:: Saturday, October 30, 2004 ::

Here goes a new text in Portuguese. Synopsis in English follows

GAZING AT …. LISBON'S CITYSCAPE:: NEW MEDIA: FRONTIERS AND STRATEGIES
Festival Multimedia em Lisboa, Portugal

Desculpas antecipadas pela auto-promocao sem vergonha... - sou uma das oradorea na conferencia. Mas e' tao raro ter oportunidade de anunciar aqui eventos em portugues que acontecem em Portugal e nao no Brazil...

Entre premios multimedia portugueses, curtas-metragens "Made in Brasil", sessoes video do ETIC, do Cine Clube de Avanca, e da Lusofona, e uma conferencia dias 12 e 13 de Novembro no CCB, os novos media em Lisboa vao dar que falar este Outono. Se morar na area de Lisboa nao perca pitada - de 3 a 13 de Novembro. E se nao morar em Lisboa... pois.. isso mesmo. Va' ate' la'!

Para mais informacao consulte o programa no site oficial

Ana Boa-Ventura

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GAZING AT …. LISBON'S CITYSCAPE:: NEW MEDIA: FRONTIERS AND STRATEGIES
Multimedia Festival in Lisbon, Portugal


Apologies in advance for the shameless self-promotion - yours truly will speak at this conference - but it's so rare that I have the chance to publish here in Portuguese about events taking place in Portugal and not in Brazil...

The program includes Portuguese Multimedia Awards, several sessions of short-movies such as "Made in Brazil", as well as video sessions by several and Portuguese Cine-Clubs and Schools, and a conference on the 12th and 13th of November at the wonderful CCB (Centro Cultural de Belem or Cultural Center of Belem).
For more information check the official site


Ana Boa-Ventura

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

Selected News

Google buys, then again, the juggernaut.

As always, the latest on SPAM.

What the "i" series is doing for apple. Going to Canada, and Japan?

Voting November 2nd? Check the contension of the electronic option.

Put your Red Hat on.

Yahoo! on the go!

Oh, yeah! U.K. and open source.


:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Internet public artwork Gothober.com promises "31 days of fear, anguish, dread and delight" with its artist commissioned animations, video and interactive projects one for each day of the month. Gothtober.com celebrates its second anniversary. As the first ever advent calendar of free internet art dedicated to the fun and excitement of Halloween, Gothtober.com launched on October 1 with a new time release door opening each day.

Featured this Gothtober is art by Lush Newton of Humboldt, Ed Lee of Los Angeles, Martin Ontiveros of Portland, OR, Jenny Walsh from the San Fernando Valley and Cristin Pescosolido of Los Angeles, and Jason Myers of Los Angeles, California.


:: [+] ::
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What about loneliness? Some people long for it, others are afraid of it.

alone / SOLITUDE / seul / loneliness , is requesting the contribution of phrases with the word 'solitude' or 'lone' or one of their derivatives.

The phrases, gathered under "vos SolitudeS", form a portrait of mass solitude which will serve as the narrative material for a series of images collected on the internet using the keywords "lone", "solitude and their derivatives.

The collection will be "performed" on 17 November 2004 at the Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, during the presentation "Machines à Poésie"; featuring arts and new media, by Annie Abrahams, Anne-James Chaton, Alexandre Gherban and Pascale Gustin.

The final compilation of images and text project will attempt to show the Internet as "a tool to reveal 'la condition humaine'" through distanced and disinterested interaction.

Solitude shared, is solitude diminished and multiplied.
:: [+] ::
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15 Seconds of Fame is an interactive art installation which I stumbled across in April's issue of Leonardo (Vol. 37, Issue 2 - April 2004).

Inspired by Warhol's statement that "In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes", the portrait / installation attempts to do do just that, make everybody who observes it famous. It does this by taking a photograph of people in front of the work, choosing one face in the image, manipulating it (pop art style) and finally displaying it on the screen with a unique ID number for them to observe. This continues every 15 seconds when a new portrait is taken and displayed. Portraits can be ordered via email with the ID number for a period of one month after exhibition.

While the idea of continuously creating portraits each with a similar pop style, yet a unique ID number and so making them one of a series. Making "everybody...famous" illustrating Warhol's statement are all interesting demonstrations of both the style and ideas of a previous artist, there are other issues in this work which deserve more attention.

The work is a portrait without predefined subject. It does not capture the likeness of a single sitter, immortalizing their image at one moment of their lives but instead it waits and observes everything that observes it. It is a portrait that is created for observing us turning the convention of a portrait on its head. With a singular and selective eye it chooses its subjects based on distinguishable features of a face. The portrait is seeing us and so just as we look at it, it looks back at us with our own face unlike any mirror can do. We become the subject as we stand before it yet as rapidly as it shows us our portrait, it disposes of it and moves on, emphasizing both the futility of trying to preserve our image and its fleeting machine gaze.

Suggestive of references such as The Portrait of Dorian Gray where an art work changes to reflect the subjects moral decay to Minority report where the media we observe observes, recognizes and changes for us, the work created by members of the Faculty of Computer and Information Science University of Ljubljana, Slovenia is indicative of how art and science are combining in ever more complex ways to challenge how we relate to technology as it evolves and becomes possible to realise previous fictions.

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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This is a short piece on the first 4 year-long "Technology and Digital Media" course of its kind in Brazil, at the P.U.C University in S. Paulo. More info in English at the bottom.

Em Portugues:
O vestibular de 4 anos da PUC-SP intitulado " Tecnologia e Novos Midia" acaba de formar seus primeiros graduados. Este curso propoe uma estrutura bem inteligente com 3 direccoes claras (em vez da confusao que frequentemente impera nas instituicoes que oferecem curricula nesta area): "desenho de interface", "educacao 'a distancia" e "arte e tecnologia". Com uma visao inteligente de mercado e de oferta-procura de emprego (ja' que o desenho de interface tem uma componente importante de design de jogos, e a area de educacao a distancia so' pode crescer mesmo...), nao deixa de *existir* um espaco para aqueles que querem trabalhar nessa fronteira complexa e nem sempre lucrativa mas fascinante que e' a fronteira entre arte e tecnologia.
Parabens aos novos graduados!


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The 4 year "vestibular" (Brazilian Portuguese term for college degree) proposes 3 clear and clever directions (instead of the tangled mess that institutions offering curricula in the new media area often offer): "interface design", "distance learning" and "art & technology". With an eye in the market (since interface design has a strong game design component, and distance learning is a market that can only rise...), there *is* nevertheless a space for those who want to work in that complex and not always lucrative twilight zone: the border between art and technology.
Congratulations to the new graduates!

Ana Boa-Ventura
:: ana boa-ventura [+] ::
...

TV incorporation with new technologies is still running into major shortcomings, but some advances are being made with cell-phone technology.

San Francisco may have free Wi Fi for everyone citywide.

The theory of relativity may no longer be a theory.

Yahoo! yahoos an e-mail serach company.


:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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