:: Saturday, December 11, 2004 ::

El Festival Internacional de Arte Electronico de Rosario 404 , Argetnina terminando. Mayor informacion y pueden contactarte con los organizadores del evento 404@astasromas.com ya que tengo entendido - y estas es un informacion de un amigo que participo - que se realizo un CD ROM de la exposicion

The International Electronic Festival of Rosario 404 , Argentine is finishing now. For more information please contact with the organization of the event at: 404@astasromas.com, because I knew from a friend that participate that an CD Rom was made

::Ignacio Nieto::
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The Peoples Portrait is "a global Networked Public Art Project by Media Artist Zhang Ga".

Commissioned by Reuters, the project consists of kiosks located at various locations around the world connected to the internet which allow users to photograph and add themselves to a database of portraits. These are then displayed as a continuous slide show on the Reuters Times Square massive video and data display screen as well as on The Peoples Portrait website. The objective is essentially "to create a global portrait of people, rendered in real time and displayed instantly and simultaneously". The locations of the sitter / user and the spectator of the portraits are separated in physical space yet barely in time emphasizing how networked new media can close distances and cultural divides.

Primarily only on the internet for the moment The Peoples Portrait has previously shown at the Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Festival from the 27/10/04 - 27/11/04 and at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival from the 09/11/04 - 21/11/04. Using kiosks or nodes of portrait gathering for the database from art events or galleries in Times Square New York, the central business district of Singapore City, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Brisbane in Australia and Linz in Austria the portrait creates an overall cultural portrait across countries and continents yet also of art event audiences in those countries and continents.

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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Some recommendations from the New Media Fix

Computer History has a new look.
Make sure to take advantage of their online reading room.

Dunadigital also changed its interface recently.

Discordia.us is n longer with "us" (pun intended). The site closed a month or so ago. We will miss it, but at least the archive is available to browse through.

Horizon Zero has also changed its interface. If you can, check out all 17 issues in their Flash interface, quite stunning.
:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Selected News

In the U.S. the cyber security alliance requests that the National Cyber-Director be elevated to Assistant Secretary.

New High-end disc by Toshiba.

Anti-viruses for mobile phones.


:: Eduardo Navas [+] ::
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Tonight saw the announcement of the Turner Prize Winner 2004 here in England. While the Turner Prize is by no means a supporting or even encouraging platform for net.art or even new media artists, in fact having hardly moved beyond video art to the extent that one of the exhibitions attendees felt it necessary to comment "we're still at video!" taking advantage of the Tate's Judge For Yourself scheme this year, politically, not really on merit, I found myself rooting for Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell.

Why? Well simply because they presented one work entitle NGO which had a sort of minimal flash aesthetic similar to something like Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries and a second entitled The House of Osama bin Laden which was made in cooperation with LAb[au] who recently presenting at Dorkbot Ghent in Belgium and are well respected in the new media community. Little steps I thought into our brave new world of new media, alas it was not to be and (in this critics opinion) the poorest, that is Jeremy Deller, of the four shortlisted artists Kutlug Ataman, Jeremy Deller,  Langlands and Bell and Yinka Shonibare, won.

Oh well there is always next year and perhaps the Tate's Judge For Yourself scheme, which is also available online can be used to an advantage! To Judge For Yourself and make a comment visit the Tate Britain website.

:: Garrett Lynch [+] ::
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Another interesting exhibition in Paris is Pick up, an exhibit made of audio visual deconstructions and reconstructions. Most of all I enjoyed two videos, which are both based on some skilful editing processes: one, by Omer Fast, is a semantic work on CNN’s speakers. In the other, Martin Arnold “scratched” a movie scene from the fifties with comic and grotesque results. Moreover the idea of curator Guillaume Désanges is original: the room is entirely dark and the works are activated one after the other; in this way the exhibition becomes similar to a movie, with a beginning, an end and a length of about forty minutes. The attention of the public is indeed better focused on the individual works. A curatorial direction that deserves further developments...

:: Daniele Balit ::

:: Daniele Balit [+] ::
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For all the computer games aficionados out there, you still have the time to sumbit your paper to the "Playing the Past: Nostalgia in Video Games and Electronic Literature" conference, to be held on March 18-19 2005 at the University of Florida. For more info go to the conference site.

This piece is not so much to inform you of this conference (with a promising topic!) as it is an opportunity to leave some lines on one of its guest speakers, whose work I respect a lot: Mary Flanagan.

Flanagan's "navigating the narrative in space: gender and spatiality in virtual worlds " is an important complement to Turkle's, Bruckman's, and Donath's writings on gender and technology. If you haven't read it correct that by following the link above! The article was published on the Art Journal, in the Fall of 2000.

Flanagan is co-editing with Austin Booth the much expected "reskin" (Cambridge: MIT Press), which is forthcoming in 2005. Reskin follows the 2002 piece by the same editors "reload: rethinking women + cyberculture" (also MIT Press). The 2005 book focuses on how technology is being used to alter the physical body.
:: ana boa-ventura [+] ::
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The Spam Letters is a unique and humorous blog by Jonathan Land who has spent the last four or so years developing correspondences with the "individuals" who inundate his mailbox with spam. Land assumes a different character for each interaction based on the situation or product of the spam and lets nature take its course. While there are numerous subjects the four main categories are "Sex," "Nigerian Scam Artists," "Products," and "My Buddy Kutty."

Like more and more blog writers, Land has rolled his entries into a book aptly titled "The Spam Letters." However, many (or all?) of the letters are still available in their original blog context.
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