:: Saturday, January 17, 2004 ::

A Brazilian digital artist to know: Guto Nobrega

Last year he was involved in two excellent projects ? the ?mystery of the virtual viewing? (el misterio de la Mirada digital) in the 5th salon de arte digital in Cuba (http://www.artedigital.cubasi.cu/) and an installation on ?urban interfaces? for the the InteractivA'03 - Biennale for New Media in Yucatan, Mexico. In ?el misterio de la Mirada digital?, Deena Des Rioux in N.Y, Alicia Candiani in Buenos Aires, Eduardo Molto in La Habana (Cuba) and Guto Nobrega in Rio articulate the idea of the interplay time / place with the multicultural dimension in digital creation.

Online you can visit and participate in the ongoing interactive narrative on Alice in Wonderland, that Guto put in place with his students in Rio (http://www.narrativasdigitais.eba.ufrj.br/
animaalice/). Finally, one of his most seminal works is the piece ?cache memory?, which he showed in Woodstock in ?Imaginary Homelands: Reconstituted Narratives in the Digital Landscape?, curated by Kathleen Ruiz (http://www.gutonobrega.hpg.ig.com.br/
memory.swf)

Guto explores interfaces and interactivity to construct new realities, which are sometimes related to the past and memory, and often to the urban space.
Guto is professor at the School of Fine Arts of University Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

:: ana boa-ventura [+] ::
...

Artists join homeless citizens of S. Paulo, Brasil

Artists in S. Paulo joined the political movement "Movimento dos Sem teto do Centro" (MSTC - Movement of the ceilingless from the center) in the "Prestes Maia occupation"

___________________

Do (net) artists need a "place"? How is this need prioritized in a city where thousands families have no place to live?

Seventy artists and twenty art collectives occupied last month a building in the center of S. Paulo, which was half destroyed by a fire who left many of the 480 families who had illegally occupied it, homeless and with their belongings gone. The artists intervened* artistically, together with some of the 2000 people that lost everything on September 7, 2003. Images here: http://public.fotki.com/shn/okupaacao/

Background: The many and very serious social problems of a city like S. Paulo supersede the artists? need of a place in society, as well as, literally: a space for exhibition of their work. The exploration of abandoned buildings has not been a welcome option by the Brazilian government. Street art has been one of answers and S. Paulo has some of the most amazing graffiti artists, such as Os Gemeos, Nina, Vitche (http://www.enoughfanzine.com/
index.php?iID=17&view=art_detail), and Herbert.

Recently, they have joined the ?Movement of the ceilingless from the Center?; the name of the movement is an extension of the well know Brasilian ?sem terra? ("landless") movement, composed by rural workers in demand of land, work and dignity. Less than 3% of the population owns two-thirds of Brasil's arable land. They appropriated lands, ploughed and farmed. The "ceilingless from the center? is composed by families who cannot afford the outrageous rents in big urban centers such as S. Paulo, and occupy their abandoned buildings.

The building "Prestes Maia" is such as case: an old fabric factory that closed down due to the fact that the administration did not pay taxes. The debt is higher that the value of the building: the city council ignores the case and in September of 2002 the building is occupied by 480 families - 2 thousand people. In September 2003 a fire leaves these families literally on the street having lost the very little they had.

One month ago, on December 13 and 14, 70 artists and 20 art collectives were welcome by the few occupants of this building. The objective - to have artistic interventions in all 33 floors of the building. More than to make a statement about the lack of housing and spaces for artistic expression, the objective was to discover a creative universe in these spaces and to (and I quote from Tulio Tavares, one of the organizers):
?creatively amplify the peculiarities of the no-ceiling movement, that nobody sees: their community relationships in the occupation spaces, the unpredictability of their individual and collective projects, the material and emotional instability that they suffer as a result of the eminent eviction, of the repossession by the former property owners; their relation with us; our relation with them.?

In the center of S. Paulo alone, the MSTC has discovered 400 abandoned buildings.

http://www.mapadasartes.com.br/
noticias.php?notid=2


*Note: In Portuguese, "intervention" is used to signify an installation, an artistic expression.

:: ana boa-ventura [+] ::
...

Following is a great opportunity for net artists and new media developers:

---------------------

Turbulence International Juried Net.Art Competition
Deadline for Submissions: March 31, 2004
Guidelines.htm

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. is pleased to announce that with the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 5 net.art projects will be commissioned for the Turbulence web site in an international juried competition.

Each commission will be $5,000 (US).

AVENUES OF INVESTIGATION: Projects that experiment with new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity and engage the user as an active participant. Collaborations may be between visual artists, sound artists, programmers, scientists, and others. Proposed works may include the use of wireless devices such as cell phones and palm pilots to access and add to the experience of the net.art work.

CRITERIA: (1) artistic merit of the proposed project; (2) originality; (3) degree of programming skill and technological innovation; and (4) extent of collaborative and interdisciplinary activity.

GUIDELINES:
Proposals must be in the form of a web site that includes:
(a) Your name, email address, country, and web site URL (if you have one).
(b) A description of the project’s core concept (500 words maximum).
(c) Details of how the project will be realized, including what
software/programming will be used. Specs for the Turbulence server are
available online at http://turbulence.org/server.htm. You may request
additional software but we cannot guarantee it.
(d) Names of collaborators, their areas of expertise, and their specific
roles in the project.
(e) A project budget, including other funding sources for this project.
(f) Your résumé/CV and one for each of your collaborators.
(g) Up to five examples of prior work accessible on the web.

PROCESS:
Email your proposal to turbulence@turbulence.org with the following in the subject field: Comp_04 Proposal.

Deadline: March 31st, 2004.

Notification: Winners will be contacted after May 15, 2004. Each winner will be asked to sign an agreement with Turbulence governing the terms of the commission. Works must be completed within 9 months.

JURORS: Luci Eyers, Marc Garrett, Eduardo Navas, Norie Neumark, and Helen Thorington.

JURORS BIOGRAPHIES

Luci Eyers is an artist based in London, UK. She works mainly on collaborative media arts projects and was one of the editors of Everything Magazine. She initiated and is a member of low-fi art
collective, an online art/curatorial project focusing on net art. Her latest work, “Cyberskiving” was recently commissioned by New Media Scotland and exhibited at The Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre. http://www.low-fi.org.uk http://www.cyberskiving.co.uk

Marc Garrett is a net artist, writer, activist, curator, and musician. He is also co-founder & co-director of Furtherfield.or. Furtherfield is an online platform for the creation, promotion, criticism and archiving of adventurous digital/net art work for public viewing, experience and interaction. furtherfield.org/

Eduardo Navas is an artist and writer whose work has been featured in several online exhibitions. He is founder, contributing editor, and webmaster of Net Art Review and is currently a Cota Robles Graduate Fellow in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism Ph.D. program at the University of Califorina in San Diego. http://www.netartreview.net/ http://www.navasse.net/docs/

Norie Neumark is a sound/new media artist who is also a professor of Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. She makes radiophonic, net.art and installation work, as well as having made the internationally acclaimed and award winning CD-Rom, Shock in the Ear” (1998). She works in collaboration with Maria Miranda as “out-of-sync.” Neumark was a juror for Thaw 2000, has given papers and published articles on sound and new media, and is co-editor of “At a Distance: Precursors to Internet Art and Activism” (forthcoming, MIT
Press). http://www.out-of-sync.com

Helen Thorington is a writer, sound composer, and media artist. Her documentary, dramatic, and sound art compositions have been aired nationally and internationally for the past twenty-two years. She has created compositions for film and installation that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, and the Whitney Museum’s annual Performance series. Thorington recently performed her own compositions with the Bill. T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at The Kitchen, New York City. Her 9_11_Scapes won two international radio awards in 2003. Thorington is both founder and executive director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc (1981-present), NewAmerican Radio and Turbulence. http://new-radio.org/helen http://somewhere.org http://turbulence.org
---------------------

:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...

Here are some additions to the New Media Fix this week:

PICKS OF THE WEEK

http://www.media.org
Media.org is a collective of artists/architects, netizens “fueled by a passion for the potential of the Internet medium.” Offering an alternative to the philosophies of Marshall McLuhan, they operate under the moto “The medium is NOT the message.” Check out the archive of re-purposed information in their digital conservation museum.

http://www.detritus.net
Detritus is a web journal and collective examining fine art and pop culture. From their manifesto: “in nature, detritus is dead plant and animal matter that makes new life possible. The very bottom of the food chain, detritus is the rotting leaves in the forest, the silt on the bottom of the pond, the thick dark mud in the salt marsh. It sticks to your shoes, it smells, but someday it will be food for something else, and that something will be food in turn, on and on up the food chain until you pick it up in the supermarket and put it in your mouth.”

(selections will be added to the New Media Fix shortly.)
:: [+] ::
...

Dividebyzero, "a continuous experimental web project", created by the same person who has created nullpointer is one of few sites that requires little or no interaction. It is linear in the sense that we view page after page of image, text, colour and code yet narrative is inevident.

Visually and aesthetically it is on a par with the work of jimpunk yet doesn't have the same light and rapidly moving feel to it. Static plays throughout as page after page loads a html generating perl script. Continously the same script in fact, generating pages differently, displaying the ouput, the code itself and even errors generated by the code. Making decisions as it goes, adapting, creating and feeding out abstraction on demand, in the moment.
:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
...

Furtherfield.org kicks off its second online residency with a live chat with Rich White as he begins the "Create" node of his work "Create/Remove." The chat starts at the FurtherStudio site at 20.00-21.00 GMT.

Furtherfield's second FurtherStudio Residency, "Create/Remove," which will be assembled largely live and online, will be an artware glance at censoring the net. During the "Create" node, users can contribute html, javascript or actionscript to the project; during the "remove" node, users can send in objects to be censored.

A project working at the hinge of software and ritual.
:: Lewis LaCook [+] ::
...

There are numerous Online projects inspired by urban life. Jodi Zellen's Ghost City and entropy8zuper's Minneappolis vs. St Paul are East African Cities are two very different examples.

toutesdirections by Dina Roisman is a project falling into this area as well, offering different scenarios in which the user can experience an abstract city according to parameters and sounds provided. Each travel is recorded and archived for future access. While Zellen's piece takes the psychological state of a city life and pushes it to its limit to bring forth political abstractions, and entropy8zuper's Minneapolis vs. St. Paul examines the lives of young people living in two cities, toutesdirections falls in a state of complete abstraction, much closer to Zellen's project. Roisman's project offers complete noise, and at times I felt I had nothing to refer to as a "city," except for the urban sounds. The interface could be much more intriguing and the download time of the Flash files could be shortened, but all in all, this is a site worth spending some time on.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
...