Tuesday, October 28, 2008

@ DOCAM's International Summit + Media In Motion conference


3 of the Media Art Histories bloggers, Rolf Wolfensberger, Nina Wenhart and myself will be in Montreal this week @ DOCAM's Media In Motion + their fourth International Summit @ McGill University. Rolf presents in the International Summit:

http://www.docam.ca/en/?p=355

+ Nina + i present in the MEDIA IN MOTION: The Challenge of Preservation in the Digital Age conference:

http://www.docam.ca/en/?p=361

we're all be presenting our Media Art Histories research, in abbreviated forms.

MEDIA IN MOTION is a project of DOCAM and Media@McGill. DOCAM is "an international research alliance on the documentation and the conservation of the media arts heritage, initiated by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology." DOCAM and the Daniel Langlois Foundation are world leaders in the conservation and preservation of Media Art. Media@McGill is "a hub of research, scholarship, and public outreach on issues and controversies in media, technology, and culture" and is based in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.

i'm rly looking fwd to the discussions + developments that follow. - jonCates

http://www.docam.ca

http://media.mcgill.ca

http://www.fondation-langlois.org

Thursday, October 23, 2008

"The Atlas of Cyberspace", Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, 2001


http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/atlas/Atlas_with_cover_high.pdf

As published today (Oct. 22nd 2008) on the nettime mailinglist, the Atlas of Cyberspace, originally published in 2001 is now fully available for download & licensed under creative commons.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

"Net.art Preservation" on Rhizome.org



Last month, during September 2008, a discussion developed on Rhizome.org about "Net.art Preservation" the discussion is archived and viewable as well as extendable here:

http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/40319

- jonCates

Art Game documentation archive on Internet Archive


"A new game video collection at the Internet Archive - games for art's sake.

We are pleased to announce a new game video collection hosted by the Internet Archive, called "games for art's sake" - http://www.archive.org/details/game-art. This is devoted to providing online documentation of both individual works and exhibitions of game art, art games and related work made "for art's sake".

Games constitute a large and important field of contemporary art. How this art will withstand the passage of time remains an open question. This collection is intended to provide a stable and enduring site for the hosting of documentation about games made for art's sake.

Artists, curators and others with relevant documentation of game art are encouraged to contribute their files to the collection. To do this, first upload them to the Internet Archive's open source video collection, using the tool at http://www.archive.org/create/. Then email us at and we will moved them into the "games for art's sake" collection. This will be viewable at http://www.archive.org/details/game-art

Julian Oliver
Helen Stuckey
Melanie Swalwell"

(New) Media Art in Museums symposium

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka organized and hosted the "(New) Media Art in Museums: production - keeping - presentation" symposium last week in Rijeka, Croatia. The event featured presentations by those working in the fields of New Media Art exhibition and Media Art Histories such as Darko Fritz, Slavko Kačunko and many others. unfortunately there is not yet an online archive of papers or documentation from the event, but hopefully there will be soon. below is the brief description of the event. - jonCates

"(New) Media Art in Museums: production - keeping - presentation
Rijeka 15 - 17 October 2008
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka organizes the international symposium (New) Media Art in Museums that will be held 15 - 17 October 2008 at the City Hall in Rijeka.
The aim of the international symposium (New)Media Art in Museums is to consider status of (new)media art in museum collections, conditions of keeping, protection, modes of exhibiting and all the changes that (new)media art introduces into the everyday practice of contemporary museums."
more information http://www.mmsu.hr/

Armin Medosch on new tendencies / bit international


Below is a repost of a posting by Armin Medosch from the Curatorial Resource Upstart Media Bliss (CRUMB) list that was similarly reposted by Paul Brown on the Digital Arts Histories (DASH) list. - jonCates

"as the new tendencies / bit international exhibition is currently shown at ZKM,
I thought the following is interesting for some people on this list as it
contains a lot of material for the study of kinetic, cybernetic and computer
art. there is also an argument contained her about the writing of histories and
above all the thesis that this early 'computer avantgard' shows many of the
problems which affect media art till today.

Article start:

Since more than 10 years the Croatian media artist Darko Fritz has been
researching the archives of the Museum for Contemporary Arts Zagreb to gather
material about the New Tendencies series of exhibitions and events in Zagreb,
Ex-Yugoslavia, now Croatia, from 1961 to 1973 and the Bit International journal
published by that same art movement. An exhibition in 2007 at Neue Galerie Graz
and now at ZKM Karlsruhe shows the works of this important but almost lost art
movement, were it not for the effort of Darko Fritz. For the Graz exhibition a
little catalogue came out with contributions by Peter Weibel, Jesa Denegri and
Margit Rosen. I have data mined those articles and present this material in the
manner of a literature review for other researchers to study it and draw their
own conclusions. All translations from German are my translations.

Full text: http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/731
http://www.thenextlayer.org/

best regards
armin"

Cybernetics Serendipity Redux discussion On YASMIN


September 2008's
Cybernetics Serendipity Redux discussion On YASMIN:

http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin/viewtopic.php?t=4385

is available as an online archive. The discussion addresses issues related to the restaging of critical exhibitions and events from recent Media Art Hystories. YASMIN, the host of this discussion, is a "
moderated list for art-science-technology interactions around the Mediterranean Rim". below is the initial introduction to the discussion. - jonCates

Cybernetics Serendipity Redux
September 2008 discussion On YASMIN, led by Ranulph Glanville.

40 years ago, Jasia Reichart's exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" showed that cybernetics, computing and art had arrived.

40 years later, while computers and art remain, cybernetics has nearly vanished, although there is a reviving interest in art.

In celebrating Cybernetic Serendipity we have the chance to re-open the debate, to reconsider the relationship particularly between cybernetics and art, and to do so taking into account the way that cybernetics has developed during its period of near invisibility.

So what is new in cybernetics, and how can that inform art: and, what is new in art, and how can that inform cybernetics.

This is a chance to reopen the connection, to explore again, and to move beyond some of the current models taken from cognitive science, computing, AI and AL, and complexity, to the (much more radical) field of their origin, cybernetics.

List of Discussants
Albert Mueller: albert.mueller ( @ ) univie.ac.at
Andreas Giannakoulopoulos: andreas ( @ ) utopia.gr
Andrew Brouse: abrouse ( @ ) gmail.com
Enrique Rivera: or.enrique ( @ ) gmail.com
Ian Clothier: I.Clothier ( @ ) witt.ac.nz
Jasia Reichart: jreichardt ( @ ) btopenworld.com
Julien Knebusch: jknebusch ( @ ) gmail.com
Mitchell Whitelaw: mitchell.whitelaw ( @ ) canberra.edu.au
Paul Brown: paul ( @ ) paul-brown.com
Paul Pangaro: pan ( @ ) pangaro.com
Ranulph Glanville: ranulph ( @ ) glanville.co.uk,
ranulph ( @ ) mac.com
Roger Malina: rmalina ( @ ) alum.mit.edu
Stephen Jones: sjones ( @ ) culture.com.au

ISEA2010 info


The ISEA Foundation Board is pleased to announce that Medienwerk NRW, Germany will host ISEA2010 as part of the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010.

Medienwerk NRW is a consortium from the North Rhine-Westphalia area of Germany including currently 16 institutions working in different areas of media culture: Music, Performance/Dance, Art, Research, Education and Digital Heritage.

HMKV which acts as the branch office of Medienwerk NRW will organise the conference in cooperation with ISEA2010's artistic director Dr Andreas Broeckmann in Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg and other cities of the Ruhrgebiet between August 20 and 29, 2010 - integrated into a month of media arts within the RUHR.2010.

The programme will include conferences, exhibitions, audio-visual and dance performances, projects in public space, artist presentations, workshops, an E-Culture Fair and Artists-in-Labs-programme.

ISEA2010 will be held from 20 - 29 August 2010. The call for proposals, papers and presentations will be published on June 1 2009 with a deadline of 15 September 2009.

The website is now online at http://www.ISEA2010RUHR.org, with a Newsletter available for subscription at the site.

For further details see:
http://www.medienwerk-nrw.de
http://www.kulturhauptstadt-europas.de/

Digital Humanities 2009 Call for papers

Digital Humanities 2009–the annual joint meeting of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs–will be hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland in College Park, USA.

Coinciding with MITH’s 10th anniversary as a working digital humanities center, we look forward to welcoming this distinguished international community to a campus that has fostered numerous early adopter projects in the field and which continues to innovate with new work on tools, text analysis, electronic editing, virtual worlds, digital preservation, and cyberinfrastructure. As a setting for digital humanities research, MITH also enjoys unusually close relationships with the campus’s iSchool or Information School, the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (the oldest of its kind), and the University Libraries, all of whom are co-sponsors of the conference.

For full information about the conference: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/


Call for Papers

September 11th, 2008

We are happy to announce the Call for Papers has been sent out and is available on our website with detailed information about submission and formatting. Translations of the call are also available.

The joint international conference is the oldest established meeting of scholars working at the intersection of advanced information technologies and the humanities, annually attracting a distinguished international community at the forefront of their fields. Submissions are invited on all topics concerning digital humanities, e.g.

* text analysis, corpora, corpus linguistics, language processing, language learning
* libraries, archives and the creation, delivery, management and preservation of humanities digital resources
* computer-based research and computing applications in all areas of literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical studies, including electronic literature and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship
* use of computation in such areas as the arts, architecture, music, film, theatre, new media, and other areas reflecting our cultural heritage
* research issues such as: information design and modelling; the cultural impact of the new media; software studies; Human-Computer interaction
* the role of digital humanities in academic curricula
* digital humanities and diversity

Submissions may be for papers, posters, or sessions. Potential participants may also read ADHO’s reviewer guidelines for assessment criteria.

All proposals should be submitted by uploading them to the ConfTool. The deadline for submitting paper, session and poster proposals to the Programme Committee is October 31, 2008. All submissions will be refereed. Presenters will be notified of acceptance February 13, 2009.

ISEA2009 Call For Artworks and Art Projects, Papers, Workshops, Open Spaces and more


http://www.isea-web.org

2nd Call for Artworks and Art Projects, Papers, Workshops, Open Spaces and more - ACROSS EIGHT SUB-THEMES
Abstracts for papers and descriptors of artworks/projects, panels and workshops etc are sought for ISEA 2009 that will illuminate both the near and long term Future of Digital Media Culture. Papers which present research outcomes, track trends or developments, describe case studies or works in progress, are speculative projection, challenge existing paradigms or record a history, are all welcome.

Submissions are encouraged from any professional, craft or scholarly field that relates to communications art/design, cultural expression, practice and aesthetics, and the technical means by which they are enabled.

The sub-themes:
Citizenship and contested spaces
Interactive storytelling and memory building in post-conflict society
Interactive textiles
Tracking emotions
Posthumanism: New technologies and creative strategies
Positionings: local and global transactions
Transformative creativity - participatory practices
Entertainment and Mobility

Citizenship and contested spaces:
Over the past decades international mobility, forced and voluntary migration has changed the social fabric of many societies. Alongside a growing ethnic and cultural diversity within countries, the nation state as discrete, bounded entity is itself increasingly being eroded under the influence of global capital and digitisation. This theme invites contributions that explore and challenge established and common sense notions of citizenship and interconnected value hierarchies particularly in politically, socially and culturally contested contexts. It aims to encourage debates on alternatives to the hegemonic model of democracy, and seeks alternative visions and creative strategies for citizen practices in contested spaces based on the (perceived) potential of digital technologies.

Interactive Storytelling and Memory building in post-conflict society
Invited are innovative and advanced strategies of constructing inter/active storytelling through collaborative and participatory practices that build on, mobilise and explore the long tradition of oral story telling. Of interest are how stories operate in the formation of memories within post-conflict (but still conflicted) society individually and collectively, and what potential they may have in conflict transformation and identity re/formation. Considerations of aesthetic and ethical concerns both within the narrative domain as well as in technological realisation and dissemination / distribution are welcome too.

Interactive Textiles
The theme invites contributions related to creative and technical production and application processes that challenge and extend conventional methods of working with textiles and their perceived material properties. It aims to give consideration to innovative ways to produce and use textiles, materials and forms that are capable of extending and responding to interaction. The panel will profile fibre and fabric structures that promote expression, communication and enhanced or altered behaviours. What kind of ‘second skins’, artifacts and constructions can be created that support interactions and context awareness?

Where are the hardware, software and material challenges, the ethical concerns, sustainability issues, aesthetic, cultural and activist potential? Themes may include-
• Information gatherers and communicators
• Mobile and personalized communication systems
• Enhanced aesthetics,
• Adoption strategies
• Wireless sensor networks and wearable computing
• Performance measurements in the medical and sports sectors


Positionings: local and global transactions
The theme takes its point of departure the processes through which spaces are being constructed, re-mapped and negotiated in the contemporary situation of global capital, digitisation and migration. Issues of space are highly pertinent in terms of its constitution, perception, appropriation, consumption. These issues cannot be divorced from a scrutiny of the social, political, cultural and medial conditions under which spaces are being produced, trans/formed, and re/presented. Of particular interest are new and convergent models of space and spatial dynamics, and thus of reality construction, whether real, virtual or augmented, and the challenges they pose to the relationship between local(ised) and global(ised) transactions in the cultural domain and the re/formation and re/presentation of identities connected to them.

Transformative Creativity - Participatory Practices
The theme highlights the operations and limitations of conventional (post-modernist) aesthetic models and cultural representation in relation to the clash of different ideological perspectives, vested interests and authority, whether they concern outright economic interests, political power or the relationship between different domains of knowledge production like art and science, or authorship and expertise, production and consumption. Contributions are invited that challenge established templates of creative practice and audio-
visual / multimedia re/presentations and their associated hierarchies of value, modes of understanding and agency in society. This strands focuses on the prototyping and probing of innovative ways of dialogic exchange, of collaborative and participatory creative engagement across the domains of creative practice and the ‘production of theory and reflection’. Proposals are thought that reconsider the transformative potential of creativity in society and scrutinise the role of and relationship between artist and collaborators/participants through the use of digital technologies and the development of innovative/alternative circuits of distribution, debate and social and political inter/action.

Tracking emotions
The theme invites contributions related to emotions. It aims to give consideration to innovative ways to scan, model, simulate, stimulate, reproduce and trigger emotions. The theme takes its point of departure the human emotions utilized in different creative processes. Where and how can artists and researchers utilize new technologies to find about spectators’ - users’ emotions? How do we trigger, research, teach, and organize, emotions? Emotions are extremely complex but with the new technologies we are for the first time able to quantify and scan them. How do we differentiate in different emotional experiences? How artists make certain that artworks trigger wishful emotions? Of particular interest are new scanning technologies, different emotional models -whether describe emotions and related processes or use emotions or metaphors based on emotions to describe different processes and new art forms where spectators emotions are used for interactivity or reshape of the artworks.

Posthumanisms: New Technologies & Creative Strategies
Posthumanism operates at the interface of transhumanism and cyborgology, drawing attention to the convergent spaces of biology and artifice. Its manifestation through a range of biopolitical events, along with an aesthetic staging of bioethical encounters ruptures the polarized views of bioconservatism and technoprogressivism, provoking a series of conflicts that demand multi-layered conceptual apparatus to unravel. The sensory habitus of posthuman prostheses initiates the re-staging of design principles to anticipate the demand for new sensory experiences, technologies, services. This theme explores and expands our understanding of how innovative hardware and technologies are constituted by shifts of new art and design forms and how modes of sensory experience alter arts. For example, what kind of experience is generated through imaginations of posthumanity in different art and design forms? What do viewers expect from artists in terms of adopting posthuman technologies and modes of sensory delivery? How do we prepare and critically engage new generations of artists, designers and consumers through these technologies?

Entertainment and Mobility
Theme seeks to identify the development of entertainment and mobile media toward arts and to understand how gaming and mobile expressions, technologies, products, services and media can shape new art forms and reshape existing art forms. Areas of possible presentation include, but are not limited to, the following:
Uses of mobile technologies in arts.
Uses of gaming in arts.
New gaming technologies
New mobile technologies
Cataloging and archiving mobile artifacts
Mobile and gaming experimenting.
New art forms utilizing mobile technologies
Mobile technologies and the delivery of art and culture experiences, services and resources
Usability
Mobile collaborating

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS, ARTWORKS AND INITIATIVES, PROJECTS AND WORKSHOPS ETC - 17 NOVEMBER 2008

Go to http://www.isea2009.org for further detailed information on symposium sub-themes, broader ISEA2009 activities and information on how to submit your paper/project proposal.

CALL FOR WORKSHOPS, ROUNDTABLES/PANELS/FORUMS/TUTORIALS AND OPEN SPACES

Proposals are sought for ISEA 2009 that will illuminate both the near and long term future of Digital Media Culture. Submissions are encouraged from any professional, craft or scholarly field that relates to communications art/design, cultural expression, practice and aesthetics, and the technical means by which they are enabled.

CALL FOR ARTWORKS AND INITIATIVES
ISEA 2009 invites artists, creators and researchers to submit their works. Submissions are encouraged from any art, craft or professional field. Artists, early career scholars and PhD students are particularly encouraged to submit.

REVIEW PROCESS
All paper and project proposal will be double blind peer reviewed by an international panel and published in the proceedings. Other, more substantial publishing opportunities may arise in due course.

Fields of inquiry and practice: ISEA 2009 accepts submissions from following fields of inquiry and practice: electronic art, cultural activism, socially and politically engaged practices, mobile environments, locative media, GIS, interactive and nonlinear storytelling, electronic fiction, hypertext, interactive television and cinema, multimedia, new media, streaming media, cinema and video, video art, video installation, interactive and networked performance, digital aesthetics, theory, history, computer games, games culture, games system design, games theory, bio-art, nano-art, sound, electronic music, interactive architecture, MOOs, MUDs, RPG, augmented reality, virtual reality, virtual worlds,

DATES FOR SUBMISSION

Dates for the submission of 500 word abstracts/proposals: 17th of November 2008

If you have any further questions or problems, please don’t hesitate to contact admin@isea2009.org

READ this instruction paragraph carefully
ONLY SUBMIT A 500 WORD ABSTRACT FOR PAPERS AND/OR A DISCRIPTOR OF ARTWORKS, ART PROJECTS ETC FOR THE 17TH OF NOVEMBER DEADLINE. PROVISION FOR SUBMITTING PAPERS ON THE WEB PLATFORM IS FOR A LATER DATE. YOU WILL BE GIVEN PLENTY OF NOTICE FOR THIS BY THE CHAIR OF YOUR CHOOSEN PANEL. ARTWORKS AND ART PROJECTS SHOULD BE SUBMITTED UNDER THE SAME PLATFORM. YOU CAN ATTACH ONE PDF DOCUMENT WITH IMAGES INSTEAD OF A PAPER IF YOU WISH TO SUPPORT YOUR ARTWORK OR ARTPROJECT WITH VISUALS. THE INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING COMMITTEE MAY REQUEST FURTHER INFORMATION FROM YOU AT A LATER DATE. THE PLATFORM WILL BE OPEN FOR YOUR SUBMISSIONS IN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS.

Friday, October 17, 2008

MEDIA ART CURATING FORUM - PERTH

MEDIA ART CURATING FORUM - PERTH

Designed for regional gallery, museum and library professionals this forum
addresses commonly asked questions about exhibiting and curating
contemporary media arts.
Coincides with the Experimenta Playground exhibition.

Media art: video installations, interactive artworks and web based art are
now part of mainstream contemporary visual arts and are continually
growing in popularity. Topics include: exhibition design and presentation;
technical/equipment requirements; maintenance and logistics; installation;
invigilation; and audiences.

Monday 17 November, 2-5pm
Western Australian Museum Perth Cultural Centre, James Street, Perth

Free. RSVP is essential as places are limited;
education@museum.wa.gov.au | (08) 9427 2792

Who should attend: Public gallery, museum and library directors and staff,
volunteers, artists, independent curators, arts educators and students.

This project is an initiative of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia
Council, the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body and
assisted by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the
Australian, state and territory governments.

http://www.experimenta.org/top_mediaartcurating.html

PhD in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London

Below is info on a PhD program in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London as it may be relevant to those of you interested or involved in Media Art Histories. - jonCates

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 22, No. 273.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:34:40 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>

"Enquiries about the PhD in Digital Humanities, Centre for Computing in
the Humanities, King's College London, are welcome. Now is a good time
to begin thinking seriously about an application for anyone who requires
funding, since most sources are now known and open to applications.
Anyone interested should write directly to me.

See http://www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/depts/cch/pg/phd/ for a
brief note about the programme. Note that the PhD is a research-only
degree. Admission is primarily decided on the basis of a research
proposal of ca. 5 to 10 pages. Normal procedure is for potential
candidates to develop a draft in consultation with the department over
several iterations. All manner of subjects within the digital
humanities are welcome at least for initial discussion. Most degrees
are supervised collaboratively between the Centre and one or more
other departments in the School of Humanities, School of Social Science and Public Policy
or potentially one of the other Schools at King's. Enquiries concerning full- and
part-time PhDs are welcome, as are enquiries about what we are now calling a
"semi-distance PhD", pursued by someone who lives abroad but visits according to an
agreed schedule.

Yours,
WM"

Thursday, October 16, 2008

florian cramer/ software art

Winner of the 2007 Media.Art.Research Award of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, Florian Cramer has written some very interesting articles on software art, net art and net literature. Check them out at his personal site
you can also download his book "WORDS MADE FLESH. Code, Culture, Imagination"

check out also the Software Art repository site

Friday, October 3, 2008

Data Mining / RYBN collective

Since the end of the Eighties, the Data Mining technologies have been used in order to increase the profit of commercial and financial activities. Nowadays, they are used by many other activities, such as humanitarian missions, research, intelligence and security agencies, etc... The development of this practice in several fields whose finality is not only economic, is symptomatic of the tendency to turn more effective a society economisation phenomenon.

The rise of this tool also coincides with the digital data amount exponential increase, due to a growing digitalization use, and Internet proliferation use (continuous flows, growing storage spaces, compression formats). However, these virtual datas are digital transations of economic, social and/or political movements. But their always growing use has generated a new opacity, making them far less readable.

In this context the RYBN collective has undertaken a Data Mining based research project, since March 2006, in order to create several artistic pieces of work. Diverted from their original goals, Data Mining tools and Digital Monitoring technologies are used in order to create a series of images of our society, pictured through its data flows. The resulting digital visualizations are based on cartographic principles, and are real-time updated.

Anti Data Mining is both an artistic research, a socio-economic and a geopolitical investigation, as well as a real-time archaeology process focusing on the data flows which acompose a part of our contemporary society.

tron online


tronline!!!






















this classical 1982 Disney-film about hacking and computer games can be watched online here: http://static.youku.com/v1.0.0330/v/swf/qplayer.swf?VideoIDS=XMzUxMDU5NTY&embedid=-&showAd=0

(quality is ok)

Thursday, October 2, 2008

prehysteries of new media

http://prehysteries.blogspot.com/

the "prehysteries of new media" blog is nina wenhart's collection of resources on the various histories of new media art. it is the base for a forthcoming book and consists mainly of non or very little edited material i found flaneuring on the net, sometimes with my own annotations and comments, sometimes it's also textparts i retyped from books that are out of print.

it is also meant to be an additional resource of information and recommended reading for my students of the prehystories of new media class that i teach at the school of the art institute of chicago in fall 2008.

the focus is on the time period from the beginning of the 20th century up to today.