Two recent posts to nettime on the general theme of landscape/nature vs technology/machines:

Landscape Painting of the Information Age or Romanticism in Media Art by Armin Medosch

more on the nature/machines debate by Andreas Broeckmann

ADR- May 13th&19th

I’m beginning to think that our sense of time is rather arbitrary. The way our minds work we organize information to make sense of it. This continues to happen when I sit down to mash-up Art Dirt Redux. Rob says the theme of Chelsea is alienation and obfuscation. I crack a bad joke. Later in our walk we go to the Richard Prince exhibition that has several paintings of bad jokes. While mixing the tracks I overlap our walk through Jasper John and John Simon Jr. What occurs is an overlap discussion of a computer painting program and the structure of Japer John’s paintings, which is also a painting program or logical structure of sorts. As we sit down to eat Rob talks about how his apartment search is becoming a performance piece with him as the audience. I didn’t know we would see the joke paintings yet I cracked a bad joke. The question is how fluid is time?

Green Media Toolshed and Aspiration, two US-based technology NGOs, are convening a strategy meeting of global activists, communications staff, technology experts and foundation staff using cell phones in political campaigns, human rights efforts and field organizing in Toronto, Canada on June 23-25th. The "MobileActive" convergence will develop guides and best practices for campaign planners, and communications and technology staff with leading activists from Africa, South Korea, the Philippines, India, the Ukraine, and the Americas to share practices and technologies.

Blogging and the Arts 2
Sponsored by Rhizome.org at the New Museum
May 16, 2005

There's a lot of art bloggers and they all seem to be related to each other, which is the point of a blog I guess. I knew two of the panelists -- Liza Sabater and Joy Garnett -- so it was a matter of being brought up-to-date on what they were up to, which I could have done by reading their blogs, but it was good to see them in the flesh. Joy recounted the famous "joywar," where she first understand just how powerful syndication and group participation can be when it is focused on a common goal. But then etoy already proved that quite a while ago with "toywar" and, well, so did ACT UP before that. Liza is forging ahead as blog-diva-in-chief and while there is a cultural slant to her work I'm not sure where there is a specific place for art. In any case, she's getting quite a lot accomplished on the political front with a new "Daily Kos" just for New Yorkers: The Daily Gotham.

Matthew Collings reviews the new history of art since 1900 by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh: Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism for the Guardian.

Trebor Scholz and Judith Rodenbeck bring up an interesting topic in their dialogue on Collaborative Mapping (the bittorent video will be available here shortly). It's a topic that needs much more exploration and their's is a start: When will new media be accepted by the art establishment?

Rodenbeck gave a solid, if academic, rundown of historical "participatory" art forms while Scholz gave examples of current practices. Unfortunately not much was resolved, but it's a start towards a much needed discourse, something we hope to nurture here.

We met early afternoon at her Williamsburg loft, overlooking the East River. I had promised to show Nin how to transform her recipe for crepes into pancakes. We proceeded by way of exact measure. The results were questionable. The space between Kent Avenue and the river was remarkably quiet, punctuated by the occasional call of a seagull. We ate crepe-cakes and chatted.

Object-Morph-Video

I started experimenting with morphing objects in 2002 as part of my video performance work Smart House/ Dumb Interactivity. Smart House/ Dumb Interactivity is the theme of my Masters’ Thesis which I recently completed at NYU. The thesis is in two parts; a 40 page theoretical paper and a video performance. The paper can be downloaded as a pdf from paper The video can be viewed via quicktime streaming here videoThe idea in part came from a notion that in the future a smart house would be self-cleaning. When the owner was not at home the house would begin a cleaning cycle where it would move the furniture around, dust, straighten and arrange all the objects, pictures etc. in the home and have the place spic and span when the owner returned. One of the oft repeated complaints of any homemaker is that their cleaning person tears through their home leaving everything askew or putting things back in places where they don’t belong. Assuming that a marketing person and an engineer would get together to solve this complaint for the self cleaning home, I thought about how one might teach a home to return the objects to their rightful place after cleaning. I imagined that a simple set of webcams and mapping software would accomplish this. All the Smart Home need do was take a snapshot before cleaning and moving the objects and furniture around and then later return the objects to their place using the snapshot and image map as a guide.

The Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS) and LACMA present

Institutional Critique and After

Saturday, May 21, 10:30 am-5 pm

LACMA Bing Theater

Institutional Critique and After is an internationally focused program exploring the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke. A key aim of Institutional Critique was the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries. The movement was redeveloped in the 1980s and after by Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Fred Wilson and others who engaged in more interactive and performative interventions; and has been vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization.

The international journal of surveillance studies

http://www.surveillance-and-society.org

'Surveillance and Violent Conflict' - extended deadline

Although we have had a good response to our call for pieces on the theme of 'Surveillance and Violent Conflict', we would still like to encourage submissions in some areas, particularly the military origins of surveillance technologies and their translation into civil applications or vice versa, the intensification of surveillance in the context of "new wars" and sub-national conflicts, and resistance to militarised surveillance.