#Melbourne: Free Digital Light #Symposium #geekgirl

The Genealogies of Digital Light ARC Discovery Project [] presents Digital Light: Technique, Technology, Creation, a free symposium to be held at the University of Melbourne in March. This interdisciplinary symposium invites a number of leading international and Australian figures working with digital light-based technologies, including two artists previously commissioned by Experimenta, Lynette Wallworth and Van Sowerine.

Digital Light: 18 – 19 March 2011

NATO Seeking Virtual Environment Tenders

Seems as if a bucketload of major organisations are keen to muscle in on the virtual these days. Now we can add NATO to that list:

“Allied Command Transformation is investigating technologies that could be used to augment or replace existing technologies for education and training of NATO staff. One of the investigative streams is in virtual worlds. This statement of work seeks contractor support for building and maintaining a virtual world to carry out this investigation.”

Happy 40th B’day, Internet!

40 techno-drenched years ago the Internet began its primordial binary crawl towards media domination:

“In fall 1969, computers sending data between two California universities set the stage for the Internet, which became a household word in the 1990s.”

How’s My Code: Improving Source Code

“How’s My Code is a simple, lightweight code review tool meant for git users and distributed teams.”

TxtNinja

Keen to have your email address, domain name, or IM content made virtually invisible from spambots? Then *tah-daah* TxtNinja is the nifty tool for you. TxtNinja is a service that allows for various levels of user-controlled “anonymity” via image conversion [a bit like having your own networked invisibility cloak]:

“TxtNinja is the perfect tool for anyone. And by anyone, we very damn well mean anyone. There is no hard and fast rule as to how you should use TxtNinja; you’re free to use it in any and every way you can think of [including]:

1. Masking your email: If you need to give out your email over the internet and use simple plain text, spam bots or email harvesters will pick up your email and your inbox will be home to thousands of spam messages. The simplest way would be to use TxtNinja, where your email address will be known to humans and will go undetected by bots.
2. Displaying non-Latin characters: Some languages such as Japanese and Greek contain characters that may not be recognised or allowed by websites and forums. Now, TxtNinja supports input from many other languages so you have a quick workaround!
3. Sale of domains and websites: Forum users (such as those of DigitalPoint Forums) make use of TxtNinja to sell their domains and websites on the forum. Their reasons for doing so vary, but most do that to keep their sales thread from appearing in search engine results.”

The Vertical Garden @ The Athenaeum

As a rule, the human race aint so spiffy at greening up surfaces of vertical buildings. Green bits + looming walls just don’t seem that ecologically compatible. One green-thumber who is a mind numbing expert at this very “art” is Patrick Blanc, who is:

“…on a mission to transform concrete walls into beautiful havens of biodiversity. His famous Vertical Gardens hang all over the world, from Bangkok to Paris, New York to Tokyo… and now London.”

One lovely example of his handiwork can be found at The Athenaeum in London [see the above link]. More examples can be ferreted out of his Flash site here.

Freezly: Automatically Aggregating Giveaways

Do you spend hours trawling through the net looking for free stuff? If yes, then how about giving the Israeli web-based start-up Freezly a whirl. Freezly searches Twitter for free items or competition-giveaways: they seem to do a reasonable job of finding a large range of items:

“In general, Freezly monitors new tweets as they come in, analyzes their content, and filters out unwanted tweets using a proprietary algorithm. Once the system determines a valid giveaway, it is added to our database…Our method is not fool-proof, but we’re constantly working to improve our algorithm and deliver you legitimate content only. And hey, we’re still in Beta… please give us a chance!”

netboot.me: Boot Anything, Anywhere, Anytime

Ever wanted to boot up any old o/s at any old time? Well, as long as you have your machine wired + good to go you can – by using a nifty l’tle aid called netboot.me:

“netboot.me works through the magic of netbooting. There are a number of ways to boot a computer with netboot.me. The simplest is to download a bootable image and burn it to a CD, USB memory stick, or floppy disk. Boot off it on any networked computer, and it will automatically fetch the latest boot options from netboot.me and let you choose from dozens of installation, recovery, testing, portable desktop and other tools. You can also start netboot.me from any computer running gPXE, or from any netbootable computer with some simple tweaks to your DHCP server.”

The Venn Diagram of Social Media

The Venn Diagram of Social Media

Primitive: A New Multi-Platform Media Artwork

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s new multi-platform media artwork Primitive was commissioned by FACT in partnership with Haus der Kunst, Munich and Animate Projects, London. The work is a combination of:

• a multiple- screen video installation
• a music video
• a short film for cinema
• an online film
• an artist’s book.

“This will be the first solo exhibition in the UK by the Thai artist, which forms part of the AND Festival, Primitive is set in Nabua in the Renu Nakhon district of Thailand, which suffered violent clashes between communist communities and the Thai military in the 1960s. Communist suspects were brutally tortured during attacks and those who managed to escape fled to the jungle where they disappeared forever. Nabua’s story undeniably has echoes with the current political turmoil in Thailand, as freedom of expression is still restricted and Thai security forces continue to engage in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary arrests, with new cases of ‘enforced disappearances’ emerging during 2008.”

Read more about Primitive at FACT.