Ha. Made my debut on ArtCast (see 'ArtCast feat. etoy') - my first actually audible contribution to the Swiss art podcast, at last, after helping out behind the scenes for quite some time now.

But heck, I don't like hear me talk or -even worse!- laugh :)

Thursday etoy are officially presenting their monstrous new project Mission Eternity - Crossing the Deadline, a « technology-driven cult of the dead, an interactive work of art that crosses the ultimate boundary » (announcement).

See you there.

A little later we're going to use the temporary etoy base for a PHPUG event nerdfest as well.

See also: Chregu, Villö, Technorati.

ArtCast is up and running!




Patrik and Barbara started their barefaced and broke-from-beginning arts-and-culture podcast with a first show from VOLTAshow, a new contemporary arts platform running parallel to LISTE and ART (which some say should be f*cking boycotted).

So congratulations to ArtCast, I really did enjoy the show, it's direct and bottom-up just like podcasting is supposed to be. Good job, and I guess we can expect it to become better and better over the coming shows - the two obviously know what they're doing.

Yesterday at the Viper conference: Piotr Cofta from the Trusting Technologies Group at MLE Dublin.
He's a computer scientist, previously worked for Nokia and now works on a device called rCube, a cheap 3x3x3cm RFID reader/writer that's supposed to help equalize the RFID information balance and allows for many kinds of creative usage.
No slides online, but there's the TT position paper.

I've been thinking a while about how the expressive means of the Semantic Web could be used for art, how those abstract but powerful mechanisms and vocabularies could be used for artistic reflection on this new meta-medium.
I don't actually have too good an overview on the net art scene, perhaps there are already lots of folks playing and producing? Hello, is there anybody?
Anyway, I guess I might have found something at Viper Basel today: GeneralNews - Ein Plädoyer für die Abstraktion by Daniela Alina Plewe et al., a web-based software using the Princeton WordNet for semantic alteration of text on the axis abstract<->specific:

General News is an interactive metabrowser which substitutes in real-time the words on websites. The substitutions may be synonym, abstract or more specific than the original expressions. By these variations new descriptions of the world and descriptions of "new" worlds are created.

More, please!

Pictures above are from the Viper exhibition that opened today in Basel, which is the self-proclaimed "swiss-made internationel trend barometer" and one of the world's leading new media art events, including an exhibition, a little conference and quite some events at different locations in the city.
The event seems to be even a bit poshier than last time I went, but I can't tell much about it yet, I just quickly strolled through the (free) exposition tonight. There's lots of screen, of course (see topmost image), some really good (IMHO) installations and presentations (e.g genoTyp) and of course video art both of the instantly charming and the rather inaccessible kind (second and third image).
I hope to meet Miss Strebel and Mister Lovink Friday or Saturday and perhaps to listen a bit to what's being discussed at the Viper Conference titled "GENERATIONS ON THE MOVE".
But alas, I have work waiting for me this weekend. Let's see if I can be a good boy and to my homework before going out to play :)

I was too busy (girl, company, etc) to report about it, but last week I had the luck to attend a soirée about and by Woody Vasulka, the video legend and founder of the legendary kitchen. His mastery of the medium is really admirable, the corpus of this works is both amazingly broad and deep, the early studies on the lowest level of the video machinery, magnetics and stuff, were indeed striking.
He spoke a bit about his ongoing project, OASIS ("Open Archiving System with Internet Sharing"), a large-scale distributed media art conservation project he leads with Jürgen Enge, formerly at ZKM, but soon at HGKZ. But that highly interesting project does not seem to have a website (?).

lifeClipper in action!

I'm busy right now, some comments regarding the installation follow tonight, in the meantime you might want to follow the above link and make an appointment for your own trip through the defamiliarized St.Alban neighbourhood.

Posting from Unternehmen Mitte with Barbara Strebel.. ( whole story follows later today)

(image from http://irational.org/tm/art_of_work/)