picasso's light graffiti

Today and Tomorrow points to a terrific set of photos found in the LIFE archive of Picasso doing light graffiti. They were shot in 1949 by LIFE photographer Gjon Mili when he visited Picasso in Vallauris, France.

from the wooster collective site

BBC's Memoryshare - A place to share and explore memories

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/memoryshare/

Memoryshare is an information visualization tool and user-generated archive that the BBC launched back in 2007. The visualizaton is a timeline that resemles a DNA-strand, with a slider on the right that enables you to go back and forth in the structure; a slider on the left side to jump from one year to the other; and a search-function with which you can access specific information via text.
Little colour-coded bulbs along the DNA strand represent the individual archive-entries. I could not figurte out, wheter colour and shape of the bulbs have meaning assigned, too. By clicking on the bulbs, the detailed information opens in a new window. Mouse-over a bulb highlights related entries.
Results can also be viewed as a list to get a different kind of perspective on the data. Entries start in the year 1900 and go up to date.


Memoryshare was featured in Infosthetics on June 24th, 2009, text:
"BBC Memoryshare [bbc.co.uk] is a living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day. Users are invited to contribute, share and browse memories of all their memorable days and life experiences, and see them in the context of recent and historical events. Memories can include text, photos and videos.

Memoryshare is a web service across a number of sites on bbc.co.uk, such as local websites, radio and television. It was launched on the BBC Norfolk site on 8 July 2007, on the BBC London site on 23 July 2007 and on the BBC South Yorkshire site on 25 July 2007. It uses the DNA software developed for h2g2. The long-term aim for BBC Memoryshare is for a fully dynamic service which will enable users to find and search BBC content against date, to create content and to share multi-media content with other users."

links:
- memoryshare on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoryshare
- h2g2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2
- on infostehtics: http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/06/bbc_memoryshare_a_place_to_share_and_explore_memories.html

Early Computer History @ University of Manchester

From "The Baby" to the "Manchester Mark 1" and the William's Tube. The University of Manchester, were these things were developed more than half a century ago, put together a website with a really nice collection of resources about the history of its early computers.

http://www.computer50.org/

FILE 2009 - symposium

FILE 2009 symposium, Electronic Language International Festival, 27th - 31st of August, 2009 @ Sesi Paulista's cultural space, Sao Paulo, Brasil

"FILE Symposium intends to create a new point of debate besides the Europe/US axis, with the intent of discussing the electronic digital culture in its international relations, and also to broaden the dialogue on digital culture in its interdisciplinary extension. FILE Symposium is a space for discussing new media that will have round-tables with artists, theoreticians and researchers from Brazil and abroad in the area of art-technology."

url:
http://www.file.org.br/file2009/eng/index.php
http://www.file.org.br/

monoskop

Monoskop is collaborative research project, that started a wiki about the social history of media art and culture in 2004, focussing on the media art histories of particular collectives and cities. The city entries are like an index to as well as detailed description of the media art scenes of these places.

Their current research project:
Collaborative research on media art and culture in Central and Eastern Europe


wiki:
http://www.burundi.sk/monoskop/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.burundi.sk/monoskop/index.php/Monoskop:About

blog:
http://burundi.sk/monoskop/log/

a.aaaarg.org

http://a.aaaarg.org/

about:
"AAAARG is a conversation platform - at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal.

AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them."

the platform includes a huge online library with lots of full texts on media theory, philosophy, art, ploitics, including works by Th.W.Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Roy Ascott, Roland Barthes, Katherine Hayles, Elias Canetti, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and lots and lots of others.

Users are encouraged to upload new texts to the library.

IMA :: Institute of Media Archeology

http://www.ima.or.at/?page_id=103&language=de

from the mission statement:
"The emphasis is on unearthing female productions in the field of electronic arts, analysing their place in the overall historical context and making them visible for a wider public. With this research priority, the Institute could position itself at an international level and join the network of the few existing institutions that are also active in this field. In 2003, for example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the most renowned institutions world-wide, published the book ”Women, Art, and Technology” edited by Judy Malloy. Within this research domain, the Institute should particularly focus on the acoustic arts in all their manifestations."

CALL FOR PROPOSALS, MEDIAMODES CONFERENCE

MediaModes Graduate Student Conference at the School of Visual Arts, NY

MediaModes is an interdisciplinary graduate student conference that provides
a critical forum to present current scholarship and academic research
projects at the intersection of media, art, and society. Open to all current
graduate students and those who have received a graduate degree within the
last year, MediaModes is sponsored by the MFA Art Criticism & Writing and
MFA Computer Art Departments at the School of Visual Arts.

Proposals due June 15, 2009
Send to: abstracts@mediamodes.com
Find out more at: http://www.MediaModes.com

paleo-future + time capsules

http://www.paleofuture.com

a great blog on "futures that never were" by Matt Novak, that covers futuristic visions from the 1880s to the 1990s.

it also has a small section of books on that topic: http://www.paleofuture.com/library/


a second blog by the same author, where he collects information about time capsules, their content and google maps where they are burried; that really made me laugh:
http://timecapsuled.org/

another interesting post on CTheory's section "Resetting Theory":

________________________________________________________
CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 32, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***

RT 005 06/02/2009 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
______________________________ __________________________


On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice:
'Hard' and 'Soft' Nonexistence
================================================

Author: Seb Franklin

Intro: "In _The Exploit_ Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker speculate
that "[f]uture avant-garde practices will be those of nonexistence."
[1] This extraordinary claim is a response to the current ubiquity of
digital technology and its impact on cultural politics; if existence
becomes a question of being classified informatically, the avoidance
of this classification, or nonexistence, becomes of paramount
importance. The discussion of nonexistence in _The Exploit_ opens
with a question, one that forms the basis of this essay: "how does
one develop techniques and technologies to make oneself unaccountable
for?" [2] Directly following this question comes a specific, material
example through which a crucial distinction between "unaccountable
for" and "invisible" or "absent" is made -- the use of a laser
pointer, aimed into a surveillance camera in order to 'blind' it. In
this situation, the camera is not destroyed nor is the individual
shining the laser actually hiding, or invisible; instead, they are
simply not present on the particular screen or data set recorded by
the camera in question. [3] The same is true of the tricking of a
server, causing it to record a routine event when one goes online.
These kinds of tactics, "tactics of abandonment", are "positive
technologies" for Galloway and Thacker. They are entirely distinct
from absence, lack, invisibility and nonbeing because they are "full"
or rather, because they "permeate." [4] The practical consequences of
Galloway and Thacker's formulation of nonexistence are clear: It's
not a question of hiding, or living off the grid, but of living on
the grid, in potentially full informatic view, but in a way that
makes one's technical specification or classification impossible." etc.etc.etc.