, impacting national regulations and policies, and building a coalition of local groups, researchers, policy leaders, decision-makers, and community activists.

It's time we organized to take the public airwaves back from corporate interests. Community Wireless Networks offer more services for cheaper prices and are owned by the communities that deploy them. Anyone interested in making the "public interest" the number one priority in our wireless telecommunications infrastructure should definitely attend this summit.

Community Wireless Developers from across North America will be demonstrating cutting-edge technologies; researchers and programmers will discuss recent breakthroughs and developments; and policy-makers and funders will strategize with participants on how to launch new initiatives.

More information and registration options are at the conference website.

I just had a brief e-mail exchange with Sascha, one of the conference organizers, about adding a session on streaming media over wireless. He seems enthusiastic, so it's all about the details.

The New York Times has a great story about the painful process a college professor went through to clear the rights for a short, informative video to be given to incoming students:

"It's crazy," Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video clips included on the CD, which was paid for by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The process took months, Professor Turow said, and cost about $17,000 in fees and royalties paid to the various studios and guilds for the use of clips. The film used ranged from, for example, a 1961 episode of "Ben Casey" to a more-recent scene from "ER."

As a result of the project, this Friday the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania will be holding a conference called Knowledge Held Hostage that will explore issues of Fair Use in education. The full program features Creative Commons co-founder and board member Hal Abelson. [via furdlog]

Mobile Exposure: an international exhibition of Mobile Video. Do the intimacy and mobility of the video-enabled cell phone represent a culture of surveillance where there is universal intimacy but a complete lack of private space? Deadline 2004 November 31. [Microcinema International]

Well, maybe not "on parade" exactly, but three (Many-toMany authors) are speaking as part of the same event tomorrow.
Those of you in the Rochester area might want to attend the panel on "Weblogs and Cross-Disciplinary Communication" being held Friday from 4:30 - 5:45 on the RIT campus (it's part of the Media Ecology Association Conference.)
I'll be chairing the panel, and the other participants include fellow M2M authors Clay Shirky and Seb Paquet, as well as Jill Walker from the University of Bergen in Norway, and Alex Halavais from SUNY Buffalo.
It will be held in RIT's Liberal Arts building, room 06-A205.
Hope to see you there!

The 13th Annual Community Technology Center Conference will be held in Seattle, June 11th - 13th, 2004. It will explore the relevance for community technology centers as they engage and connect diverse communities to effect positive change.

Nearly fifty sessions and a variety of special features, networking opportunities and other events, including a June 10th Pre-Conference Day of workshops and activities. More information on conference themes & content can be found here, and for schedule and session information see the conference program.

Click here for confereence registration details and hotel information.

"BlogOn is the first conference to examine in-depth the business of social media. It is not just for the professional blogger, but for forward-thinking investors, smart marketing executives and media company professionals who understand it is time to understand and harness this gathering disruptive phenomenon. BlogOn is for executives who want to see a sharper Big Picture for social media and to identify their options and opportunities."

Check the writeup at Napsterization:

"The conference proposes to address what the business cases are for social media and look at some of the latest experiments companies are having conversating with users, making interesting interactive technologies and figuring out how users are pushing media with blogosphere filtering and RSS (that goes for radio and video, not just news)."

The combination of sensors and low-power wireless networking is giving inanimate things an identity," says Ian McPherson, president of Wireless Data Research. Perhaps nowhere has sensor networking become more alive than at the Sensor Expo & Conference June 7-10, 2004 in Detroit.

In just a few weeks I will be making my third trek to the Allied Media Conference in Bowling Green, OH, happening June 18 - 20. This event, which started as the Underground Publishing Conference, is an amazing meeting of the minds of independent media that keeps growing and improving this year. I'm really excited for the keynote address by Mark Hosler of Negativland and the Saturday night performance by the Evens, featuring Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina.

I saw Hosler at the Reclaim the Media Conference in 2002, where he related some engaging anecdotes and showed some of Negativland's video work. At the AMC, Hosler will premiere Negativland's "The Mashin' of the Christ."

I am preparing the second mediageek to be ready for the AMC. mediageek #1 made its premiere at the AMC last year. The kind folks at Clamor Magazine put on the AMC, and they also put out the annual Zine Yearbook, which compiles some of the best writing and illustration that appeared in zines during the last year. I'm pleased and honored to note that this year's edition, Zine Yearbook 8, has a piece from mediageek #1.

If you can make the trip to Bowling Green, OH for one weekend, the AMC is worth the trip. Even if only to see an energetic bunch of independent media makers take over this sleepy college town for three days.

ISWC '04 Colocated with IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. ISWC 2004, the eighth annual IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, will bring together researchers, product vendors, fashion designers, textile manufacturers, users, and all other interested parties to share information and advances in wearable computing. We invite you to attend ISWC 2004 and submit to one or more of the following categories: papers, posters, demonstrations, tutorials, and exhibits.

Hoder sends word of a Weblog Festival in Tehran, Iran on June 8-10 (damn, don't you wish you could be there?). Here's a photo from the last big gathering of bloggers there at Hoder's photoblog. Iit was Hoder's photos from that session -- just folks, just eating lunch -- that first impressed upon me how blogs and the Internet can connect folks across any boundaries; this, too, is why I'm so glad to see photos showing up on Iraqi blogs. Here's Hoder's blog post on the event. And the official Weblog Festival site: "Our goal is to improve the quality of such Persian media and to improve their quantity as well." (That sounds just like the mission of the Citizens' Media Center I've been hoping to put together here.)

It's being put together by Persian Blog and the National Youth Organization of Iran -- which, mind you, is a government organization. Think about that: This is a nation that has arrested bloggers and still cuts off Internet access and yet a government organization is sponsoring a blog event and bloggers -- who write at some risk -- will come. A land of ironies.

If you are interested in networks -- of any sort -- you may want to attend the MeshForum conference in Chicago this October. One important prerequisite for attendance is that you be well-networked: one can only attend if one is invited by another attendee, and find someone else to pay your way.

Organizer Shannon Clark tells us:

Our goal is very much to engage the widest range of thinkers on Networks we can, and connect those people to each other across fields of study and industry/political lines. We are looking for a mix of academics, business leaders, and public sector leaders to cross-pollinate ideas and build up new connections. It is my view that while there is a lot of exciting research and work being done on networks at the moment, it is still only scraping the surface of the possibilities - Networks as a lens from which to study different industries, structures, and types of problems will, I think, open up many exciting new developments and opportunities - from innovate organization structures to solutions to complex biological research challenges.

We are also very eager to bring thinkers from a wide range of areas - and to expose thinkers who have been working deeply in one area to people from a diverse range of other fields (i.e. introduce people from the programming group of a major airline to academic network researchers but also to say innovative thinkers studying networks in perhaps biological systems - with the thesis being that there are common approaches and common "rules" about networks that each party can learn from the other.

Today's Ottawa Citizen is running a report in the TechWeekly section on the recent open source conference in Toronto organized by U of T's interdisciplinary Knowledge Media Design Institute and last month's Real World Linux trade show. It highlights the extremely poor Extremadura region of Spain's success story using open source to bootstrap themselves technologically. Quotes from FOSS luminaries include: 'Who controls the software, controls life. Well, it had better us. That's the real political meaning of the free software movement,' said Eben Moglen. Open source 'was the default way you built Internet Infrastructure. You wrote code and released it without trying to commercialize and monetize it,' said Brian Behldendorf." Newsforge (also part of OSDN) has a series of reports on the conference: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

(Drazen just returned from the conference full of energy and ideas. Can't wait to hear what he has to say about the conference. Also check out the Loomware blog for roundups of the sessions. -kc)

Blog, Wikis, Social Networks - what can social software do for you? is an online course that runs May 17 through May 21. It costs $149. I'm posting this because I know and endorse a number of the people who will be teaching: Tom Mandel, Lisa Kimball, Ross Mayfield, Tom Erickson all know what they are talking about, and know how to teach in an online environment.

Here comes Psy.Geo.Conflux! Presented by Glowlab, the Brooklyn-based arts lab dedicated to the production, documentation and presentation of multi-media work in psychogeography and public-space arts, Psy.Geo.Conflux 2004 is the second in an annual series dedicated to current artistic and social investigations in psychogeography [the study of the effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behavior of individuals]. Part festival and part conference, it brings together visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public to explore the physical and psychological landscape of the city. Events are scattered throughout NYC this weekend. All events will be free and open to the public. More info here at the Psy.Geo.Conflux website.

Here is a brief description of a few events, as quoted from their website:

WiFiKu :: Julian Bleecker: A drift through New York City neighborhoods to discover the names people give to their WiFi nodes and to construct haiku using these found SSID names.

Footprint Mapping :: Noriyuki Fujimura: An attempt to create a digital map of streets and public spaces by gathering "footprints" of participants in the project; a DIY-style digital mapping system consisting of a cheap pedometer, digital compass, microprocessor, webcam and laptop computer, set on a custom-made backpack for participants to wear.

Funerals for a Moment :: Kanarinka: Brings together collaborators across space and time to commemorate the passing of inconsequential moments at particular locations in New York City. The event will culminate in a collaborative performance of simultaneous funerals across New York City.

Nomadic Talk Show :: J. Gabriel Lloyd and Jason Kambitsis: Crushed velvet, scotch in one hand, blue and black tuxedos, big ties, and good timeslike a 1970s Dean Martin Roast on the city streets. The guests of the show are people who live or work in the neighborhood.

The New York Snap Exchange :: Andrea Moed: A round-robin, massively multiplayer street photography derby; a game in which everyone commissions art, everyone's an artist, and together we create an emergent visual index of the city.

Human Scale Chess Game :: Sharilyn Neidhardt: A cellphone-directed chess game played in real time, with humans acting as the pieces and the street grid of southside Williamsburg as the chess board.

Read the Gothamist interview with Psy.Geo.Conflux co-organizers Christina Ray & Dave Mandl.

Raul Ramirez, director of News and Public Affaris at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, will be leading a public journalism workshop in the Netherlands from June 28-30, 2004.

Some of the topics that will be covered include: The state of civic reporting, fundamental principles and assumptions behind public journalism, applicability of public journalism approaches in different European national settings, encouraging passive readers, viewers and listeners to become active sources and civic players, a European approach to civic reporting, and finding the untold stories in your community and the voices to tell them.

Sounds like a good workshop which could be adapted and taken on the road worldwide including the USA.

There are scholarships for journalists from Central and Eastern European countries and Turkey.

In cyber-literate circles, it's common knowledge that the DMCA has been a dismal legislative failure. For years now, every new DMCA lawsuit trumps the last for absurdity. And it sure hasn't made any perceptible dent on "digital piracy." As detailed in our "Unintended Consequences" report, it's been consumers, researchers and competitors who have had the most to fear from the DMCA.

But Congress hasn't heard the message. Until now. This Wednesday, May 12th, at 10:00 a.m., the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee on Trade, Commerce and Consumer Protection is holding a hearing on H.R. 107, also known as the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA).

Introduced by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), the DMCRA aims to reform the DMCA. If it becomes law, there will be no more Sklyarov prosecutions, no more threats against professors like Ed Felten, no more injunctions against 2600 magazine or 321 Studios' DVD X Copy. It will also ensure that copy-protected CDs are adequately labeled.

This hearing is a testament to the efforts of the more than 33,000 citizens who have used EFF�s Action Center to write to Congress to support the DMCRA, as well as the efforts of 321 Studios, which has hired top-drawer lobbyist talent to explain the importance of fair use in the digital age.

It turns out that I'll be attending and reporting on portions of the Berkman Center's always fascinating Internet Law Program in Cambridge next week (May 13-15) -- as will two other weblog writers likely to be familiar to Copyfight readers: Frank Field and Clancy Ratliff.

Frank, Clancy and I will also be leading dinner discussions on Friday night, so if you're a Copyfight reader planning to attend, you'll have your choice of Copyfight-related themes. Check them out below -- we hope to see you there!

My dinner: What's the Next Step? Mapping Out Battle Strategy in the Fight for Semiotic Democracy

(Continue reading this post at Copyfight.)

From the description:

"The Personal Democracy Forum will bring together political figures, grassroots leaders, journalists and technology professionals to discuss the questions that lie at the intersection of technology and politics -- to take a realistic look at where we are now and where we are headed."

Sample topics include:

- How do weblogs and other alternative media sources change how information moves? What is their perceived objectivity? What is the role of citizen journalists?
- How does the online medium help and hinder public discourse? What are we learning from deliberative democracy, deep democracy and other projects?

(via kottke.org)

I'll be giving a talk about my upcoming book, We, the Media, in Silicon Valley on May 20. It's part of the SDForum's speaker series, and will be at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

Details here.

The 2004 OURMedia conference (OM IV) will take place July 22-25 in Porto Alegre, Brazil as a pre-conference to the annual meeting of the IAMCR - the International Association of Mass Communications Research.

"Our work spans many fields: community media, independent media, radical media, citizens media ... grassroots networking, telecommunications policy, indymedia activism, cultural arts, communications theory, social-movement research, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, development communication and communication for social change. Our annual meeting is a time to learn from each other and to strengthen our analyses, strategies, collaborations and campaigns."

Topic areas include:

- Connecting Research and Advocacy for Citizens' Media
- "Best Practices" and "Notable Failures"
- Current Policy Issues and Implications
- The Evolution of OURMedia and Project Working Sessions

A Call For Proposals can be found here.

Participatory journalism tools in the form of weblogs and other electronic communications are changing the face of mass media, but are complementary to public journalism. These are powerful tools as Howard Dean�s campaign proved by using weblogs and MeetUp to get 170,000 people nationwide to sign up for face-to-face meetings. The Daily Kos, a citizen run weblog, has 1.5 million unique visitors a month. These are just two of many impressive examples. Learn how we can borrow from or incorporate these tools to improve the state of journalism.

You can get full conference information here and register here. You can book a hotel room here. Special Airfare...

Last three Mondays I was having a workshop "DOCUMENTING PERFORMANCE ART" on streaming with Coco Fusco's class at Columbia University. For the last session students were to come up with a short (three minute) performance that we have streamed live. Streams and torrents for the clips are here.

On Friday April 30th the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism will be presenting a panel discussion on "Disrupting the News Industry: Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism." Panelists include Neil Chase, managing editor of CBS MarketWatch, Vin Crosbie of the media consulting firm Digital Deliverance LLC, Dan Gillmor, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of the forthcoming book "Making the News," and Ken Sands, managing editor of online and new media at The Spokane Spokesman-Review. The event is free and open to the public and will be webcast live at 10:30AM PDT.

The panel is being held in conjunction with a two-day conference on the impact of information and communications technologies on Chinese society which also promises to be very interesting.

Just got back from a very interesting conference Remaking Revolution:


One of the main discussion topics was how to have broad progressive participation in the public life and media, and what are the strategies and possible outcome of unmediated and immediate news reporting ...

Don't know why I didn't get the good news out earlier. The symposium proposal that seven co-conspirators (across three continents no less) andI prepared was accepted for the ED-MEDIA conference.

One interesting meta-note about the development of the proposal: it was built in a collaborative manner over a few pages in my personal wiki. The proposal document went through dozens of updates. (See the revision history.) The process went quite smoothly, undoubtedly more easily than it would have gone if we had been passing revisions around by email.

The symposium with the title "Introducing disruptive technologies for learning: Personal Webpublishing and Weblogs" will include the following contributions:

Paper 1: Personal Webpublishing practices and conversational learning
Paper 2: COLLABOR: Cooperative Learning and publishing
Paper 3: Integrating Webpublishing tools in higher education
Paper 4: Observational Learning in Personal Webpublishing Networks
Paper 5: What can be learnt by reading weblogs?
Paper 6: Weblogs and learning culture
Paper 7: Blogging and reflective learning

Continue reading "Introducing disruptive technologies for learning symposium" at uber.tv

From blueherenow: Next Week, C-Summit will bring together camera phone enthusiasts from around the world. Luminaries such as Alan Reiter will be making presentations but the biggest reason to go is to see who else is participating in the space. BlueHereNow will be posting reports on each days events. Tune in beginning April 27. To learn more about the conference or register visit www.c-summit.com

This looks like more of an industry event than anything else (there's a million dollar golf tournament!), although i trust blueherenow and some of the panel discussions look interesting. -kc.

"A one-day explosion of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP." Don't forget to ask the students about their work.

Our panel on Design for Hackability has been accepted for DIS 2004 - hope to see you there!

Design for hackability draws on hacker, punk DIY and remix cultural practices and values. It encourages designers and non-designers to critically and creatively explore technology and media, to reclaim authorship and ownership of new and existing technologies, and of the social and cultural worlds in which we live. Hackability implies more than customisation or adaptation - it calls for redefinition. Design for hackability involves creating spaces for play where people are never forced to adapt to technology. It involves recognising and working with tensions between people and artefacts. It also subverts the traditional function and use of networks. In a world where technologies are increasingly mobile and invisible, design for hackability means allowing and encouraging people to work with resources at hand and to make technologies be what they want them to be. It cultivates reciprocity between users and designers and supports transparency and graceful responses to unanticipated uses.

We invite people to further explore with us what it means to design interactive systems that are creative as well as socially and culturally responsible - to explore what design for hackability might involve and how it may inspire our design objectives and processes.

I will be moderating, and panelists include Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Lalya Gaye and Elizabeth Goodman.

For those of you in the Bay Area, this Saturday April 17th Garage Cinema Research will hold its annual Open House. Come by and see demos and videos of select Garage Cinema projects, talk to the team members, and hear a presentation by Professor Marc Davis on "The Future of Digital Media." The open house is open to all members of the public.

For more details, see the schedule of events. The open house will take place at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management & Systems. There are directions available on the school's website.

The fifth International Symposium on Online Journalism will be held April 16-17, 2004, at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Information about the two days of live webcasting is available here. Saturday's session "The State of Blog Journalism" and "Reconsidering Journalism and Its Effects on a Wired World" might be particularly interesting to participatory and public journalism folks.

Location One announces a new weekly event: Server-based Mediation of Dreams, Wednesdays from 7 - 9 PM

Beginning April 7, Location One initiated a new series of Wednesday evening of talks and artist presentations on various topics. We are proud to include renowned curators and specialists from many disciplines, questioning and reflecting upon different aspects of our highly mediated contemporary society.

In this first month of April 2004, we will focus on art and technology. The events will address such themes as peer-to-peer biofeedback mechanisms; server-based mediation of dreams; robotcats; and implied morality of network incisions.

Notices about the upcoming speakers will follow, but here is the line-up for April:

April 7th
dorkbot-nyc
kicked off the series with presentations by people doing strange things with electricity.

April 14th
Drazen Pantic
co-director of Location One will talk about political and pragmatic implications of the open source movement as it affects artists today.

April 21st
Chris Csikszentmihalyi
a lecture by new media artist and MIT professor, Director of the Computing Culture Program at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

April 28th
Brian Whitman
from the Music, Mind and Machine Group, MIT Media Lab.

The Experimental Gameplay Workshop From the site: The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is a forum for the demonstration and discussion of innovative game designs. It provides a place for designers to showcase challenging, unproven work, and discuss it with peers. By...