Sept on -empyre-: Mobile Media with Paula Roush and colleagues

Sept. 1, 2006

Type: discussion

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SEPT 06 ON -EMPYRE-: MOBILE MEDIA WITH PAULA ROUSH AND COLLEAGUES
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Mobile Media are increasingly present in our daily life because networks are
more flexible and widespread. Currently, connecting is not only about
accessing something that is /not here/, but also about moving along with the
flow. /From here to elsewhere/: beyond browsing (which was the Web
approach), towards physical traces of relational data. Real time maps of
cities allow people to exchange and retrieve information based on its
location. GPS games explore the possibilities of mixing urban and data
landscapes. Mobile phones become moving infotainment platforms. By using
such devices, our culture is shifting even further towards nomadic
procedures that blur the boundaries between frontiers and stable knowledge.
Space becomes an important category, since making sense of this continuously
moving and interweaving collections of text, image, sound, video and binary
depends on an understanding of their trajectories. But there is a dark side
of this moon: such devices allow tracking and surveillance, making their
user more and more exposed. RFID tags are, probably, the most evident
example of a new, distributed panoptic. This month, Paula Roush, Joanna
Callaghan, Luis Silva, Heather Corcoran, Marina Vishmidt and, time
permitting, Lucas Bambozzi will discuss how mobile media is affecting our
culture.

-empyre- mods
http://subtle.net/empyre

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FEATURED GUESTS
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PAULA ROUSH (pt/uk)
Brought up in the favelas of Lisbon, joined the
International Red Corps to access education and research mobile strategies
of display and mediation (http://www.msdm.org.uk). Having travelled
worldwide in high impact rescue operations, she is currently on reserve to
integrate the portuguese troops in the south lebanon UN settlements> her aim
is to develop a locative media lab with open access to satellite
photography tools and other geo-sensitive data across the arab world. To
counterbalance her interest for the visual panopticon, she is now
developing: what are we doing whats happening to us what needs to be done I
prefer not to, a collective archive of tactical audio that will be broadcast
during ear appeal at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse
(http://kunsthalle.wuk.at/7e/frame.htm) and arphieldRecordings, a podcast of
the London undeground (http://www.odeo.com/channel/85358)

LUCAS BAMBOZZI
His works have been shown in solo and collective shows in more than 30
countries. For many years he has coordinated activities in Brazil related to
video and media-art such as the Electronic Art Festival.ForumBHZvideo, an
electronic art festival and the video and media art department at the Museum
of Image and Sound of Sao Paulo. He took part in early experiences on
web-based art in Brazil [at Casa das Rosas gallery he created a pioneering
net-art lab in 1995 and curated the exhibition Arte Suporte Computador,
where Eduardo Kac presented his perfomance Time Capsule]. In the last three
years he presented video-installations and interactive work in exhibitions
such as the World Wide Video Festival, the 7th Havana Biennial and the 25th
Sao Paulo International Biennial. He still makes single-channel videos [with
the same enthusiasm he had at the end of the 80's], as well as documentary
films, web projects and live-video performance presentations. He is
currently a MPhil candidate in the CaiiA-STAR Program (University of
Plymouth - School of Computing). Recent exhibitions took place at Share
Festival in Italy <www.toshare.it>, at Videoformes in France
<www.videoformes.com> with a large retrospective of his single-channel
videos and at HTTP Gallery in UK/London <www.http.uk.net>. His most recent
curatorial projects were: SonarSound (2004) at Instituto Tomie Ohtake;
Digitofagia (2004) at MIS, Nokiatrends (2005) at Anhembi. In 2006 Lucas is
curating the Motomix Art & Music Festival at MIS/Mube, which involves a
series of debates, multimedia installations and screenings programs.

MARINA VISHMIDT
Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer, researcher and editor. She is
interested in materialist aesthetics and the political economics of
cultural production, with particular emphasis on art as vanishing
mediator of both social change and the reinforcement of the commodity
form. She is currently focusing on information-based art, situated
technologies, urbanism, feminist media arts, conceptual art, Marxian
theory, temporality, artists' moving image, and errant modernisms. She
is the editor of the NODE.London Reader: surveying art, technologies
and politics (NODE.London, 2006), and is a frequent contributor to Mute
magazine and MetaMute website, Untitled magazine, and a few other
publications, including the second Producta Reader (Barcelona, 2007) and
Art and Social Change (Tate and After All Publishing, 2007). She also
publishes short fiction in small journals such as Guestroom and
Ontophonie. She recently gave a workshop on domestic labour, free
software and value production at Digitales, the bi-annual event for
women and digital technologies organised in Brussels by Interface 3 and
Constant. Other current projects include volunteering for Cinenova
(Europe's only women's film and video distributor) and working in the
local 'arthouse' video rental shop. She is hoping to get back into
film/video production next year.

JOANNA CALLAGHAN
Joanna Callaghan is an Australian living in London. She occupies various
roles as artist, curator, producer and investigator. Recent projects include
Mobile Dream Telling, an interactive performance shown during Sydney Design
06, Show me the Monet, a radio discussion program concerning the relation
between art and the economy (www.showmethemonet.org.uk
<http://www.showmethemonet.org.uk> ), KISSS - Kinship International Strategy
on Surveillance and Suppression, an international meta-performance project
(www.elastic.org.uk/KISSS
) and Artists vs Hollywood an international touring program of films and
video. She is director of heraclitus, a curatorial agency
(http://www.heraclitus.org,uk) and lectures at the University of
Bedfordshire (http://www.beds.ac.uk)

LUIS SILVA
Luis Silva studied Social Sciences and is now completing his MA on
Communication, Culture and Information Technologies and finishing a research
project on net art. He has curated a few new media exhibitions, namely
Online - Portuguese Netart 1997-2004, Source Code and Sound Visions. In 2006
he created the Lisbon node of the Upgrade!, an international network of
gatherings concerning art, technology and culture. He is now developing and
curating lx_2.0, Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporanea's online program. Silva has
written several reviews and texts addressing the issues of art and
technology for various publications, namely Turbulence's
networked_performance, Rhizome and newmediafix.

HEATHER CORCORAN
Heather Corcoran (CA/UK) is an independant producer/curator as well as
Emergent Technologies Coordinator at SPACE Media Arts
(http://www.spacestudios.org.uk) in London. Her current project at SPACE
Media Arts, Tagged, is a year long programme centred around Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) that has commissioned new work from four artists
culminating in an exhibition opening in October '06. Recently she has
curated the game hack exhibition Controller at InterAccess Electronic Media
Arts Centre in Toronto (http://www.interaccess.org), and worked with
artist/programmer collective Goto10 (http://goto10.org). She is also an
organizer of NODE.London (http://www.nodel.org).