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In his own words, Los Angeles-based artist Eddo Stern 'works on the disputed borderlands between fantasy and reality, exploring the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation.' The works on view in Stern's second solo show at New York's Postmasters Gallery--which will open September 8--result from his obsessive participation in online games. Recently, the artist immersed himself for one year inside 'World of Warcraft' (the most popular online multi-player game), logging over 2000 hours of play. His new pieces--kinetic shadow sculptures and 3D animations--explore documentary material drawn from web forums, YouTube, midi music, and hand made puppets. For instance, in 'Man, Woman, Dragon,' the 'World of Warcraft' is reduced to its core elements: the cult of Chuck Norris, female elves, and a slain dragon. Also worth mentioning is 'Level sounds like Devil (BabyInChrist vs. His Father, May 2006),' in which a teenager living with an adoptive Christian family tries to overcome the spiritual dilemmas of his involvement in the game by asking, 'Is World of Warcraft Evil?' And Stern's 'Best Flame War Ever (King of Bards vs. Squire Rex, June 2004),' is a recreation of a virtual flame war about degrees of expertise around the well-known 'Everquest' game. Mixing innovative narrative techniques with experimental technology, in this exhibition Stern examines the video gaming culture at 'its paradoxical extremes,' as the galley puts it: 'on one hand, an untenable perversity of life spent slaying an endless stream of virtual monsters; on the other, an ultimate mirroring of the most familiar social dynamics.' - Miguel Amado

http://www.eddostern.com/

I was discussing with a friend the vitality of the postcolonial debate, the viability of a discussion where we looked into many of the wars of today as remnants or consequences of the colonial rule, the division of the world by a few super powers and the control of strategic resources. Not only oil, but drinkable water, harbours, metals, food, woods. By mail I got a letter from some Palestine activists. They belong to Al Awda, an organization working for the right of return and supporting Palestine children in the refugee camps. They had received a letter from some Canadian activists who wrote about the Algonquin nation and their struggle with the Canadian law. The Algonquin don't want let their lands digged for uran and other metals, they feel they are the caretakers of the land and not the owners.

This morning I finished translating the last text for a catalogue for an exhibition in Berlin. A group exhibition. A special group exhibition: a "family" exhibition. Working on the catalogue texts, I was amused and intrigued by the different ways in which the authors attempted to come to terms with the idea of "family" and an entire five-person family of artists exhibiting their work together.

As more and more personal memories began floating to the surface of my mind, though, I began to wonder if it really does justice to this group to consider them as a more or less isolated phenomenon, a kind of anomaly, without the context in which they live and work. Because the reason why I translated these texts is that I share that same context, and working on these texts made me more aware of how important this context is.

San Francisco-based artist Jonathon Keats is, in his own words, a 'fabulist.' For example, he once attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, and recently he has presented extraterrestrial abstract art at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. When he was choreographing a piece for honeybees at Chico State University last year, Keats became interested in the potential impact of show business on non-human viewers and decided to produce motion pictures for other species, from rose bushes to almond trees. By projecting specially prepared video directly onto foliage, he has found a way to share films with bushes and brambles, for example. Therefore, he decided to open a movie theater for the natural world at Chico's 1078 Gallery, which will begin its program next September 10 with an adult film for the region's flora. As Keats has put it, 'This wasn't the sort of situation where I could learn the audience's mindset. The only thing that would be a sure hit, I figured, was sex.' So, he has made a gritty black-and-white work titled 'Cinema Botanica: Pornography for Plants' that, according to a caption in the footage, 'features explicit acts of cross pollination filmed in photosynthetic silhouette.' While looking for other venues to show the movie, Keats posted on YouTube a trailer ofit that is already drawing the attention of internet users and, perhaps, of the authorities, whom will undoubtedly flag it as inappropriate. Representing a step forward in his exploration of the uncanny, Keat's new project constitutes a revolution in the entertainment industry. - Miguel Amado

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZqzr5ANi7I

this evening i've been enjoying the lunar eclipse, amongst other things. here in brisbane we saw it as a beautiful deep dark orangey-red colour, i have never seen such a bloody moon before! it was obscured from time to time by cloud but for a lot of the evening it was very clear. soon after 9pm it started to go back to normal, with the brilliant white contrasting dramatically against the blood colour. apparently it wasn't so colourful everywhere - my brother in karamea said there was a shadow but no red.

Is your blogroll getting stale? Do you need to pump some bass into your RSS feeds? You might consider adding Remix Theory, a relatively new blog maintained by media artist, writer, and curator Eduardo Navas. While Navas has written on the contemporary climate in essays such as 'Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture,' he makes a distinction between remix culture, and remix proper, and focuses directly on the latter creative act. This inquiry has been addressed by the prolific critic in a number of projects, including his essay on The Blogger as Producer; his curatorial project, The Latency of the Moving Image in New Media, at Los Angeles' Telic Art Space; and his recent interview with Yto (Isabel Eranda) in the Chilean magazine, Escaner Cultural. Remix Theory aggregates Navas's work, alongside excerpts and projects from others. In addition to coverage of various manifestations of the principles of remix, one essential goal of the blog is to define the term, itself. Navas insists that this effort must begin with the study of remixed music, before branching out. Offering copious historical and bibliographic resources to that effect, the site is stimulating on several levels, offering insight into new art works and new means of discussing them. - Elizabeth Johnston

http://remixtheory.net/

My 16 year-old sister got her exam results this week. She did brilliantly well, and the whole family were celebrating with her this weekend. Everyone was jubilant, especially as she had often been told by her teachers that she wasn't trying hard enough, that she was going to fail (particularly in sciences) - which she eventually aced.

Someone brought out the newspaper and triumphantly pointed out her school, which came number 4 in the league tables of state schools for GCSE results. I then heard her speaking about the other students in her class. She knew what each of them had got, and rattled them off: 'Alistair got 5 A's, 3 B's and a C, the same as Corrie and James, Ellie got 7 A*'s and two A's, the bitch...' then finally this degenerated into 'She got 2 more A*'s than me, but she's got a huge arse, and I know I did well and everything, but all my friends did too and they're thin!'. I should point out that my sister is a beautiful size, perfectly normal and healthy for her age.

inane story on the radio -- dancing around the pop-media-has-discovered-the-promotional-hype-of-ubiquitous-computing-research (still?) -- about the installment of sensors on house plants that will send wifi info about their condition.

who sets up this network? who maintains it? who interacts with it? when and why is it interacted with? under what conditions is it necessary to interact with it? or is it ever necessary to interact with it? those people who are so interested in spreading digital networks somehow forget the necessity of deployment, installation, configuration, and, especially, maintenance. not to mention the actual (life-)time necessary to interact with the data being gathered, tweaking it if necessary or even possible to a form that is understandable and useable to the idiosyncratic self, NOT the generic Everyman (who is the Grail of the data collectors).

Kevin Bewersdorf and Paul Slocum draw on the tragicomic nature of internet culture in their current exhibition, 'Passing Time and the Changing Seasons of Time,' at Austin, Texas gallery Okay Mountain. Both artists share an individual appreciation for music and homebrew instruments, and their hacker aesthetic often leads to other forms of shape-shifting--from websites to videos to multi-part installations. But the current show looks at a different form of change: the seasonal. The word seems to be employed here not only in reference to the weather, but perhaps more so in the way that one refers to 'television seasons.' Their solo and collaborative works investigate the emotional arcs, demographics, and formal qualities peculiar to various epochs of visual production. Some of their more interesting works, in this show, attempt to translate between genres, hand-painting the image of a spam message into a sweatshirt or using computer-knitting programs to embed the image of a fictitious pharmaceutical ad (for a product called 'MaxXimuM SorRoW') into a tapestry. Exploring the mainstream life of the digital image, the artists employed the drugstore Walgreens' online photo service to order the fabrication of mugs, coasters, mouse pads, and silkscreened pillows that display the images retrieved in Google searches. These objects and many others are on display at Okay Mountain through September 1st. - Marisa Olson

http://www.geartekcorporation.com/passingtime/

New York-based Canadian artist Nancy Davenport has been exploring photography's medium-specificity through a series of computer-manipulated photos that challenge the illusion of the real embedded within the photographic document. In 2001, for example, her exhibition 'The Apartments,' presented at New York's Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery one week before 9/11, stormed the international art scene, as it included a group of pictures of fictionalized bomb attacks on modernist architectural edifices, and thus prompted the uncanny feeling that fiction was envisaging reality. Currently, Davenport is completing her latest project, 'Workers,' that is on the checklist of the upcoming Istanbul Biennial. Evoking the famous early film in the history of cinema, the Lumiere Brothers's 1895 'Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory,' Davenport's installation consists of a multi-screen DVD environment depicting a factory and portraits of sets of both Norwegian blue-collar workers and their out-sourced Chinese counterparts. Referencing nineteenth-century technology yet using more recent image-making techniques, Davenport thus examines the politics of representation within contemporary digital culture. Selecting as her subject matter the global economy, with its never-ending flux of capital, goods, and labor, the artist’s output hits a higher tone, as it reflects a facet of everyday life that often defines our age. - Miguel Amado

http://www.nancydavenport.com/

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Struggling home along the trolley-wobbling pavement of Green Lanes in North London. Dank, gray skies and chaotic, always-divergent, multicultural masses are in sharp contrast to the rarefied air of the mountains of Banff. Where friendly participants clustered around shared interests, to learn, exchange and muck about together. This rare pleasure is very sweet but probably has to be temporary, because the point is to make connections with difference, across distance and then to maintain and explore the creative potentials of those connections...No?

i've always fancied the idea of a tail, and last night my dream came true. out with a group of artists on our ponies for a gallery crawl, i was secretly admiring and coveting the impressive long black swishing tail of one of our company, nonnatus. after some time i plucked up the courage to compliment him on his appendage, which it turns out he made himself, and he generously offered to give me one. i leapt at the opportunity & promptly attached it to my pelvis. (second) life is so much more fun with a tail. however it detaches every time i wear my pony, & when i dismount i have to reattach it, which is pretty annoying.

It can often be hard to describe internet art as a movement, because its participants are spread across so many cities, and work in so many different ways. Net art has also been spread across a time period of great tech development in the last 15 years or more. In fact, some notable critics have already declared net art 'dead.' But this week in New York, one event seems poised to reflect the loud pulse of web-based practices by a new generation of artists. The Great Internet Sleepover, at Eyebeam, will be a night to remember as web-surfers flock to New York from all across the country for a creative lock-in. Most of the participants' activities will happen behind closed doors--a chance to bond and collaborate with colleagues. However, the first two hours of the event, from 8-10pm, will be open to the public. Members of 'group surfing' blogs Double Happiness, Loshadka, Nasty Nets, and Supercentral will be on hand, as will unaffiliated 'surfers' who go by handles such as Seecoy, Ominous Moo, and Wizard is Hungry. These two open hours will provide an inside glimpse into the artists' creative techniques, a chance to get your own hands dirty,a rumored 'free table,' and the requisite roundtable discussion on what all this means. - Elizabeth Johnston

http://www.eyebeam.org/engage/engage.php?page=unique&id=136

Calls for support have been circulating around various related mailing lists for several weeks now, and I hope that many, many people will sign the online petitions calling for the suspension of §129a proceedings and the release of those imprisoned in Germany: open letter
The charges against Andrej H. are especially outrageous and clearly pose a threat to the freedom of academic research and political engagement, and a wave of protests has responded accordingly. I wholeheartedly support these efforts on the basis of my own political convictions, but also for personal reasons.

This month, the London-based collaborative Furtherfield is hosting an online retrospective of the work of Tales of Tales. Previously known as Entropy8Zuper, this artist partnership is made up of American Auriea Harvey and Belgian Michael Samyn, who were once at the forefront of internet art and now concentrate on game design. The duo came into being with the design of '8,' which they describe as 'an epic single player PC adventure game inspired by the various versions of the folk tale, Sleeping Beauty.' They have since created a number of games borrowing content or form from classical religious or folk literature. Included in Furtherfield's retrospective are 'Eden.Garden,' a browser-like piece in which the activity of the game narrative's characters is driven by the data analyzed at a URL specified by the reader; and 'Guernica,' originally a Doomsday-like 'client' for RSG's legendary network packet-sniffing project, Carnivore. Many of Tale of Tales' projects involve a form of written correspondence between game characters. To some extent, this form of storytelling mirrors the digitally-mediated process by which Harvey and Samyn fell in love and decided to work together. Among these is 'The Godlove Museum,' their newest project, which is 'A series of web-based artworks that mix the personal lives of the authors and political and social commentary with the mythical texts of the Bible,' with references to the War on Terror. These and other projects are linked on Furtherfield's site and are introduced by a major, two-part illustrated interview conducted by Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X). - Angela Moreno

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=283

Several Chinese artists have been drawing the attention of the international art scene in recent years. For example, at the current Venice Biennale, the China pavilion -- in its second installment after its 2005 debut -- is showing four female artists that have received a good deal of critical acclaim. Among them is Cao Fei, one of the rising stars of the latest generation of Chinese artists that, as curator Hou Hanru once put it, 'has grown up in the world of electronic entertainments and advertisements prevailing within Hong Kong/Taiwan-style pop music, TV drama, computer games and new subcultures influenced by various global trends such as Japanese Manga, American Rap, and Hong Kong films...' For the Venice Biennale, Fei has developed a new project, an Igloo-like inflated nine-chamber house in which several video projections take place featuring a work protagonized by her Second Life avatar, 'China Tracy.' After discovering Second Life, Fei embarked on a six-month journey through the wonders of the digital realm, as China Tracy, and many came across her through a YouTube stream in which she introduced herself in machinima footage with Chinese subtitles. According to Fei's declaration to Second Life's sponsored New World Notes, all sorts of typical activities occurred during that period: 'Fly, chat, build, teleport, buy, sex, add friends, snapshot...' These experiences were documented and generated the three-part, thirty-minute epic, 'i.Mirror' that Fei is now exhibiting at Venice’s Arsenale back garden as well as on YouTube. A melancholic allegory of consumerism, love, and humanity as seen through the eyes of a late-twenties female Chinese anime character, 'i-Mirror' is a brilliant examination of contemporary society's condition; an observation perhaps only possible today form the perspective of virtual space. As Fei says of Second Life, 'It brings us business and democracy, at the same time with feelings and culture. We can't avoid capitalism's wave; at the same time, we can't avoid Communist aspirations in our heart... Communism is our Utopia, Second Life is our E-topia... It is our mirror, it tells us the truth.' - Miguel Amado

http://www.caofei.com/

Marc and I are here in Banff for Interactive Screen 0.7- User Friendly is Not Enough.
The mountains are huge, and all around us, the food is excellent and the programme is an ambitious exploration and critique of web 2.0 by curators, artists, software-developers, game-developers, entrepreneurs, lawyers. A full programme of talks runs alongside an 'intensive' workshop for 14 scholars developing new projects with the support of their peers.

It's no wonder that 'privacy' is among the most popular tags for users of the social bookmarking site del.ico.us. The increasing use of surveillance technologies ranging from security cameras to consumer profiling, and RFID tags to telecommunications eavesdropping techniques has placed the question of privacy at the forefront of contemporary political debates. But the bigger question is of the relationship between surveillance and web 2.0 services; particularly social networking sites. That is to say, the same people who make sites like del.icio.us work are caught up in a web of self-surveillance that is indicative of a larger cultural/ political phenomenon. Enter Ars Electronica. Every September, for over 25 years, the Linz, Austria-based new media art center has organized one of the most important international conferences focused on art and technology. Each year includes an academic conference, in tandem with a major art festival and a series of very ambitious public installations. These are always focused around a particular pressing theme and this year's is, not surprisingly, 'Goodbye Privacy.' From September 5-11, dozens of artists, critics, scholars, and media activists will gather to comment not only on the increasingly pervasive threat to privacy, in contemporary culture, but also on the ways that this notion is represented in contemporary art. If you're at all interested in intersections of art, politics, and technology, make your plans now to sneak away to Austria. - Marisa Olson

http://www.aec.at/en/festival2007/index.asp

Perhaps inspired by Joseph Beuys declaration that 'Every human being is an artist,' Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum's 'Would you like to participate in an artistic experience?,' featured at the current Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, follows the famous German's radical proposition of a 'social sculpture.' A new installment of the project, initially launched in 1994 and presented online, was the first event at Kassel, this year. A few months ago, ten white and blue steel items left an apprentice's workshop and joined ten others on three continents, where households located in Kassel, Dakar, Ljubljana, and Mexico City, among other places, have received them. There, its inhabitants--their temporary owners--have appropriated them according to a personal understanding of their function or aesthetic qualities. As Roger M. Buergel, artistic director of Documenta 12, has commented, the works are 'unreasonable, fitting-in nowhere so they pose a challenge.' Indeed, their uncanny shape--resembling 'an empty pie dish or a bathtub with a hole in it,' as someone once described them--challenges any utilization or contemplation. Visitors to the exhibition at Kassel lay on colorful pillows placed on the green-carpeted floor of a prison-like cell and watch the several TV monitors placed inside the structure. Here they witness the creativity with which different individuals have dealt with the pieces. Living with them has triggered unexpected situations that the videos document (as well as photographs posted in the website), leading to a close relationship between the participants, the objects, and the artist. As Basbaum has put it, echoing Beuy's utopian proposal, 'I want to reverse the relationship between the artist and the audience, to find out something about the people involved. Now the audience is the sender and the artist is the recipient.' - Miguel Amado

http://www.nbp.pro.br/

brisbane's winter is so benign, comparable to a mild dunedin summer; we eat dinner on the deck every night and most days are clear blue skies, t-shirt weather. i wonder why more people don't have solar panels on their rooves, there's so much sunshine. in the mornings and evenings i smell smoke from the controlled burn-offs - attempting to avoid devastating bush-fires that are actually part of the environmental cycle; the seeds of some trees can't germinate without the intense heat of a fire.