05 PM | 02 Jun

Second Life at IMA

Chinese artist Cao Fei has been making art online under her avatar guise of China Tracey. She built her RMB City on the Second Life Creative Commons island of Kula. Named after the Chinese currency, this crazy city is parody of Beijing, with Tiananmen Square as a swimming pool, a giant panda hanging from a crane, and a Mao statue half-submerged under water like a ghost. 

Institute of Modern Art (IMA), 420 Brunswick Street Fortitude Valley QLD 4006 runs until ­27 June    More info at www.ima.org.au

02 PM | 24 Mar

Call for submissions – Virtual Residency Project 2.0

Location One presents its second Virtual Residency Project in the form of a call to artists and other creative individuals with the purpose of fostering collaboration and creativity across geographical expanses and areas of expertise. The goal of this residency is to find 2 participants who are not physically proximate but who are willing to work with someone they’ve most likely never met before using some form of non-F2F (face to face) interface such as webcams, email, chat, video, blogs, telerobotic prostheses, Second Life, MIDI, skype, social networks, walkie-talkie, snail mail, mental telepathy, radio, networked video gaming, POTS (plain old telephone service), tin cans on string, or any other means of collaboration to develop a project that will be presented at Location One in the Fall of 2009, either on our web space or in our exhibition space. The theme of this project is Levels of Undo.   Please send your URL or submit electronic materials to virtualresidency@location1.org Application Deadline: midnight, April 15, 2009   For more information check out: www.location1.org/virtual-residency-project

01 PM | 16 Mar

LAMP ‘Interactive Workshop’ VIRTUAL STORY: MACHINIMA

Seminar Thurs 14 May 2 – 5 pm

Games and virtual worlds are now being used as creative tools to make a wide range of films from horror genre, comedy to corporate training and education. YouTube, Machinima.com and scores of other video portals are filled with examples of these new forms of virtual storytelling and some are now being commissioned by mainstream TV. NBC aired a CSI episode in 2008 featuring machinima made in Second Life and HBO recently acquired the machinima series ‘Molotov Alva’.

The seminar will explore the vast range of machinima made with console, PC and online games. It will also look at simple forms of film pre-visualisation now possible using games technologies. The intensive workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the tools of machinima and the opportunity to work on a short project. Participants are encouraged to bring along a pre-recorded soundtrack (including voice and/or music) to use as the basis for their project.

Presenters and workshop trainers include: * Gary Hayes, LAMP and MUVEDesign * Gary Wiesneski, SLCN.tv * Mark Strong – Wandering Eye Pictures * Kit Devine and/or Ian Brown – AFTRS * Kathy Mueller – AFTRS

By the end of this workshop & seminar participants will have had the opportunity to learn about:

* What makes compelling machinima * The wide range of machinima styles being created around the world * Insight into the engines and tools used to create machinima * Basic storyboarding and scripting techniques for machinima * Global machinima community and other online resources * Role playing and improvisation techniques that work in this new form

More info – http://lamp.edu.au/2009/03/10/new-lamp-multiplatform-content-seminars-workshops/

NOTE: Workshop Fri 15 May 10 am – 5 pm (must attend seminar)

12 PM | 14 Jan

The Inner History of Devices – lecture by Sherry Turkle

Contemporary science has done a great disservice to Sigmund Freud, suggests Sherry Turkle, who believes the psychoanalytic tradition can teach us much about the often concealed connections between physical objects and our thoughts and feelings. On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Inner History of Devices — the third in a trilogy — Turkle speaks of the importance of technology as a subjective tool, as a window into the soul.

When she first arrived at MIT, Turkle relates, colleagues viewed devices like their computers as simply instruments for accomplishing work. Turkle set out on her life’s work to demonstrate that technology serves a much greater purpose in our lives. People turn their devices “into beings, which they animate, anthropomorphize.” Her research and writing involves the ways people invest themselves in physical objects, and how those objects “inflect inner life, relationships, carry ideas, sensibilities and memory.”

Turkle’s latest work, as she describes it, brings together the artful listening of a memoirist, the interpretive skills of a clinician, and the participant observational skills of an ethnographer. Together, these enable her to dig deep into such questions as how cellphones can change people’s sensibilities, what is intimacy without privacy (e.g., texting and Second Life); and how people are starting to add robots as companions to their lives. There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.”

Turkle reads snippets from her three books, which, as an ensemble, tell the story of the intellectual and emotional links between objects and ourselves. Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed … that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.”

Watch the MIT video> …