project

Artist in residence Call for Proposals
http://nimk.nl/eng/artist-in-residence-call-for-proposals

Funware Shared Artist in Residence:
Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam (NL)
BALTAN Laboratories, Eindhoven (NL)
Piksel, Bergen (NO)

CALL

BALTAN, NIMk and Piksel have launched an open call for proposals as part of the exhibition project Funware. We are looking for interesting new software art projects that can be developed in the period of June – November 2010 through a shared residency. The new work developed during the residency will be presented in the Funware exhibition at MU in Eindhoven, at HMKV in Dortmund and as part of the Piksel festival 2010.

This residency is a collaboration between three labs, based on a desire to investigate the ways and potential of working within a network of labs that support the exchange and sharing of resources and knowledge. The form of this collaboration aims to provide the most specific and relevant support to artists working on art and technology projects in residence. Knowing the capacities and competences of each lab/organisation, the residency exchange will offer targeted support (in the form of resources, space, technical support, local context and time) to be provided at different stages of the research and development of the project specific to each organisation. Off- and online dissemination of form and content via this partnership and the building of structural relationships are crucial to the collaboration.

FUNWARE

Funware, conceptualised by Olga Goriunova (runme.org), is an exhibition about the fun in software. Making and using what has become known as software is experimental, humorous, and eventful. However improbable it might sound for today’s all encompassing dullness of forms, databases, schedules and processors, “fun” has informed and guided the development of software from its very inception. The rise of net art and the changes the Internet and desktop computers brought to culture gave rise to software art at the turn of the millennia. Performed by amateurs, artists, alternative coders or professional programmers for “fun”, software art as an aesthetic practice questions, tangles and experiments with the materiality of software has subsequently lost its visibility again, as attention is turned to the social web and software applications for third generation mobile phones, which all harness some of the energies constitutive of aesthetic software. Funware reflects on the history of engagement with software, that demonstrates its non-industrial, non-professional, non-commercial, or non-academic character.

The exhibition demonstrates the trajectory of humour and affect as constitutional to software and computing. The exhibition aims to make such an ‘obscure’ technological object as software, open, palpable and approachable, bridging a gap between ‘serious’ production such as technology and ‘non-serious’ production such as different forms of art. The exhibition has a few distinct threads: games; ASCII; code art; a few vectors of AI; computers in popular culture; spyware, conceptual software, hardware modification, hacker/virus approaches, sound, software modification, pranks, participatory web. And as software is intertwined with the hardware it runs upon and the networks that construct the society in which it rules, the exhibition features a lot of projects dealing explicitly with computer hardware or the materiality of hardwareas well as engaging projects experimenting with sound.

The VROOM website is a growing online database of Australian Venues available for touring bands to search and use. Both metropolitan cities and rural towns' venues are available. visit http://www.vroom.net.au for more details

from the VROOM About Us page :
# The following information is available about all venues; technical and production specifications, music genre preferred (and on which night), licensing arrangements, capacity, noise restrictions, accommodation, booking contact details etc
# The types of venues listed will include licensed and unlicensed venues (i.e. bars, cafes, restaurants, clubs, universities community centres, ovals, PCYCs, and entertainment centres) and cover all genres of original contemporary music

USE YOUR TALENTS TO EXPAND THE GENE POOL

Charles Darwin discovers social networking! Salute the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species, by sharing your adventurous vision of evolution and mutation in Gene Pool (pool.org.au/genepool).

Gene Pool takes evolution way beyond survival of the fittest, sex and the 'selfish gene', or scientists in lab coats. Cultures and ideas mutate too. Contribute a poem, story, photo or tribute, or perhaps a home movie or mini-documentary, a piece of music or field recording. Use other people's contributions to create your own recombinations, mash-ups, mutations, mixes and musings - or slice, dice and remix gems from the ABC archives - Gene Pool is full of possibilities.

In an ABC first, Gene Pool releases content from the ABC's archives under a Creative Commons licence so it's free for you to download and rework however you wish.

Renew Newcastle is a not for profit company limited by guarantee. Renew Newcastle has been established to find short and medium term uses for buildings in Newcastle's CBD that are currently vacant, disused, or awaiting redevelopment.

Renew Newcastle aims to find artists, cultural projects and community groups to use and maintain these buildings until they become commercially viable or are redeveloped. Renew Newcastle is not set up to manage long term uses, own properties or permanently develop sites but to generate activity in buildings until that future long term activity happens.

Renew Newcastle was founded to help solve the problem of Newcastle's empty CBD. While the long term prospects for the redevelopment of Newcastle's CBD are good, in the meantime many sites are boarded up, falling apart, vandalised or decaying because there is no short term use for them and no one taking responsibility for them.

Renew Newcastle has been set up to clean up these buildings and get the city active and used again.

-- info from Renew Newcastle About page

visit http://renewnewcastle.org for more details

The Sydney Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef - In the interest of contributing to the world wide phenomenon initiated by The Institute For Figuring, In Stitches Collective is facilitating the creation of a Sydney Coral Reef. We invite you to participate in this woolly celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and craft, a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world.

The reef was inspired by geometric models of hyperbolic space, originally developed by mathematician Dr Daina Taimina in 1997, using the art of crochet. Until that time most mathematicians had believed it was impossible to construct physical models of hyperbolic forms, yet nature had been doing just that for hundreds of millions of years. It turns out that many marine organisms embody hyperbolic geometry, among them kelps, corals, sponges and nudibranchs. The IFF reef not only looks like an actual coral reef, it draws on the same underlying geometry endemic in the oceanic realm.

The Crochet Coral Reef is a collective and collaborative experience created by The Institute For Figuring (IFF) directors Margaret and Christine Wertheim (www.theiff.org). The project not only draws attention to the beauty and fragility of the coral reef (an ecosystem system most vulnerable to the effects of climate change), but also links communities through science, mathematics, art & craft.

In Stitches Collective are holding a workshop at 2pm on the 21st of Feb at 44 Little Oxford Street, Darlinghurst (behind Taylor Square on the Surry Hills side). visit http://sydneyreef.blogspot.com for more details

The IFF site has instructions for you to build your own hyperbolic plane

One suggestion is to use plastic bags instead of yarn as another method of recycling them. the gooseflesh blog has a plastic bag yarn tutorial on how to reuse plastic bags as yarn.