02 PM | 11 Apr

Interactivos?’10: Neighborhood Science – Call for Projects and Papers

Submission Deadline 19 April 2010  :: Workshop: 7 – 23 June 2010 :: Medialab-Prado, Madrid Interactivos?’10 is a workshop which develops projects gathering and putting into action collaboration and local urban knowledge networks using free software and hardware technologies and “Do it yourself” (DIY) and “Do it with others” (DIWO) methods. A maximum of five theoretical works will be selected, among theoretical and research papers, presentations and analysis of the experiences about the proposed subject matter. Subjects include: Urban Infrastructure (mobility, transport, urban and telecommunication networks); Health and environmental issues (quality of the air and water, meteorology, nutrition, gastronomy and recipes, urban gardens); Social relations and cultural production (games, education and learning in the street; exchange of services and knowledge).

For call guidelines and submission forms http://medialab-prado.es/article/interactivos_ciencia_de_barrio

04 PM | 14 Dec

Fibreculture Journal 15 – Remix launched. Good reading that will keep you busy for a while. #fb #in

The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices. —

What Now? : The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/

It became a minor phenomenon during 2007. By September 2009 it was a virus out of control. Described in Wired as a ‘popular internet meme’ (Wortham, 2008), the obsessive serial mash-up of a key sequence from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film of the last days of Adolf Hitler, Der Untergang (The Downfall), is suggestive of the cultural logic of the contemporary formation known as remix. Remix culture is comprised of what could loosely be termed amateurs and professionals engaged in the practice of creatively re-using found material. The distinction is useful in identifying the aesthetic and material differences between dedicated intermedia remix artists (Negativland, Martin Arnold, Craig Baldwin, Soda_Jerk), artists who incorporate elements of remix into a broader audiovisual practice (Philip Brophy, Candice Breitz, Christian Marclay, John Zorn) and the vernacular audio-visual mash-up/remake/dub/scratch aesthetics associated with a broad range of online practices. The domestication of audio-visual literacies in the digital age has meant that the processes of sampling, editing and compositing – once the province of dedicated adepts – have become second nature for a generation weaned on computers and digital technology. Audio-visual remix attests to a utilitarian competence in ‘writing’ for the communications paradigm of the internet and networked conditions that Gregory L. Ulmer famously termed ‘electracy’; a concept that prioritises the notion of the ‘remake’ and the use of found material (Ulmer, 1989, 1994, 2005, Tofts, 1996). As well, this pervasive cultural competence (in Chomsky’s linguistic sense of the term) attests to the dramatic distribution of the material means of production into the hands of consumers.