The Rhizome Digest merged into the Rhizome News in November 2008. These pages serve as an archive for 6-years worth of discussions and happenings from when the Digest was simply a plain-text, weekly email.

Subject: RHIZOME DIGEST: 5.15.05
From: digest@rhizome.org (RHIZOME)
Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 03:44:10 -0700
Reply-to: digest@rhizome.org
Sender: owner-digest@rhizome.org
RHIZOME DIGEST: May 15, 2005

Content:

+announcement+
1. Pete Otis: REFRESH! Histories of Media Art: Program and Registration
2. Lauren Cornell: commissions announcement delay
3. Jo-Anne Green: Turbulence Guest Curators: "Why rock" by Annie Abrahams
and Clément Charmet

+opportunity+
4. Trebor Scholz: Prog:ME (fwd from Ricardo Rosas)
5. Sheindal Cohen: New Media Curator vacancy

+scene report+
6. Marisa S. Olson: Sonic Interventions: Pushing the Boundaries of Cultural
Analysis Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit von Amsterdam

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Rhizome.org 2005 Net Art Commissions

The Rhizome Commissioning Program makes financial support available to
artists for the creation of innovative new media art work via panel-awarded
commissions.

For the 2005 Rhizome Commissions, seven artists were selected to create
artworks relating to the theme of Games:

http://rhizome.org/commissions/2005.rhiz

The Rhizome Commissioning Program is made possible by generous support from
the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Rhizome is now offering organizational subscriptions, memberships
purchased at the institutional level. These subscriptions allow
participants of an institution to access Rhizome's services without
having to purchase individual memberships. (Rhizome is also offering
subsidized memberships to qualifying institutions in poor or excluded
communities.) Please visit http://rhizome.org/info/org.php for more
information or contact Kevin McGarry at Kevin AT Rhizome.org or Lauren Cornell
at LaurenCornell AT Rhizome.org.

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1.

Date: 5.10.05
From: Pete Otis <virtualart AT culture.hu-berlin.de>
Subject: REFRESH! Histories of Media Art: Program and Registration


REFRESH!
1st INT. CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

September 28 - October 1, Banff New Media Institute, Canada

www.MediaArtHistory.org
<https://freemailng5502.web.de/jump.htm?goto=www.MediaArtHistory.org>


?The technology of the modern media has produced
new possibilities of interaction. What is needed is a wider view
encompassing the coming rewards in the context of the treasures
left us by the past experiences, possessions and insights."

R. ARNHEIM, Sommer 2000
- Honorary Chair, Refresh! ?


Recognizing the increasing significance of media art for our culture, the
conference on the Histories of Media Art will discuss for the first time the
history of media art within the interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts
of the histories of art. Banff New Media Institute, the Database for Virtual
Art, Leonardo/ISAST and UNESCO DigiArts are collaborating to produce the
first international art history conference covering art and new media, art
and technology, art-science interaction, and the history of media as
pertinent to contemporary art.

The conference will also discuss the documentation, collection, archiving
and preservation of media art. What kind of international networks must be
created to advance appropriate policies for collection and conservation?
What kind of new technologies do we need to optimize research efforts and
information exchange?

Held at The Banff Centre REFRESH will feature lectures by invited speakers
as well as others selected by an international jury from 350 received paper
proposals.

SESSIONS

For further information on the program and the speakers in each session
please go to www.MediaArtHistory.org
<https://freemailng5502.web.de/jump.htm?goto=www.MediaArtHistory.org> .

I. MediaArtHistories: Times and Landscapes I Chairs: O. GRAU and G.
NADARAJAN
MediaArtHistories: Times and Landscapes II E. SHANKEN and C. GERE
II. Methodologies: W.J.T. MITCHELL and tba.
III. Art as Research / Artists as Inventors: D. DANIELS
IV. Image Science and 'Representation': From a Cognitive Point of View: B.
STAFFORD
V. Collaborative Practice/ Networking (history): R. KLUSZCZYNSKI and D.
DOMINGUES
VI. Pop/Mass/Society: M. KUSAHARA and A. LANGE
VII a. Collecting, preserving and archiving the media arts: J. GAGNON
VII b. Database/New Scientific Tools: R. FRIELING and O. GRAU
VIII. Cross-Culture - Global Art: S. DIAMOND and M. HSU
IX. What can the History of New Media Learn from History of Science/Science
Studies? L. HENDERSON
X. Rejuvenate: Film, sound and music in media arts history: T. GUNNING and
D. KAHN
XI. High Art/Low Culture ? the future of media art sciences? K. BRUNS
XII. History of Institutions: I. SAKANE and J. REICHARDT
XIII. tba


REGISTRATION:

For information, online conference registration and accommodation please go
to: http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/events/refresh/registration_form.asp
<https://freemailng5502.web.de/jump.htm?goto=http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/
events/refresh/registration_form.asp>

For questions concerning registration please contact Luke Heemsbergen:
Luke_Heemsbergen AT banffcentre.ca

Conference: September 28 ? October 1st
www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi
<https://freemailng5502.web.de/jump.htm?goto=www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi>


EXHIBITION
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Banff New Media Institute and
in conjunction with the conference, Sarah Cook and Steve Dietz will curate
"The Art Formerly Known As New Media", an exhibition at the Walter Phillips
Gallery (Sept. 17 - Oct. 23).



Supported by:
BANFF NEW MEDIA INSTITUTE, DATABASE OF VIRTUAL ART, LEONARDO, DEUTSCHE
FORSCHUNGSGEMEINSCHAFT, UNESCO DIGIARTS, VILLA VIGONI, INTEL,
GOETHE-INSTITUT, SSHRC, CANADA COUNCIL

CONFERENCE CHAIR:
Prof. Dr. Oliver Grau
Siegen University
Fachbereich 3, Medienwissenschaften
Adolf-Reichwein Strasse 2
57068 Siegen
Germany
http://virtualart.hu-berlin.de
<https://freemailng5502.web.de/jump.htm?goto=http://virtualart.hu-berlin.de>
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/grau/
<https://freemailng5502.web.de/jump.htm?goto=http://www2.hu-berlin.de/grau/>

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Rhizome Member-curated Exhibits

http://rhizome.org/art/member-curated/

View online exhibits Rhizome members have curated from works in the ArtBase,
or learn how to create your own exhibit.

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2.

Date: 5.11.05
From: Lauren Cornell <laurencornell AT rhizome.org>
Subject: commissions announcement delay

Hi Rhizome,

I am writing to apologize for the delay in announcing the winners of this
year's commissions. We are awaiting word from one of our funders, and
expect to announce the winners in the next three weeks.

Thanks for your patience.

yours,
Lauren




Lauren Cornell
Executive Director, Rhizome.org
New Museum of Contemporary Art
210 Eleventh Ave, NYC, NY 10001

tel. 212.219.1222 X 208
fax. 212.431.5328
ema. laurencornell AT rhizome.org

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3.

Date: 5.14.05
From: Jo-Anne Green <jo AT turbulence.org>
Subject: Turbulence Guest Curators: "Why rock" by Annie Abrahams and Clément
Charmet

May 14, 2005
Turbulence Guest Curators: "Why rock?" by Annie Abrahams and Clément Charmet
with texts by Alan Sondheim and Frédéric Madre
http://turbulence.org/curators/rock/rock.htm

"Why rock?" presents sound works by net artists with real or supposed rock
affinities. Why rock? Is it a need to make an adolescent dream come true or
an urge to become more pop(ular)? Is it about making the body present on the
screen or taking control of the power of the word? Is it an escape from net
art production patterns or because we believe 21st century rock stars will
emerge from the net?

Works by Alexei Shulgin, Pavu, Richard Stallman, Igor Stromajer,
V.N.A.T.R.C., Talan Memmott, Cory Arcangel, Clément Charmet, Dragan
Espenschied, Annie Abrahams, Clement Thomas, Alan Sondheim and Marc Garrett.

BIOGRAPHIES

ANNIE ABRAHAMS is an artist who has worked on the net since 1996. In her
work she often addresses the visitor directly; she wants him/her to be aware
of his/her loneliness in front of the computer. There is no other person,
there is only you and your imagination. Most of Abrahams's work is featured
on her site "Being Human / Etant Humain" (bram.org): about low-tech mood
mutators and interrogations on communication. Not immersive. She teaches in
the Art Department of the University of Montpellier, France.

CLÉMENT CHARMET is a French programmer and artist born 1981. His work as an
artist began in 2002 when he released several net art pieces which dealt
with automated data generation and manipulation of the network. Since 2003
he has performed with Vincent Dorp under the name thirtytwobit, a group
interested in computer glitches and digital noise. Charmet is also the web
designer of panoplie.org, a French webzine about contemporary art that has
produced web works with non-web artists since 2004.

For more Turbulence Guest Curators, see http://turbulence.org/curators

--
Untitled Document Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director
New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org
New York: 917.548.7780 ? Boston: 617.522.3856
Turbulence: http://turbulence.org
New American Radio: http://somewhere.org
Networked_Performance Blog and Conference: http://turbulence.org/blog

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4.

Date: 5.09.05
From: Trebor <trebor AT buffalo.edu>
Subject: Prog:ME (fwd from Ricardo Rosas)

Prog:ME Festival Ë? Call for Entries

Prog:ME (programa de mída eletronica) is the 1st Festival of Electronic
Media of Rio de Janeiro which will be an annual event in the city. Organized
by Carlo Sansolo and Ã?rika Fraenkel, the festival will take place on the
19th July until the 18th September 2005 in the Centro Cultural Telemar, in
Rio de Janeiro-RJ, with 30.000 reais in prizes (approximately $11,000 US).
The deadline for application is 15th of June of 2005. To apply please go to
www.progme.org <http://www.progme.org/> .

The event hopes to contribute to the stimulation of national production by
highlighting new and established artists who develop works of art and
technology, domestically and internationally. Running parallel to this is a
program of invited foreign curators who will introduce artists of video-art
from around the globe.

In this festival we'll be inviting submissions for net-art, interactive
cd-roms and dvds, and video-art works; we'll also exhibit performance and
urban intervention pieces using electronic media. There will be talks with
theorists in electronic arts; workshops; electronic music shows with DJs/VJs
and talks with selected artists who will be presenting their works.

There will be 10 prizes of 3000 reais each, five destined for national
artists and five for international artists, distributed in the categories of
net-art, interactive cd-rom/dvd and video-art.

All the participants will receive a catalogue, the catalogue will register
all the activities developed on the event, all this information will be also
at this web site, and it will feature more Data regarding every work and
every artist. All the net art works will be also available from the web site
through links and we intend to keep all this info and the works as an
on-line catalogue.

All the activities, and the programme will be published on this site so you
can have follow what is going on.


Any doubts about the event please send an email to info AT progme.org
<http://mail8.uol.com.br/cgi-bin/webmail.exe?Act_V_Compo=1&amp;mailto=info AT p
rogme.org&amp;ID=IokP5a0Bc29cV459EOjXMwxd4lWnGKYhoeFMJ6Ev&amp;R_Folder=aW5ib
3g=&amp;msgID=4173&amp;Body=0>

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5.

Date: 5.11.05
From: Sheindal Cohen <admin AT fact.co.uk>
Subject: New Media Curator vacancy

FACT
FOUNDATION FOR ART AND CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY

CURATOR (New Media)
£18-£22K

Based in Liverpool, European Capital Of Culture 2008, FACT is dedicated to
the support, development and presentation of artists' work in film, video
and new media.

We are seeking an inspired individual with extensive experience of curating
new media.

Working within the Exhibitions Team, you will be developing programming
ideas, commissioning artists and delivering across a range of exhibition
platforms, including galleries, offsite and online.

In addition to generating exciting and innovative programme, you will
possess the skills to convey your passion of new media to a range of diverse
audiences.

For an application pack please contact:

Sheindal Cohen
Email: admin AT fact.co.uk
Tel: 0151 707 4444
Website: www.fact.co.uk

Deadline for applications: Wednesday 1st of June
Interviews in Liverpool: Tuesday 7th of June

We welcome applications from any individual regardless of ethnic origin,
gender, disability, religious belief, sexual orientation or age. All
applications will be considered on merit.

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Support Rhizome: buy a hosting plan from BroadSpire

http://rhizome.org/hosting/

Reliable, robust hosting plans from $65 per year.

Purchasing hosting from BroadSpire contributes directly to Rhizome's fiscal
well-being, so think about about the new Bundle pack, or any other plan,
today!

About Broadspire

Broadspire is a mid-size commercial web hosting provider. After conducting a
thorough review of the web hosting industry, we selected Broadspire as our
partner because they offer the right combination of affordable plans (prices
start at $14.95 per month), dependable customer support, and a full range of
services. We have been working with Broadspire since June 2002, and have
been very impressed with the quality of their service.

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6.

Date: 5.15.05
From: Marisa S. Olson
Subject: Sonic Interventions: Pushing the Boundaries of Cultural Analysis
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit von Amsterdam

Conference Report:
Sonic Interventions: Pushing the Boundaries of Cultural Analysis
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Universiteit von Amsterdam
by Marisa S. Olson

The Sonic Interventions Conference was described by its organizers, the
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, as an interdisciplinary conference
³dedicated to exploring the cultural practices, aesthetics, technologies,
and ways of conceptualizing sound, noise, and silence.²

One might imagine that this is an enormous topic, just as enormous as
attempting to categorize something as pervasive as light, with which sound
is frequently lumped. Taking the example of a panel discussion on the
radio, consider the differences between discussing the radio in domestic
life in the 1920s and the entire cultural history of the police radio.
Interesting connections emerged and, yet, there was not enough time to
address them in a single panel. And, of course, these are just fractional
aspects of radio history, and of sound, writ large.

The conference was driven by a large number of such concurrent panel
sessions, which tended to foreclose the possibility of any two
conference-goers having a ³common experience,² or of a consistent discourse
emerging. The organizers also asked speakers to limit their presentations to
ten minutes, rather than the standard twenty, in order to be more conducive
to conversation among the thinly-spread audience.

Despite the structural obstacles and the broad topic, Sonic Interventions
managed to play host to a number of interesting presentations. Though a wide
net was cast in the call for proposals, inviting artists and engineers to
contribute, in addition to the typical range of academic papers, the program
ultimately skewed in the direction of the academy. Sonic Interventions,
then, became an opportunity to survey some of the more interesting
contemporary humanities research related to sound.

Keynote speaker Douglas Kahn was among the better-known sound theorists
present and his opening talk provided an art historical backdrop for the
next four days of discussion. In lieu of discussing sound art, Kahn actually
discussed artistic research into states of soundlessness. In a reprise of
his catalogue essay for the Son et Lumiere show at the Pompidou, Kahn
discussed John Cage¹s and James Turrell¹s notions of ³silence,² and
perception in general. Discussing the former¹s visit to an anechoic chamber
and the latter¹s emulation of such a space, Kahn began to outline a
phenomenology of corporeal sound; one concerned with the difference between
perceiving the sounds of the body (of the blood flow, or even of thought) as
interior or exterior events?that is, whether the sounds of the body¹s
systems or the retinal changes experienced in a transition to darkness,
would be read as coming from the self or as environmentally specific to the
anechoic chamber.

Kahn¹s arguments find extension into the realms of site-specificity and
composition, of course, but also 1960s military research and
counter-cultural resistance, or the ever-slippery relationship between light
and sound, as manifest through shades of withdrawal and hallucination. This
approach echoed the ethos of the overall conference, made evident in ASCA¹s
CFP, which stated, ³Sound is a mental impression, a penetrating sensation, a
transmitted disturbance that may be structured or chaotic, narrative or
non-narrative, organic or technologically produced, communicative, and even
politically charged.²

Despite the vagaries of the call (which were, admittedly, posited in a
gesture towards inclusion and diversity), Kahn¹s specific approach became an
apt backdrop for the ensuing days of Sonic Interventions. The overall intent
of the conference was to not only define what constitutes sound or silence,
but what historic discourses and ideological models of value have been
associated with those definitions.

A glance at the conference program reveals that all of the following stood
as specimens in the study of sound: music (of many genres, era, and areas),
the spoken word (also of many genres, era, and areas), radio, noise
(political, mental, static, dynamic), the sound of writing, silence (as in
³the silent arts,² anechoism, ³queer silence,² and beyond), orality, the
voice, what the dead would say if they could, what the subaltern would say
if they could, the soundscape, instruments, recording and playback
technology, the broadcast and its political economy, field recordings, sound
memories, sound trauma, and the ecology of sonic waste, among others.

Punctuated by performances by Mary Flanagan and Jay Needham were
presentations under the heading of four continuous themes: Sound and the
Moving Image & Sound Technologies and Cultural Change; The Sonic in the
?Silent¹ Arts and Bring in the Noise; Silences/Orality; and Soundscapes:
Sound, Space, and the Body & Sound Practices and Events. In the interest of
time and space, I will present the best or most interesting panels from each
heading.

Under the first category, which considered sound in relationship to the
moving image, technology, and cultural change, there was an interesting
meeting of Cageian theory and pop aestheticism, brought about by Seda Ergul,
Jaël Kraut, and Luke Stickels. Kraut¹s approach to reading Cage¹s notion of
silence, and the means of ³defeating² it, sounded almost staid in comparison
with Ergul¹s paper on ³Cageian Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer² or
Stickels¹s, on ³Violence versus Silence: exploding binaries in Hana Bi.² The
three bounced nicely off each other, while proving that a flimsy definition
of silence could be profitable in its potential for widespread application.

The second category, ³The Sonic in the ?Silent¹ Arts and Bring in the Noise²
seemed to yield some of the most interesting, if diverse presentations. The
title of the category sounds like a collision between ancient philosophy and
a contemporary Broadway musical. Nonetheless, conference attendees with an
openness to such ³accidents² could find themselves presently surprised, as I
was in attending a panel of a literary bent. Hannah Bosma, Alix Mazuet, and
John M. Picker did an excellent job in excavating the polyvalent ³sounds²
with which literature is infused, ranging from rattling in one¹s head space
to the scratchy scrawling of ecriture, to the narrative representation of
aurality. Where Bosma opened with an elucidation on ³Different Noises,²
Mazuet and Picker looked at Victorian-era instanciations of them. Picker
compared the latter to contemporary urban noise problems.

Pulling at a similarly literary thread, under the heading of
³Silences/Orality,² Greg Esplin, Maria Boletsi, David Copenhafer,
and_Zachary Sifuentes plunged into canonical texts by Melville, Conrad,
Kafka, and Eliot. Each presented studies of characters and contexts in which
the cacophony of an encroaching modernity is ³heard.² The panel was
interesting in that each presenter took a very specifically-angled approach
to looking at issues with which many media theorists are currently
concerned. These include the notions of private/public, or
privacy/publicity; the relationship of the part to the whole (be it a
character in a book, and individual in a society, or a cog in a wheel); and
modes of distribution and broadcast. Discourses of power, be it individual
agency or the apprehensively aligned electrical power, were understatedly
present, and the entire conversation was ³enlightening.²

Finally, under the fourth broad category, ³Soundscapes: Sound, Space, and
the Body & Sound Practices and Events,² Ros Bandt, Ching Fang Chiang, and
Pieter Verstraete comprised the panel most oriented toward contemporary art.
This very international group looked at variations on installation art
ranging from large museum works to smaller-scale immersive works, to Janet
Cardiff¹s ³audio walks.² The panelists performed close-readings of sonic
aspects of the works, which could also have been inspected under the lens of
the previous topics. In particular, the thread of modernity (surprisingly
more so than postmodernity) permeated the majority of the conference
presentations and the aforementioned tenets of this discourse?particularly
the distinction between the personal and the public?were uniquely embodied
by the art works discussed here.

Elsewhere under the ³Soundscape?² category, Julian Henriques presented a
paper, entitled ³The Reggae Sound System: Music, Culture and Technology,²
which in a certain sense represented the best synthesis of all of the
conference themes: comparing sensorial and political notions of sound and
silence, tracing diasporic and ideological roots and metaphorically equating
them with root objects in an evolving musicology, and tracing the
simultaneous evolution of recording technology and its relationships to the
sound it plays and the people who hear it.

In the end, were one to draw any one conclusion about the Sonic
Interventions conference, it might be that ³sound theory² is currently
finding room to ³intervene² in other humanistic studies. For better or for
worse, this all-encompassing conference worked less to establish sound as a
category in its own right (as one will recall was once done for film studies
and new media, in the conferences of yore) than to posit is as a useful, if
intricate, gloss upon other areas of enquiry.


http://www.hum.uva.nl/asca/object.cfm/objectID=63151C88-6DD8-4960-A6BC779404
1A49D5

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Rhizome ArtBase Exhibitions

http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/

Visit the third ArtBase Exhibition "Raiders of the Lost ArtBase," curated by
Michael Connor of FACT and designed by scroll guru Dragan Espenschied.

http://rhizome.org/art/exhibition/raiders/

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Rhizome.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and an affiliate of
the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard
Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council
on the Arts, a state agency.

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Rhizome Digest is filtered by Kevin McGarry (kevin AT rhizome.org). ISSN:
1525-9110. Volume 10, number 20. Article submissions to list AT rhizome.org
are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art
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