Circuit Circus

Tuesday, May 4, from 7PM to 9PM at Soundlab, Pearl and Swan Streets, downtown Buffalo.

One night exhibition of interactive electronic artwork by students from Visual Studies, Media Study and Architecture produced in the course Real-Space Electronic Art (Art 489/589).  Admission free.

Richard Stallman visits UB and Emerging Practices

> 6:00pm Monday February 22, University at Buffalo North Campus, Norton 112 <

Stallman launched the GNU Project and initiated the free software movement years before others even thought about ‘open software’. Don’t miss the Fidel Castro of Computer Science !

All are invited – there is no admission charge.

Curious? Go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

LALYA GAYE Lecture+Mobile phone workshop 12.03.09

Thursday, December 3, 2009

–Lecture, 11:30am – DMS 232 – Lalya discusses her work which “explores potentials of ubiquitous computing for everyday life aesthetic activities, and focuses in particular on locative media and mobile music technology”.

–Workshop – 7:00pm – DMS 246 – ***Limited Space – Please RSVP to Erik: erikconrSPLATbuffaloDOTedu*** This hands-on workshop will demonstrate the creation of media for mobile phones using python.

ABOUT

Lalya Gaye is an HCI/interaction designer, researcher and teacher, trained in engineering, who works in multidisciplinary projects at the convergence of art, technology and design.

In her research, she is interested in the relation between people and new technologies, in the context of contemporary culture and society: how to design new technologies that can challenge and inspire people creatively, and what aesthetic activities people come up with when having access to them. This covers a broad range of interests, from mobility and urban space, to aesthetic computer-mediated interactions such as electronic music making or digital photography, to physical interfaces and the integration of technology into everyday environments, artefacts and behaviours, i.e. ubiquitous computing. Her research explores in particular the potentials of mobile and ubiquitous computing for everyday life aesthetic practices and creative behaviours, and builds on mobile music, locative media and physical computing projects. She approaches her research question with a combination of user-centred, body-centric and culturally grounded interaction design, of physical prototyping and of user studies in context.

For more information about Lalya Gaye’s work, please see: http://www.daonk.org/people/lalya/

I’ve had the pleasure of having a conversation with Mathias Jud via email for the past week or so. We talked about art, activism, the German Democratic Republic, and the People’s Republic of China.

The GDR serves as a kind of point of entry for Jud and Wachter into the broader world of media censorship. They spent some time in the GDR as artists-in-residence, and during that time they noticed the ways in which Western media were still used under the radar. picidae is named after the “Wall woodpeckers,” the first people who tore holes in the Berlin Wall — in some ways, the project is tearing some pretty big holes in the new variety of Iron Curtain.

picidae is a project that takes image grabs of websites that are banned or firewalled. This way, they can avoid the censorship of, say, China’s Golden Shield. In fact, picidae is used by people living in China to get information from beyond the Great Firewall. Mathias also said that it was an experiment in seeing the Internet from a different perspective, considering how our relationship to the medium might be different if we were born on the other side of the world.

Because picidae has been used as an activist tool — and because their other projects have been very politically heavy — I couldn’t help but wonder if Jud and Wachter relate to the activist element in their work. Mathias said that, while their work has a real-world impact, it is art, and they consider themselves artists. He told me, “We are very proud and feel honoured, when our work is used to fight or grant basic human rights.” Mathias also said that their works are works in progress, that require the audience to participate in the experiment. Since it is an experiment, it seems there are many ways individuals can use the tools that Jud and Wachter create.

Interestingly, some internet security companies have contacted them to find out more details about picidae and how it can be used or turned off. Their responses were not those of the enemy, trying to shut down the project, but instead had the tone of peers. Mathias explained that they were mostly curious about how picidae worked. When I asked about this “other side,” Mathias pointed out that maybe it’s the same side — it’s hard to tell in the constantly shifting configurations of power on the internet.

You can catch Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter talk about picidae as well as their other work tomorrow on campus and at Sugar City.

Wachter / Jud (Honorary Mention ARS 2006, Honorary Mention Transmediale 2008, Winner Cynetart 2008) are in Buffalo as part of their first US tour this week. Wachter / Jud’s work visualizes forces we are subject to, but have no control over. They are the creators of Zone*Interdite, a community project that maps restricted military areas around the globe and unveiled secret prisons such as the children’s prison in Guantanamo or Bagram, Afghanistan as well as Picidae, a message passing system that converts texts into images and makes them illegible to common forms of filtering and censorship.Wachter / Jud will present their work at UB’s Department of Media Study and Sugar City on Tuesday November 17 (3pm and 9pm).

Presentation: Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo, CFA232, Tuesday, November 17, 3pm
Discussions: Sugar City, 19 Wadsworth St., Buffalo, Tuesday, November 17, 9pm

Both events are open to all. Limited seating available. Please arrive early.

Spaces Rubbing Together: De Certeau on a GPS Sound Walk

FRAUKE BEHRENDT
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 10th
Time:  3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
Room:  CFA 232 (North Campus)

Frauke Behrendt is a researcher, historian and critical theorist interested in the role of sound in the areas of interactive art, locative media and mobile technology. She studies the increasing number of artists experimenting with mobile phones as means of audience participation in their sound/music-focused projects. Frauke is actively involved with the rapidly growing field of mobile music and is on the steering committee of the International Workshop of Mobile Music Technology. Currently she is completing her PhD at the Department of Media and Film Studies at the University of Sussex, England. Frauke has presented her research at various international conferences and published her research both in English and German. Recently she presented a paper on “Sound Art on the Move” at the SoundAsArt Conference in Aberdeen and published the conference paper “Mobile Music Technology: Report on Emerging Community”, presented at the 2006Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-06) at the IRCAM Center in Paris. Her Master’s thesis was awarded a research prize on Digital Media and published as “Handymusik. Klangkunst und ‘mobile devices’ ” in Germany in 2004.

Frauke works on several commercial and governmental advisory committees to help steer progress in mobile and locative media. She has been appointed as Management Committee Member for Germany and is Chair of the Working Group “Interactive Art and Music”. Her work in Sonic Interaction Design is funded by COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research). Frauke is also a Member of the Centre for Material Digital Culture at Sussex, which aims to re-connect media studies with forms of thinking that have traditionally been marginal to the discipline, but which have been more centrally concerned with thinking through early techno-culture: in particular medium theory, cultural geography, and science and technology studies (STS). Frauke is also a Member of the Steering Committee of the International Workshop on Mobile Music Technology

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to what it means to be a part of this program. I guess it’s starting to come clear to me what it means to me to be involved with Emerging Practices. Here are my thoughts about why I’m here.

I have spent a lot of time in advocate/ally activist communities, and the common refrain these days is that nobody cares. I guess it’s kind of true — people really don’t care about the old forms of social engagement, or are jaded about them, whether we’re talking about general strikes and unionizing or student sit-ins to demand University administrative actions. I did my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, which has a storied history of student activism. Other students there were often very annoyed with the kind of activist work my friends and I were involved in. And, given the U’s history of student activism, the rhetoric surrounding the work that we did was often steeped in the politics — and technological capabilities — of students in the 60s and 70s. Granted, we used Facebook to organize rallies, and texted each other when we were late for meetings, but new forms didn’t follow from this kind of communication power. It’s hard to care when the politics haven’t caught up with the society.

So I spent a lot of time casting around and thinking. What could possibly harness these kinds of technologies, empower activists, and make a mark? Sure, there are flash mobs. But flash mobs are largely apolitical and not designed to create a sustained movement. Facebook is generally used just as an augmentation of work that people do normally. Video games are historically apolitical and averse even to critical analysis of their contents.

I started playing alternate reality games (ARG) because I’m the kind of person who can’t resist a riddle. When I started reading Jane McGonigal’s writing and following her work, it dawned on me that ARG — or at least a model of organizing based on ARG — has the potential to be a form that follows the function of our new technological capabilities. It’s not that ARG uses the most high-tech of tools, it’s that ARG uses the tools we have that are ubiquitous — social networking, cell phones, GPS — to create playful, engaging environments that connect people. And, the fact that play is something that has always connected people is certainly a plus.

To me, ARG is a paradigm of Emerging Practices. It’s about re-appropriating technology for something innovative. It’s unrestricted in medium and unrestricted in message. That the question that faces game designers where to go from the commercial advertising-type games of the past now makes it even more prime for investigation. I’ve also been thinking lately about how ARG fits into a Freirean model of praxis — the marriage of theory and practice. What are your thoughts about the future of political engagement?