This doesn't need any comment from me:

"Art-O-Meter is a device that measures the quality of an art piece. It bases its evaluation on the amount of time that people spend in front of an artwork compared to the total time of exhibition. The measurements are graphically represented by comments and a 5 star rating system.

Without the interaction of a viewer, the Art-O-Meter will register time like a regular clock. However, when a user enters the area covered by its motion sensor, a second timer is triggered and it will count time as the viewer observes the artwork."

Video.

A work by Marcelo Coelho.
Merci Cati!

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YouTube: "Produced by Hit 'n' Run... this interview took place with Paul B. Davis from the BEIGE collective at the 35th Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam. Paul exhibited a piece at the exhibition 'Satellite of Love' produced by Exploding Television. Here he talks about his Nintendo Cartridge Hacking."

Davis' delivery is very dry and funny in this video, and he has some great things to say. He and fellow artist Cory Arcangel, through their work with the BEIGE collective, have both been active proponents of busting open game cartridges and reprogramming the chips (though perhaps in a less aggressively activist way today than a few years ago--but that's another post). While gaygamer.net calls Mary Flanagan the "secret heart" of the movie 8 BIT, I don't really agree with that. (As mentioned earlier, Kristin Lucas's work would have been a catchier example in the film to show the psychological effects of life in a high-speed technological world--her late '90s videos incorporating game and sci-fi tropes are at once disturbing, aesthetically engaging, "lo fi," and presaged many themes of what might now be called the 8 BIT movement.)

No, if the movie has a secret heart, it's why Arcangel and Davis, who used the phrase "8 Bit" in an LP title five years ago and are sort of the poster children for the current scene, started hacking Nintendo cartridges in the first place. Davis was always the more political of the pair in how he speaks about it, but he makes an interesting point in this YouTube vid: that untapped aesthetic potential exists in everyday gear that is meant to be inaccessible to us. As he describes it, the "cheapest, highest quality audio and video generation system you could get" is locked up in a proprietary system ...

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The 6th UK Digital Art Award of £17,500 is the largest to date and will enable Luke to develop his career and proposed ideas through a supported residency at Watershed, a leading public media centre in Bristol.

Luke will document, present and discuss his work in progress, online and through events and exhibition, to engage audiences throughout the development process. With additional input from key partners such as Situations, a research and commissioning programme at the University of the West of England, Luke will benefit from a responsive network of support and facilitation.

Over 70 applications were made to the Bursary and following shortlisting and interviews Luke was selected. An expert panel participated in the selection process including ARC Co-directors Chris Byrne and Iliyana Nedkova; Helen Cole, Producer of Live Art and Dance at Arnolfini, Bristol; and Anthony Rowe, artist and previous recipient of the Clark Bursary.

The Bursary is funded by J A Clark Charitable Trust, Watershed, and Arts Council England South West. In association with the University of the West of England, Bristol.

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Call for submissions

ARCO/BEEP NEW MEDIA ART AWARDS
2nd edition
Conceded by BEEP, in collaboration with ARCO
Worth 8.000 euros and 6.000 euros

The goal of these awards is to advance the production and exhibition of New Media Art, and art linked to new technologies. Its purpose is to promote new high-tech art, and to foster communication between the manufacturers/creators of this new technology and those who create art. A natural collaboration, which will benefit and enrich both sides.

There are two ACQUISITION PRIZES:

1) @ARCO Prize: worth 8.000 euros. To be eligible, an artwork must be shown by a gallery at the 26th edition of ARCO, the International Contemporary Art Fair, in Madrid (15-19 February 2007), and must have a significant component involving new technology or electronic media.

2) OFF-ARCO Prize: worth 6.000 euros. Artworks presented by individual artists or collectives.

The prizes will be awarded by an international jury of prestigious specialists.
Registration form will be available from the 30th of October on the ARCO/BEEP NEW MEDIA ART Prize website http://www.arco.beep.es

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a collection of computer-generated art works that combines & layers Brian Eno's hand-made slides based on parameters from his ambient music. the program can generate 77 million different artworks automatically. Eno said: "I think of these things as visual music ... intended to occupy television downtime so that, instead of having a dead hole in the wall, you have a living picture."

[links: allsaintsrecords.com & sean.co.uk & amazon.com]

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Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Douglas is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center. Here are a selection of his own projects that I especially like.

Slowscan Soundwave is a series of pieces that attempt to create simple physical manifestations of complex physical, biological, and social phenomena. Sound travels through open spaces via the compression and rarefaction (expansion) of air molecules. For example, as the head of a drum vibrates, it pushes and pulls at the air around it. That pushing and pulling creates areas of higher and lower air pressure, which propagate out from the source in waves.

Slowscan Soundwave 1 uses a microphone to sample the ambient air pressure in its environment. It then uses those samples to change the alignment of seventy nine suspended plastic sheets in an attempt to create a visible analog to those constantly changing pressure fronts. Even the simplest of sounds is too complex, and changes too quickly, to be accurately represented by plastic sheets slowly moving this way and that. As a result the patterns formed by Slowscan Soundwave are a crude approximation of those formed in the air. [....]

This is roughly analogous to what happens when you blow, clap, or otherwise introduce a sudden burst of energy into the air. Your action displaces air molecules, causing them in turn to displace their neighboring molecules. This action reverberates though the air, transmitting the energy from your action to distant parts of the space. puff bang reverb is ...

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a collection of computer-generated art works that combines & layers Brian Eno's hand-made slides based on parameters from his ambient music. the program can generate 77 million different artworks automatically. Eno said: "I think of these things as visual music ... intended to occupy television downtime so that, instead of having a dead hole in the wall, you have a living picture."

[links: allsaintsrecords.com & sean.co.uk & amazon.com]

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Hasan Elahi is a conceptual artist whose life is an ongoing work about surveillance. He starts by telling us a chilling story - his detention by the INS at Detroit Airport after returning from a trip from overseas. An immigration officer scanned his passport and blanched, then led Alahi through a maze under the airport to an INS detention facility. As a US citizen, this was pretty odd - he tried to talk with the guards to figure out what was going on. But it all became clearer when the man from the FBI in the dark suit came to talk with him.

The FBI asked him about his whereabouts on September 12, 2001 - he was able to answer the questions by taking out his Blackberry and showing off his meetings. Over the course of questioning, it became clear that the reason he was being questioned was that he had a storage locker in Tampa, where he'd been teaching. Scared by 9/11, the owners of the storage area reported that 'an Arab man had fled on 9/12, leaving explosives in his locker.' There were, of course, no explosives, and he hadn't fled - just the detritus of ordinary life.

Elahi's life for the next few months involved dozens of interviews with the FBI, finally culminating in nine back to back polygraphs, which finally 'cleared' him. He explains that the power dynamic of an FBI interview leads to a very human response - the desire for survival. Elahi says that he could have questioned the legality of the experience, hiring a lawyer--but he realized that there was the possibility that any act of resistance could have gotten him sent to Guantanamo.

For the next few months, every trip Elahi took, he'd call his FBI agent and give the routing ...

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Jordan Crandall:

Under Fire is an ongoing art and research project for the analysis of war and political violence. It explores the organization, representation, and materialization of armed conflicts: their structural, symbolic, and affective dimensions.

The next Under Fire will take place during the period 16 October - 10 December 2006, as a project for the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville.

At the core of this project is an online forum. We invite you to subscribe to the forum and participate in the discussion. To subscribe, send a blank email to: underfire-join@underfire.eyebeam.org

Further information: http://underfire.eyebeam.org

SCHEDULE

OCT 16 - OCT 21
PRELUDE
AMIR PARSA

OCT 22 - OCT 28
WAR INFRASTRUCTURES
ALAIN JOXE
with JOHN ARMITAGE and PAUL N. EDWARDS
Intervention: KELLER EASTERLING (on the global industry of subtraction); RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE (on the act of 'turning a deaf ear')
Insertions: MANUEL DELANDA (on war ecologies); CHALMERS JOHNSON (on military baseworlds)

OCT 29 - NOV 4
VIOLENCE AS SYSTEMIC CONSEQUENCE
LORETTA NAPOLEONI
with JAMES DER DERIAN and NABEEL ZIAD
Intervention: TREVOR PAGLEN (on stealth installations)
Insertion: MAHMOOD MAMDANI (on the legacy of the Cold War and the roots of terror)

NOV 5 - NOV 11
CULTURAL FICTIONS AND SYMBOLIC REALITIES
NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH
with RYAN BISHOP, RADHIKA SUBRAMANIAM, and ANANYA VAJPEYI
Intervention: CALEB WALDORF (on ecologies of suspicion)
Insertions: JEAN BAUDRILLARD (on the irreducible singularity); TERRY EAGELTON (on terror as symbolic form); KLAUS THEWELEIT (on war as symbolic system of desire)

NOV 12 - NOV 18
RELIGION, POLITICS, MEDIA, AND WAR
MELANI MCALISTER
with MARY KELLER, JOHN WILLIAM PHILLIPS, and ANA VALDES
Insertion: TALAL ASAD (on the inseparability of modern politics and religion)

NOV 19 - NOV 25
SECULARISM AND RELIGIOUS REVIVALISM
BARBARA VICTOR
with SABA MAHMOOD and HAREL SHAPIRA
Insertion: JACQUELINE ROSE (on Zionism); ARTHUR KROKER (on born again ...

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The rollerbabe is a long-established trope in 'alternative' pop culture, but artists Anne-Marie Schleiner and Talice Lee take this figure to another level in their collaborative project, 'Riot Gear for Rollarista,' a joint Mobile Gaming and blog-based performance. Their action will begin in Castellon, Spain on Saturday, October 21, 2006, as part of an exhibition at EACC, Espai d'art Contemporani de Castello, from October-January 2007. The artists' initial performance 'will involve three short Machinima (stories told with video game footage) videos that will be beamed from an ultra-light projector stapped to one of [their] head helmets.' Now linked on YouTube, these videos are comprised of samples from the Playstation games Narc and MechWarrior. The artists relish the fun side of their project, while stating that, 'It sort of evolved into a violent (break) dance musical and each video is dedicated to an African or Muslim immigrant who was seriously abused by police in Spain or France.' Their project takes on political and psychogeographic dimensions as they add, 'We, two American women in padded anime/riot gear/something else inspired moda, will be holding Playstation controllers and rollerskating at the same time, (and sometimes dancing), while we coast around projecting onto surfaces of the city.' Documentation of their meta-entertainment/ hyper-performance activities will be posted in an blog that captures the interventionist spirit of their sexy subtexted acrions. - Irene Wu

http://blog.myspace.com/rollartista

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