ANAT is calling for applications from young and emerging practitioners working with distributed, portable, online, wearable, mobile and emerging platforms to undertake a three-month mentorship with an established practitioner of their choice.

Managed by ANAT, the mentorship is a part of the Australian Government's Young & Emerging Artists Initiative through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The mentorship provides an opportunity to explore new artistic directions, to expand technical skills and increase knowledge of networks, debates and business practice. Applicants are invited to select a mentor and develop a program of activity spanning a three-month period. The mentorship may be largely a program of skills, development however applicants are encouraged to explore programs which incorporates critical investigation and dialogue, business skills development as well as marketing and exhibition opportunities. Utilising emerging technologies the mentor may be accessed locally, nationally or internationally. Additionally the successful applicant will maintain a blog for the duration of the mentorship hosted on the ANAT server.

read more or visit the ANAT emerging technologies mentorship website

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

I've been watching the identity 2.0 presentations from 2005 oscon and web 2.0 conferences. I'd been meaning to watch more of the presentations from these conferences but hadn't got round to it yet. I came across this again via another site, presentation zen blog, which was talking about different styles of presentations - Dick Hardt from sxip.com (pronounced skip) was recommended as having good presentation style. He in turn borrowed this style from Lawrence Lessig, the well known copyright lawyer and advocate. They both use many slides with short phrases or single words, with a scattering of images and are displayed with a fast pace. It does make the presentation more interesting! - well compared to the traditional powerpoint style anyway. This topic has been on my mind recently - not presentations per se, but events and conferences - as the iDC mail list has been having interesting discussions about the different styles of presentations at digital arts / music / new media conferences. Mostly the conversations have been regarding providing remote connections and contributions for people to attend the conferences remotely either during the conference or after it. Discussions on presentation style came up - different ideas, particularly wrt academics presenting papers and just reading them to the audience when they may have been available prior to the conference, then running out of time for questions. Anyway, I find it interesting as I'm not able to attend all the conferences I'd like to, though I try to attend as many as feasible, but it's really handy to be able to watch a video or listen to audio of the presentations after the conference. I find most of the larger IT based American conferences have video lectures / presentations available - perhaps this is because they have deals with ISPs and video production / distribution people. I think videoblogging could help with this as there's many more people recording video these days, but I suppose it won't be videoblogging as such, but using videobloggers to apply their skills to provide documentation and video on the web. Really useful for online education also!

read more for links used in this post

I remember reading about holographic storage / crystalline data storage in the mid 90s but back then they could write the data but couldn't read it back off. seems like they've fixed the problems according to the tests run last november. looking forward to the personal device using these to be available.. they've been doing tests with broadcasters for hdtv and the like. http://www.hiptechblog.com/2005/11/25/maxell-introduces-groundbreaking-h...

"The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices" was a manuscript written by al-Jazari in 1206 which described automata and mechanical devices used in early Islam. One of the more famous is the "The Elephant Clock" pictured here. Other machines include wine servers. The devices were 'programmed' to be random and unpredictable.

There is an excellent explanation of some of these devices and the book in general @ http://66.244.200.112/D1006Gunalan_Nadarajan.wmv - this is a conference presentation by Gunalan Nadarajan on his paper :

Islamic Automation: A Reading of al-Jazari's The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206)
http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2005/refresh/lisiten.asp

Professor Noel Sharkey from Sheffield University is building a replica of al-Jazari's automata boat which acts like a programmable drum machine.

[quote]
"Al-Jazari's machine was originally a boat with four automatic musicians that floated on a lake to entertain guests at royal drinking parties. It had two drummers, a harpist and a flautist."

"The heart of the mechanism is a rotating cylindrical beam with pegs (cams) protruding from it. These just bump into little levers that operate the percussion. The point of the model is to demonstrate that the drummer can be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns if the pegs are moved around. In other words it is a programmable drum machine."
[/quote]

The guys from pawful.org have been working on a livecoding game called Al-Jazari which is a musical robot livecoding system based on the principles of al-Jazari's automata boat.

view the video demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxwLllYchlw

[quote]
"Al-Jazari is written in scheme for fluxus, and continues in the gamepad driven vein of BetaBlocker.
Livecoding for all the family! Only for use at royal drinking parties."

"The language consists of instructions to move and turn the robot, along with conditionals based on the external state (blocked, robot to my left, right etc) and jump instructions to switch between 4 seperate code states. A simple signalling system to allow the bots to communicate is planned."
[/quote]

Onion Robotics website contains a great deal of technical, creative and background information on robotics for hobbyists and even those more experienced. Some areas of the site also form a dictionary for some of the terms and concepts used in robotics, electronics, porgramming, Lego building and engineering.

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:

I have an external 120Gb firewire hard drive which has travelled with me from Sydney to UK to Auckland. It's worked really well. Well, until last week when it fell over and now makes horrible clunking noises when it's spinning up. Unfortunately this drive holds my ipod music files - copies of my cds and records that I couldn't bring with me from home. Luckily I'd done a full transfer to my ipod a couple of weeks ago, so the music is intact, but I can't export it back onto a hard drive (planning on buying another 2.5" drive instead of the firewire drive). I just found an article on endgaget about transferring files from your ipod back to hard drive using ephPOD. cool :) now I just have to buy the new drive and try it out.

IEEE computer society website