We have posted about the Vienna scene and the Austrian Abstracts here on previous occasions, but the video work that was central to that movement has generally not been available for viewing online. Therefore, it's with great pleasure we see that Tina Frank has posted some early videos to Vimeo. Let's hope other artists follow her initiative, it would be nice to have an online archive of these early experiments somewhere.

Shown above is the video AKA by Skot, produced for Gasbook 4. Skot was the name used by Tina Frank and Mathias Gmachl for a number of collaborations from 1996 to 2000. Gmachl is also one of the founders of farmersmanual, a collective that was central to the Vienna scene. "Aka" means "red" in Japanese, and the video was made with Image/ine software from Steim, one of the very first softwares to support realtime processing of video on a regular computer.

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Electrofringe 2008 is now calling for proposals for this year's festival from artists, media makers, curators, researchers, playful experimenters, enthusiasts, writers and producers.

Electrofringe is a five day festival of electronic arts and culture occurring as part of This Is Not Art in Newcastle Australia. Electrofringe is dedicated to furthering the creative use of technology and electronic art forms with focus upon skills exchange and development. In 2008 Electrofringe is also including a residency program in Newcastle during the lead up the the festival to allow for the creation of site specific work.

Electrofringe is seeking proposals in the following program areas:

Artist and Project Presentations, Panels, Workshops, Site Specific Residencies, Special Events, Electro-Online (web based art) and Electro-Screen (single channel video based works).

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"Impermanent Markings" at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery
Opening Reception Thursday, March 6 from 5-8pm.
through April 17

This exhibition seeks to define drawing and the vestiges of the artist's hand in very broad terms: where a drawing can be graceful outlines of charred earth or luminous traced gestures; where sinuous computational paths can be drawings; and where scratched lines can express the creative process itself. Mark making will be explored in various ephemeral and impermanent media such as sand, fire, earth, water, code, motion capture, performance, and video.

Guest Curator: Linda Lauro-Lazin, professor, Digital Arts, Pratt Institute

Artists: Jean-Pierre Hebert, Ana Mendieta, Oscar Munoz, The OpenEnded Group-Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser, C.E.B. Reas, Carolee Schneemann, and Camille Utterback

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The Experimental Television Center is pleased to announce Finishing Funds 2008.

Finishing Funds provides media and new media artists with grants up to $2,500 to help with the completion of diverse and innovative moving-image and sonic art projects, and works for the Web and new technologies. Eligible forms include film and video as single or multiple channel presentation, computer-based moving-imagery and sound works, installations and performances, interactive works and works for new technologies, DVD, multimedia and the Web. We also support new media, and interactive performance. Work must be surprising, creative and approach the various media as art forms; all genres are eligible, including experimental, narrative and documentary art works. Individual artists can apply directly to the program and do not need a sponsoring organization. Applicants must be residents of New York State; undergraduate students are not eligible. The application requires a project description, resume and support materials, including a sample of the proposed project. Selection is made by a peer review panel. About $25,000 is awarded each year. Announcement is made in early June.

The program is supported in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a public agency, and by mediaThe foundation.

Postmark Deadline: March 15, 2008

Guidelines and applications are available on the web at: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/ in the ETC News Section and the Grants area or by mail or email.

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http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/galleries/listening_post.aspx

Listening Post is a 'dynamic portrait' of online communication, displaying uncensored fragments of text, sampled in real-time, from public internet chatrooms and bulletin boards. Artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin have divided their work into seven separate 'scenes' akin to movements in a symphony. Each scene has its own 'internal logic', sifting, filtering and ordering the text fragments in different ways.

By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors' postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data.

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Here's some information on a new project of mine. "Google Alert Loop" uses Google's free "Blogger" software and "Google Alerts" to create a webblog that auto-publishes itself based on mentions of specific alert topics sent to the email address specified. The idea is to create a self-perpetuating blog that will publish repeatedly until it begins to publish its own mentions into a continuous cycle. The project attempts to question the utility of these automated systems such as "Google Alerts" and how they are being used to aggregate and polarize opinions across the Internet.

More info on the project here.

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[kate armstrong & michael tippett / grafik dynamo / 2004-2005]

Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist and theorist with a panache for new media powered permutational storytelling. Her work questions the nature of narrative in light of computation, social media and contemporary urban space. She has exhibited widely and is currently en route to Turkey for the March 8th launch of PATH, a bookwork generated by "an anonymous individual living in the city of Montreal between 2005-2007" at the Akbank Art Centre in Istanbul. Above and beyond her creative practice, she is the author of Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, sits on the board at The Western Front artist-run centre and is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts + Technology.

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An obvious starting point in any line of questioning about your work would be the primacy of text. The vast majority of your projects could be described as machines for making fiction and you've explored storytelling through found documents, the blogosphere and social media, and even as a geo-locative phenomena. This list of work more closely resembles a bibliography than any conventional understanding of the word portfolio. Could you talk about your relationship with storytelling and why it is a driving force in your work?

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Climate Clock Global Initiative Call for Ideas

The Climate Clock Global Initiative is seeking ideas from artist-led teams to create a major artwork entitled Climate Clock, which will measure changes in greenhouse gas levels, and be the first in a series of global projects calling attention to climate change. Climate Clock will be an instrument of long-term measurement and will collect data for 100 years. The artwork will be located in downtown San Jose, California, Silicon Valley's city center, and will be a collaboration between an artist-led team composed of artists, international and Silicon Valley engineers and other creative professionals who are working with climate measurement and data visualization. It is anticipated that the budget for the construction of Climate Clock will be between $5 and $15 million, depending upon the scope of the final proposal.

To view the call, visit http://cadre.sjsu.edu/fuse/strategem.html.

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If you've been reading Subtopia for a while now then this may not come as anything new since I've called attention before to these mysterious simulacrums of urban space--I'm talking about those ghostly MOUT (Military Operation on Urban Terrain) training facilities where entire pseudo landscapes and quasi architectures are designed solely for the purposes of being conquered and reconquered, over and over again to help prepare the armed forces for counter-insurgency warfare in cities abroad--life inside a simulative architectural loop; landscape as militaristic prop...

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