ANAT Makerblog now online #fabrication #3D #opensource #geekgirl

maker-blog's-snowflake

The rapidly evolving fields of personal fabrication, digital manufacturing and 3D printing are changing manufacturing and design - taking it from the factory floor to your work place or home. Desktop 3D printers, open source software and print-on-demand companies are offering artists and creative practitioners opportunities to not only prototype their creations but also to manufacture and sell their work on a scale to suit demand. As part of its ongoing research and development program, ANAT has acquired and assembled a flat-pack desktop 3D printer ” the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic “. ANAT’s Makerblog will document experiments with the Thing-O-Matic, provide information and links about 3D printing and other personal manufacturing techniques and discuss how these technologies are being harnessed by creative practitioners.

http://makerblog.anat.org.au

Ted Nelson with #geekgirl mug

For more info on Ted’s work go to:

Ted Nelson with #geekgirl mug

For a video snapshot of Ted Nelson’s challenge to computing norms see:

Ted Nelson on Pernicious Computer Traditions: http://bit.ly/LlmpI

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space: http://bit.ly/FM0qu

www.sisr.net
www.apo.org.au
www.creative.org.au
www.inside.org.au

A Public Lecture from Ted Nelson #Melbourne #xanadu #geekgirl

geekgirl

The Institute for Social Research in conjunction with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation are delighted to present a public lecture from information technology pioneer and visionary Ted Nelson.

Monday, 4 April
Time: 7.00 – 9.00 pm
Venue: State Library of Victoria, Village Roadshow Theatrette

This is a free event but Bookings are essential. Contact isradmin@swin.edu.au indicating the number of tickets required.

The computer world could be completely different A Public Lecture From Ted Nelson

Fish, they say, aren’t aware of water. Most people, including computer scientists, don’t notice the hidden assumptions and traditions that have structured today’s computer world and digital documents. These assumptions push the real problems into the laps of users and programmers.  Almost nobody notices the consequences of this locked cosmology.  While there is no right or wrong computer world; what is wrong is that there is only one computer world, with no other choices.

We will consider some alternatives.

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Theodor Holm Nelson is an American designer, generalist, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms “hypermedia” and “hypertext” in 1963, and is also credited with first use of the words micropayment, transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and dildonics.  He is the most important computing visionary of our time.  The main thrust of his work has been to create a different kind of electronic document which allows many forms of connection, instead of the “paper simulation” of Word, PDF and the World Wide Web. Nelson founded Project Xanadu in 1960, a project that has inspired a whole generation of computer programmers, hobbyists and developers. The effort is documented in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines and the 1981 Literary Machines. He has just published an autobiography, Possiplex.

For a video snapshot of Ted Nelson’s challenge to computing norms see:

Ted Nelson on Pernicious Computer Traditions: http://bit.ly/LlmpI

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space: http://bit.ly/FM0qu

www.sisr.net
www.apo.org.au
www.creative.org.au
www.inside.org.au

Ted will also be giving this lecture in Sydney on Wednesday 6 April:

http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2011/ted_nelson.shtml

Elusive Light exhibition #WA #wabi-sabi #arts #geekgirl

Elusive Light by Stephen Armitstead & Lia McKnight…Exploring many meanings of the word light, using objects, photography, video and sound.

Exhibition runs until 10 April 2011. Artist talk 2nd April.
Heathcote Museum & Gallery (Western Australia)

elusive-light

This exhibition of work by Lia McKnight and Stephen Armitstead is about turning glimpses into long looks. It is about finding beauty in the fragile and transitory, and then trying to hold it for long enough so everyone can see it. It is about revealing the contradictions between our aesthetic observations and their ultimate expression as art. At the heart of all art practice that gives form to ideas there are contradictions They are the intractable relationship of opposites that are at the centre of our attempts to unravel what we observe and then explain to the world.

Light is at the heart of this exhibition, but not the constant, steady illumination that we associate with naturalistic painting. In naturalism the assumption is that the world is stable and ordered and that art’s great task is to reveal that to us. Naturalism emphasises the solidity of objects, their permanence, and by implication, their authority; but as soon as one grasps the artful contradictory fiction of naturalism – for the world isn’t stable and permanent – we are free to explore other ways in which the complexities of the world can reveal themselves. This exhibition encourages us to look at the world differently, to appreciate the seemingly inconsequential and to gain pleasure in unravelling how we have learned to look. It is in this way that we can re-imagine how the world can be understood.

The artists have drawn widely on a set of experiences about ideas and materials that are contemporary, but a contradiction of art making is that the present can be understood by looking backwards over its shoulder at what happened in the past. A thousand years ago in China, the poet and critic Su Shi wryly observed the futility of trying to understand the value of art in terms of how it did or didn’t resemble the world.

For Su and others like him, the world had to be transformed by the artist through a work of art that revealed how the artist had been touched, physically and emotionally, by the world. This is a contradiction as big as naturalism’s but it gives us another perspective on how to understand how McKnight and Armitstead are working. McKnight has been drawn to the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-sabi where beauty is found in the fragility and transience of the materials and the combination of hopefulness and sadness.

Japanese manufactures ‘net’ for space junk #spacetravel #geekgirl

Japan’s JAXA space agency, is apparently working with a fishing net manufacturer to make a steel wire net for collecting space junk floating in orbit around the earth. The net will be several kilometers wide and after a “catch” of junk is made, it will be electrified by an attached control box, causing the whole mess to fall back to earth and be burned up upon re-entry. JAXA is still some years away from making anything solid from the project, but needless to say, the roughly 320,000 pieces of junk exceeding 1cm in diameter and in orbit at the moment is causing some risks to space travelers and someone needs to clear it. Clean-tech takes on a new dimension. (Source: http://on.msnbc.com/gnjjKX )

Awesome circle cover #music #indiemusic #sydney

The Rabbit is eating the Snake.

http://ilovecircle.com/

Public Lecture: Robotic Art as technical & aesthetic innovation & activism #robots #geekgirl

Professor Simon Penny (University of California, Irvine)
60 Years of Situated Machines – Robotic Art as a site for technical and aesthetic innovation, activism and intervention
Presented by the Digital Cultures Program and the Centre for Social Robotics at the University of Sydney.

Time: 5:30-6:30pm, Thursday 16 December 2010
Venue: New Law Seminar Auditorium 101, University of Sydney
Map: <http://sydney.edu.au/law/about/campus.shtml>

Synopsis: This keynote will attempt to provide a context for the assessment of the contemporary condition of robotic cultural practices by reviewing the history of the field and the history of pertinent ideas and debates. In particular, attention will be drawn to the context of ‘cultural robotics’ as a highly charged cross disciplinary test-environment in which platonist computationalist approaches confront phenomenological realities of being-in-the-world. In the context of doing robotics for other-than-instrumental purposes, the politics and pragmatics of paradigms of top-down control confront the performative and processual practices of the arts. Questions of material instantiation, structural coupling and machine sensing provoke the reconsideration of notions of (machine) intelligence according to post-cognitivist paradigms. Interventionist and activist practices as well as emerging neo-formalist sensibilities will be discussed. The presentation will be illustrated with images and video of relevant works.

Bio: Simon Penny has worked as an artist, theorist, teacher and organiser in Digital Cultural Practices, Embodied Interaction, Interactive and Robotic Art for 25 years. His works involve custom robotic and sensor systems including novel machine vision systems. His art and writing address critical issues arising around enactive and embodied interaction, informed by traditions of practice in the arts including sculpture, video-art, installation and performance, and by ethology, cognitive science, phenomenology, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, robotics, critical theory, cultural studies, media studies and Science and Technology Studies. He founded the Arts Computation Engineering interdisciplinary graduate program (ACE) at University of California, Irvine. He was previously Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon. <http://www.ace.uci.edu/Penny>

This event is part of the Robot Cultures research initiative and Cultures of Robotics Symposium <www.robotcultures.org> organised by the Digital Cultures Program <http://sydney.edu.au/arts/digital_cultures> and the Centre for Social Robotics <http://www.csr.acfr.usyd.edu.au/> at the University of Sydney.

Third Dimension – Arts Project Australia #Melbourne

Terry Williams Not titled (green animal/man)
2010 ceramic
26 x 9 x 8.5cm

Third Dimension runs until – 27 November 2010
Arts Project Australia

A sensorial extravaganza, Third Dimension encourages people to engage with art through touch, sound and sight.

The exhibition invites us to consider alternative ways in which art can engage, excite and inspire.

Participating Artists
Alan Constable, Valerio Ciccone, Paul Hodges, Ruth Howard, Kate Knight, Chris Mason, Kaye McDonald, Cameron Noble, Jodie Noble, Tim Noble, Chris O`Brien, Lisa Reid, Rebecca Scibilia, and Terry Williams.

Curated by artsworkers Katie Jacobs and Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman.

Arts Project Australia is a not-for-profit organisation and has been promoting and developing the work of artists with an intellectual disability for 35 years.

I’m about to become the recipient of a Barbie – Computer Engineer doll #geekgirl

She’s on her way to me as I type. I;ll let you know what kind of house guest she is & whether she hacks into the fridge.

2010ComputerEngineer

Playlist – a reinvention of obsolete technology and art.

iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technologies is proud to announce Playlist: Playing Games, Music, Art, an exhibition focused on the artistic reinvention of obsolete digital media. Produced and hosted by LABoral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial (Gijon, Asturias) in the frame of the Mediateca Expandida, Playlist now moves to Brussels enriched with twelve new participants and a broader range of artworks.

Open from June 4 until August 21 2010.
iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology
Koolmijnenkaai 30 Quai des Charbonnages, 1080 Brussels

For more information visit www.imal.org