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: November 29, 2006
From: digest@rhizome.org (RHIZOME)
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 10:57:22 -0800
Reply-to: digest@rhizome.org
Sender: owner-digest@rhizome.org
RHIZOME DIGEST: November 29, 2006

Content:

+note+
1. Lauren Cornell: update/ upcoming

+opportunity+
2. Shankar, Ravi: Call for Proposals: Recharging the Sensorium 2007
3. Brian Evans: Visual Music Marathon-call for submissions
4. Franziska Schroeder: Reminder for submitting to "Two Thousand + SEVEN symposium"

+announcement+
5. prensa AT 404festival.com: III FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE ARTE ELECTRONICO 404
6. Simon Mills: framed: New interviews with Michael Atavar, Sean Cubitt, Chris Joseph & Mez
7. Chris: Threshold artspace, Perth: Sparkle
8. Nick Hallett: MONKEY TOWN HOLIDAY PARTY featuring MY ROBOT FRIEND!
9. Lauren Cornell: Rhizome presents Open Source: On the Line at the Vera List Center, 12/4
10. Franco Mattes: 13 MOST BEAUTIFUL AVATARS

+comment+
11. aeneas.ioannis AT gmail.com: Suicide Walks

+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+
12. Christina Ray: Interview With Adam Greenfield by Christina Ray


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Organizational memberships with Rhizome

Sign your library, university or organization up for a Rhizome organizational membership! Give your community access to the largest online archives of digital art and new media art-related writing, the opportunity to organize member-curated exhibitions, participate in critical discussion, community boards, and learn about residency, educational and professional possibilities. Rhizome also offers subsidized memberships for qualifying institutions with limited access to the Internet. Please visit http://rhizome.org/info/org.php for more information or contact Ceci Moss at ceci AT rhizome.org

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1.

From: Lauren Cornell <laurencornell AT rhizome.org>
Date: Nov 29, 2006
Subject: update/ upcoming

Hello Rhizome RAW readers, and beyond

I wanted to report back on some site and community-related progress of late. Below are some projects we've accomplished recently:

+Diversified Site Editors (formerly 'Superusers'), adding 9 more from various quarters of the new media art world
+Fixed outstanding bugs in ArtBase submission process, so acceptance of works will move more quickly
+We also brought on two new volunteers: artist Annie Abrahams, who will be moderating discussion about ArtBase works, and the skilled programmer and artist Steven Read who is working with our Director of Tech, Patrick May, on setting up an open source blog comments project, amongst other potential projects.

In regards to programming, new and ongoing:

+I'm pleased to announce that we've launched our first youth media project: GROK. Based in CD-ROM format, GROK presents digital art works selected from Rhizome's ArtBase, each indexed with a curriculum and supplementary material. GROK is intended to familiarize high school age youth with artistic uses of digital technologies, and encourage literacy and agency in this field. Currently, we're reaching out to youth art enters around the country and internationally to distribute GROK. If you'd like to help or get a copy, contact me. (It's free!)

+I'd also like to point you to Time Shares, our online exhibition portal co-presented by the New Museum. We developed Time Shares to strengthen our commitment to exhibiting Internet art. This was partly inspired by feedback from Members who felt this was important.

http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares/

+ In regards to the Festival, it is winding up before winding down with two last events: a panel discussion, Open Source on the Line, and an exhibition Networked Nature, details of which we'll send to the list separately.

In terms of upcoming improvements to the site,:

+We are now beginning technical implementation for the Metadata project and we have slated the addition of our comments to the reBlog for the near future.

Finally, given the recent interest in discussing the site and community, and also the fact that it is our anniversary, we think it's important to have an open discussion on RAW about community in our second decade. This could be an opportunity to discuss problems and challenges as we have in the past on this list, but also a forum to imagine possibilities and evaluate how certain site changes (such as the two just mentioned) might shape particular kinds of interactions.

I hope to begin this discussion on Rhizome RAW soon, and that you will join in.

All the best,
Lauren

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2.

From: Shankar, Ravi (English) <shankarr AT ccsu.edu>
Date: Nov 26, 2006
Subject: Call for Proposals: Recharging the Sensorium 2007

Please submit any proposals by December 20th, 2006 to
sensorium2007 AT gmail.com

Recharging the Sensorium: CSU Presents a Writing/Multimedia Day of the Arts
Open to Students and Faculty
Friday, April 27th, 2007
On the campus of Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT 06050

INTRODUCTION

CSU Systems Office in conjunction with the Connecticut Review, the Helix and
Drunkenboat.com, online journal of the arts, present a day dedicated to the
conjunction of text with other media. Despite the popular image of the
solitary writer in a garret, writing is not an isolated art or stand-alone
skill, especially these days. Writers expressions of the written word
regularly combine with film, music, photographs, paintings, graphic
illustrations and other arts, creating new, collaborative forms of
composition. Newspaper reporters' stories are brought to readers combined
with photos from the field. Poets write lines to match music or find their
lines set to music. Ekphrastic poetry, that is the verbal representation of
visual representation, has grown exceedingly more popular. More and more,
the web brings together multimedia elements with streaming audio and video,
fine art photographs and paintingsand an entire generation relies on the
web for their information, entertainment and encounters with the arts. Here
words are almost always embedded in a multimedia environment. The
combination of words and multimedia is hardly new. Since the advent of
recorded history, writing has come in a multimedia form. From the
"performances" of scops, gleeman and jongleurs to illuminated manuscripts,
language has often conjoined with the other arts.

We invite students and faculty from the four CSU campuses and local high
schools to think imaginatively about writing in terms of the new, extensive
multimedia reality. Recharging the Sensorium, the inaugural Writing and
Multimedia Day of the Arts will be devoted to examining the multiple
connections between text and other media. It will address historical
contexts and investigate the use of new technologies. This conference could
potentially include collaborations across various disciplines such as (but
not confined to) poetry, prose, visual culture, art history, musicology,
photography, graphic novels, comparative literature, media archeology,
dramaturgy, film, dance, performance, and the natural and behavioral
sciences.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

The conference program will include competitively selected, collaborative
projects, as well as a small number of invited panelists and speakers. The
conference will culminate in a keynote event that will feature the winners
of Drunken Boats inaugural PanLiterary Awards and contributors to the most
recent issue of the Connecticut Review.

The conference will also include panels on a variety of subjects, including
editing print and online journals, multimedia processes, text and image, and
the rapidly changing media environment. Accepted presenters will also have
the chance to debut their work in a variety of forumsin gallery space, on
stage, in interactive displays and in forums. We will encourage all
participants to engage in open-ended discussions that delve into relevant
issues and questions. Potential projects include slide shows, dramatic
performances, film (run in a loop or featured discretely), public navigation
of unusual websites, the public showing of illustrated children's books, the
production of graphic novels, musical scores, or operas, choreographed sound
or performance pieces, dramatized readings, intersections of visual imagery
and textuality, investigations into architecture and space as it relates to
other media as well as any other projects that demonstrate the
cross-pollination of the arts.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Recharging the Sensorium welcomes proposals that use at least two different
media in its conception and execution. Collaborative projects are highly
encouraged, but we will also accept solo proposals that propose to use at
least two forms of expression (e.g. text and image). We are especially keen
on proposals that explore the territory of interdisciplinary artworks.
Please note that there is a limited funding available to help students and
faculty members complete their proposed projects.

Submissions should include the following information:

1) Name and contact information of the parties involved in the project,
including their affiliation with a CSU school or high school (e.g. student
or faculty)

2) Brief Project Description: Spend no more than a page describing what it
is you intend to do, how it involves the use of more than one media, and
what the desired outcome of your project will be. Please feel free to
include examples to buttress your ideas. You could mention similar kinds of
projects, or models that you are basing your own project on.

3) Specifications: Please indicate what space and equipment youll need
for the composition, production and display of the work in question. If it
is an artwork, indicate the expected dimensions and how you would see it
situated. If it is a collaborative theatrical or musical piece, or a film,
indicate the expected duration and how you would like the piece screened
and/or choreographed. If it is a web-based artwork, please indicate what
software you will be using to create the piece and how you would like the
work viewed. If it involves props or any other equipment (projector,
streaming video server, television, DVD player, frames, etc.), please also
indicate that information.

4) Budget: To the best of your ability, please delineate how much you
expect this project to cost and what you would spend any funding on. Please
be aware that we only have a limited amount of funding at our disposal so
requests may only be partially funded, depending on the feasibility and
scope of the project. No budgets over $500 will be considered. Be as
specific as you can.

5) Letter of Recommendation: If you are applying for funding, please also
include a letter of recommendation from a professor or other established
figure who can vouch for your creative/technical abilities and follow
through.

Email your proposal as a Word or .rtf document to: sensorium2007 AT gmail.com

Feel free to include any urls, related graphic or sound files, or other
supplementary materials that might help us make our final determination.

The DEADLINE for submissions will be Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

INFORMATION about the submission process and general information will be
found online shortly and a website address will be passed on to those
individuals with projects accepted.

Conference Organizers: JP Briggs (WCSU) briggsjp AT wcsu.edu, Ravi Shankar
(CCSU) shankarr AT ccsu.edu, David Cappella (CCSU) cappellad AT ccsu.edu, and Andy
Thibault (CT-IMPAC) Tntcomm82 AT cs.com


***************
Ravi Shankar
Poet-in-Residence
Assistant Professor
CCSU - English Dept.
860-832-2766
shankarr AT ccsu.edu

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Support Rhizome's annual Community Campaign!

Our 2006 Campaign launched October 17th and our goal is $25,000--an amount that is absolutely essential to our survival and growth this year! We need the support of our community now. Please join as a member, renew or consider making a donation today! And, help us start our next decade on solid ground!

http://www.rhizome.org/support

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3.

From: Brian Evans <brian.evans AT ua.edu>
Date: Nov 27, 2006
Subject: Visual Music Marathon-call for submissions

Visual Music: Fine art animation, video or film in which the visual elements
are informed by musical processes.

Call for Submissions
Deadline: (postmarked) January 22nd, 2007
Northeastern University is pleased to announce a call for work for the 2007 Visual Music Marathon, to be held on April 28th, 2007 as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. The Marathon will include screenings of new and historic works that reflect the theme of the event and a live video component. Approximately thirty minutes of programming will be selected for national cablecast on the Harmony Channel, available to subscribers of digital cable on the Comcast and Cox networks.

The Visual Music Marathon will be held in the Raytheon Amphitheatre of Northeastern University, Boston and is produced in conjunction with the Northeastern Multimedia Studies and Music Technology programs, the Departments of Music and Visual Arts, and the Harmony Channel. Please see
http://www.music.neu.edu/vmm/ for details.

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4.

From: Franziska Schroeder <franziska AT lautnet.net>
Date: Nov 29, 2006
Subject: Reminder for submitting to "Two Thousand + SEVEN symposium"

This is a reminder of the upcoming deadline for the Two Thousand + SEVEN symposium.
Feel free to submit any wild ideas that you may have.
Apologies for Xposting:


Two Thousand + SEVEN
<<< 2nd international symposium focusing on networked performance environments >>>

The upcoming edition of Two Thousand + SEVEN will once again run in parallel to the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music (www.sonorities.org.uk), hosted by the Sonic Arts Research Center, Queen's University Belfast (www.sarc.qub.ac.uk). The festival is the longest-running new music festival in Ireland that presents cutting-edge new music and features some of the most thought-provoking and controversial musicians.

Call for papers/presentations:
The call for papers is now open.
Please go to: www.sonorities.org.uk/symposium
for details.
The focus will be on cultural and practical issues that arise in virtual performance environments.


Keynote Speakers:
George Lewis (Columbia University) and
Steven Connor (Birkbeck College, London)

George Lewis previously taught at UC San Diego,Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Simon Fraser University's Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. He has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in the "Interarts Inquiry" and "Integrative Studies Roundtable" at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. An active composer, improvisor, performer and computer/installation artist, Lewis has explored electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. His artistic work is documented in over 120 recordings and has been awarded by a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, 1999 Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His oral history is archived in Yale University's collection of "Major Figures in American Music," and his published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes.
www.music.columbia.edu/faculty/lewis.html

Steven Connor has taught since 1979 at Birkbeck College, where he is now Professor of Modern Literature and Theory. He is currently Academic Director of the London Consortium Masters and Doctoral Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. He is also the College Orator. For publications see:
www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc

Further Details:
Paper sessions will take place in the morning and the afternoon bridged by a lunchtime performance and finished off with two evening concerts.
Date: Saturday, 21st of April 2007
Location: Sonic Arts Research Center/Belfast, www.sarc.qub.ac.uk


Deadlines:
A maximum of 8 papers of 20 minutes duration (plus question time) will be accepted.
Abstracts (max. 350 words) are due in electronic format by the 15th of December 2006.
Presenters of accepted papers/presentations will be informed by the 15th of January 2007.
All accepted papers will be published on the SARC site.

Registration: 30 (15 unwaged).
This includes free access to all Sonorities Festival events on the day of the symposium.

Submissions and all queries should be directed to:
f r a n z i s k a s c h r o e d e r
franzisk[at]lautnet[dot]net

_________________________

f r a n z i s k a s c h r o e d e r
Initiatrice of "Two Thousand + SEVEN"

www.sonorities.org.uk/symposium
franziska AT lautnet.net

Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music
www.sonorities.org.uk
_________________________


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5.

From: prensa AT 404festival.com <prensa AT 404festival.com>
Date: Nov 23, 2006
Subject: III FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL DE ARTE ELECTRONICO 404

Se agradece la difusin de la presente gacetilla.

Del 30 de Noviembre al 03 de Diciembre en la ciudad de Rosario, Argentina
se realizar la tercera edicin del "Festival Internacional de Arte Electrnico 404" y
ya est online el programa del Festival 404 en: http://www.404festival.com/esp/cronograma.htm

Como resultado de la convocatoria 2006, fueron seleccionadas 106 obras
provenientes de 27 pases en las siguientes reas:
Net.art, Imagen fija, Animacin, Video, Msica, Set-audiovisual, Teora, Performance, Instalacin.
Se harn presentes artistas de Japn, Francia, Serbia, Estados Unidos,
Canad, Brasil, Mxico, Argentina, Per, Italia, Chile, Blgica, Holanda, entre otros.

Si vivs en Argentina, el Festival 404 te invita a viajar a la ciudad de Rosario
para recorrer las muestras y presenciar los conciertos y proyecciones en Plaza Civica y Centro Cultural Parque de Espaa
Para ms informacin click aqu

El "Festival 404" cuenta con el auspicio de la Direccin General de Asuntos Culturales de la Cancillera Argentina , Secretara de Cultura de la Presidencia de la Nacin , Secretara de Cultura de la Nacin , Secretara de Cultura de la Provincia de Santa Fe, Secretara de Cultura de la Municipalidad de Rosario, entre otros.

*no se suspende por lluvia*
________________________________________
The III "International Festival of Electronic Art 404" will be held in Rosario, Argentina,
from November 30th to December 03rd, 2006, in the "Plaza Cvica" and "Parque de Espaa" Cultural Centers.

Visit the shedule of the 404 Festival at: http://www.404festival.com/eng/cronograma.htm
As a result of the 2006 call, 126 artworks from 27 different countries in the following categories:
Net.Art, Still Image, Animation, Video, Music, Audiovisual-Set, Theory, Performance and Installation.
Authors from Japan, France, Serbia, USA, Canada, Brazil, Mexico,
Argentina, Peru, Chile, Italy, Belgium and Holland, among others will be present at the Festival.

404 FESTIVAL > WWW.404FESTIVAL.COM | ASTAS ROMAS > WWW.ASTASROMAS.ORG

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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.

From: Simon Mills <simon.mills AT gmail.com>
Date: Nov 25, 2006
Subject: framed: New interviews with Michael Atavar, Sean Cubitt, Chris Joseph & Mez

The framed interview project continues with the publication of four new interviews with new media writers and artists now online at
http://www.framejournal.net :

Michael Atavar is an artist who works with digital art, installation and performance, using methodologies of chance and process to make work both in real time and in the online environment.

Sean Cubitt is currently Professor of Media and Communications at The University of Melbourne. His books include Digital Aesthetics, The Cinema Effect and EcoMedia.

Chris Joseph is a writer and artist who has produced solo and collaborative work since 2002 as babel. His projects include Inanimate Alice, an award-winning series of multimedia stories produced with novelist Kate Pullinger, and The Breathing Wall, a groundbreaking digital novel that responds to the reader's breathing rate.

Mez is a pioneer of code poetry, net.wurks and the unique net.languageMezangelle. Mez has exhibited extensively including at ISEA 1997, ARS Electronica 1997, SIGGRAPH 1999 & 2000.Her awards include the 2001 VIF Prize [Germany], the JavaMuseum Artist Of The Year 2001 [Germany], 2002 Newcastle New Media Poetry Prize [Australia] and the winner of the 2006 Site Specific Competition [Italy].

These are the latest in the framed series of interviews with new media artists and writers in which they discuss their practice, both past and present, and the current state of new media art and writing.

Simon Mills

/=/=/=/=//==/==\====

Senior Lecturer in New Media
De Montfort University
Leicester
LE1 9BH

e: smills AT dmu.ac.uk

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7.

From: Chris <chris AT crowriver.net>
Date: Nov 27, 2006
Subject: Threshold artspace, Perth: Sparkle

Sparkle
Public preview 10am-8pm, Saturday, 2 December 2006
Exhibition runs until Friday, 1 February 2007. Open daily 10am7pm
Threshold artspace, Perth Concert Hall, Horsecross, Mill Street, Perth, Scotland, UK

Sparkle a trail of new exhibitions will be switched on at the Threshold artspace on Saturday, 2 December 2006 for the first time. The exhibitions will continue to illuminate the gallery throughout the festive season. Sparkle features 15 works by more than 15 Scottish and international artists a glowing selection of brand new additions and old favourites from Scotlands only permanent collection of digital art at the Threshold artspace,

Sparkle finds a natural habitat at the artspace which itself thrives on such moments the way artists use pixels, light, time, sound and electricity as their media of choice. This is an exhibition which literally shines a spotlight on these basic ingredients of digital artistic practice. An exhibition which also brings a touch of glitter to the long dark winters of Scotland.

The Sparkle trail of shows starts at Threshold Welcome the giant interactive juke box at the entrance of the Perth Concert Hall. Walking though visitors will be able to trigger at random more than 200 new snippets from a medley of classic Christmas crooners and carols to more surprising leftwing songs guest-curated by Andy Shearer.

Next, the exhibition takes over the Threshold Wave the long digital canvas of 22 flat screens under the copper dome. Brand new highlights include Sonorous Forms a piece for cello, water and 22 screens in C Major by the emerging artists and musicians Catherine-Anne Lee and Eilidh Glynn; Berlin-based artist Graham Robertson experiments with a roll of film slowly winding it through the camera with shutter open capturing brilliance, time and motion; Simon Wilkinson's Light Fantastic recreates the euphoria of the search light show which bathed the skies over the concert hall in space age glamour; for her humorous video collage Snowdome Theresa Pickles animates a bunch of these popular treasure-like miniatures full of fake snow and curiosities. Recently launched Counting Until the End of Time by Bergen-based artist Lei Cox will provide a breather of a flickering intermission between each film.

The interactive playground at Threshold Stage is divided between the new arrival at the artspace collection Random Snow Generator a digital snowflake fiesta by Ross Cairns and the old favourite Influx, a tricky digital mirror by Joanna Kane.

At the Threhsold Flush screens tucked away in the public toilets people can dip in and out of The One Minute Wonders a selection of 20 seriously funny films of 60 seconds each by young people from a network operating across Europe guest curated by Raya Ribbius.

On view (and for sale) at the flexible office/artspace Tay Suite are the shimmering, limited edition prints by artist Susan Collins from the series Glenlandia The Four Seasons. They will soon be joined by Catherine-Anne Lees new video stills Sonorous Forms.

Additionally, art historian Lindsey Morse has been commissioned to produce a series of contextual essays about selected works from the Threhsold artspace permanent collection. The first in this new critical writing series is dedicated to Catherine-Anne Lees new work Sonorous Forms and will be published on the occasion of Sparkle.

The exhibition launch (4-6pm) will round off with artist Simon Bogles Glowing Throwies workshop in electronic graffiti an inexpensive, DIY way to add a touch of sparkle and colour to any magnetic surface. To join call box office 0845 612 6319. Price 3GBP.

More about Sparkle
* Sparkle is curated by Iliyana Nedkova and produced by Horsecross for the Threshold artspace in partnership with the University of Dundee; Eyebeam, New York and Eyebeams Graffiti Research Lab, European Cultural Foundation, Film and Video Umbrella, FRS Freshwater Laboratory and Art Research Communication.
* Sparkle is the first in a series of annual exhibitions at Threshold artspace enabling artists and audiences to respond critically to the festive frenzy and the fundamental ingredients of digital art pixels, sound waves, light, electricity.
More about the artists and their works
* As part of Sparkle Sonorous Forms and Random Snow Generator are the first public exhibitions by Catherine-Anne Lee and Ross Cairns since they graduated from the University of Dundee in the summer of 2006.
* Glowing Throwies is an artist-led participatory project for young people which will result in a short film by Simon Bogle to be premiered as part of Sparkle 2007. This is the first time the LED Throwies technology will be seen in the UK.
* Lindsey Morse is currently undertaking her first internship at Threshold artspace after graduating from the University of St Andrews in the summer of 2006.
* Counting Until the End of Time by Bergen-based artist Lei Cox is part of Lei Cox Revisited a retrospective exhibition featuring another three works by Cox recently repurposed for the Threshold Wave.
* Susan Collins Glenlandia The Four Seasons is the first artist's limited edition produced by Horsecross. It is available as inkjet prints on archival paper in an edition of 20 in a size of 13.5 x 18 cm and priced as 200GBP each or 700GBP for a set of four unframed.

Threshold artspace, Perth Concert Hall, Horsecross, Mill Street, Perth, PH1 5HZ, 0845 612 6320, info AT horsecross.co.uk,
www.horsecross.co.uk
Scotlands first dedicated gallery for digital public art, with nine unique spaces presenting a varied programme of artists films, videos, editions, games, text, photography, performance, light, sound and software art.
For further details please contact Iliyana Nedkova, Horsecross Creative Director New Media at inedkova AT horsecross.co.uk

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Associated Content is the people's media company. We run a massive library of content where you can share your work and earn extra cash. Explore scores of articles, videos, essays, reviews, how-to's and contribute your own. kShow what you know at www.associatedcontent.com/join/rhizome

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8.

From: Nick Hallett <nick AT harknessav.org>
Date: Nov 27, 2006
Subject: MONKEY TOWN HOLIDAY PARTY featuring MY ROBOT FRIEND!

THURSDAY DEC. 7

MONKEY TOWN HOLIDAY PARTY
A Benefit for Monkey Town

LIVE,
in his only New York appearance for 2006,
MY ROBOT FRIEND

the ?crackpot genius? of
DYNASTY HANDBAG

NO ORDINARY MONKEY DJs

Lightshow by Luke Dubois, Adam Kendall, Ray Sweeten among many others

Surprise Performances

emceed by NICKLCAT

Monkey Town t-shirts and gift cards will be on sale.

"We want to thank our patrons for your incredible support over the past few months by throwing the kind of party you would only expect from Monkey Town. Earlier this autumn, we were threatened with the real possibility of having to close our doors, but the efforts of the New York artists community have kept us afloat. We are not out of the red yet. With winter?s dawning, we envision a prosperous future at Monkey Town, and want to celebrate it with you."--Monkey Town HQ

MY ROBOT FRIEND
My Robot Friend is the over-the-top project of Howard Robot, whose live performances mesmerize with quirky technopop, computer animations, general "new media" topsy-turveydom, and his legendary costume, an interactive suit of blinking and whirring L.E.D. lights and electroluminescent wire. A musical homage to new wave acts like Devo, his records have charted in Germany, he has been short-listed in Rolling Stone magazine, and his song "We're the Pet Shop Boys" was actually covered by the Pet Shop Boys (and more recently/absurdly, Robbie Williams!). Playing out social stereotypes of robots, My Robot Friend humorously enables his audience to consider how technology interacts with human emotion as evoked in popular song: alienation, angst, and most importantly, love.
http://www.myrobotfriend.com

DYNASTY HANDBAG
The one-woman tour-de-force performance of Jibz Cameron, who takes the most absurd banalities of life and exaggerates them into a side-splitting philosophic rant involving music, video, as well as an aerobics routine or two...
http://www.dynastyhandbag.com

NO ORDINARY MONKEY
Phil South and friends are known for their extraordinary disco speakeasys in the Financial District, sunday tea parties along the East River, and a mindblowing set at PS1's Warm Up last summer.
http://www.noordinarymonkey.com/

EVENT DETAILS
MONKEY TOWN HOLIDAY PARTY
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7
9 pm to 2 am
at EUROPA, Polish-American Discothque in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
98-104 Meserole Ave. (corner of Manhattan Ave.)
G train to Nassau
18+
Tickets, sliding scale $12-20

http://www.europaclub.com
http://www.monkeytownhq.com
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=23304&page=1#44746

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9.

From: Lauren Cornell <laurencornell AT rhizome.org>
Date: Nov 29, 2006
Subject: Rhizome presents Open Source: On the Line at the Vera List Center, 12/4

Hello,

One of our final events in the Festival -- a panel discussion called "Open Source: On the Line" -- is taking place this Monday December 4th at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School. The discussion will explore open source practice and philosophy in programming, arts and culture, and also touch upon recent threats to its continuation. Panelists include Wikipedia pioneer Daniel Mayer, artists (and Rhizome participants) Joy Garnett and Cory Arcangel, our Director of Technology Patrick May and lawyer Laura Quilter. More details and address can be found below.

Please note there is a discount for Rhizome members, you simply need to email ticket at rhizome.org in advance if you'd like to attend so we can have your name at the door.

thank you, Lauren

OPEN SOURCE: ON THE LINE
at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

December 4, 2006 6:30pm

Admission: $8, free for all students as well as members of Rhizome.org and New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID.

This panel will explore the aesthetic and political possibilities afforded by different open source systems. Our diverse panelists will examine sites like Wikipedia, Digg.com, as well as p2p networks and social networking sites. They will also explore offline artwork, arts institutions and businesses that have sought to adopt open source models, and current challenges to the continuation of this ethos, such as 'Net Neutrality' legislation.

Panelists include: artist Cory Arcangel, Wikipedia pioneer Daniel Meyer, Rhizome Director of Technology Patrick May; artist Joy Garnett; lawyer Laura Quilter; moderated by Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art

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Rhizome.org 2005-2006 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 2005-2006 Rhizome Commissions, eleven artists/groups were selected to create original works of net art.

http://rhizome.org/commissions/

The Rhizome Commissions Program is made possible by support from the Jerome Foundation in celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial, the Greenwall Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Additional support has been provided by members of the Rhizome community.

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10.

From: Franco Mattes <Propaganda AT 0100101110101101.org>
Date: Nov 24, 2006
Subject: 13 MOST BEAUTIFUL AVATARS

PRESS RELEASE

The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University invites you to the Opening Reception for the Fall, 2006 Premio New York Exhibition:

Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG)
"13 Most Beautiful Avatars"

November 30 - December 19, 2006
Opening: Thursday, November 30, 6-8pm
The Italian Academy, New York

EVA and FRANCO MATTES (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG) present "13 Most Beautiful Avatars," a portrait series at the Italian Academy and in an online exhibit organized by Rhizome and co-presented by the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The Matteses have been living in the virtual world, Second Life, for over a year, exploring its terrain and interacting with its peculiar inhabitants. The result of their "video-game flanerie" is a series of portraits, entitled "13 Most Beautiful Avatars." Not unlike Warhol's entourage of stars, captured in the "13 Most Beautiful Boys" and "13 Most Beautiful Women" portrait series, the Matteses' "13 Most Beautiful Avatars" captures the most visually dynamic and celebrated "stars" of Second Life.

The portraits reflect Second Life aesthetics, featuring the bright colors, "artificial" light, broad flat areas, 3D shapes, and surreal perspectives that are typical of this virtual world. Overall, the series draws on the technological developments which allow the creation of alternate identities within simulated worlds. Despite the relative newness of using video game-derived source materials, the avatars' icons recall questions common to earlier eras of portraiture, including the cultural and psychological context of the images, and the relationships between high art and subculture, between contemporary art and "traditional" art forms, and between art and life itself.

Concurrent with the show at the Italian Academy is an online exhibition organized by Rhizome and co-presented by the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, in Second Life's increasingly popular Ars Virtua gallery, mirrors the Italian Academy's art gallery, and is visible here: http://rhizome.org/events/timeshares.
Highlights of the online exhibition will also be projected during the opening reception.

Eva and Franco Mattes are known for their controversial artworks, such as staging high-profile hoaxes and defeating the Nike Corporation in a legal battle over a fake advertising campaign. Their works have been shown worldwide including the Venice Biennale, Manifesta and Postmasters Gallery, New York.

The Premio New York is sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Italian Academy and the Italian Cultural Institute of New York.

Few of the avatar paintings will be shown by Postmasters, the Matteses New York gallery, at the PULSE Art Fair in Miami, and a portfolio of prints produced by Jean-Yves Noblet Contemporary Prints is also available.

The Italian Academy, 1161 Amsterdam Avenue (just south of 118th Street), New York.
Subway #1 to 116th Street
Monday through Friday, 9:30 am to 4:30 pm.
CONTACT: Allison Jeffrey, 212 854-8942, aj211 AT columbia.edu

http://www.italianacademy.columbia.edu/IA_premioFall2006.html
http://www.0100101110101101.org

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11.

From: aeneas.ioannis AT gmail.com <aeneas.ioannis AT gmail.com>
Date: Nov 28, 2006
Subject: Suicide Walks

Confusing the Locative Medium
As with any emerging new media art form, countless definitions and delineations are conjured from individuals who deem themselves avid practitioners, and the art community engages itself in a civil war of research papers until a single idiom is accepted by a majority. There is a grave need for a new method, a new form of scientific representation of defining new media of this sort. Unfortunately, I do not possess the necessary method, so I, too, fall in line to wage war on deciphering the very nature of what is known as Locative Media.

The three major elements in locative media are the user, the users environment, and the user interface that binds them together. The word media generally refers to the developed interface or the specific usage of a developed interface in an artwork. However, any locative work that fails to incorporate the user and that users location, in turn, fails to capture the essence of locative media. Julian Bleeker, in his essay concerning WiFi.Bedouin, highlights this point, stating that simply providing access to the Internet via a WiFi node is not particularly innovative at this point in the evolution of access technology. It is the context of the space providing the access, however, that can offer innovation, rendering it a work of locative media.

Contemporary technology has opened many new doors of possibility for artists in all fields. The most coveted technologies, for their accessibility and easy application, are those involved in Web 2.0, as described by Tim OReilly. It is in the use of these technologies that many artists strive to create locative works of new media. Yet, the simple usage of such applications does not infer any relationship to the space that the user occupies. That is the endeavor of locative media; to understand the spatial relationship between ourselves and the world around us.

Fellow practitioners, beware of art that claims locative roots while merely using elements of Web 2.0. While such applications can be stimulating and works of art in their own right, they lack the spatial insight that locative media requires. Think, calculate, design, program, but above all, explore the world around you.

The path to a concise and responsible definition of locative media contains within it the necessity to identify its antecedents. The simplest locative experiment requires taking any art practice, and allocating a location, or space, to it. For example, the ancient art of line drawing applied to a specific geographic location, transforms itself from a work of fine art to that of locative media art. In fact, with this simplistic outlook on the art form of locative media, all forms of art that are susceptible to a specific location or spatial relationship can be adapted to a locative art work.

Chasing Time
Popular psychology teaches us that art is the external expression of inward, indescribable emotions and needs. Every stroke of paint reveals the accumulation and expenditure of angst. As the wheels of time turn inevitably onward, new methods of art manifest from new historical events and traumas and the need to express the feelings that accompany them. Consequently, as the world becomes more complex, so must our expression. Here we stand, now, on the verge of new media practices, discussing one of its offspring.

Locative media was conceived to express an inward emotion that all other present art forms could not convey. Our human existence, albeit grand and beautiful, is doomed to play the victim of the fleeting nature of time. It is the omnipresent notion that haunts our daily lives. We will be born and grow, learn, love, hate, fight and forgive; but we will all eventually die. Yet, we spend a great portion of our lives fighting this truth using the best available ammunition; media.

We fight to preserve ourselves in family photos and films, hoping that we can go on to live in the memories and lives of those around us. We relinquish the fruits of our lifelong labors upon skyscrapers, museums and hospitals in order to engrave our names in stone and iron. We strive to achieve heights that are deemed historically worthy to earn a few lines of print in the book of men. We hope to give our lives a location.

Suicide Walks
My work operates within this framework and strives to create a new method for discussion in the field of audio walks. Audio walks typically consist of pre-recorded sound played back at a specified location using a personal sound player. The particular sound being played and the location of the user intertwine and create meaning. Experiments of this nature explore the art of context and reveal the complexities of human cognition. How far can the boundaries of context be pushed? I have decided to examine the deepest corners of context and the most sensitive of relationships of human beings.

After simple surveys and academic research, it quickly began apparent to me that the subject of suicide has remained to be one of the most difficult aspects of human life that we, as humans, are faced with. My audio walks confront this subject head on. I began to write on the subject of suicide and audio walks while publishing the works on the World Wide Web. It was not long before an individual came forward to request that I record his personal audio walk. However, it was not until the first recording began that I realized my false judgment of the situation. My client wished to record an audio walk, which consisted of some of the last few moments of his life. Being terminally ill, he requested one last chance to speak, to move and to leave his mark on a location.

This work has sparked distaste among religious circles. Again, I returned to academic research to resolve my own doubts and inquiries. The funeral service of today leaves much to be desired. While our lives have more than doubled in span over history, we will be gone much longer than we are here. Every human deserves the right to be remembered. Can brief speeches spawned from briefer interviews with loved ones of the deceased bring solace? Can ancient psalms and scriptures wash away the pain of grief? Or can we attempt to capture the very soul of an individual within his words and walk in their shoes upon the path of their lives? My audio walks will prove the latter. While audio walks have been used for memorial purposes, the accounts have always been second-hand, at best. My walks, however, freeze time momentarily, for one last walk through that special place with that special, lost loved one.

Modern funeral services always use a tombstone to mark the final resting place of the deceased. Instead of hopelessly grasping onto stones without context, I provide those left behind a personal message of hope forever inscribed upon a series of locations; all aspects meaningful in the context of each different listener who performs the walk.

Locative Media is a powerful tool in which we can fulfill our deepest human desire to live on. Our innermost wishes and feelings can be imprinted upon virtual gravestones that dot the landscape of our lives.

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12.

From: Christina Ray <ray AT glowlab.com>
Date: Nov 29, 2006
Subject: Interview With Adam Greenfield by Christina Ray

+Commissioned by Rhizome.org+

Interview with Adam Greenfield
by Christina Ray

I recently met up with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, to discuss the book's ideas over coffee. Everyware was published in 2006 and draws upon Adam's background as a user experience consultant and critical futurist to describe the subtle yet persistent diffusion of computing technology into the landscape. Against the espresso machine hum, the cafe's iPod shuffling through indie rock tunes, and the register jingle, we talked about speed and convenience as the seductions that drive our increasingly mediated reality. And we pondered the cultural, ecological, and ethical costs of living with everyware and where we go from here .


CR: From where we are right now, what kinds of everyware or pre-everyware can you identify?

AG: Remember when you were a kid, and you were first writing letters to your friends, and you'd lavish a ridiculous amount of detail on the return address? "127 North Van Pelt Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19103, USA, North America, Earth, the Solar System"? It turns out that "where," in the everyware context, is a little like that -- in order to give you an answer as to "where I am right now," in the sense that's most relevant to this discussion, I'd have to specify all the situations and contexts in which I'm presently implicated.

Some of these situations are physical, and they're unfolding at a nested series of scales. So I'm simultaneously in the United States, and in Brooklyn, and at the given address of this cafe. And, of course, I also happen to be in a room, and sitting at a table, and in close proximity to an array of tools and devices at that scale.

At the most global scale, I'm already implicated in ubiquitous systems, at this very moment, by dint of those ghostly traces of me that exist in networked databases -- property register, driver's license, utility accounts -- and which associate me with this location. Those, in turn, can be correlated with an IP address that locates me virtually. In front of me are my mobile phone and wallet and transit pass, lying on the table, and those things are all either presently networked or designed to be used with the global information network.

Increasingly, we inhabit what I think of as an order of networked things. I think of each of them, as diverse and heterogeneous and apparently unrelated as they are, as nothing other than tendrils of ubiquity. All that would be necessary for these things to constitute everyware, in the sense I discuss in the book, is for them to start talking to one another -- and we're already beginning to see the signs of just such a convergence.

All of this is a way of saying that, if you want to detect the traces of emergent ubiquity in the world around you, it can't hurt to cultivate a certain sense of the paranoid-critical. Look around you: It's there to be seen, if you have but the eyes to see it.


CR: You've described a sense of wonder at seeing how women in Hong Kong almost immediately adapted to a new subway entrance system by simply swishing their handbags containing their passes over the turnstile's RFID reader. This lets them glide on through without having to stop, and was a completely self-taught "dance" that emerged on its own. What other adaptive behavior have you encountered that responds to everyware in public space?

AG: One of the things I've really enjoyed about being out on the road so much this year, and giving my talk in so many places, is that people will come up to me afterward and tell me their own stories, share their own experiences of this nascent ubiquity.

So I'll get people saying that their academic department or their job has doors which are unlocked with the RFID nametags they're required to wear - but that men in these situations will leave these cards in their wallet, and the wallet in their back pocket, so that the interaction with the system consists of them half-turning and rubbing their ass on the card reader. I love that, and I'm particularly interested to see the sorts of language that emerge around behaviors like that.

But I've seen, probably, a great deal more behavior that has not yet adapted to the fact of our engagement with networked devices in public space. If you pay attention to this sort of thing, you see social conflict breaking out all along the fault lines, with concerns emerging around things like mobile phone etiquette, continuous partial attention, whether someone should stop messaging and look up from their Blackberry long enough to order a coffee, if you're justified in not tipping a cab driver if they're on a phone headset during your entire trip, and so on. And should we forget that surveillance is at least as much a question of Little Brother as of Big Brother, there's always the object lesson of 'Dog Poop Girl' (see link below) to keep in the back of our minds.


CR: In the book you propose several features that should be designed into everyware. Everyware should default to harmlessness; be self-disclosing; be conservative of face and time; and be deniable. Could you expand upon these ideas a little?

AG: I believe that when designers imagine systems that by their very nature assume a great deal of responsibility for the outcome of situations, that exert an outsized and even unprecedented influence on life chances, they should among other things be held to the very highest standards of ethical design. This goes beyond the idea of installing appropriate safeguards for identity and privacy -- it's not even properly a technical question, but a moral one.

However unfashionable or bourgeois it may be, I believe in all those good old Enlightenment values: that you always already have the inalienable right to your privacy, your time and self-determination and personal autonomy. You have the right to know that information about you is being collected, and by whom, and what they are proposing to do with that information. We should demand that the ubiquitous systems we're subjected to be designed in such a way as to respect these prerogatives -- further, that we be able to refuse exposure to any system which does not, at least in private space. (It's probably too late to assert any such principle in the public sphere.)

In that sense, there's nothing in the Everyware principles that's even specifically about ubiquitous computing: This conversation is older than history, and obviously far better heads than mine have taken it up.


CR: From conferences to new university courses to corporate marketing departments, the subject of ubiquitous computing is becoming ubiquitous. In your book, Thesis 69 reads, "It is ethically incumbent on the designers of ubiquitous systems and environments to afford the human user some protection." Are engineers, designers, students, and companies having discussions on the ethics of protecting users?

AG:I think that a vanguard few are, yeah, even if in the latter case it's only as a business differentiator. It's going to be exceedingly difficult for most engineers to consider these questions, though, for the very good reason that so often, the sorts of effects of ubiquitous systems that I personally find so worrisome can only be understood as emergent behavior. That is, they arise out of the free interplay of discrete, distributed, networked systems. We're talking about a class of behaviors that can't necessarily be predicted at design time, even in principle. I'm the first to admit that incorporating the sorts of prerogatives we've discussed into the design of new products and services is not at all a simple thing to ask for.

I think it really takes someone able to step back from a given device, or even a given technology, to discern how it will interact ecologically with the others already on the table, those currently emerging, and the pre-existing body of everyday cultural practices. Traditionally, this has been just where information architects and other user-experience professionals have had so much to offer, and I still I have high hopes that the UX community will rise to the challenge of everyware. As far as deep, ongoing conversations, though, I don't really see it happening. Not yet. And, you know, the hour is late.


CR: The emergence of everyware can be, as you describe in the book, often quiet and subtle. No one's shouting, "Hey we just developed a device that tracks your every movement." Unless or until a major techno-disaster forces problems into the public arena, how do concerned citizens identify what's frequently invisible?

That's a great question, an absolutely crucial one, and I'm afraid I don't have a very good answer for it. About all I can offer is the suggestion that we all try to do a better job of questioning -- with rigor and honesty and fearlessness -- the assumptions undergirding every new technological product and service we're offered. Will this really make my life easier? What are some of the less-obvious implications of inviting this into my life? What might I be giving up in exchange for what this is offering me? And what would my world look like if everyone adopted it?

These, again, are not obvious questions, and we're just not used to thinking along these lines. So a big part of what I see myself as being engaged in is something very old-fashioned: consciousness raising. It's something I'm pursuing in the hope that I can both learn to make decisions about emergent technologies that I'll be happier with in the long run for myself, and help other folks do so as well, on their own behalf.


+ Christina Ray is an artist and curator living in Brooklyn and the founder of Glowlab, a project to support and develop art/tech experiments exploring the nature of cities. Glowlab produces the annual Conflux festival in New York.


LINKS:
+ http://www.studies-observations.com/everyware/
+ http://www.v-2.org
+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_poop_girl
+ http://christinaray.com
+ http://glowlab.com
+ http://confluxfestival.org


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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 Marisa Olson (marisa AT rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 11, number 44. Article submissions to list AT rhizome.org are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art and be less than 1500 words. For information on advertising in Rhizome Digest, please contact info AT rhizome.org.

To unsubscribe from this list, visit http://rhizome.org/subscribe. Subscribers to Rhizome Digest are subject to the terms set out in the Member Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php.

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