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.
The seventh Annual Conference of the School of Performing Arts (University of Malta) considers knowledge in relation to performing arts practices. More specifically, the conference aims to explore, question, and discuss the different types of ‘knowledges’ that emerge from or are involved in performing arts practices including creation, production, performance, and spectatorship. The conference’s focus on performing arts practices—dance, theatre, and music—acknowledges an affinity with Performance Studies, which originated in American universities as a new ‘knowledge formation’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1999) with the aim to integrate performance into interdisciplinary scholarship and offer a counterbalance to the emphasis on texts and literature within cultural studies. The conference focus on practices is also strongly connected to developments originating around the same time for artistic research in the context of European higher education. The debates about artistic research have posited basic questions about the constitution of knowledge and its valorisation (Borgdorff 2012). The conditions and opportunities for artistic research in higher education continue to evolve, but many questions about its status and relevance, in connection to knowledge production in particular, remain. The aim of Performance Knowledges is to offer an opportunity to refresh some of these discussions and debates through a focus on performing arts from the perspectives of transmission, composition, and praxis. This is a chance to include research cultures working at the borderline with the social and cognitive sciences, where the vantage point of the performing arts should provoke a robust discussion of embodied and relational forms of knowledge. It also encourages participants to rethink how in composition and transmission processes knowledge is diversified into different types, including tacit knowledge—with emphasis on process and experience (Polanyi 1958). This should include addressing the question of skill—which is so often overlooked in academic debates about the subject. We are looking for presentations that engage with questions of varieties, generation, transmission, and implications of performance knowledges. We are looking for inter- and multidisciplinary approaches that might contribute to the analysis of ways of knowing in the performing arts, and to the scholarly study of collaborative encounters between directors, choreographers, composers, performers, designers, and spectators. We are particularly interested in alternative and diverse conceptualisations of practice-generating knowledges, as well as knowledge-generating practices, Presentation topics might include, but are not limited to, issues and themes of performance knowledges in relation to practices, methodologies, and technologies. We welcome submissions across a number of areas that address the multifaceted understandings of knowledge as emergent in theatre, dance, and music, including but not limited to:
the artist’s perspective on languaging and documenting practices
embodied cognition and moving beyond dualism in the practice of the performing arts
problematising hegemonic knowledges, implications for performing arts
training processes and compositional strategies as intangible heritage
practice turn in contemporary theory, communities and ecologies of practice
habits, skills and contexts for tacit knowledge acquisition and transmission
perspectives on and from diverse atypical modes and mixed abilities
historical, analytical, and theoretical understandings of embodiment in the performing arts
case studies of creators, performers, spectators, and other agents of performance
technologisation and the impact of digitisation on performance practices
translation, transformation and/ or appropriation of performance forms
New media art curator Klio Krajewska gave a talk about the prevalence of digital culture in contemporary life. During the talk works by the following artists will be presented and discussed: !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Disnovation.org, Guli Silberstein, Winnie Soon, Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, Shota Yamauchi and others. Klio is a member of the curatorial team of WRO Art Center and the WRO Media Art Biennale. She is also Head of New Media Arts at Watermans Arts Centre in London and associated with the Parisian environment of sound art.
Adnan Hadzi presents thoughts on ‘mindless futurism’ at the Hacking the Computable symposium.
Zur ästhetischen Kritik digitaler Rationalität
Eine Tagung der Staatlichen Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Stuttgart/Campus Gegenwart, der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Ästhetik und dem Forum Digitalisierung der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft in Kooperation mit der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, der Staatlichen Akademie der bildenden Künste Stuttgart und der Université de Fribourg.
Tatsächlich scheinen mit der digitalen Wende, dem ‘digital disrupture’ sämtliche gesellschaftliche und auch kulturellen Prozesse in ein dichtes Netz von Codierungen und Kontrollen eingesponnen, die ebenfalls die Dinge (die ‚smart‘ werden) als auch die Körper und ihre Identität und Integrität wie das Ästhetische selbst und die Künste betreffen. Digitalisierung und Algorithmisierung tangieren im Sinne entscheidungslogischer Programmarchitekturen mittels Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, stochastischer Zufallsprozesse Denken und Kreativität als vermeintlich letzte Domänen eines ,Anderen’ der Computation und genuines Residuum der conditio humana.Die Vermutung liegt nahe, dass diese ‚letzten‘ Entscheidungen über den Ort des „Menschlichen“ sowie das, was die Rolle von Ethik und Verantwortlichkeit wie gleichermaßen der kritischen Urteilskraft sein kann, auf dem Feld des Ästhetischen ausgetragen werden – ob als spezifisch ästhetische Anmutung des Technischen und Ökonomischen oder in künstlerischen Formen von Erkenntnis und Kritik. Hier geht es um Möglichkeiten einer Widerständigkeit gegenüber der vermeintlich restlosen Usurpation des Realen durch Algorithmik und Digitalisierung. Die Tagung Hacking the Computable. Zur ästhetischen Kritik digitaler Rationalität versteht sich in erster Linie als Diskussionsplattform, die diese und ähnliche Fragen zu untersuchen, kritisch zu hinterfragen und – möglichst kontrovers – zu überprüfen sucht.Veranstalter*innen: Judith Siegmund, Natascha Adamowsky, Dieter Mersch, Emmanuel Alloa, Daniel Feige
In the framework of Hyperemployment, the symposium AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS! wants to explore a contradiction implicit in the increasing automation of work: is this process, which should apparently open up a new age of free time, no labour and universal basic income, instead turning humans into software agents, invisible slaves of the machines? Welcomed as a curse by the Luddites a tthe very beginning of the industrial age, throughout the 20th century,automation did not destroy human labour, but profoundly changed itsorganisation on a global scale. In the late-20th century, technological innovations brought automation to a brand new level, accelerating the shift toward a post-industrial economic model. Today, with many jobs previously run by humans becoming fully automated, the dream– or nightmare – of a post-work society seems closer than ever; andyet, at a closer look, automation in its current form isn’t destroying human labour. Rather, it is making it invisible.
Domenico Quaranta Portraying the Invisible Crowd Throughout history, portraying workers has often been a step into recognising their existence, allowing them the dignity tobe considered as a subject, as well as the representatives of a “class”. Digging into the research for the show, Hyperemployment’s curator Domenico Quaranta will offer atour through various artistic efforts to portray online workers,from Chinese Gold Farmers to scan-ops, from gig workers to online content moderators.
KEYNOTE Elisa Giardina Papa Notes on Post-Work: Free Time and the Human Infrastructures that Sustain Automation and Artificial Intelligence Most of the academic and political discourse on post-workhas focused on the relationship between automation andfree time. That is, it has posited that automation has theemancipatory potential to free us all from work: to reducenecessary working hours or at least to devote ourselvesto more intellectually rewarding jobs (immaterial labour).What is not fully convincing about this approach is that it isgrounded in a hierarchical separation between machinesand humans. What is missing is the acknowledgment of thehuman infrastructure that sustains automation and artificialintelligence. The invisible, precarious, alienated, low-paidand offshored workforce that automation requires in orderto function properly. These workers and their tasks are thefocus of this talk.
LECTURE PERFORMANCE Sebastian Schmieg I Will Say Whatever You Want In Front Of A Pizza, 2017 I Will Say Whatever You Want In Front Of A Pizza is aspeculative Prezi (a presentation software) that exploresdigital labour, the amalgamation of humans and software,and the possibility of interventions inside algorithmic systems.Narrated from the perspective of a cloud worker, the Prezivideo presents digital workers as software extensions. Theubiquitous network and the computerisation of everythinghave not only blurred the lines between bots and people –supposedly autonomous programs are sometimes people whohave to act as if they were software; this development hasalso made it very easy for everyone to hire, programme andretire humans as part of any workflow: bodies and minds thatcan be plugged in, rewired and discarded as one sees fit.
BOOK PRESENTATION Silvio Lorusso EntreprecariatEntreprecariat (Krisis Publishing, 2018; Onomatopee, 2019) explores and maps out the current entrepreneurial ideology from a precarious perspective. The Entreprecariat indicates a reality where change is natural and healthy, whatever it maybring. A reality populated by motivational posters, productivity tools, mobile offices and self-help techniques. A reality in which a mix of entrepreneurial ideology and widespread precarity is what regulates professional social media, online marketplaces for self-employment and crowdfunding platforms for personal needs. The result? A life in permanent beta, with sometimes tragic implications.
ROUND TABLE Michael Mandiberg Sašo Sedlaček Sanela Jahić Domenico Quaranta – moderator Art Making in the Age of Automation How does the increasing automation of labour affect artistic practice, on all the levels of content, process and form? How is it affecting the present society and our vision of the future?What can art do to deal with the increasing fragmentation of human labour and its disappearance from visibility, and give it back its presence and dignity? Taking off from their own work and from the statements of other participants in the symposium, the artists involved in the round table will attempt to offer an answer to these and other questions.
It’s that time of the year for us to meet and have a laugh, drop some tracks, have a jam and eat some healthy food together. Join us in our festive season get together!On Saturday, 4th January 2020, we celebrate a busy year and the start of a more busy and sure more exciting year 2020.We will discuss exciting new developments and opportunities ahead of us plus you will get to meet new members of the EMM team.Various dj’s and friends will be invited to play, you can bring your own laptop or records to play too!Plus we will be bringing some music rig with us too, so please do not hesitate to bring your own synth or drum machine for a music jam with us.
FRAGMENTA book launch “FRAGMENTA – Art and Life in Public Space 2013 – 2018”. You get to see the overview of all events, a mind-blowing selection of Maltese headlines (we wished the headlines extended to 2019 at this point) and celebrate art and life. You can buy copies of the book if you missed the indiegogo campaign. Or collect your preordered ones.
SUNDAY Dec 8th, 5 – 10pm at MAORI, Valletta.
With FRAGMENTA Artists: Jon Banthorpe, Gina Levante, Adrian Abela, Kris Van Dessel, Goele de Bruyn, Aksel Høgenhaug, Ritty Tacsum, Samir Ramdani, Jagna Ciuchta, Bettina Hutschek, Aiden Celeste, Stefan Nestoroski, Alexandra Pace, Hassan Khan, Teresa Sciberras, Roxanne Gatt, Erik Gong, Sandra Zaffarese, Aaron Bezzina, Christof Zwiener, Sonya Schönberger, Charlie Cauchi, Erik Smith, Darrin Zammit-Lupi, Karen Irmer, Anna Block, Sarah Maria Scicluna, Ryan Falzon, Sharon Kivland, Pippin Barr, Carl Gent, David Pisani, Karine Rougier, Kay Turner, Mario Asef
Designed by Jon Banthorpe, printed by LONGO.
The event is free of charge and open to all.
Come any time between 5pm and 10pm. Bring your protest posters.
