Tuesday 4 December 2007

How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social — Not Electronic

Thanks to Koji Wakayama for this:

By Noah Shachtman

The future of war began with an act of faith. In 1991, Navy captain Arthur Cebrowski met John Garstka, a captain in the Air Force, at a McLean, Virginia, Bible-study class. The two quickly discovered they shared more than just their conservative Catholic beliefs. They both had an interest in military strategy. And they were both geeks: Cebrowski — who'd been a math major in college, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and an aircraft carrier commander during Desert Storm — was fascinated with how information technologies could make fighter jocks more lethal. Garstka — a Stanford-trained engineer — worked on improving algorithms used to track missiles.

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Monday 3 December 2007

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008

The deadline for Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference has been extended to December 16, 2007. The conference website can be found at:

http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/programs/dtc/elo08.html.

The conference takes place from May 29-June 1, 2008 at Washington State University Vancouver in lovely Vancouver, WA. It is sponsored by both the Electronic Literature Organization and WSUV. Speakers include Mark Amerika, Sue Thomas, and John Cayley. A Media Arts Show will be held in conjunction with the conference and will feature art such as digital sculpture, net art, multimedia installations and performances, electronic music, and the like. Workshops in audio production and reading elit are also scheduled.

It should prove to be an interesting weekend for anyone involved in digital media projection, scholarship, and teaching.

Best,

Dene Grigar, PhD

Sunday 2 December 2007

Has Modern Art Always Been Torture?

By JOHN ROCKWELL

ADOLF HITLER hated Modernist painting. He was convinced it was a Jewish plot (Jewish painters, Jewish dealers, Jewish collectors). But whatever the racial origins of the artists, he thought their works were ugly and perverted.

''It is not the function of art to wallow in dirt for dirt's sake, never its task to paint men only in a state of decomposition, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, to picture hunch-backed idiots as representatives of manly strength,'' he orated at a decadent-art exhibition in Dresden in 1935, as quoted in Frederic Spotts's new book, ''Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.'' ''There really are men,'' he went on, ''who in principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, clouds sulphur-yellow.''

Let us now imagine that Hitler did not die in his Berlin bunker in 1945 but was captured by the Allies and imprisoned. And not imprisoned in any ordinary jail cell, but one tricked up in earnest imitation of what were then the latest Modernist and Surrealist paintings. His cell would be a distorted room like those of Kandinsky and Klee, with geometric drawings on the walls to make him sick to his stomach.

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Friday 30 November 2007

Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds by Jean Francois Augoyard

Never before has the everyday soundtrack of urban space been so cacophonous. Since the 1970s, sound researchers have attempted to classify noise, music, and everyday sounds using concepts such as Pierre Shafer's sound object and R. Murray Schafer's soundscape. Recently, the most significant team of soundscape researchers in the world has been concerned with the effects of sounds on listeners.

In a multidisciplinary work spanning musicology, electro-acoustic composition, architecture, urban studies, communication, phenomenology, social theory, physics, and psychology, Jean-François Augoyard, Henry Torgue, and their associates at the Centre for Research on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON) in Grenoble, France, provide an alphabetical sourcebook of eighty sonic/auditory effects. Their accounts of sonic effects such as echo, anticipation, vibrato, and wha-wha integrate information about the objective physical spaces in which sounds occur with cultural contexts and individual auditory experience. Sonic Experience attempts to rehabilitate general acoustic awareness, combining accessible definitions and literary examples with more in-depth technical information for specialists.

The ability to concentrate our attention on the speech of a specific speaker by disregarding parasite information coming from the surroundings…From the physical perspective, one of the predominant elements is the spatial separation of noise and speech. On the psychophysiological level, selective listening is governed by our capacity to discriminate sounds from different sources - by our capacity to localize in the noise.

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Graffiti Artists Light the Way for Animation

Thanks to Johannes Tolk for this (from Wired):

Gallery: Graffiti Artists Light the Way for Animation
By Jenna Wortham

Cologne-based art collective Lichtfaktor has transformed a simple street science into a lucrative new genre of illuminative art. Check out samples of their signature style of light scribing, which has landed them ad campaigns producing videos and images for companies like Current TV, Philips, Sprint, Speedo and others.

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Wednesday 28 November 2007

INTERREGNUM: In Between States

PSi # 14 conference in Copenhagen 2008, August 20-24

The PSi # 14 conference INTERREGNUM: In Between States takes place at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. It will represent the collaboration of several institutions in the Øresund region, and seek to encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the concepts of vision and visuality within performance studies.
The conference will include areas beyond the traditional theatre studies approach, by emphasizing performance studies in relationship with visual arts. At the same time we wish to stress vision and visuality as areas of interest within disciplines other than art history, visual culture studies and media studies. This interdisciplinary focus on vision and visuality will be captured and developed throughout the conference under the theme of INTERREGNUM: In Between States.

To submit a proposal for the conference or find out more about the event please click the links above.

Please visit the Performance Studies international website http://psi-web.org for more information about the PSi organization.

Limited Language

And thanks to Johannes Tolk for this too:

ltd.

limited Language is a brand which uses the web as a platform for generating writing about visual communication. the idea of the brand in this context is a deliberate conceit - to explore how words, like images, are commodities.

language

cutting, pasting and recycling are all properties of contemporary image culture and are present in the way we generate ideas. thoughts and conversations are cut and pasted from one context to the next, taking on a new significance in each. limited language aims to capture this as a working process for new writing.

expanded

like an image bank of stock photography, anyone can be part of limited language by responding to trigger blogs. once posted, we encourage people to recycle your comments in their own research, as we may collage them in to our own writing, with the aim to publish the resulting articles (any post eventually used will be credited to you).

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