Australia's largest festival of experimental electronic arts and culture, "Electrofringe", will burst through the cracks of Newcastle from October 2 – 6, 2008, for its eleventh year as part of "This Is Not Art". More than 100 emerging and established artists from Australia and overseas will take part in 80 events over five days including workshops, gigs, screenings, performance and public intervention.

Electrofringe in 2008 brims with new ventures. These include an artists-in-residence program and a three-week interactive media exhibition. New program gems include a hybrid media/dance performance, an all-girls soldering workshop, a chorus composed for Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, an audiovisual "love-in", and a chamber recital for robots.

Special international guests include Birchville Cat Motel (NZ), Domenico Sciajno (Italy), xtine (US), The League of Imaginary Scientists (everywhere) and The Green Eyl & Sengewald (Germany). Japan is well represented by elongated harshcore musician Maruosa, noise artists Pig & Machine, and experimental multi-instrumentalist KK NULL.

Electrofringe 2008 features an impressive screening program including award-winning highlights from the Japan Media Arts Festival and SIGGRAPH 2008, surround-sound selections from New York's Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Centre and eclectic works from France’s Arcadi festival. There are also two specially curated screening reels called ElectroEtre and ElectroProjections compiled from open, international call-outs.

Head to: www.electrofringe.net for more details, and see you in Newcastle!

Electrofringe 2008 is directed by Alex White, Elmar Trefz and Somaya Langley.

-- electrofringe & the other festivals as part of This is Not Art are my favourite festivals in the world - very grassroots. Newcastle becomes abuzz with creativity and people at this time of year. I hope you can all check them out this year!

The Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services blog is devoted to the use of online social networking sites for any and all types of library-related programs or services. One article on their blog is A Face(book) In The Crowd: Online Social Networks For Engaged Learning which has video slideshows broken into these sections :
Part 1: Introduction to Social Networking Software
Part 2: Introduction to Facebook
Part 3: ISU and the Library in Facebook
Part 4: Putting it all together
University video page : http://www2.lib.iastate.edu/video/homepage.html

article abstract :
"In April 2006, there were nearly 22,000 members of the Iowa State University community registered in Facebook. Two years later there are nearly 35,000 members, an increase of nearly 60 percent."

I visited the Sticky Institute in Melbourne yesterday and bought a few zines and recorded a video asking the team a few basic questions about zines. The store has a wide selection of zines, and there's a membership / mail list where you can sign up and receive zines in the mail. If you're a zine-writer, you can contact the store and have them stock your zines. Their website also includes an impressive "Zineopedia" of Melbourne based zines which is a great resource for anyone wanting to find out more about zines. Though the best way would be to visit the store if you're in Melbourne, their website if you're not in Melbourne, or a local zine-festival and buy & read some zines. Or even better, start your own!

visit http://www.stickyinstitute.com for more details
store details :
Sticky Institute
Degraves St Subway
Shop 10 Campbell Arcade Melbourne
stickyshop @ gmail.com (remove the spaces)
(if you're not from Melbourne like me, it's opposite the train station on Flinders St, about half way (Flinders between Swanston & Elizabeth) - go downstairs towards the station subway and you'll see it)

PO Box 310 Flinders Lane Vic Australia 8009

One of the zines I bought was the "Anyone can.. " zine (anyone can make a zine) which launched the same day by the City Library Street Press. The City Library Street Press are quite active, having a few projects on the go and regular meetings at the library for zinesters and writers to get involved with. The "Anyone can.." zine also includes a MAP of Melbourne city showing writers & zinester spots of interest eg libraries, stores, artist spaces.

I also bought Anna Poletti's book "Intimate Ephemera : Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture" whilst at Sticky. I've been to some of her panel sessions at the National Young Writers Festival in Newcastle & Critical Animals as part of This is Not Art (TiNA) over the years, so was glad to find her PhD book in the store too. The book is also available as an e-book (pdf) or d-book (pod / print on demand) from Melbourne University Publishing e-store

I haven't finished the book yet, but here's one passage about what a zine is [pg 11-12] :

"Personal zines do not share many of the characteristics of he texts that make up the bulk of sources studied in literary or cultural studies and, more specifically, scholarship on auto/biography. Of central importance to these non-traditional texts is the fact that sines are not mass-produced; they are not published by a professional publishing house, and thus not 'sanctioned as significant by [their] status as a mass produced commodity' (Huff 510). Moreover, zines are not easily available, do not participate in standardised modes of presentation and distribution, and are not well recognised within literary communities or among the reading (most commonly constituted as 'book-buying') public. Zines are homemade, ephermeral and amateur. They circulate among communities of readers through the mail, in out-of-the-way spaces, and are passed around hand-to-hand among social groups. They are also non-traditional because of the modes of emplotment that characterise them; in the case of personal zines, we find a unique mixture of established modes of life writing, such as the diary, alongside zine-specific narratives such as cut'n'paste collage. These material and textual idiosyncranasies challenge the literary critic to practise 'connected reading', which Gillian Whitlock describes as a practice which 'pulls at the loose threads of autobiography, and uses them to make sutures between, across and among autobiographical narratives' (Intimate Empire 204)".

I also like this definition by Richard A Stoddart and Teresa Kiser in Poletti's book [pg 27]
"Zines are a written product of the human need for self-expression. Beyond that, zines are hard to define."

on page 7-8, Poletti gives Duncombe's list for a 'zine taxonomy'. I thought this was very similar to the original definitions of video blogs when they'd first started (video blogs came after zines of course!) - my attempt was this video blog mind map before I realised it was crazy to try and define all the combinations - a simple all encompassing definition of 'video on a blog' was more appropriate, and did it matter anyway.. every now and then the videoblogging list starts up a new 'what is a video blog' thread - I suppose it is the same for all sub-communities that are less commonly known / new. the response below also reminds me of the videoblogging list arguments towards a simpler definition (or no definition), and at least a step away from a taxonomy.

"genres of zines: fanzines (broken down into subcategories by subject, that is music and sports), political zines, personal zines, scene zines (covering local and community events in the zinester's area), network zines (which review zine publications), fringe culture zines (covering UFOs, conspiracy theories and so on), religious zines, vocational zines (detailing 'life on the job'), health zines, sex zines, travel zines, comix, literary zines, art zines and 'the rest'"

... "the collapse of Duncombe's taxonomy into 'the rest - a large category' underscores the futility of attempting to solidify or organise a definition of zines based on their content. As Kirsty Leishman argues: 'Duncombe's work reveals that zines are ill contained and thus it is useful because it relieves subsequent researchers from pursuing such an arduous, yet futile, endeavour'(7)."

TechGnosis maillist website
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-Philip K. Dick-
VISIT TECHGNOSIS AT: http://techgnosis.info
SUBSCRIBE to TechGnosis List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TechGnosis/join

http://www.maybelogic.org
http://www.maybelogic.net

http://edge.org/

http://www.techgnosis.com - Erik Davis' site

http://www.undergrowth.org

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org

http://www.entheo.net/ - entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference

http://www.docquan.com/lib_dead.html - an online collection / library of interesting books

Etsy.com is a community driven online store that people making handmade goods can sell their products - their motto is "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade". there's a zine called Storque, and you can read about some of the success stories highlighting successful Etsy storeholders. some storeholders have been able to give up their day jobs to sell their works fulltime via Etsy, whilst others are part-time sellers.

Customers can browse by colours and find something to buy that matches that colour. or they can search one of the 105000 stores for one in their local area should they wish to buy local. there are a couple of Time Machines where customers can browse recently and past listed random items, ordered by posting time. Etsy also supports the buy handmade challenge for the holiday season.

Kultour invites artists and art workers to apply for inclusion in the annual touring program. Kultour is a national network of arts organisations established in 2001 by the Australia Council as an initiative of the Arts in a Multicultural Australia policy to increase awareness of Australian multicultural arts through its annual touring program of Australian multicultural art. Kultour provides opportunities for local professional artists to reach new audiences in new areas whilst the annual touring program offers audiences insight into multicultural issues and arts through a professional quality touring program. read more or visit www.kultour.com.au/howtoapply.html for more details

PDF Mags is a site listing hundreds of free arts and music pdf magazines / zines. they also have a calls for submissions listings area so you can find out where to have your work published

For all of the Fellowships we are seeking applications from artists, hackers, designers, engineers and creative technologists to come to Eyebeam for a year to undertake new research and develop new work. The ideal Fellow has experience working with and making innovative technological art and/or creative technology projects and has a passion for collaborative development. Fellows will bring this experience and working approach to their own independent projects, projects initiated by other Residents or Fellows and projects conceived collaboratively during the Fellowship period.

Read more for details or visit
http://www.eyebeam.org/production/production.php?page=felcall

If you have any questions, please email fellowshipinfo@eyebeam.org or visit the online application page @ http://www.eyebeam.org/production/onlineapp/

Sophie, the Institute's first piece of software, is designed for reading and writing next-generation electronic books. Sophie will facilitate the easy construction of documents that are designed to live on the network and to use multimedia and time in ways that are currently difficult, if not impossible.

The Croquet Project is an international effort to promote the continued development of Croquet, a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications. It features a network architecture that supports communication, collaboration, resource sharing, and synchronous computation among multiple users. Using the downloadable Croquet SDK, software developers can benefit from a flexible enough framework that virtually any user interface concept could quickly and easily be prototyped and deployed to create powerful and highly collaborative multi-user 2D and 3D applications and simulations.

Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies is a biannually published, refereed journal. The journal covers the studies of music sciences, together with the studies of music and sound in the disciplines of humanities, social sciences, cognitive sciences, medical and engineering sciences. Our aim is to establish a wide range of interdisciplinary platform for the scholars studying on music and sound.

Radical Musicology is a peer-reviewed online journal produced in the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University (UK). It was established to provide a forum for progressive thinking across the whole field of musical studies, and encourages work that draws on any and all relevant discipinary and interdisciplinary prespectives.

click here or on the image to play the quicktime movie

slideshow video of photos taken during the 2003 This is Not Art and Electrofringe festivals in Newcastle, Australia 01-06 October 2003

http://www.thisisnotart.org has info about this year's festival

http://www.massarcade.com/electrofringe has the 2003 electrofringe website - you can find the program on this site

http://flickr.com/photos/aliak_com/tags/tina2003/ has photos of the event

The Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society (KEAMS) was founded for the development of electro-acoustic music and computer music in 1993.

The IDEA [Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts] is a very simple creative sharing matrix for e-Creative Practitioners and associated individuals & organizations from all over the world to share their works, visions, aspirations, experiments and communiqués, etc. on a common platform that can be distributed, retrieved and archived for the future. The 7 gazettes issued so far are also now hosted online by the e-music pioneer & composer (and Special Advisor to The AeA) Laurie Spiegel, at http://retiary.org/idea

Create Digital Motion is a webzine and community site for VJs and other producers of moving images. Their audience can read the latest news, tips, reviews, and features on digital video production and performance.

PixelPress' intent is to encourage documentary photographers, writers, filmmakers, artists, human rights workers and students to explore the world in ways that take advantage of the new possibilities provided by digital media. They seek a new paradigm of journalism, one that encourages an active dialogue between the author and reader and, also, the subject.

Founded in 1995, Studio XX is Montreal's foremost women's digital resource centre. Through a variety of creative activities and initiatives, the Studio works with women to demystify digital technologies, to critically examine their social aspects, to facilitate women's access to technology, and to create and exhibit women's new digital art.

LUX is a not-for-profit organisation that supports and promotes contemporary and historical artists' moving image work, and those who make it, through distribution, exhibition, publishing and research.

The aim of the Melbourne Independent Filmakers site is to provide some documentation about the myriad independent filmmakers that have existed, and continue to exist, in Melbourne. The site's owner classifies a filmmaker as "independent" if he or she has shown or is showing an individual spirit and committed attitude to realising their particular cinematic vision. And if they have also (at some point) shown some initiative in making their work without official financial support - that they have or had (for those directors from the past) a willingness to create their works, at whatever cost. More information and profiles of Melbourne film artists and directors can be found at the site : http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/