Tending Networks: The 5th Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium will address new developments, connections, and opportunities in digital, new media and electronic art practice in New Zealand and internationally.

The symposium will feature presentations by major international artists Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries of Korea, and Adam Hyde, a New Zealander based in Amsterdam. A wide range of artists and researchers from Christchurch and around New Zealand will present current projects, and panel discussions will focus on the creation of new work, including the role of community networks, the value of collaboration, and the challenges posed by exhibiting digital art.

Art of Record Production Conference

Brisbane, Australia in 2007 and Lowell, Massachusetts in 2008

PRESS RELEASE – Feb 2008

one of the workshops we did at electrofringe 2006 was on max / msp with Bruce Mowson
our group made a simple max patch which rotated through a few video clips we recorded of people who were in the workshop. we'd asked them to say something about the electrofringe / this is not art festival. the patch was basically a random video player. we only had an hour to make it so we chose something simple. we had to show Bruce the following day. our patch worked and we were one of two groups (well our group + 1 person from another group) who turned up the next day to demonstrate the finished patch

here's a photo of the attached patch - version 2

Mark's patch worked too - his is much more advanced! it's an identity bank ATM machine
Mark is from Chailight Productions - he lives in Melbourne now, but used to live in Brisbane and run the Spin'n'Jam nights, amongst other things such as some of the outdoor parties

one of the slides in Bruce's talk. I tried the url in the photo but it's a dead link now - granted it is 2 years later ;) no luck finding it on the wayback machine either :(

This is Not Art festival, Newcastle, Australia.
Electrofringe workshops.
Saturday 30/09/2006

http://www.thisisnotart.org/

Expand - Collapse

Unmasking the art behind making a truly great record will be the focus of a very special event in Brisbane this December. The third Annual Art of Record Production Conference will feature some of the most exciting music producers this country has to offer - plus a keynote address from iconic US DJ/Producer Hank Shocklee (Public Enemy, BombSquad). The Art of Record Production is a World Class event being presented for the very first time in the southern hemisphere. read more for details, or visit the website to register or view the program : http://www.arpbrisbane.com/

DrupalCon was held recently in Barcelona. I didn't make it this year. the schedule looked good though, and from all reports it was the best drupalcon ever (as it is each year!!). there's a wrap up post on the drupal site with links to some of the slide presentations, videos of the sessions on archive.org - search for drupalconbarcelona2007 tag, or try the mirror site.

drupal for facebook was a session by Dave Cohen. he's started a Facebook project on the Drupal site. the video of his presentation is online as well as the slides
there's a demo on facebook. I'm already feeding facebook with my drupal site blog entries using the RSS capabilities of Blog Friends and the built in Notes application, but it'll be interesting to see what the Drupal guys build.

and, speaking of facebook, mashable have reviewed widget box, a wizard for creating Facebook apps

Vlog Europe is on this weekend, but they've just posted a link to the site where they'll be streaming some of it live - video of course! and a chat channel. the schedule looks good. they're going to talk about software, personal media, videoblogging and it's effects on big media, videoblogging and making content not money

The eighth edition of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference, sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies, once again aims to provide a participatory and scholarly space in which to reexamine, reinvigorate, and make relevant the social and political tradition of anarchism.

At previous conferences, presenters have proposed topics that ranged from the character of social change to the ongoing relevance of categories such as class, community, and labor; from the changing shape of the state and capital to emergent forms of both domination and resistance in a globalizing world; from the character of twenty-
first-century technology to the functions and potentials of anti-authoritarian art and propaganda; and from anarchism's relation to geopolitical concerns such as terrorism and war to its ability to grapple with issues of identity such as race, gender, and sexuality.

Read more for the Calls for Proposals or visit http://anarchiststudies.org/node/146 for more details. http://www.homemadejam.org/renew has archives of previous year's conferences.

Video Vortex Conference is being held in Amsterdam (NL) on November 30 and December 1 2007. It is organized by the Institute of Network Cultures.

Themes of the conference include:
Viral Video critique
Vlogging Critique
Participatory Culture, Participatory Video
Real World Tools and Technologies
Theory & History of the Database
Narrative and the Cinematic
Database Taxonomy and Navigation
Internet Video: Art, Activism, and Public Media
Evening Programme / Exhibition

Visit the conference website @ http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex/ or read more for details

1st International Congress Art Tech Media @ www.artechmedia.net
8-11th may . Madrid. Spain

The First International Art Tech Media Congress has been set up in order to reflect upon and analyse questions currently being raised about art and new technological media within an international context.

artechmedia.net is calling on all creatives of the world to participate. Submissions will be accepted from the following categories:

A
- Video art
- Net-art
- 2D & 3D Computer Animation
- Blog, videoblog
- Creation for mobile platforms
- Digital Music
- Videodance

B
- Digital Communities
- Geospatial storytelling
- Artificial Life, Software art, Transgenic art, Generative art

read more for more information or visit www.artechmedia.net

Watch the video

various shots taken at This is Not Art festival in Newcastle, Australia 28/09/2006 - 02/10/2006

http://www.thisisnotart.org

Watch the video

part of the video, audio performance by Somaya Langley who uses gestural movements combined with accelerometer sensors attached to her outfit, and David Wolf who provided the visual feast to accompany the soundscapes. part of Electrofringe 2006 festival in Newcastle, Australia, on sunday 01/10/2006.

http://www.thisisnotart.org/

http://www.thisisnotart.org/Members/ben/david-wolf-and-somaya-langley-tba/

TBA explores sonic city spaces through a gestural interface. In the current sociological climate, the city can be an alienating yet sonically rich space. Individuals potentially relate more closely to the city, the buildings and architecture than they do to the other inhabitants. However, the city is an ever-changing environment demolishing buildings, resurrecting monuments simultaneous moments of destruction and resurrection. Using footage of Newcastle as well as abstract and generative 3D systems, elements are combined and manipulated in real time using custom built applications developed with Quartz Composer and Max/MSP.

click here or on the image to play the quicktime movie

music is Indian Summer by Big Bud

I went along to the Sarai Independent Fellows 2006 workshops last weekend (26-27/08) @ Sarai, CSDS, New Delhi. I missed the first two days sessions, but here is a slideshow video of some of the saturday & sunday sessions. it was really interesting - both the presentations and the discussions afterwards. some sessions were in Hindi so I couldn't follow as easily. there were a wide range of projects though - art, music, urban issues. hopefully they'll link to some of the full papers on the sarai.net website. it was a great way to get another insight into life and goings on in India and related places.

photos @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/aliak_com/tags/saraiifellows2006

http://ifellows2006.wordpress.com

http://www.sarai.net

The Biennale of Sydney is Australia's largest and most exciting international visual arts event. The Biennale of Sydney is held in Sydney's leading museums and galleries and is renowned for showcasing the freshest and most innovative contemporary art from Australia and around the world. Since 1973 the Biennale of Sydney exhibitions have presented the work of more than 1200 artists from over sixty countries. Most of these artists were also brought to Sydney by the Biennale, which often facilitated their travel and co-ordinated their professional engagements in a national outreach program to art schools and universities across Australia. Please visit the Biennale of Sydney website for more information on the Biennale's mission, history and past exhibitions. The concept 'Zones of Contact' forms the framework and organising principle of the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, which will include a range of artists from around the world practising in all forms of the visual arts. 'Zones of Contact' is about the spaces in which people live in and move between, the spatial dimensions of cities, settlements, territories, the land and home. The work refers to the temporal dimensions of those spaces, the body, everyday life, places in which people encounter one another and other cultures and sense of self and their histories. Visit http://www.bos2006.com/ for more details.

There's a couple of conferences coming up which I wouldn't mind checking out.. don't think I'll have a chance in person as I'm still in Delhi for work, but I think they'll have video / audio recordings of them so I can check out later.

Vloggercon 2006 is being held in San Francisco this year. Here's the blurb from their site:
"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.

In the past year, videoblogging has grown into a myriad of forms with a worldwide voice. And your voice is needed at Vloggercon– after all, the media is being made by you so it’s your voice that we want to hear! Vloggercon is a two-day collection of roundtable discussions about the emergence and the future of this new medium; not a series of lec-tures. This conference is created for meeting and learning from each other, so be ready to share your thoughts!

Vloggercon 2006 will be held June 10 & 11 at the Swedish American Hall, 2174 Market Street, San Francisco CA 94114. "
http://www.vloggercon.com/ - tickets are available online.

Where 2.0
This one's about locative and GIS / Google Earth, Second Life / Electric Sheep & similar web apps. Would be good to see what's happening on this front at the moment. Here's the blurb from their site :

" Everything happens somewhere. With open source and free web mapping tools like Ka-Map and Google Maps, we finally have a way to display location information. At last year's Where 2.0, we put the spotlight on the grassroots developers building mash-ups on platforms from Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google. This year we'll look at the latest developments in those platforms as well as the latest startups, civic projects, and labs experiments built on them.

In addition you'll find source mapping tools, open standards for data and location web services, and sensors for obtaining location data. We'll learn how the established geo industry is reacting to the first businesses making money from their grassroots geospatial projects. There's no better place to meet the people behind the mash-ups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial. "
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2006/

ADA will be a working conference involving new media artists, critics and curators. We'll be looking at critical questions of resourcing, education and practice.We're in the planning stages now, and would love to hear any suggestion you may have for participants and key questions for discussion. We're keeping it local (while working on the odd international visitor and web conference). The focus is to connect people within New Zealand and Kiwis working internationally.

O'Reilly killer apps mentioned in the audio recording of e-Tech 2004 from archive.org

social software - harnessing the power of use contributions & user participation:

successful platforms using social software:

The TransAcoustic Festival was held in Auckland, New Zealand this weeked, starting on Thursday 8th and finishing up tonight, Sunday 11th December. I missed the Thursday/Friday performances due to a bad memory and thinking the festival was actually on next weekend. I went along to the seminars at the Art Gallery and the Saturday night performances at the Kenneth Myers Centre in central Auckland. Tonight is the closing night, with final video screenings being held at Odeon Lounge in Mt Eden. The festival delved into themes of sound, light and synaesthetic experiences using mediums such as experimental music & film. Artists from Australia (Brisbane & Melbourne) and New Zealand performed. Many of the performers are part of the experimental and new media mail list communities, aus_noise, empyre, audio foundation and ada.

here's an email thread from aus_noise mail list - I posted the photos then a reply to some questions with details about the gigs.

===========================================================================================

hey lloyd, yeah the photos are mostly setup and the tables after the performances. it was dark for the actual performances and my cameraphone isn't the best in full light let alone no light so not many crowd shots I'm afraid. I probably should have taken my proper camera or video but am never sure if people allow it or not.

I only made it to the Saturday shows - there were two sessions at the Art Gallery in the afternoon and three performances in the evening.

here's some of the notes I took (apologies if I heard things incorrectly & they're not coherent)
stella brennan spoke about her paper "Visual Musak - from Lava Lamp to Screensaver" - she spoke of some historical experimental cinema performances; some entries in the "Expanded Cinema" book by Gene Youngblood (intro by R.Buckminster Fuller); highlighted some examples of World Fair/Expo art including the "Labyrinth" large scale film projection in 1977 (projecting film vertically rather than horizontally) and the early beginnings of IMAX cinema and the people involved in it; "animated sound" project; telefunken project cd; of "connecting to ideas of all enveloping environments"; chemical brothers film clip "...landscape responding to your emotion"

or, if you have time, take a listen to it via this site:
http://www.archive.org/details-db.php?mediatype=audio&identifier=2005121...
(not the best audio quality either I'm afraid) I believe there'll be a video of the seminars available for better representation of them. (I just record things to listen to them again later, so don't worry about the quality too much I'm afraid)

Robin Fox was really interesting - he spoke about his work with oscilloscopes/cro's (you're probably already familiar with this?) - he feeds the inputs with harsh sounds often using nyquist foldover frequencies & using a library of sounds created in max/msp. I've used cro's before at work measuring tv signals but haven't got them to make beautiful animated images such as he was getting out of it. I heard everyone really enjoyed the performance the night before (I missed it unfortunately). one of the physicists in the class was really animated during the talk and had comments/questions afterwards. he also spoke of John Rose's perspective/observations on laptop performance in relation to virtuosity and limitations of human performers (hopefully I have this correct) - when an audience watches an instrumentalist perform they have certain preconceptions about what sounds should be heard and how good they think they could be, which are then sometimes surpassed, hence the performer becomes a virtuoso. but with a laptop/computer performer, because there are no limitations on the possibilities the computer brings to the equation it is harder for people to relate to the performance as much as watching a traditional imstrumentalist. he also showed the external controllers he uses with max/msp. and spoke of experimental cinema using oscilloscopes in the 1960s (Mary Ellen Bute). experiments of Ron Pellegrino who created still images from an oscilloscope, but who didn't like the sounds used to create them. then he spoke about "sound to shape" and synesthetic relationships of images and music and some of his mother's experiences with synesthesia. and 3d, immersive environments "looking into sounds". and finally he spoke a bit about the lasers he's been working with lately and some of the safety aspects involved.

http://msp.sfsu.edu/Instructors/rey/synesth.html is one site which has more info on some of these things.

in the evening there were performances by The Professionals, Adam Willets and Abject Leader.

The Professionals were up first - they make sounds from photo-sensitive devices. the photos of polystyrene boxes with the breadboards & circuitry are from their performance. they also fed back sound into the video on a couple of monitors, though I wasn't sure if this was part of their performance until towards the end when the constant blue light started getting affected by the sounds into the stripey video similar to Botborg performances I've seen in the past (at electrofringe this year). I couldn't see exactly what they were doing as I was sitting behind the other benches, but I could see a torch being shone onto the boxes and sounds corresponding to the flashing light and then chirpy noises sounding when a lighter was lit. it was good to see they'd gone through the whole creative process and made the devices which they then used to make the sounds.

Adam Willets was up next. he had solar powered (well, desk lamp powered this night) 'robots' housed in clear plastic christmas decoration balls, one of which was resting on a saucer which was in turn sitting on the strings of a guitar (actually, I think it was a guitar - I was too busy looking at the bots to notice the stringed instrument). the other was placed on tinfoil on the bench. there was a camera projected on the screen so we could have a better view of what was going on. the bots twitched and flipped themselves under the light. at first I thought it was due to the sound as well, but I asked him afterwards, and they move due to the light. but the motion of the bot on the saucer made scratchy sounds on the saucer, and vibrated the strings underneath to create the sounds which then went through the pedals etc.

Abject Leader were last up. I really liked the films and watching Sally change the film & filters and feed the film through the reels (sorry if I have her name wrong) was like watching a dance alongside the film as she reached from one to the other to add a filter here or adjust a lens or piece of film there. the music was really nice too - it matched the visuals really well. I wasn't sure if the music and film were interacting with each other, as I couldn't see how they'd done this from my seat if it was, & I always like to know how things work. so I asked but they were two separate parts of the performance, apart from hearing the film projector as a backdrop to the projections, which worked in well with the music.

I couldn't make the sunday night or thurs/friday night performances, so sorry I missed the Botborg/Robin Fox performances, but I met a couple of nice Aucklanders there who made me feel welcome and mentioned they'd enjoyed the previous performances and said that it was cool how many different perspectives had been brought to the festival based on it's theme.

http://www.transacoustic.org.nz/ has the artists bios and programme if u haven't seen it already.

- Hide quoted text -

[original email - email addresses & names removed]

On 12/12/05, lb wrote:

--- Kath wrote:

> hey guys, thanks to those on aus_noise for
> performing at the TransAcoustic
> Festival in Auckland over the weekend. I went along
> last night and really
> enjoyed the performances, as well as the seminars in
> the afternoon. I have
> some photos from the sat night performance uploaded
> - unfortunately I only
> had my cameraphone so the quality isn't that great
> but u get the idea.
>
>
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aliak_com/tags/transacoustic/

Hey Kath,

thanks for the photos - though it looks like a
performance rather empty of perfomers - did you shoot
the setup or were there very few people? Can you
comment on the aussie contigents performances (Abject
Leader, Botborg, Robin Fox)?

chrs
][oyd

aus-------------------------------------
noise-----------------------------------
diary-----------------------------------

++++++++
BRISBANE
++++++++
Thursday 15 December 2005
Judith Wright Centre, Rehearsal Room (level 4)
420 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane
MUJI
Rare solo sets from Scott Sinclair and Joel Stern.
+++++
Saturday 17 December, 8pm
Rob Curvengen
G55
Dada-Meinhof
Hetleveiker
Exploded Cinema
Other Theory @ The Globe
Brunswick St. Fortitude Valley (outside train station)
$7/$5
+++++
Monday 19 December 2005
Judith Wright Centre, Performance Space
420 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane
MUJI2
Trio -
Scott Sinclair (modified guitar, electronics)
Joel Stern (feedback instruments)
Adam Park (prepared tape loops)
+++++
27.01.06 + 28.01.06
OPENFRAME - Room40
Peter Rehberg, Anasten, Michael Rodgers,
abjectleader's 'noh cinema' and much more.
Brisbane Powerhouse's Rooftop Terrace from 8pm.
28.01.06
+++++

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aus_noise/

================================================================================================
links mentioned in this blog entry:

http://www.transacoustic.org.nz/

http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_ExpandedCinema/ExpandedCinema.html

http://www.archive.org/download/20051210_auckland_transacoustic_festival...