All over Europe new working tools, ideas and support mechanisms of and for cultural initiatives have popped up during the past weeks. Some of them might be temporary, some might be here to stay. Some of them are developed by you, a lot of them by others. All of them try addressing our ‘new normal’. But how normal is this new situation?
We invite you to join our webcare sessions: Speaking in a community of care and with peers from all over Europe to exchange on new realities, share fears and dreams, listen to and support one another.
In this third webcare session we will together discuss if and how the newly formed grassroots solidarity movements might find an international equivalent?
Hosts Shelagh Wright and Peter Jenkinson are cultural change agents working locally andinternationally with activists in culture, development and progressive politics, including with Reshape, Laboratories of Care and Compass UK.
Zoomed In is a new virtual festival celebrating photography and architecture.
The festival will take part from 21st-24th April 2020, and is one of the official partners of the Dezeen Virtual Design Festival.
Zoomed In is organised by London-based architectural photographer Luke O’Donovan, kindly supported by an incredibly generous network of guest curators and event participants. Please direct any enquiries to Luke at contact@lukeodonovan.co.uk
For updates on the festival, please check our Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. You can also subscribe to Luke’s email newsletter below for updates on Zoomed In and other architectural photography projects.
On April 23 New York-based artist Ellen Pearlman will give a public artist talk about the practices of working with artificial intelligence and its use in contemporary art. The event is organized in frames of the American Arts Incubator program.
Is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go? Can artificial intelligence be fascist? These are just some of the complex questions raised by the work of Dr. Ellen Pearlman in her brainwave and AI operas Noor and AIBO. In this artists presentation Ellen will show excerpts from both operas and highlight their technological breakthroughs. She will also present her work as Director of ThoughtWorks Arts – a global research and innovation lab at the forefront of new developments in emerging technologies that embraces the unique perspective artists can help foster to understand the implications and impacts technological developments have on society.
Dr. Ellen Pearlman is a New York based new media artist, critic, curator and educator. As a Zero1 American Arts Incubator/U.S. State Department artist she will be leading workshops in the Ukraine on artificial intelligence and art. A Fulbright World Learning Specialist in Art, New Media and Technology, she is a Senior Research Assistant Professor at RISEBA University in Riga, Latvia, and on faculty at Parsons/New School University in New York. Ellen received her PhD at the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong City University where her PhD thesis was awarded highest global honors by Leonardo LABS Abstracts.
The talk will be held online on IZOLYATSIA facebook page and ZOOM in English with simultaneous translation to Ukrainian.
As the majority of the universities and academies are closed, leaders and lecturers find themselves having to convert their courses to digital formats with immediate effect. During this one-hour conversation, we invite ELIA members to share their thoughts and experiences with their international colleagues. Guest speaker Dimitrios Vlachopoulos will explore the various implications of a speedy transition to teaching and learning online and look at practical ways arts educators can improve their practice for the future. We will also touch upon the social changes and societal challenges that COVID-19 has created for higher education in the arts, staff and students.
Dimitrios Vlachopoulos has a PhD in distance education and instructional technology. His research focuses on new and emerging pedagogies, instructional design, digital transformation, teachers’ training and quality assurance. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) with over 80 publications in books and peer-reviewed journals. He is currently Program Manager with “EdTech for Social Change” at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
During Virtual PIE, we encourage you to join us online and share your experiences and concerns regarding the impact of the coronavirus on your institution.Aparajita Dutta (Head of International Affairs at The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and PIE Coordinator) outlines for us what are the main challenges that institutions are facing during this coronavirus crisis, particularly from the perspective of international offices.We will be looking at what is the impact that this situation has and will have on internationalisation.Maria Jaber (International Partnerships Head at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Italy) presents the approach and the solutions that her institution has implemented to face the current situation, specifically looking at international students inquiries and showcasing the NABA Open Day Online.
These and many other questions are raising up these days: * How should we deal with the current crisis? * How should we ensure the wellbeing of students and staff? * How can we run exams online? * How can the PIE community help each other in this situation?
Our sector and members are under intense pressure at this point in time. Teaching has moved online, students and freelancers have lost part-time jobs, events, projects, performances, exams have been postponed or cancelled.
*Recent developments in response to COVID-19* *EU Emergency Measures* The EU is adopting various new measures to ensure the immediate release of funds to help member states deal with the effects of the current pandemic. Although the measures are general, we recognise that it is vital the cultural sector remains a priority within that framework. *Joint Letter initiated by Culture Action Europe* Earlier this month ELIA Executive Director Maria Hansen signed on behalf of the ELIA network, a joint letter initiated by Culture Action Europe. Sent to Commissioner Gabriel and Members of the Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture (DG EAC), the letter contains a list of proposed ways to deal with the consequences of COVID-19 on Creative Europe and the European Cultural and Creative Sectors. Proposed support measures include: – Extension of eligibility period of Creative Europe projects that had to cancel or postpone events and other activities due to the crisis. – Eligibility for compensation of costs already made for planned events and projects that had to be cancelled. – Allowing physical events to be replaced with other formats and activities more suited to the current situation. – “Provide the possibility to apply for additional funding to mitigate losses and support the rescheduling of events where appropriate”.
*Response from Commissioner Mariya Gabriel* CAE received a swift response from Commissioner Gabriel. In her letter she outlines the following core points: – She agrees that there is a need to ‘urgently implement measures to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 amongst Creative Europe beneficiaries and beyond’ – The Commission and Croatian presidency of the Council are organising a summit of European Ministers of Culture to discuss these issues and how to move forward together. – DG EAC and EACEA are exploring extra flexibility measures regarding ongoing Creative Europe projects. These are good signs however ELIA will continue to campaign alongside others to ensure these good intentions are turned into practical measures. *Letter and Open Petition initiated by Green CULT MEPs signed by ELIA* Supported also by Culture Action Europe this letter demands immediate and unbureaucratic initiatives such as the following: – Offer financial aid to the Cultural and Creative Sectors and the whole cultural ecosystem, including through the Corona Response Investment Initiative, proportionally to the size of the CCS in our economy. – Ensure access to unemployment and other social benefits for all cultural professionals, with particular attention to freelancers, self-employed and others in atypical forms of work, including creators coming from cultural minorities, and grant them compensation for the discontinuation of income. – Provide emergency aid to cultural professionals, especially the independent ones, as well as to small and medium-sized cultural companies, for example in the form of tax relief, loans, (micro-)credits, compensation for losses and non-recoverable costs.
Alan Butler led a tour of the game environment of Grand Theft Auto V, focusing on topics of representation and simulation as well as the role of the in-game photographer. Viewers were able to follow the artist in his critical analysis of the game logics, and their social, political, and economic implications.
Do you also always have several windows open on your screen? Does this look more like a hidden object game than a work surface? And does this sometimes result in exciting combinations?
In this workshop we explore the creative possibilities of screenshots. We experiment with the physical and digital space they open up and create exciting picture-in-picture or even room-in-room collages. For this we will use the video conferencing tool Jitsi.
You need: paper, pens, tape, objects for physical experiments in the room, computer with internet access.
The workshop is led by Anna Kälin, computer scientist and art educator, and Patricia Huijnen, art educator HeK.
The workshop starts at the given time – online via video chat. The link to the video conference will be sent to you personally via e-mail after registration. Gather the material and off you go!
Dezeen announces Virtual Design Festival, the world’s first online design festival, taking place from Wednesday 15 April onwards.
With much of the world in lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, the global architecture and design community is, along with many other sectors, facing unprecedented challenges.
Virtual Design Festival (www.virtualdesignfestival.com) is a platform that will bring the architecture and design world together to celebrate the culture and commerce of our industry, and explore how it can adapt and respond to extraordinary circumstances.
We will host a rolling programme of online talks, lectures, movies, product launches and more. It will complement and support fairs and festivals around the world that have had to be postponed or cancelled and it will provide a platform for design businesses, so they can, in turn, support their supply chains.
We are inviting individuals, companies and organisations to get in touch to explore how we can help each other. We would like to team up with other architecture and design publications as well.
While we cannot pretend that these are normal times, we can at least explore alternative ways of sharing design, helping others, coming together as a global community and doing business.
How Virtual Design Festival will work
From 15 April onwards, we will host a rolling programme of online talks, lectures, movies, product launches and more. Some of these activities will replace those that we would have hosted at fairs and festivals around the world, but we also want to explore new and innovative formats, specially tailored for the digital sphere and for our locked-down world.
We are particularly interested in hearing from technology companies and developers who could help us develop innovative formats to help connect the global architecture and design community and help them work more effectively in the current situation.
Museums are still closed. School is still cancelled. The world is still shut off and we’re still stuck indoors. The toilet paper is sold out and we change our Zoom backgrounds more often than we change our clothes. And Twitter…we won’t even go there. While everything is still cancelled, why not make our online show MORE?
Silicon Valet is pleased to present the re-opening of Well Now WTF?, an online exhibition curated by Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, and Wade Wallerstein—now with MORE WTF! The exhibition was designed and installed by Kelani Nichole.
Join us for a virtual opening party on May 2nd from 2PM – 4PM EST at http://wellnow.wtf/. We’ll be live streaming on Twitch, and (as always) kicking it in the chatroom.
With everything unrelenting, we continue to ask ourselves: Well Now WTF? We still have no answer, but we’re having a great time making GIFs. We’ve shown that we can come together and use the creative tools at our disposal to build a space for release outside of anxiety-inducing news cycles and banal social media feeds.
Well Now WTF? is as much an art show as a community gathering. Since the initial opening on April 4 and continuing past the virtual re-opening party on May 2nd, we will hold online events on the site itself and via Twitch where people can gather and talk as they would normally for a physical exhibition.
Well Now WTF? is available online at www.wellnow.wtf. The exhibition is free and open to the public, with a $5 suggested, pay-what-you-wish entry that will be redistributed to the artists contributing work.
Donors who contribute $100 or more to Well Now WTF? Will be rewarded with an advanced look at an unpublished GIF by Nicolas Sassoon, Rick Silva, or Wednesday Kim delivered directly to their inbox. These gifs are exclusive and available only to donors. All money will go to the artists in the exhibition. We will be releasing new easter egg GIFS for donors periodically—collect them all!
The exhibition is accompanied by essays by Wade Wallerstein and Seth Barry Watter.
Images & press information from the exhibition (including the original exhibition release) are available here. Please credit artists listed in file names when using.
Silicon Valet is a virtual parking lot for expanded internet practice, serving as a hub for the global spread of artists working with the internet and digital materials. Silicon Valet also hosts a digital arts residency and an online exhibition program.
