homo ludens ludens

symposion at LABoral (Gijon, Spain) from 19th to 20th of April 2008

http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/seminarios/proximos/3

speakers include: Roy Ascott, Laura Beloff, Julian Oliver, Mackenzie Wark and Margarethe Jahrmann

The symposion is accompanied by an exhibition that runs until September

Monitoring Media Art Preservation 2008-1

"Since January 2005 the Netherlands Institute for Media Art (NIMk)publishes new media art preservation research, events, publications and presentations as an online newsletter. As a tribute to Video Art e-monitor this online newsletter is called Monitoring Media Art Preservation. Monitoring Media Art Preservation offers information and news about ongoing research, presentations and publications dealing with video- and media art preservation 4 times a year. The newsletter is in English only.

Subscribe/ Unsubscribe preservation@nimk.nl
Editor: Gaby Wijers gaby@nimk.nl

TO TRANSFER OR TO TRANS FROM

The Netherlands Media Art Institute a series of presentations and discussions on the theme emulation of media art installations began 18 December 2007. For the next 2 years emulation, re enactment and virtualisation of media art will be discussed every 4 months based on a series of case studies. Gaby Wijers invites researchers and artists to submit cases / projects related to the NIMk collection for presentations from a conservation perspective. The next presentation 13 May 2008. The presentations will be streamed live streamed. The results will be published.
gaby@nimk.nl

SYMPOSIUM ACTIVEARCHIVE
25 and 26 April 2008, Luzern

In the scope of the exhibition „Schweizer Videokunst der 70er und 80er Jahre. Eine Rekonstruktion“ in the Kunstmuseum Luzern, ActiveArchive will present their art technological research. The Symposium will focus on mediation and discussing ActiveArchives approach; the authentic form of presentation with authentic apparatus, versus the migration and emulation of media art works. Case studies from the exhibition next to a lab setting were different versions of the art work are presented next to each other, will be present. Questions concerning how to document video installations and boundaries of the re installation of historical equipment will be discussed. The Symposium will be in German language only.

http://www.kunstmuseumluzern.ch

COMPENDIUM OF IMAGE PERTURBATIONS IN ANALOGUE VIDEO

The TAPE project has issued an overview of audio and video carriers by Dietrich Schüller of the Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Sciences. The text systematically describes recording principles, storage and handling, maintenance of equipment, format and equipment obsolescence, for each type of carrier, and includes a list of recommended reading. It provides a solid, non-technical introduction for all those professionally managing sound and video collections. pdf The overview is a full text version of presentations used in TAPE workshops by Dietrich Schüller and Albrecht Haefner. It is available at

http://www.tape-online.net/docs/audio_and_video_carriers.pdf

MATERIALISED FLEETINGNESS CONSERVATION AND RE-ENACTMENT OF NEW MEDIA ART INSTALLATIONS

imai – inter media art institute initiated the research-project “Materialised Fleetingness. Conservation and Re-enactment of New Media Art Installations”. The project aims to deliver guidelines for the conservation of New Media Art installations that will be interesting for art historians, curators, conservators/restorers and collectors. The results will be presented at a conference and in a publication.

Further information: http://www.imaionline.de

THE FUTURE HISTORIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE RESEARCH NETWORK

With the advent of digital technology the nature of moving image production, distribution and exhibition has changed dramatically. This technology is also changing the way in which we analyse and document current and historical moving image practices, as there has been a recent proliferation of digital archive and database projects relating to film, video and television practices. The Future Histories of the Moving Image Research Network has been set up to examine the changing ways in which we are circulating and interrogating all areas of our moving image culture and to address the issues of sustainability and historiography arising from the growing number of moving image arts database and digitised collection projects in the UK. The project is led by Julia Knight (University of Sunderland) in collaboration with the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection (University of the Arts London) and REWIND: Artists' Video in the 1970s & 1980s (Dundee University). Information regarding the conference Future Histories of the Moving Image Conference : An international conference held at the University of Sunderland 16-18 November 2007 is available on the conference blog.

Further details of the conference proceedings and results on http://www.futurehistories.net/

GAMA
GAMA: A central online portal to Media Art in Europe

Gateway to Archives of Media Art approved by EC eContentplus programme GAMAs objective is to establish a professionally coordinated central online access to Europe’s most important digital archives and libraries regarding media art and thus significantly enhance not only access but above all exploitation of the material gathered by expert institutions. The challenge is met by a well balanced team of art historians and theorists to safeguard the integrity of the approach to the artworks, Cultural agents provide not only content but above all their yearlong expertise at the interface between artists, collectors, curators and the interested public. Technological research and IT experts will implement state-of-the-art technology to ensure both a high level of user-friendliness and a sophisticated query performance.

http://www.gama-gateway.eu/

Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst /
Netherlands Media Art Institute

Keizersgracht 264,
NL-1016 EV Amsterdam,

t: +31-20-6237101
e: info@nimk.nl
http://www.nimk.nl"

electronic know how

pickled feet is an organization in berlin that sets up workshops etc. using household materials and chemistry, readily-available electronics components, free software and the GNU toolbase to construct various electronic audiovisual artifacts - they give access to some hard to find resources and some interesting links
http://pickledfeet.com/workshops.php

Game Off on -empyre-

this month's hosted discussion on -empyre- soft-skinned space (listserv for digital media arts and culture, Sydney, Australia) is called Game Off + addresses Art Games. this discussion is also criss-crossing + interconnecting issues such as Media Art Histories, archiving + preservation in Digital + New Media Art, Open Source formats, etc... below is the announcement + description of the Game Off discussion. another week remains to participate in this conversation by subscribing to empyre.

March 2008 - Game Off
Marguerite Charmante, Daphne Dragona, Margarete Jahrmann, Christian McCrea, Max Moswitzer, Julian Oliver, Melanie Swalwell and David Surman

Melinda Rackham
Christian McCrea

"Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence."- Chris Marker, 'Sunless'

Truncated, repetitive, coin-operated nihilism. To a point. The 'insufferable philosophy of our time' is not a single object or symbol, but the array of signs and symbols placed at odds with each other, made to wage a type of war we aren't told how to engage with. We were told that play would desensitise, depoliticise and disconnect us, and now games are presented by the museum as the latest historical and contemporary cultural artefacts. Whether we play or not, whether we live in the moneyed west or not, games occur. Our guests will tease out intertwining threads of play culture, game art, game theory in multi-streamed dialogues – interrogating the frictions and frissons of experiential pleasure, avatar uprisings, the game engine medium, collection and archiving, futility and joy.

With:
---> Marguerite Charmante is a tagged game figure. She reflects ludically on futility as resistance, toys and game fashion. 2005 she and MosMaxHax co-founded the international association LUDIC SOCIETY to provoke a new discipline on play and cultures. The affiliations club-magazine appears regularly in print.
---> Daphne Dragona is a new media arts curator and organiser based in Athens. Recently she has been focusing on game arts and currently she is a co – curator of Homo Ludens Ludens, an exhibition opening in April 08 in Laboral Centro de Arte y Industrial, Gjion Spain.
---> Margarete Jahrmann is professor at the Game Design Department of the University of Arts and Design Zurich and a Ph.D. student of Caiia, School of Computer Sciences and Communications, University of Plymouth. 2003 Jahrmann/Moswitzer received an award of distinction at Prix Ars Electronica and in 2004 at transmediale Berlin.
---> Christian McCrea is a writer and theorist from Melbourne,Australia. His work describes the non-virtual aspects of games under the rubric of materialism, namely nostalgia, euphoria, the proscenium of gaming actions and explosive body aesthetics. He works as Lecturer in Games and Interactivity at Swinburne University of Technology.
---> Max Moswitzer specializes in 3D simulations and artistic server design, Dozent at the Game Design Department of the University of Arts and Design Zurich and the University for Applied Arts in Vienna. Moswitzer co-founded Konsum.net in 1995 and regularly produces interactive applications, online installations, videos and telematic performances
---> Julian Oliver is a New Zealand born artist, free-software developer, teacher and writer based in Madrid, Spain. Julian has given numerous workshops, exhibitions and papers worldwide. In 1998 he established the artistic game-development collective, Select Parks.
---> Melanie Swalwell is currently developing a suite of projects on the history of digital games in New Zealand, with essays published in the Journal of Visual Culture and Vectors, and forthcoming in Ludologica Retro and Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader.
---> David Surman is Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the Newport School of Art, Media and Design in the green hills of Wales. He blogs about technology, sexuality, gaming and popular culture at gaygamer.net.

A (modified) Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation

A (modified) Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation - Oscar Xavier Chavarro García (2005)
http://sophia.javeriana.edu.co/~ochavarr/computer_graphics_history/historia/

"Borrowed from Wayne E. Carlson's original, and modified (basically added pictures and table re-organization)."

An Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation

An Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation - Wayne E. Carlson (2003)
http://design.osu.edu/carlson/history/timeline.html

Interesting exhibition and symposium in Luzern Switzerland. (Opening of exhibit March 15.)
Invitation to symposium and outline unfortunately only in German


Symposium zur Ausstellung
„Schweizer Videokunst
der 70er und 80er Jahre.
Eine Rekonstruktion“
organisiert von AktiveArchive, Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft,
Hochschule der Künste Bern

Freitag 25. und Samstag 26. April 2008
Kunstmuseum Luzern

Die Videokunst der 70er und 80er Jahre war lange ein wenig beachtetes
Thema in Kunstgeschichte und Konservierung-Restaurierung.
Erst seit wenigen Jahren bemüht sich die nationale und internationale
Forschung intensiv um die kunsthistorische Aufarbeitung und
die neue Herausforderungen stellende Erhaltung dieser Werke.
Die Ausstellung „Schweizer Videokunst der 70er und 80er Jahre.
Eine Rekonstruktion“ bietet nicht nur einen umfassenden Überblick
über die beiden ersten Jahrzehnte Schweizer Videokunst, sondern
auch die einzigartige Möglichkeit, die Werke in der Präsentation mit
historischen Geräten aus der Entstehungszeit kennenzulernen.
Im Rahmen des begleitenden Symposiums kommen kunsthistorische,
kuratorische, konservatorisch-restauratorische, medientheoretische
und -technologische Fachleute zusammen, um Strategien
der Erschliessung, Erhaltung und Wiederaufführung von Videokunst
vorzustellen und zu diskutieren.

Referenten/innen:
Christoph Blase
Leiter Labor für antiquierte Videosysteme,
ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie
Karlsruhe
Sabine Breitwieser
Freie Kuratorin, Wien, 1991–2007 künstlerische
Leiterin und Geschäftsführerin der
Generali Foundation
Wolfgang Ernst
Professor für Medientheorien, Institut für
Kultur- und Kunstwissenschaften,
Humboldt-Universität Berlin
Christiane Fricke
Kunsthistorikerin, Redakteurin, Wachtberg/D
Johannes Gfeller
Projektleiter AktiveArchive, Professor
für Konservierung und Restaurierung von
modernen Medien, Hochschule der
Künste Bern
Christoph Lichtin
Sammlungskonservator Kunstmuseum Luzern
Joanna Phillips
Konservatorin-Restauratorin AktiveArchive/
Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft
Zürich
René Pulfer
Künstler, Kurator, Leiter Institut Kunst,
Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel,
Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz
Jochen Saueracker
Künstler und langjähriger Assistent von
Nam June Paik, Düsseldorf
Irene Schubiger
Kunstwissenschaftlerin AktiveArchive/
Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft
Zürich
Gabi Wijers
Videokonservatorin, Koordinatorin Sammlung
und Konservierung Netherlands Media Art
Institute Amsterdam

http://www.aktivearchive.ch/home.html
http://www.kunstmuseumluzern.ch/ausstellungen/videoschweiz/index.php

International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging

International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging
Date: June 18–20 2008
Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Computational Aesthetics will be held the Hotel Riviera in Lisbon, Portugal. It is the fourth event on this topic following a Workshop in 2005 in Girona, Spain, a Dagstuhl seminar in Germany in 2006, and a Symposium in 2007 in Banff, Canada. Accepted papers will be fully refereed and will be published by the Eurographics Association in their workshop proceeding series.

Arts Program Keynote Speaker: Ernest Edmonds, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Title of keynote address: The Art of Programming or Programming as Art

Biography: t.b.a.

Technical Program Keynote Speaker: Pat Hanrahan, Stanford University, USA

Title of keynote address: The Semiology of Graphics – Take 2

source: http://computational-aesthetics.org/2008/

Nina had proposed that we could do some project in the frame of ars electronica 08 that focuses on archiving and preserving..i ve been doing some reading, and this publication came up, seems like worth checking out..

source: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11443&mlid=660

Memory Practices in the Sciences
Geoffrey C. Bowker

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

The way we record knowledge, and the web of technical, formal, and social practices that surrounds it, inevitably affects the knowledge that we record. The ways we hold knowledge about the past--in handwritten manuscripts, in printed books, in file folders, in databases--shape the kind of stories we tell about that past. In this lively and erudite look at the relation of our information infrastructures to our information, Geoffrey Bowker examines how, over the past two hundred years, information technology has converged with the nature and production of scientific knowledge. His story weaves a path between the social and political work of creating an explicit, indexical memory for science--the making of infrastructures--and the variety of ways we continually reconfigure, lose, and regain the past.

At a time when memory is so cheap and its recording is so protean, Bowker reminds us of the centrality of what and how we choose to forget. In Memory Practices in the Sciences he looks at three "memory epochs" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and their particular reconstructions and reconfigurations of scientific knowledge. The nineteenth century's central science, geology, mapped both the social and the natural world into a single time package (despite apparent discontinuities), as, in a different way, did mid-twentieth-century cybernetics. Both, Bowker argues, packaged time in ways indexed by their information technologies to permit traffic between the social and natural worlds. Today's sciences of biodiversity, meanwhile, "database the world" in a way that excludes certain spaces, entities, and times. We use the tools of the present to look at the past, says Bowker; we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs.

About the Author

Geoffrey C. Bowker is Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University.

The Folksonomic Museum: National Museum of African American History and Culture (reblogged)

// i am reblogging this post by Mark C. Marino on WRT: Writer Response Theory
// b/c i think it bears a relation to considerations of how New Media technologies
// can effect existing or traditional forms of historical preservation and the making
// of multiple/overlapping/subjective hyperthreaded hystories + systems
// to make them open + available as archives
// jonCates

"Before one brick for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture has been laid, its online instantiation is already being constructed by those who preserve and people that history. Surely, this is not the first museum to use a website to allow people to shape its history and holdings, but this particular use of the folk gives strong cultural resonance to the use of online social networks.

Established in 2003 (and online as of 2007), The museum was launched with an explicitly social mission. Director Lonnie Bunch writes:

In many ways, there are few things as powerful and as important as a people, as a nation that is steeped in its history. Often America is celebrated as a place that forgets. This museum seeks to help all Americans remember, and by remembering, this institution will stimulate a dialogue about race and help to foster a spirit of reconciliation and healing.

At this point, the “institution” IS the website, as the NMAAHC is the first museum to open its doors on the Web before opening its physical doors.

Navigating the Network of Memory
The “centerpiece” of the museum is its online Memory Book, described here as:

the collected reminiscences of ordinary Americans. These stories, called “memories” are collected as text, images, and audio uploads in the virtual Memory Book where website visitors are encouraged to submit their own histories, traditions, thoughts and ideas. Memories are then associated visually with other aspects of the museum’s holdings and scholarship, such as photographic portraits from the Let Your Motto Be Resistance traveling exhibit or the Save Our African American Treasures program. Memory Book contributions may also be associated with offerings from other visitors, enabling the creation of a dynamic social network for the NMAAHC community.

To help users see the “associations,” the museum uses a dynamic network map, reminiscent of Thinkmap (but built by IBM). The visual effect is the reproduction of a richly interconnected nodal history, with tags such as “resistance,” “Civil Rights,” and “Choices,” linked to events such as “Negro Girl Changes the Color of Class Rooms” and such storied lives of everyday people like Rosetta Riddick as recounted by her grandson. Oral history meets online history, as the network links become a multitude of telephone lines, of postal routes, of hands to cheeks, of family trees.

More than merely decoration, this is a true navigation map that reorients itself to display the readers place within the linked memories and moments, always calling to mind context and connection. Each time the museum goer clicks a node, the map refreshes, growing itself again as if a self-generating network, or a woven fabric that cannot be disconnected.

Hovering over the Help button opens a speech bubble that explains:

The people, place, and artifacts that define African American History and culture are connected to each other in complex and fascinating ways. Threads allow you to explore — discovering how a moment in history is connected to a person, how that person is related to a topic.

This is not an unique visual interface, yet its enframing seems to write it into a deeply cultural and political project — political here in the sense of social movements rather than campaign rhetoric.

James Barnes writes of life in Kansas in an entry described as “black social networks”:

James Barnes: When I was a teenager, I knew just about every black that lived in Eudora. I knew almost all of the blacks that lived in Ottawa. I knew just about most of the blacks that lived in Tonganoxie. I knew a heck of a lot of them that lived in Topeka. I knew a few people in Kansas City. You know, then we went around to all the towns and I just knew a lot of people. When my kids came along and they were growing up, the only people they knew lived in Lawrence, Kansas. They hardly knew a soul from any other town.

Of course, the museum is a new kind of social network that enshrines memories, testimonies.

The museum uses an odd icon for “tags” reminiscent of tags at a sale or chillingly like tags that might be found hanging from bodies.

Collective Griotlage

The website’s accounts have been enriched by collaborators using a more space-based medium, the roving recording booth. StoryCorps in collaboration with the Public Broadcasting System conducted the year-long Griot Project to help collect more accounts. More reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston’s recording projects, this mobile recording team brought its studios to the people, traveling to nine cities. According to the Smithsonian press release (.pdf),

The “griot” is part of a West African tradition of story telling, a highly respected tribe who acted as a living repository of births, deaths, marriages and significant events community. Griots were responsible not only for transmitting oral history through generations, but also for ensuring that people found meaning in their own lives.

Does the IBM network become the Griot in the online museum? Or does the centered authority of the Griot get replaced by the distributed Griotlage of the many?

I cannot help but feel that this particular appropriation of the social function of these textual networks speaks better to the social and historical potential of the Internet than say the infinity of MySpace posts thanking each other for the add. And as a preserver of memories, the online museum offers a chance for social networks to rediscover their deep social links to a past and to people too often omitted from the trackbacks of history.

Suggestion Box:
Having recently attended a conference on Do-It-Yourself video, I’m wondering why the museum does not allow users to submit videos (or audio) of their memories ala vlogs or video testimonials? It may be possible, but the museum’s instructions (and the current holdings) do not have any indication that video input is possible or invited. Wouldn’t that form work nicely with the gestures toward oral histories? Why privilege texts in a museum trying to capture the voices of history?"