:: Saturday, October 16, 2004 ::

Its fantastic when industry sponsors, funds or instigates the creation of art whether its to be seen assisting in culture or because its interested in researching topics using people (artists) with different perspectives or objectives to their own researchers / scientists etc.

We all know (or should know) about companies such as Xerox with their Parc Artist in Residence program and HP who regularly sponsor new digital art (especially of the print variant) but seldom pay attention to commercial companies who initiate projects for advertising their latest products.

Not at all what I would consider net.art but very beautiful and certainly worth a look is Diesel's (the clothing brand) new Diesel Dreams website. True its not the sort of art that makes us question our relation to new media forms, how our identity is diffused by media for example, but sometimes beauty really does suffice.

Taking the almost classic year 1 art course project concept of interpreting peoples dreams, Diesel manage to collect together 30 stunning video shorts from 17 different cultures. The presentation on the site of the videos is simple but elegantly worked into a flash catalog employing dreaming models, itself very clever, and credit should be given to Diesel for allowing the videos to be both downloaded in quicktime format (and not hidden through the use of flash as is often done) or picked up on dvd in stores for free.

Personnaly I prefer the three shorts "My Dark Horse is Horny", "The Geisha will show me" and "There's Smoke in my head" all heavily influenced by David Lynch. Now if only there wasn't that unsavory track-record of clothes being manufacturing in asia.

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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In Portuguese:::Em Portugues

Digitofagia - Rio de Janeiro e S. Paulo, BRasil
Outubro 2004

Este evento desafia a prática antropofágica na era digital. Antropofagia nao e' so' a pratica de comer outro (!) mas foi tambem, no Brasil, um movimento super-importante em que o sentido dessa expressao foi alargado metaforicamente para uma certa "digestao", nos anos 20 e no Brasil, dos movimentos de vanguarda europeus.
O termo "Digitofagia" traduz tambem essa ideia de ilegalidade que esta' bem presente nas tematicas escolhidas para esse festival, as quais incluem rádio livre e o open source (software livre). No Rio, o programa começa no dia 14 e o festival termina com uma Antifesta dia 17 de outubro. Recomeça em São Paulo, no dia 17.
A não perder!!! Ler mais aqui
Read more here IN ENGLISH
Ana Boa-Ventura
:: ana boa-ventura [+] ::
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We've been having problems with postings. Apologies to our readers. Below are more selected news. New reviews will be posted briefly.

Selected News

IBM's new servers

Beckam: the new Trojan horse

Check your Pay-Pal

Fighting child porn online

Music to go: taking on Apple

Novel, open-source, and patents
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Selected News

The reevaluation of Spyware sale tactics

With hp and friends getting the ipod frenzy, Apple strikes back, this time with photos

Microsoft's beef with itunes

Indymedia servers taken away by FBI in the U.K.

Porn in China, now being acknowledged

A conference on SPAM
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Jacques Derrida died of cancer last Friday, October 7, 2004 (read article on his death here). The contributions of Derrida to art are fundamental. In the case of net art I would stress here his concept of deconstructionism - for in net art, the multiple layers of meaning in the "text" are almost literal, tangible - and his ideas on archiving, by stressing how "the technical structure of archiving [...] determines the structure of the content to be archived even while it is being created and in its relation to the future." (Jacques Derrida, Dem Archiv verschrieben, p. 35. quoted by Danie Tyradellis.

Derrida was 74 but his ideas *are* always new. His questions around archiving - how can one store art without letting the structure of the very process of preserving interfere with the structure of the content to be archived - are very relevant today as some recent postings in the Crumb listserv (new media curating) show (tisi one, by Myron Turner). This particular posting - and the discussion aroufn the porblem of net art archiving - stemmed from the fascinating and ongoing discussion on taxonomies of digital art that is taking place in the Crumb list.

Ana Boa-Ventura

:: ana boa-ventura [+] ::
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