April 27, 2005

NEW | MAzine

MAzine is a new venture launched by the post graduate community at Ravensbourne College to focus on issues, trends and discussions in the area of networked media from technical, artistic, social and political perspectives. We invite you to join us at the Science Museum's Dana Centre, 28-29 April for the official launch at Cybersonica.
http://mazine.ws
http://mazine.ws/cybersonica05

MAzine@Cybersonica multi-blog
As one of our first projects we invite visitors and participants at Cybersonica Festival to give their impressions and to express their views in a multi-blog. The MAzine team will be reviewing events and performances, offering up-to-date online coverage. Those unable to visit the festival will therefore be able to get a sense of what's going on and add their own observations or content.
http://www.mazine.ws/CybersonicaMultiBlog

About MAzine
MAzine will bring together a dynamic community, starting with those engaged in post graduate and other research across the UK, Europe, Asia and the Americas and will serve as a showcase for innovation in art, design, science, technology and more. It represents an experimental model for online collaboration and communication that challenges ideas about intellectual property.
http://www.mazine.ws/aboutus

Info:
editorial@mazine.ws
http://www.mazine.ws/contributors
http://mazine.ws/subscribe

April 26, 2005

CALL | Emerging Writers' Program

As a part of Express Media’s commitment to providing professional development opportunities for writers under the age of 30, and Gertrude’s commitment to supporting emerging practitioners and fostering critical dialogue, the Emerging Writers’ Program will partner four young arts writers with four experienced mentors, working together for 20 contact hours over a period of four months between July and December 2005. The mentorship program will assist in the growth of an insightful critical culture, providing participants with professional development opportunities as well as enhancing literacy through a focus on arts writing.

As part of the project outcome each participant will be expected to produce an exhibition review for publication in un Magazine, Melbourne’s quarterly art review journal, and a catalogue essay for Gertrude’s Studio 12 exhibition program. The four mentors who will be participating in this program are:
:: Tessa Dwyer: independent writer, curator and former Director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne. Tessa has curated numerous photomedia projects and has written for publications in Australia and internationally.
:: Anthony Gardner: writer and academic based in Melbourne and Sydney. Anthony teaches at the University of Melbourne and at Monash University, and is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics at the University of New South Wales.
:: Natalie King: writer, curator and broadcaster. Natalie curated the recent survey exhibition Destiny Deacon: Walk and Don’t Look Blak at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as Supernatural Artificial, an exhibition of Australian photomedia artists currently touring the South-East Asian region.
:: Linda Michael: independent curator, writer and editor. Linda was the curator of Australia’s 2003 Venice Biennale pavilion, featuring the work of Patricia Piccinini, and is currently curating the 2006 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

APPLICATION PROCESS
Interested applicants to the mentorship program are asked to submit a relevant writing sample of no more than 500 words, together with a CV and a cover letter outlining what they hope to gain from participating in the program, to:
Emerging Writers’ Program
C/- Express Media
The Meat Market Arts House
42 Courtney Street
North Melbourne VIC 3051

DEADLINE: MONDAY 30 MAY 2005, 5pm. Late applications will not be accepted.

Info:
http://:www.gertrude.org.au

CONFERENCE | Measuring the Muse

Conference on Arts Research

Measuring the Muse: Arts Research from the Frontlines, co-hosted by the National Arts Journalism Program and the Alliance for the Arts, will be held 5 May 2005, at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. The conference, supported by The Wallace Foundation and Columbia's University Arts Initiative, will bring together top arts researchers, arts managers, arts advocates, students and journalists to present and dissect the latest data from new studies published over the past 12 months. The day-long event will consist of a series of research presentations followed by discussions about current debates in the field and the future of arts research and advocacy. Registration required.

Info:
http://www.najp.org

April 24, 2005

CALL | Hz

Online journal Hz is accepting articles on New Media, Net Art, Electronic Music, Sound Art for its next issue. Earlier published and unpublished articles in English are welcomed. Hz is published by Fylkingen, a non-profit art organization in Stockholm. Established in 1933, Fylkingen has been promoting new and experimental art forms throughout its history.

Deadline: 15 May 2005

Info:
Sachiko Hayash
hz-journal@telia.com
http://www.hz-journal.org
http://www.fylkingen.se/fylkeng.html or
http://www.hz-journal.org/n4/hultberg.html

IDEAS | Wide Open: Open source methods and their future potential

Source: Demos Foundation

The rise of the Internet has made it possible for knowledge to be created and shared in ways that emphasise its character as a common good, rather than as something to be owned. In the world of open source programming, the computer software is distributed under licence, allowing users to change or share the software’s source code – the human readable version of a computer programme.

This open and collaborative approach to creating knowledge has produced remarkable results, such as the Linux operating system and the web-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia. In defiance of the conventional wisdom of modern business, open source methods have led the main underlying innovations around the Internet.

Other fields have much to learn from open source methods – because they bring principles and working methods which can help to produce better knowledge, goods or services, or make them available on more widely beneficial terms. From the formulation of public policy to more open forms of academic peer review, setting up mutual support groups for people facing similar health problems to collaborative forms of social innovation, the principles of open source promise to radically alter the we approach complex social problems.

The future potential of these methods is such that they will soon become commonplace in our lives. Just as it is now impossible to think about getting things done without considering the role of the Internet, so will it soon be impossible to think about how to solve a large social problem without considering the role of open methods.

Geoff Mulgan is Director of the Young Foundation and former Head of Policy in the Prime Minister's Office. Tom Steinberg is Director of mySociety and is currently a fellow at the Young Foundation. Omar Salem is a student at Oxford University and an intern at the Young Foundation.

Download the publication from:
http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/wideopen

JOB | Flash Art

Flash Art is looking for a new News Editor to work in the Milan offices

Flash Art International is looking for a new News Editor to join the young and dynamic editorial team in the Milan offices. Applicants must have English as their first language, be computer literate and have an excellent knowledge of contemporary art. A graduate/post-graduate qualification, some editorial/journalism experience and familiarity with Quark are desirable. Please send CVs to matt@flashartonline.com.

Interviews by the readers

Also Flash Art is asking readers to submit questions for John Currin. Following the phenomenal success of our "interviews by the readers" series (with Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan and Jeff Koons interviewed to date), we are now soliciting questions from you, the readers of Flash Art and the Flash Art newsletter. We will present the best of these questions to John Currin, and he will respond to them in an exclusive interview published later this year. With your help, we want to create an interview that is curious, stimulating, entertaining, explosive and, above all, intelligent. Please email all questions to matt@flashartonline.com before the deadline - Wednesday 4 May. Feel free to send as many questions as you like. If we end up printing any of them, we will also include your full name and the city where you are based. For this reason, we cannot use any questions not accompanied by a full name (first and last name) and location. This invitation is being sent to our email databases for Italy and abroad (containing over 60,000 addresses). Flash Art prides itself on the discerning minds of its readers, so we look forward to your thoughtful questions.

April 15, 2005

NEW | Machine

visual arts bimonthly

Machine is a new Brisbane-based critical writing publication that seeks to engage with the ideas and work of Queensland visual arts practitioners. The publication is an interdisciplinary journal and covers divergent art forms, content and approaches. Machine also has a focus on emerging artists and writers, facilitating development opportunities for its writers, and providing a platform to critically address the work of emerging artists.

Machine is seeking submissions for the inaugural issue. Lead articles (700 - 1000 words) will be remunerated, and should address the theme of 'machine', in its most timely and curious interpretation. If you would like to be involved in the first (or subsequent) issues of Machine, please submit the following to machine@artworkers.org by Friday 6 May:
:: Your CV or a brief bio
:: 2 recent examples of your writing (500 - 1000 words). Examples can be unpublished
:: A brief outline of your suggested article (150 words max)

Each issue of Machine will also include exhibition reviews (400 words). If you are interested in writing exhibition reviews please submit the following to machine@artworkers.org:
:: Your CV or a brief bio
:: 2 recent examples of your writing, (500 1000 words). Examples can be unpublished
:: Details of your particular visual arts interests and knowledge, or a specific exhibition/event you would like to review

For additional information on Machine contact Maura on 07 3215 0850 / 1300 780 291 (local call charges for regional callers) or email machine@artworkers.org. Machine is funded by Artworkers and managed by an editorial committee of emerging Queensland writers, curators and artists.

April 10, 2005

PROJECT | WRT

We Request Theorists

Whether you are a narrative nerd, a games geek, bot boffin or IF infatuated or a respectable media theorist, please accept our invitation to stop by WRT: http://WriterResponseTheory.org

WRT is a blogging collective dedicated to the discussion and exploration of digital character art -- any art involving electrons and making use of letters, alphanumerics, or other characters in an interesting way. Our primary focus is on active and interactive works, in which users input text and receive textual responses as output. Our URL -- Writer Response Theory -- is a play on Reader Reponse Theory and therefore shifts the investigative focus to a reader/writer whose textual input will change the works they encounter. We see ourselves as writers or creators responding to theory; as writers creating theory, a theory which is also a response to writers.

We'd like you to join our community through commenting, suggesting new topics, or helping/heckling us from your own blog. Some objects of study include ASCII art, blog fiction, chatbots, email fiction, e-poetry, hypertext fiction, and interactive fiction (IF). What are the methods of design, the modes of usage, and the relationships between scriptons and textons in these art forms?

Why Read This?
WRT is an open site. Everyone who reads this blog is a member and may suggest a thread or a link. As long as it pertains to digital letter/character art we will post and pursue it. WRT is a research and discussion collective - not an announcement site. Members may follow a topic or pursue a particular blog author. Organize and reorganize us as you see fit. Individual blog authors may post outside the scope of WRT, but the home page will remain dedicated to digital character art.

Who Runs This?
Christy Dena is a postgrad student in New Media and Creative Writing at the School of Creative Arts (http://www.sca.unimelb.edu.au/), Uni of Melbourne, Australia, . Her research interests are crossmedia-storytelling (http://www.crossmediastorytelling.com), and bot fiction. She teaches 'interactive narrative' and writes for Australian New Media Arts magazines.

Jeremy Douglass is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research focuses on interactive fiction and reader response to textual new media. Jeremy is also a database and web developer for numerous projects, including the academic search engine Voice of the Shuttle.

Mark Marino is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Riverside, studying chatbots, electronic literature, games, and other doodads. He is editor of Bunk Magazine(http://www.bunkmag.com). He currently teaches at Loyola Marymount University and UC Riverside.

Wildly Repetitive Title: What does W.R.T. stand for?
With respect to our wildly repetitive title, what's the real term? Writer Response Theory, We Realize Text, Web-Ridden Texts, Wrong Right Theory, Wide Robed Techies, We Rotten Tomatoes, and perhaps just WRiTing.

April 09, 2005

CALL | There Is Always An Alternative

A call for submissions for a publication charting the emergence of alternatives within contemporary art in the 90s. The publication will consist of essays, anecdotes, statements, documents and works both from the period and in response to it. The publication is produced to accompany an exhibition, also called There Is Always an Alternative, which will be at temporarycontemporary gallery in London, in June, and travel to The International 3 gallery in Manchester, in September.

There Is Always an Alternative will articulate an alternative history of art practice and a history of alternative art practices around the early 1990s based on a political understanding of the position of the artist. The title derives from an inversion of one of Margaret Thatcher's favourite ideological phrases, "there is no alternative". This is a phrase used by people attempting to undermine whatever alternative there is and in that sense is always false and falsifying. On the contrary, there is always an alternative.

One of the techniques available to the status quo is to minimize or eliminate the sense of any alternative in the present or immediate future by obliterating the alternatives that existed in the past. The market is a very good mechanism for this sort of institutionalised selectivity. It is through recovering alternatives in the past, therefore, that we will inform and spur on alternatives in the future. There is Always an Alternative documents an under-represented array of radical practices from the early-90s in order to provide potential models of radical individual and collective art practice now and to come.

Exploring models and possibilities for artistic practice that resist, undermine or otherwise oppose the closures, absences and exclusions in dominant art discourse and practice, There is Always an Alternative will raise awareness of an alternative history of art in the early 1990s and in so doing, provide a resource for all those practices seeking to confront the limitations, both arbitrary and ideological, upon what can be done now.

Send submissions to dave.beech@clara.co.uk or post them to 108 Slade Lane, Levenhsulme, Manchester M19 2BA. Deadline for submissions 25/04/05