Pikadon Day

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Pikadon is a grassroots project started in Japan to promote healing and collaboration in remembering World Pikadon Day. Pikadon is the japanese expression for bright lightning a.k.a. atomic bomb.

The Pikadon project is solliciting proposals for any scale collaborations with artists in remembrance of the atomic bomb explosion and in contemplation of where we are now in the world, so many years after the event.

Ramesh Raskar presentation this Friday

Ramesh Raskar from MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs) has kindly agreed to give a presentation for us, which will take place this Friday August 5th from 10am-12pm in the ZML. Everyone is invited.

Ramesh and his lab are doing some amazing work, and I highly encourage you to attend if you can possibly make it.

Spatial Augmented Reality
Ramesh Raskar
Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), Cambridge, MA USA
http://www.merl.com/people/raskar/raskar.html

The goal of Augmented Reality (AR) is to insert computer-generated virtual
objects in the real world and the challenge is in creating an illusion of
consistency between the real and the virtual environments. Traditional AR
approaches involve head-mounted, eye-worn or hand-held displays. But we
can draw parallels between the displays techniques used for virtual
reality (VR) and AR, and speculate about the alternative approaches for
AR.

In this talk I will discuss new practical alternatives using spatially
augmented displays. The spatially augmented reality (SAR) approach
exploits video projectors, cameras, radio frequency tags such as RFID,
large optical elements, holograms and tracking technologies. The
underlying techniques in SAR overcome some of the annoyances of the
eye-worn AR in authoring, identification and image registration. I will
discuss enabling techniques and describe our experience with applications
in industrial maintanance, entertainment, art, education and various forms
of human computer interactions.

Bio

Ramesh Raskar joined MERL as a Research Scientist in 2000 after his
doctoral research at U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he
developed a framework for projector based displays. His work spans a range
of topics in computer vision and graphics including projective geometry,
non-photorealistic rendering and intelligent user interfaces. Current
projects include composite RFID (RFIG), multi-flash non-photorealistic
camera for depth edge detection, locale-aware mobile projectors, high
dynamic range video, image fusion for context enhancement and quadric
transfer methods for multi-projector curved screen displays.

Dr. Raskar received the TR100 Award, Technology Review's 100 Top Young
Innovators Under 35, 2004, Global Indus Technovator Award 2003, instituted
at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators on the globe,
Mitsubishi Electric Valuable Invention Award 2004 and Mitsubishi Electric
Information Technology R&D Award 2003. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE.

IMD @ SIGGRAPH 05

Here's a line-up of what some IMD faculty and grad students are up to during SIGGRAPH.

Professor Mark Bolas will be panel wrangling at E-Tech on Thursday for a discussion titled, "Emotion and Camera Analysis and Laval Virtual" Thursday, 10:15-12:15, rm 407

Professor Tracy Fullerton is one of the organizers of the sweet sounding Guerilla Studio Games Atelier. It runs pretty much all week. The schedule is available below.

http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=studio&s=tech

Professor Julian Bleecker will be participating on the panel "Networked Performance: How Does Art Affect Technology and Vice Versa?" on August 1st from 3:45p-5:45p, Room 515B

Professor Perry Hoberman has got a whole wagon load of stuff exhibiting in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. He'll also be on a panel discussing "Digital Activism" on Wednesday August 3, 2005 from 1:45 - 3:30 in Room 407, Moderated by Dr. Edward Shanken, along with panelists Hoberman, Ligorano/Reese (Nora Ligorano and Marshal Reese), David Lu, MarkDavid Hosale and John Thompson.



Professors Peter Brinson and Julian Bleecker will be demoing their location/orientation-aware game framework developed last spring and this summer in the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, featuring what has to be the world's first electronic version of the kid's classic, "Red Light, Green Light, Go!", with an extra special twist, at the Guerilla Studio Games Atelier, Tuesday, August 2nd, from 11-noon in Room 403AB.
http://www.visavisgames.com

Professor Mark Bolas is an author of a hopped-up sounding technical sketch - "Performance Geometry Capture for Spatially Varying Relighting"
A technique for capturing reflectance and geometry for real-time performances using high-speed, time-multiplexed LED and projector light patterns. This sketch explores how the dataset allows for local lighting effects.
Thursday, 4 August
10:30a-12:15p
Petree Hall D
http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=sketches&s=sketches25

2nd year IMD Graduate Student Mihai Peteu will be part of The Incubator (Educators Program), showcasing "Wonderwalls: Playful Peer-to-Expert and Peer-to-Peer Collaborative Learning Spaces".
http://www.siggraph.org/s2005/main.php?f=conference&p=edu&s=incubator

Laurie Anderson @ICC

Went to an amazing 30 year retrospective of Laurie Anderson's works that opened last week at the ICC center in Tokyo. Professor Hoberman's influence was well represented.

At the opening she performed while wearing ice skates embedded into large blocks of ice (sorry for the crappy phone image).

Fun for all ages...

Mobile Monday LA Hosted at USC Annenberg Center for Communication July 25th

This Monday, July 25th the monthly meeting of Mobile Monday LA will be held at The Annenberg Center for Communication here at USC.

Monday, July 25th, 2005
7-9pm
The Annenberg Center for Communication
734 West Adams Blvd, LA CA
(Directions)

Secondish year IMD grad student and inestimable fire pit handler Justin Hall will present his "naescent mobile entertainment project" (asbestos gloves will be provided).

IMD Professor Julian Bleecker will share some of the magic of the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, the near-future research, design and development lab he runs.

THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY

WALK-IN MOVIE SERIES PRESENTS - THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY

Leon Theremin was the secret link between sci-fi films, the Beach Boys and Carnegie Hall. His electronic musical instrument took the world by storm in the 1920s and '30s. Winner of the Sundance Filmmakers Trophy, this fascinating documentary includes an interview with Robert Moog as well as clips from movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Before the movie, hear two of the city�s finest thereminists, Sukho Lee and Charlie Lester demonstrate the instrument�s ethereal and compelling music.

When: Friday July 22nd 2005, 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM

Cost: FREE

Where:
California Plaza
350 S. Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90014

Phone: 213-624-2146

Downtown LA residents are invited to attend the Walk-In Movie Series Sponsored by the Downtown Center Business Improvement District

events page

"Optical Lounge and Audio Lab"

Art event (predominently photography) downtown this Saturday purported to have "interactive installations".

In addition, live video artists will integrate sight, sound and music at the event. Bert Spangemacher will perform live Polaroid transfers. Jennifer Evonne and iC will integrate photography and latex. Franklin Londin will compose 3D free-floating photography sculptures. Miss Surex will interpret the evening's music with a video projection loop.

Not sure how spectacular the interactive work is really going to be, but hey, it's multi-media-interactive-vj-3D something! It looks to have some established artists and money behind it, as well as a good rep.

press release
event page

Los Angeles, CA - Arts organization Create:Fixate presents its second annual all photography edition of the "Optical Lounge and Audio Lab" on Saturday, July 16, 2005. This Create:Fixate event will take place in the mezzanine of the Spring Arts Tower, a refurbished Art Deco Bank Building at 453 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013 (at the NW corner of 5th). Photographic exhibits and video presentations will fill the historic space as two sound systems pump a variety of musical accompaniment. The evening begins with a free preview of the exhibit from 4:00pm - 7:00pm. The official event runs from 7:00pm - 2:00am. Admission is $10.00, $7.00 before 9:00pm. For more information please visit www.createfixate.com.

RES Screening JUNE '05

RES LA - JUNE SCREENING:
Tuesday, June 28, 8:00 PM
Egyptian Theatre
6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, CA
INFO

IMD students/faculty will meet @ the Pig & Whistle (next door) @ 7:00 PM

Wired NextFest 2005 - Synthecology

Our division's INIT LAB (Immersive Narrative & Interactive Technologies Lab) is remotely participating in Synthecology. Come visit our lab-in-progress in Lucas G152B (next to vault) for a networked vr experience. We're under construction but we will be running Friday (1-4pm PST), Saturday (9-11am PST), Sunday (1-4pm PST). There is also a Flash web interface that allows you to contribute audio and look at a simplified top view of the environment in real-time so you can track down the USC avatar!

Chicago - Applied Interactives announces Synthecology, a tele-immersive collaborative project with a new architecture for virtual reality sound immersion to create a garden of sonic experimentation for visitors to explore and cultivate.

Synthecology will debut at WIRED's NEXTFEST2005 in Chicago, June 24-26, 2005. During the festival, you will be able to visit the physical installation and/or connect to the virtual installation and contribute content to the project. You can experience Synthecology by visiting the Future of Communication Pavillion at the Navy Pier Conference Center, June 24-26, 2005, 9am-6pm. You can contribute content in the form of audio to the installation by visiting the project website, at www.appliedinteractives.com/synthecology

Synthecology is being created as a collaboration of Applied Interactives and students and faculty from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and (art)n.

For this special event, the virtual environment of Synthecology will be networked from Navy Pier in Chicago to the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at Indiana University, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California at San Diego and the Virtual Reality Studio, Department of Media Study, University of Buffalo and the Immersive Narrative and Interactive Technologies Lab (INIT LAB) of the Interactive Media Division at the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California.

Parsons - MFA - Design + Tech Thesis Show

Opening Reception:
Wednesday May 25, 6 - 8pm
Aronson Galleries
66 Fifth Avenue
and Gallery at 2 West 13
Mon-Fri 9-9, Sat-Sun 9-6
Galleries closed Memorial Day weekend

couldn't find a website, but here's the cool MFA DT 2004 Show website

Thesis Guidelines

Parson's news

Michael Naimark: Interactive and Immersive Film Environments,1977 � 1997

Michael Naimark
Interactive and Immersive Film Environments,
1977 � 1997

Opening reception:
Saturday, May 21,
6:00 to 9:00pm

Exhibition dates:
May 22 � August 20, 2005

Williamson Gallery hours:
Tuesday through Sunday, 12 noon to 5 p.m.
Friday, 12 noon to 9 p.m.
Closed Mondays and holidays

Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
Art Center College of Design
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, California 91103-1999
(626) 396-2446
williamsongallery.net
Michael Naimark

Moving Movie #1 (1977)
panoramic film loop projection and cylindrical screen;
Originally produced at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT
Courtesy of the artist

Displacements 2005 (1980-84)
panoramic video projection and living room painted white;
Originally produced at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
With additional support from the MIT Council for the Arts
and the National Endowment for the Arts
Re-Creation

Golden Gate Flyover (1987)
interactive moviemap from the air;
Originally produced at the Exploratorium
With additional support from Advanced Interaction, Inc.
Courtesy of the Exploratorium

Karlsruhe Moviemap (1991)
interactive moviemap from the tram;
Originally produced at the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media
Courtesy of the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media

See Banff! Kinetoscope (1993-94)
stereoscopic interactive moviemap
Originally produced at Interval Research Corporation
With additional support from the Banff Centre for the Arts
Courtesy of the American Museum of the Moving Image

Be Now Here (1995-97)
stereoscopic interactive panorama
Originally produced at Interval Research Corporation
With additional support from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre
Courtesy of the artist

RES Screening MAY '05

RES invites you to our monthly series showcasing brand new music videos, short films and motion graphics. This month we are proud to present the West Coast premiere of Chris Cunningham's new short film Rubber Johnny. The evening will also feature brand new music videos for Basement Jaxx, Quasimoto, Aesop Rock, Amon Tobin and many more.

Also screening is a new crop of excellent short films, including Albert Kodagolian's Moving On, Zeitguised's Dancing About Architecture, Sally Ann Arthur's Perfect, Chihcheng Peng's Something in the Water, Edouard Saller's Empire and Pic Pic Andre's Le Grand Sommeil.
We will also premiere new RES-Commissioned D-SNAP Shorts by Spencer Susser, Jonnie Ross and Gabriel Malaprade.

More Information
Buy Tickets

I am 8-bit exhibition

link

Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight
7020 Melrose Ave, 90038
(323) 937-7088
April 19-May 20
Tue-Sat 11am-7pm

MFA THESIS SHOWS 2005

The First MFA Thesis Exhibition

http://interactive.usc.edu/thesis2005/

Featuring:
Mike Brinker, Will Carter, Todd Furmanski,
Kurt MacDonald, Tripp Millican, Stephanie Weinstein

May 7-12, 2005

**************************
opening reception
**************************
Saturday, May 7, 2005
4 - 8pm
**************************

exhibition schedule
Sun-Thu, May 8-12, 1-5pm
(closed Monday)

presentations
Thursday, May 12, 5-6pm
@ Ron Howard Theatre

This year, the USC School of Cinema-Television, Interactive Media Division graduates the first class of its three-year MFA program, and we proudly present PASS THROUGH, an exhibition of our graduating seniors' thesis projects. These six unique projects range from mobile media to games to immersive installations, from memories and fantasies to arenas and cityscapes, and from live performance to intimate interaction. Taken together, they exemplify the promise of interactive media: a glimpse of a digital future, a vision of a novel aesthetic, a passage through what is to what can be.

Fieldworks Art-Geography at the Hammer

This symposium includes an evening of performance and a day of discussion to bring together practitioners from art, architecture, and geography to present original (field)works and address emerging relations between geographical science (including GPS, satellite surveillance, etc.) and artistic production. Program includes Trevor Paglen, Laura Kurgan, Lize Mogel, Juan Geuer and a live performance by Ultra-red. At the UCLA Hammer Museum on Thursday evening and all day Friday.

Fieldworks Symposium Program

Boston Cyberarts Festival

two very different takes on the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival:

my favorite snippets:

From the NYTimes: "Interactive art is irritating... machines make no bones about their own flaw, but are unbending about yours... is every piece of interactive art designed to make you feel like a fascist, a dupe, a cult member or someone cornered by a pervert at a party? No, of course not... Scott Snibbe's 'Shadow Play,' a four-part installation of video projections linked to camera sensors... Hooray! Here's a machine that is not your enemy or your superior... Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art (prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima's 'Trains'... "

From Wired: "The Cyberarts Festival's 70 exhibitions combine computer technology with dance, poetry, music and digital images... 'The living world -- us -- is becoming embedded in the software of the virtual world,'... Many of the artists contributing to the Cyberarts Festival are exploring the new media literacy, in which stories are told and received in a nonlinear fashion... Corporations such as Intel, which has an employee participating in a Cyberarts Festival panel discussion next week, are eager to see the uses that artists come up with for mobile phones and other devices with location-tracking capabilities... 'Everyone is a broadcaster of information and self-expression,'... 'We have access to more information than ever, we are self-confident and we have the tools to create.'

Brian Eno & Danny Hillis @Skirball Tonight

AN EVENING WITH BRIAN ENO AND DANNY HILLIS: THINKING AFTER EINSTEIN
Monday, April 25, 8:00 p.m.
$30 General, $25 Members, $20 Students
Advance tickets: (866) 468-3399 or TicketWeb Logo (service charges apply)
Listen in on a conversation between two of the most innovative thinkers of our times. Legendary musician, producer, and visual artist Brian Eno sits down with scientist and technical wizard Danny Hillis to discuss their inventive careers and explore the theme of creativity. Both Eno and Hillis are board members of the Long Now Foundation, an organization that aims to promote "slower/better" thinking.
More info here.

Public Art Project @ The Trojanvision Kiosk

presented by the Second Years as part of CTIN 542, Interactive Design & Production

Mobile Media Lab - Projects Presentation - Friday April 29th 2PM ZML

The Mobile Media Lab, a lab run by the Interactive Media Division and the Annenberg Center, is hosting a projects presentation afternoon and general open house. We'll be presenting many of the projects we've developed over the last couple of years and some new ones recently introduced to the lab.

All are welcome.
We'll be convening on Friday April 29th at 2PM in the presentation-friendly Zemeckis Media Lab on the second floor of the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts:

Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts
3131 South Figueroa Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90089-7756

We'll be presenting some locative media projects, mobile blogging applications, augmented reality apps, spatial annotation apps, some hopped-up media mobiles that you'd only ever possibly find in Los Angeles.

Professor Hoberman a "biped"

well, Professor Hoberman made it into Xeni Jardin's best photos of bipeds from the SRL show... just goes to show what a healthy obsession with Stereo Imagery can get you!

I know this pic was posted earlier, but what with it being linked of boingboing, I figured I'd put it up again...

Cinematheque108 - An Evening with Michael Snow

The Canadian Filmaker who made La Region Centrale and many other very influential experimental films will be on campus this weekend:

April 24, 2005 (7:00pm - 9:00pm)
Cinematheque108 - An Evening with Michael Snow

Filmforum presents Michael Snow in person at USC, at 7:00pm on Sunday, April 24th, in Norris Theatre. The event is co-sponsored by the USC School of Cinema-Television and Cinematheque108.

The following three films by Michael Snow will be screened: Wavelength (1966-1967, 16mm, color/sound, 45min) Standard Time (1967, 16mm, color/sound, 8 min.) So Is This (1982, 16mm, b&w/silent, 45min.) Michael Snow will be present to answer questions after the screenings.

GPS and Satellite Imagery Projects - Part of Boston Cyberarts Festival 2005

From April 22 until May 8, the Boston Cyberarts festival expresses the connection between the region's arts community and its high-tech industry. Amongst lots of other cool things are the projects making interesting use of GPS and Satellite Imagery. The Boston Globe has some interesting coverage today.
(Small plug: I will be speaking along with a bunch of others at at a Boston Cyberarts event at Emerson College as part of the speaker series Floating Points 2: Networked Art in Public Spaces.)

IM MFA Thesis Presentations

Final Thesis Presentations by the Interactive Media Division's First Graduating Class

Wednesday April 6
12:25pm - 4:00pm
Ron Howard Theater, USC Zemeckis Center

We are pleased to present our first final thesis presentations next week. The six graduates will each make a 20 minute formal presentation followed by 10 minutes of Q&A. We will begin promptly at 12:25 and end at 4:00pm.

12:25 - Introductions

12:30 - Tripp Millican - "iam: persistent video recording, publishing and sharing"

1:00 - Stephanie Weinstein - "Hypermedia Reveries: A Journey Through Space, Time and the Subconscious"

1:30 - 15 minute break

1:45 - Kurt MacDonald - "Performance Cinema: A dynamic live video performance of Los Angeles photography, composed and animated using cinema techniques and the visual components."

2:15 - Will Carter - "Location 33: Envisioning post-iPodalyptic mobile music"

2:45 - 15 minute break

3:00 - Todd Furmanski - "Here Be Dragons: A Study in Artificial Life, Virtual Architecture and Emergent Immersive Spaces"

3:30 - Mike Brinker - "Clownerstrike: No more clowning around!- The power of performance and physics as next generation game concepts"

The presentations are open to the USC community.

Power bars and bottled water will be served.

**********

Hybrid Vigor

The Beall Center for Art and Technology presents HYBRID VIGOR!
Erik Conrad / Sky Frostenson / Adrian Herbez / Garnet Hertz / Ryan Schoelerman / Margaret Watson / So Yamaoka
April 6 - 16, 2005 Opening Reception April 7th, 7-9pm

This year celebrates the first graduating class of the newly formed ACE (Arts Computation and Engineering) graduate program at University of California, Irvine. Students in this pioneering interdisciplinary program will curate and organize an "open lab" exhibition showcasing their work and experimentation in new media and interdisciplinary arts at UCI.

Contact / Information: (949)824-4339
Beall Center Hours: Tuesday - Wednesday 12-5; Thursday - Saturday 12-8
Hybrid Vigor
Beall Center for Art and Technology
Arts Computation and Engineering

SRL PERFORMANCE: SATURDAY, APRIL 2 at 8:30 PM

SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES
Organized by Susan Joyce

PERFORMANCE: SATURDAY, APRIL 2 at 8:30 PM

Dangerous Curve
1020 � E. 4th Place
Los Angeles, CA 90013
www.dangerourcurve.org
www.srl.org

Fringe Exhibitions is pleased to present a live performance by Survival Research Laboratories in the Los Angeles Downtown Arts District. Featuring the debut of the new Sneaky Soldiers, a remote controlled army of revolutionaries, a recent addition to the SRL machine family. Also appearing, some of the old favorites included in the show; screw machine, pitching machine, shock wave cannon, air launcher and several other machines along with the fabulous SRL crew from San Francisco.

Survival Research Laboratories was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in 1978 as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to redirecting the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product, or warfare. SRL has staged over 50 mechanized presentations in the United States, Europe, and Japan that consist of a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices, employed in developing themes of socio-political satire. Since its inception SRL has operated as a not for profit organization producing its own live mechanical performances.

SRL engages new vocabularies by integrating machines, theatrical sets and props, with dramatic, visual metaphors bringing to life, large-scale mechanical performances for audiences that rival other popular culture events. By taking things to extreme ends, SRL attempts to create new levels of sensory and emotional intensity. Using diverse disciplines such as performance, literature, and engineering, in concert with artistic expression, ideas are transformed into visceral experiences. Please visit the website at SRL dot org.

The new Sneaky Soldiers are available for sale!
Please contact fringexhibitions@aol.com.
818-414-9176

Blur+Sharpen Tuesday 3/22 @ 7:00PM

BLUR + SHARPEN presents TIME MACHINES
Tuesday, March 22, 7:00 PM
Ron Howard Screening Room
Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts

Blur + Sharpen returns this Tuesday night with a program devoted to experiments with time in a series of short films, music videos and commercials. Time has become an obsession for many filmmakers � why? In part, artists are responding to our culture�s accelerated pace and the ensuing emphasis on instantaneity and disposability. But they�re also visualizing a new temporal consciousness, with attempts to show the instant or frozen moment seen in bullet time effects, or the contradictory stasis and movement in the use of open flash, or the tension between forward and backwards time, extreme fast and slow motion, and spatio-temporal fragmentation.

The pieces collected for the �Time Machines� show express some of the transformations in the cultural conception of time. Works include the pinhole camera bullet time videos of Finnish artist Liisa Lounila, the Timetrack project of Chris Cunningham, and the temporal distortions of Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze. Also screening, Daniel Askill�s award-winning short We Have Decided Not to Die and Michiel van Bekel�s amazing 360 degree Muybridge update Equestrian.

www.iml.annenberg.edu/blursharpen

Vectors launch party at MoCA Thursday March 3

Please join us on Thursday, March 3, 7-10 pm at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (250 S. Grand Ave.) for the launch of Vectors, USC's new electronic journal of culture and technology. Thursday night's party features multi-player mobile gaming led by Julian Bleecker and Jane McGonigal, large-screen projections, live music and free food and drink. Vectors editor Tara McPherson will facilitate a discussion of a new era in digital publishing featuring work by Erik Loyer, Raegan Kelly, N. Katherine Hayles, and Alice Gambrell. Free and open to the public.
RSVP
More info

EIN Oscar Party - 5:00 PM this Sunday

Looking for a place to watch the Oscars? Look no further!! Join the EIN at Birds on Franklin St in on the Hollywood/Los Feliz border. Hang out with fellow usc-ers and fill out a ballot before-hand! Birds is a really great bar and they've got two large flat screen TV's. The small lounge area is reserved, but the earlier you get there, the more space we can claim!

This and all EIN social events for the semester will have a Tsunami Relief donation option. SO, for this event, they are asking for a 3-5 dollar donation per ballot. EIN will take $1 per ballot and donate it toward the "pot" for the winner and the rest will go in toward the donation. TO RECIEVE A BALLOT RSVP TO USCEINRSVP@YAHOO.COM by this Saturnday noon.

Birds: 5925 Franklin Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90028-5515
Phone: (323) 465-0175

Blur+Sharpen Feb. 22 at 7:00PM

This month's Blur + Sharpen showcases an international mix of short films and music videos that return to the physical world via low-tech aesthetics and garage video remixing.

Screenings include classic music videos by Michel Gondry for the Chemical Brothers and Steriogram, Olivier "Twist" Gondry's latest video Bricoleur for the French jazz group Les Fils de Teuhpu, Tsujikawa Koichiro's Drop (do it again) for the Japanese electronica group Cornelius, LA design firm Logan's Information Contraband for DJ Money Mark, Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich's award-winning Fast Film, Peter Tscherkassky's digital analogue horror film Outer Space, Mike Nourse's satirical State of the Union remix Terror Iraq Weapons, and the notorious Grey Video by Ramon+Pedro. Plus a special bonus screening of Gary Beydler's Pasadena Freeway Stills, the film that started it all!

Blur + Sharpen is a theme-driven monthly screening series for recent digital media. All screenings are free and open to the public on Tuesdays at 7:00 PM in the Ron Howard Theater at USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for the Digital Arts. The series is sponsored by the Institute for Multimedia and co-curated by Steve Anderson, Peter Oleksik and Holly Willis.

Spring 2005 Blur+Sharpen schedule

VersionFest 05

Version>05: Invincible Desire
April 22- May 1 2005
Chicago, Illinois

DEADLINE: February 28, 2005.

SEND US YOUR IDEAS AND PROPOSALS FOR:
papers, workshops, films, street art (stickers, cut-outs, xeroxable pages, stencils), anti-corporate actions, tactical media projects, culture jamming activities, public art interventions, micro actions, billboard modifications, DIY urbanism, office pranks, social and technology hacking ideas, agit prop posters, how-to guides, creative disturbances in public space, profiles of space invaders and hijackers, lists of tactics and strategies, and psychogeographic adventures.

more

Christie's "Origins of Cyberspace" Auction

The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking & Telecommunications
23 February 2005, 10:00 am
Christie's, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York

The catalog is an amazing browse, even if you don't have extra cash lying around.

Karel Capek, R.U.R. Rossum's universal robots, Prague: Vydalo Aventinum, 1920
Estimate: $15,000-20,000

Highlights include:

- Edmund C. Berkeley's Giant brains or machines that think
- Karel Capek's R.U.R. Rossum's universal robots
- Joseph Marie Jacquard's manuscript on the Jacquard loom
- Claude E. Shannon's "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits"
- Alan Mathison Turing's "On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"
- Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine
- The UNIVAC Short Code
- J. Presper and John Mauchly's "Outline of plans for development of electronic computers"

Classic Game Theme Goes Classical

The Game Developers Conference 2005 has a new attraction. The event, which will take place in San Francisco, California for the first time this year, will feature a Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy Symphony Concert. The concert will take place at the Masonic Auditorium on March 7th. Conducted by Grammy Awards winner Arnie Roth, the Symphony Silicon Valley orchestra and a full chorus will perform songs from various Final Fantasy installments. Composer Nobuo Uematsu himself will be present at the event and meet with VIP ticket holders after the concert.

EA@USC Lecture Series - January 26

Announcing the EA@USC Lecture Series. This monthly event brings top designers, engineers, and executives from Electronic Arts offices around the world to the USC campus. The first event is Wednesday January 26 from 1-5 pm at USC's Bing Theater.

All members of the USC community, as well as all Electronic Arts employees, are welcome.

Details, speaker list, and RSVP here.

Check out the cool event poster here.

Big Art Group @ REDCAT

Flicker | West Coast Premiere
January 19-23, 2005

Part multimedia extravaganza and part slasher film, Flicker uses inventive technology and high voltage live performance to create an innovative storytelling form that director Caden Manson calls "Real Time Film." Manson's New York company uses the language of media in a unique narrative form, pushing the formal boundaries of theater and film to create culturally transgressive and challenging new works.

REDCAT
Big Art Group

[Michael L + I saw this tonight. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in live cinema, media performance or whatever you want to call it. Fast paced, very funny, extremely inventive, and inspiring in its use of low tech for big FX. It's on thru Sunday.

Inner and Outer Space: Film Artists Explore the Universe

Thursday, January 13 @ 7:30pm

The Skirball and the Getty Research Institute are proud to co-sponsor an evening of short films that explore the intersection of science and art. The screening will encompass the early experiments of pioneer George M�li�s alongside the more abstract musings on light, color, and movement found in the work of L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, Ralph Steiner, James Whitney, and Stan Brakhage. Also included will be more straightforwardly scientific "documentaries" by Charles and Ray Eames and Jean Painlev�.

* On Thursdays arrive early and explore the Skirball galleries! All Museum exhibitions, including Einstein, will be free and open until 9:00 p.m.

Skirball Cultural Center

SoCal WUG meeting 12/16

Going to go check out the next meeting of the SoCal Wireless Users Group if anyone is still around and interested in joining me, I'm driving, and the event is free (except if you want pancakes, you'll probably have to pay for them.

There will be a brief presentation by Redline communications concerning some of their current wireless hardware research, but there is a lot of meet and greet time that people may be able to establish relationships with folks who are interested in doing wireless stuff, and would probably love to brainstorm new projects.

details are as follows:

# Pasadena IHOP Restaurant (rear meeting room) # 3521 E. Foothill Blvd # Pasadena, CA 91107 # Map: http://ihop.know-where.com/ihop/cgi/site?00006 # Wireless SSID: www.socalwug.org # GPS: N 34� 09.032' - W 118� 04.645'

EIN HOLIDAY PARTY

Looking for a break from working on final projects? This year's EIN Holiday Party may be the solution:

When: Sunday December 12th starting at 8:30pm
Where: The Bungalow Club--7174 Melrose Ave.�

The EIN will take over the entire venue and guarantees NO WRISTBANDS (for those of you at the last party). Hang out with other CNTV students feeling the same way you do at this time of semester.� There will be good food, drink specials (TBD), a DJ and dancing upstairs, and a raffle of "relevant" prizes.�

Hope to see you all there!

found magazine reading

this magazine came up in mobile class the other day. they are having a reading on sun here in la. ive been to one last year and it was fun, even though will thinks its too hipster. (but he lives in los feliz, so i think it might be the pot calling the kettle black.)

more info:
http://foundmagazine.com/

Sunday, December 5, 2004
Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight, 7 pm, 7020 Melrose Ave,
323.937.7088

almost certified (grade A noise for non-discerning consumers)

a distributed network of sixteen precarious egg tapping robots. carefully designed software conducts calculated emergent sequences as a shifting range of curious patterns. the result: a peculiar acoustic spatial drum machine.

we present our extensive research on the egg industry as an example of a broader lack of industrial modernization. by promoting social consciousness and self sustainability, we may live better through decentralization.

by k.cain and b.crabtree
a mechanical installation and informative publication.
opening 12.04.04 7pm. showing through 12.19.04
at machine project. 1200 d north alvarado street. los angeles, ca 90026.

tehn (bcrabtree) http://nnnnnnnn.org/

SACHIKO KODAMA @ Telic

This Saturday, December 4th, 7 - 9 pm, join us for a Preview of "Breathing Chaos" and Reception for the artist. Exhibition Opening is Saturday December 11, 7-9pm.

Telic
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
http://www.telic.info

TIME/SPACE, GRAVITY, AND LIGHT

Opening: Wednesday, November 17, 5:00-7:30pm
November 17, 2004 - February 27, 2005
Milken Gallery @ the Skirball Center

Albert Einstein used the objective logic of mathematics to revolutionize the way we view nature's physical properties. The exhibition Time/Space, Gravity, and Light - which complements the Einstein exhibition - presents ways in which artists use science and technology to evoke a subjective, emotional response from the same physical phenomena. It features three award-winning contemporary art works:

Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin displays online chat rooms to demonstrate how information moves at the speed of light between remote points on our planet, allowing for instantaneous communication.

Protrude, Flow by Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno renders visible unseen forces of magnetic attraction, evoking behavior that seems to defy gravity. For the piece, the artists created a sleek fluid that responds to the pull of magnetic attraction and to the sounds in the gallery.

The Ambiguous Icons series by Jim Campbell shows us how much we rely on past perceptions when we piece together what seems to be recognizable imagery from an absolute minimum of information. Campbell's installation is made up of a handful of blinking LEDs and primitive-seeming screens.

$8 General, $6 Students and Seniors (free with admission to Einstein).

Christian Moeller @ DMA EDA

BEING IN BETWEEN: DESIGN | MEDIA ARTS FACULTY
November 15th, 12 noon -- 2pm
11000 Kinross Avenue (Kinross North Building - EDA Room)
All lectures are free. Refreshments will be provided.

Bridging art and architecture, Christian Moeller's work is informed by emergent digital media and how these media have transformed the landscapes of experience across multiple scales. By harnessing sound, light, weather conditions, motions, and human emotions, Moeller creates spaces that are responsive and manipulable. Exhibitions: two land-art installations in the historic Schloss Eggenberg Park, Graz, Austria; Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; and the Science Museum, London. Publications: "A Time and Place," a monograph on Christian Moeller's work from 1991 to 2003.

If you are not able to join us physically, log on to the live stream

The diverse backgrounds and expertise of the D|MA senate faculty reflect the direction and philosophy of the department. This unique group of media artists, designers and theorists all make connections between design but then branch off into art and science, architecture, sculpture, performance, technological innovations, sensors and robotics, information spaces, database aesthetics, fashion and technology.

Lectures by Victoria Vesna, Casey Reas, Vasa Mihich, Jennifer Steinkamp, Rebeca M�ndez, Robert Israel, Christian Moeller, Erkki Huhtamo, Katherine Hayles, and Mark Hansen.

BIOGRAPHY FOR CHRISTIAN MOELLER:

Dipl. Ing (Diploma of Engineering), Frankfurt am Main Polytechnical University. A pioneer in the design of interactive architectural installations. He studied architecture at the College of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt and was a Scholarship holder under Gustav Peichel at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He headed the ARCHIMEDIA research institute at the College of Design in Linz, Austria and was Professor at the College of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany before he moved to Los Angeles in 2001.

Bridging art and architecture, his work is informed by emergent digital media and how these media have transformed the landscapes of experience across multiple scales. By harnessing sound, light, weather conditions, motions, and human emotions, Moeller creates spaces that are responsive and manipulable. Exhibitions: two land-art installations in the historic Schloss Eggenberg Park, Graz, Austria; Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; and the Science Museum, London. Publications: "A Time and Place," a monograph on Christian Moeller's work from 1991 to 2003.

DORKBOTSOCAL 5 - 20-November-2004

From: Garnet Hertz
To: dorkbotsocal-announce@dorkbot.org

DORKBOTSOCAL 5 - 20-November-2004
Telic : Ruest / Schoenerwissen/OfCD / Schlegel / Sauter

[ S P E C S ]

*** NOVEMBER 20th 2004 - 8pm (Saturday)
*** Telic
*** 975 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA 90012
*** map

[ O V E R V I E W ]

This is going to be an excellent event - and it's not just because I say that every time. Casey Reas has organized a cool mix of tactical media, GPS, text visualization, connecting expressive environments, and projections on to the cityscapes of Los Angeles. Investigate the links below: you'll be thoroughly impressed. As a bonus, it's hosted at Telic on Chung King Road in the heart of Chinatown: come on out, tell all your friends, and be there. You won't want to miss this.

[ P R E S E N T E R S ]

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Annina Ruest
http://www.t-t-trackers.net/

TRACK-THE-TRACKERS is a network installation consisting with mobile components. The project makes use of existing personal technologies in conjunction with GPS infrastructure to provide participants with an audible (not a visual) experience of the proliferation of video surveillance in the urban public sphere. The mobile unit, a bag containing a laptop, GPS-receiver, earphones, and a generic mouse is taken on a walk through the city. The sound in the headphones changes whenever the participant enters the vicinity of a surveillance camera. This effect is not automatic but created by other participants who are adding new locations to the existing database. The technology is documented with the intention of inspiring others to build similar psychogeographic systems.

Annina Ruest is a Swiss media artist currently based in San Diego. Most of her artistic activity so far has taken place within the field of software art. As part of the group LAN she co-authored the project tracenoizer.org - Disinformation on Demand. She is also the author of SuperVillainizer - Conspiracy Client (supervillainizer.ch), TRACK-THE-TRACKERS--- (t-t-trackers.net) and most recently BUSH BOT 0.4 (bushbot.ath.cx). She graduated in 2003 from the Department of New Media, Z�rich School of Art and Design (www.snm-hgkz.ch) and is now a graduate student at the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego (visarts.ucsd.edu).

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Schoenerwissen/OfCD
http://www.sw.ofcd.com

Schoenerwissen/OfCD presents their approach of by outlining principles and methods they used for recent projects - situating the work with respect to other related design strategies. They will focus on their last project txtkit - A Visual Text Mining Tool.

Schoenerwissen/OfCD continues its design research on information architectures, interfaces and visual languages currently at UC Santa Barbara. In developing new digital tools SW/OfCD provides spatial and temporal contexts serving as frameworks for exploration and dynamic decision making. Their project Minitasking - a visual gnutella client has been recognized by an Award of Distinction of the Prix Ars Electronica in 2002 and received the transmediale Software Award in 2003. Their latest project txtkit - visual text mining tool was supported by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMB+F) and L�nder Ministries for Education or Science and Culture. In 2004 txtkit has been awarded an Honorary Mention at Net Vision category of Prix Ars Electronica.

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Andreas Schlegel
http://www.sojamo.de/

TEMP is a software based network environment for any software capable of tcp or udp socket communication. TEMP is made for people utilizing computers and similar devices as a tool for their expression. Where most software is developed for specific processes, TEMP interconnects these environments, and enables collaborations between artists, scientists, or researchers from different disciplines without insisting on one particular software environment. Time shouldn't be spent on solving technical issues but rather on finding communication models to explore the possibilities of interactions and interconnections amongst nature, people, and devices.

Andreas Schlegel is a computational designer interested in collecting data, sensing spaces, exploring communication processes in the fields of networks. He received a diploma in communications design from Merz Akademie Stuttgart, Germany, and an MS in Media Arts and technology from the University of California, Santa Barabra. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Daniel Sauter
http://daniel-sauter.com/

LIGHT ATTACK is a media artwork, as well as a social experiment, which takes place the urban sphere of Los Angeles. While driving through the city, an animated virtual character is projected onto the cityscape of L.A. exploring three places "to go" and three places "not to go", according to the popular Lonely Planet travel guide. Light Attack elaborates the concept of the "moving moving" image in the stereotyped neighborhoods of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Downtown, Watts, and Compton. The virtual character, projected from a moving vehicle onto the city facades, reacts to the architectural context, and interacts with passers-by while "walking" through the city. The character's actions are condensed in a gallery installation, reflecting projection as an emergent ubiquitous medium. The piece raises questions about property and privacy. How public is public space? How projection, as a medium, changing the environment in which we live?

Daniel Sauter is a media artist exploring interactive installations dealing with time and space relations, cultural implication of technologies and site-specific interventions. Currently Sauter is a lecturer at the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA. His works have been shown internationally including the Ars Electronica Festival 2004, O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; Milia 02 in Cannes, France; International Video Festival in Bochum, Germany; 6. International Videofestival in Novi Sad, Serbia and Montenegro, FILE2002 in Sao Paulo, Brazil; telic gallery, Los Angeles; LACMALab, Los Angeles; westweek, Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles; Europrix Festival in Vienna, Austria; Leipzig Book Fair in Leipzig, Germany; werk, bauen + wohnen in Zagreb, Croatia, Europrix Award, Lisbon, Portugal. Diploma HfG/ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany; MFA Design | Media Arts, UCLA. Honorary Mention Prix Ars Electronica, Interactive Art, 2004; Winner Europrix Students' Award, 2001.

// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ M O R E _ I N F O R M A T I O N ]

Telic
http://www.design.ucla.edu/telic/
http://www.design.ucla.edu/telic/images/map.gif

Directions
>From the 110 Freeway (traveling either north or south) take the Hill St. Chinatown exit. From downtown drive north on Hill St. to Chung King Road, a pedestrian only street parallel to and just west of Hill St. You can park on Hill St. Enter through the plaza at the pedestrian crossing halfway between College and Bernard Streets. There is also a parking lot at each end of Chung King Rd. Driving in from Hill St. (take the first driveway on the right after the 110 exit - $2.50/3 hours parking). The other parking structure is on Bernard Street between Hill St. and Broadway.

This event has been organized by Casey Reas: http://www.groupc.net/
If you would like to present at future dorkbotsocal events, please contact Garnet Hertz at dorkbotsocal at dorkbot dot org.

(( December's dorkbotsocal will likely happen in San Diego. ))

LOST?
If you're completely lost, you can always call Garnet at nine-four-nine-981-6438.

* PLEASE REDISTRIBUTE THIS ANNOUNCEMENT *
.......................................................................
.........dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity..........
..........................http://dorkbot.org............................
........................................................................

RES November '04 Screening

UCLA Live Presents MODERN PROMETHEUS LLC

Wed-Sat, Nov 17-20 at 8pm; Sun, Nov 21 at 7pm

MODERN PROMETHEUS LLC depicts the corporate launch of a new life form: Human Analogues, �built from the atom up�, and imagines the first attempt by a species to acquire control of its own evolution through artificial selection. �The assembled spectators will witness the galvanic animation of vat grown tissue into Human Analogues, followed by programming of the newly activated Analogues, physical demonstrations of their general and specialized uses and surgical procedures to add anatomical accessories. �The exhibition�s highlight takes place when one of the female Analogues, after artificial insemination, gives birth to a machine.
link

Red and Blue

Annenberg IML Salon:
��
�What did I do� to be so red and blue?�*:
a consideration of nationalism, multimedia technology, and the �04 election.
��
Friday, November 12, at 2:30
in the Annenberg IML library

By way of Andrew Durkin, Postdoctoral Fellow at the IML: "Okay, the election is over. So what do we do now? Are we all still Americans? Do we secede? Why do the �red states� hate us? (Is it �for our freedom�?) And what does multimedia technology have to do with politics, anyway?
��
Suggested reading:
�
Siva Vaidhyanathan: �The Empire Strikes Back� (to be forwarded soon as an attached PDF). This is a chapter from Vaidhyanathan�s latest book, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. For more on Vaidhyanathan: www.sivacracy.net.

Smiley, Jane: �Why Americans Hate Democrats�a Dialogue�; available at http://slate.msn.com/id/2109218/#ContinueArticle

Anatol Lieven: �America Right or Wrong�; available at www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-2081.jsp
��
Frank Pastore: �Christian Conservatives Must Not Compromise�; available at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-pastore5nov05,1,3170258.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Daniel W. Drezner, Henry Farrell: �Web of Influence�; available at www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2707&page=0

KeyFrame

OOOPSSSS!!!! 7:00

FREE!!!
TONIGHT!!!!
7:00
USC Campus @ Norris Theatre

KEYFRAME
CNTV Division of Animation and Digital Arts Showcase

Featuring works from your fellow students!
(i.e. me; yes this is shameless self promotion)
I was there last year and there were great works, from traditional to experimental.

Hope to see you there!

Laurie Anderson presentation

Laurie Anderson is in town this week to perform at UCLA's Royce Hall on Friday and Saturday [link], and she has graciously agreed to come and talk to us in the ZML on Thursday November 4th at 4:00pm. All IM faculty and students are invited to attend.

PARTY! Saturday, 8PM, Hollywood

Party at Kurt and Tripp's place in Hollywood, this Saturday starting 8!

Scheduled to appear, such notables as Scot Fisher, Perri Hoberman, Jenn Stein, Marc Bolas, and Julien Bleecker!

If you're reading this, then you have to come.

Seriously.

Don't give me that look.

Just drop by, have a drink and get your picture taken so your mug shows up when I post the post-mortem. Haha. 'Post the post-mortem'.

Sigh.

Entertainment Industry Network (EIN)

"The Entertainment Industry Network has worked since its creation to bring the different factions of the USC graduate film school together with parties, pitch fests and social gatherings. Equally important to our mission is putting students in touch with industry professionals with guest speakers and Dinner for Eight events. Dinner for Eights are events in which an industry professional will host a dinner at his or her home, or sometimes at a restaurant, for eight students. This setting provides an intimate forum for some up-close brain-picking.

Each year, as it grows, the EIN puts its best foot forward to make intermingling between writers, production students, producers, animators, interactive media and critical studies students a more integral part of grad life at USC. This year we�re planning a Sundance trip, three large parties, a couple pitch nights, as many Dinner for Eights as we can, and working on getting an information panel started featuring speakers that have been recent festival winners. We�re also concentrating on planning smaller more frequent and casual events like happy hours and screenings, and getting the ball rolling with UCLA and AFI in addition to forming alliances with the business school and entertainment law students here at USC."

I'm honored to be the Interactive Media EIN representative for 2004-2005. Please feel free to email me with any questions, ideas, dinner for eight host requests, and/or to be added to the EIN-email list.

AIDS Walk Los Angeles this Sunday!

A last-minute reminder: the walk is tomorrow. I did it last year and it was great. This year, other cares stopped me from what would have been otherwise a fundraising month.

Show that you care and walk or contribute or both. Silence kills and the fight is not over.

All of us still young, old and lucky could benefit from a brisk walk (6.2 miles). USC usually has its own team of walkers you can meet and join.

AIDS WALK LA

RAIN OR SHINE!

Join a crowd of tens of thousands for Southern California's largest AIDS fundraiser. The ten kilometer (6.2 miles) AIDS Walk begins and ends in West Hollywood. Walk with your friends, family and co-workers to raise urgently needed funds and to send the message that the AIDS crisis is not over - and that you are changing the course of the epidemic.

8:30 a.m. Sign-In

9:15 a.m. Opening Ceremony

10:00 a.m. Walk Begins!

with folks like Modest Mouse (who also curate), Lou Reed, Flaming Lips, The Walkmen and many more.... @ the Queen Mary in Long Beach: All Tomorrow's Parties/Pacifica/04

RESFEST 2004 Los Angeles

Egyptian Theatre � 6712 Hollywood Blvd.
Wednesday, October 13 - Sunday, October 17

The eighth annual RESFEST kicks off on Wednesday October 13th. Come enjoy five jam-packed days with over a hundred of the year's most inventive and inspiring short films, music videos and animation. This year's lineup is the biggest yet, featuring Shynola Rarities, the festival premiere of Thomas Campbell's Sprout, a Jonathan Glazer Retrospective, Warp Vision a collection of 15 years of groundbreaking videos from Warp Records, Studio Tours and nighttime events featuring live music performances from Midnight Movies and Hifana.

www.resfest.com � buy tickets

Psychedelic picnic

This screening of rare hand-picked abstract experimental films in the back cemetery of the Paramount studios among the ghosts of the stars will be quite surreal. A lot of experimental filmmakers will be attending. Bring a blanket and a picnic.

PSYCHEDELIC PICNIC
A Benefit for Film Preservation
Saturday, October 9th
NEW TIME: GATES AT 6:00PM FILMS AT SUNDOWN
Hollywood Forever Cemetery
6000 Santa Monica Boulevard at Gower
No reservation necessary.
$10 Admission Tickets available at gate.

As a courtesy to fellow moviegoers:
NO TALL CHAIRS ON THE FIELD, NO DOGS

Please join us for this special night of visual music, a program of mind-expanding work by 1960s West Coast experimental film artists. Hand picked by Cinespias David Hollander, these abstract animated films are profound, beautiful and inescapably psychedelic.

Among these rarely screened jewels is James Whitneys "Lapis," created entirely with intricate hand-drawn dot patterns intended to activate the psychic forces of the mind, as well as Scott Bartletts "OFFON," a psychedelic metamorphosis of film and video. Also included is "Cycles" by legendary Bay area filmmakers Jordan Belson and Stephen Beck, as well as hypnotic works by Don Fox, Adam Beckett, Pat O'Neill, and Jean Painleve.

Bring cocktails, blankets and picnic dinner for this rare screening beneath the stars.
Proceeds to benefit the preservation of visual music films
DJ John Wyatt spins a psychedelic set before and after the screening.

Lev Manovich @ UCLA DMA

"Introduction to Info-Aesthetics"
Monday October 11, 2004
6-8 pm in the EDA
11000 Kinross Avenue
Free to public
http://www.eda.ucla.edu/main/index.php

Lev Manovich is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department, University of California San Diego where he teaches courses in new media art and theory. He is the author of The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) as well as many articles. His awards include a Mellon Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship). Currently he is working on a five year project Soft Cinema http://www.softcinema.net which was supported by ZKM, BALTIC, and CAL-IT(2).

Monday Lunchtime Lecture Series

October 11
BEING IN BETWEEN: DESIGN | MEDIA ARTS FACULTY
Casey Reas - Assistant Professor
Noon to 2 p.m. in the EDA, room 104 Kinross
11000 Kinross Avenue, Westwood

All lectures are free. Refreshments will be provided.
If you are not able to join us physically, log on to the live stream.
http://www.eda.ucla.edu/main/index.php

LAATHC Sunday 7pm

The Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker Club
coming at you : c-level this Sunday October 10th 2004, 7pm.

Schedule:
1) Casual chatting while waiting for stragglers
2) Meeting announcements + planning.
3) Kate Rich is radioengineer with the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT). She will be talking about her current experiments in Outsider trading - trafficking goods along social and data networks - with a view to rendering diverse currents in globalisation, international relations & network mobility from the extreme-local point of view of the feral trade product.
http://bureauit.org
sparror.cubecinema.com/feraltrade/statement.html
4) Free form mingling and problem solving for those who brought stuff, working or non.
5) After we finish there is a talk across the street with the Tactical Magic guys.

The Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker Club is an open group formed for people interested in doing cool things with electronics. All levels of experience are welcome to attend and participate. The group meets some sunday early every month, at c-level, in Chinatown Los Angeles. To sign up for the discussion and announcement list, visit http://www.c-level.cc/classes/hackerclub.html

Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment

The first in a series of exhibitions entitled Urban Traces: Rephotographing Southern California, 'Cultivating Pasadena' combines 50 archival and contemporary rephotographed images with an interactive database installation. Visitors may perform cross-dissolves with the photographs and search supplementary material including interviews, period films and contemporary videos to create visual and contextual links between past and present. Co-produced by The Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center, the Automobile Club of Southern California, and the PMCA.

Opening reception:
Friday, Oct 8, 2004 * 7:00 - 9:00 pm
Wine, Hors d'oeuvres and Live Jazz
Pasadena Museum of California Art
490 East Union Street
Pasadena, CA 91101
626-568-3665
www.pmcaonline.org

DORKBOTSOCAL

people doing strange things with electricity

NEXT MEETING

DORKBOTSOCAL4 - 9-October-2004 - Flash Film Works: Draves / Goodwin / Schoelerman

[ S P E C S ]

*** OCTOBER 9th 2004 - 8pm (Saturday)
*** FLASH FILM WORKS
*** 743 Seward Ave., Hollywood, CA 90038
*** Phone Number: 323-468-8855
*** http://www.flashfilmworks.com

[ O V E R V I E W ]

This - I think - will be one of the most exciting DORKBOTSOCALS yet: we're meeting at Flash Film Works in Hollywood, a motion picture special effects house. Dan Novy, a dorkbotter and FFW employee, will give us a quick tour of the facilities. The first presenter will be Spot Draves (down from San Fransisco) who will be presenting his acclaimed "Electric Sheep". Next, Doug Goodwin from CalArts will present "Reactive System"; last but not least, we'll catch Ryan Schoelerman, fresh from performing his "Autonomous Radiobodies" system on the streets of Los Angeles.

Bring all your friends and beer: prepare to see some great work in an interesting venue.

http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsocal/

Happy Birthday Todd

Happy Birthday Todd! You think you can sneak your birthday by us, but it will not happen. Thank you to the mysterious "dante" for revealing this date.

Send Todd a birthday greeting in the comments here.

September RESFEST in LA

This month Resfest LA celebrates the art of film title design with special guests Kyle Cooper (Prologue Films), Karin Fong (Imaginary Forces) and David Peters (Design Films, San Francisco), who will contrast recent works with groundbreaking titles from the 1960s. A conversation will follow the screening. Also on tap: new music videos from Air and Zero 7, Intro's Prodigy video, plus the latest from Michel Gondry and Ruben Fleischer.

Go to Resfest LA for more information.

Visiting Speaker for 9/20/04: Aditya Dev Sood

The IM Division is hosting a brown-bag lunch talk this coming Monday by Aditya Dev Sood from Bangalore, India. His work has looked at ways to use mobile phones for education in remote and tribal areas in south asia and also developed an outreach program that works with leading urban media artists in India to provide access and support to emerging technologies.

Title: Sharing Media: Social Capital and Technology Design in an Emerging Economy

Abstract: This presentation explains the importance of shared and sharable experiences in defining how non-traditional users value diverse kinds of media devices. The physical sharing of media devices in a public location such as a kiosk, and the realtime mutual experience of voice, text and image represent two alternative means of creating social capital. Using examples from on-going work by CKS in urban and rural India, this presentation shows how such user-oriented data can serve as a resource for the design of new information products, interfaces and features.

Aditya Dev Sood is Founder and CEO of CKS Consulting, a user research and interaction design firm based in India. A former Fulbright Scholar, he has published widely and maintains a multidisciplinary interest in social research, education, technology, and design. With foundational training in Design and Critical Theory at the University of Michigan, he is also completing doctorates in Anthropology and South Asian languages from the University of Chicago.

Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm, Monday 9/20/04

TRACING THE DECAY OF FICTION

TRACING THE DECAY OF FICTION: ENCOUNTERS WITH A FILM BY PAT O�NEILL

3 screen installation is part of the exhibition �Pat O�Neill: Views From Lookout Mountain� at the Santa Monica Museum of Art
September 11 - November 13, 2004

Opening reception: Saturday Sept. 18, 2004 7-9pm
Schedule for Saturday, Sept. 18, 2004
4-6 pm Removals, Inclusions, and the Margins of Memory
A panel discussion on the work of Pat O�Neill moderated by John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts, Solomon r. Guggenheim Museum.
Participants include: Paul Arthur, Professor, Film and Literature, Montclair State University; Elizabeth A.T. Smith, chief curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Erika Suderburg, Professor, College of Arts and Humanitites, CRiverside

Admission: $10 Members: $5
Limited seating: please pay at the door

6-7pm Members� Preview: exclusive exhibition walk-through with guest curator Julie Lazar and Pat O�Neill

7-9pm Public Opening

Santa Monica Museum of Art
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90404
310 586-6488
www.smmoa.org

Certain Traces, New Dialogue Los Angeles/Prague

@POST: LYNN ALDRICH, ERICA BORNOV�, JITKA HAVL�C?KOV�, �JAN JAKUBKOT�K, ALENA KOTZMANNOV�, KARL MATSON (+), PERFORMANCE BY TOMAS RULLER, LELAND MEANS, JAN MERTA, PETR NIKL, S?TE?P�NKA S?I MLOV�, LIZ YOUNG

Reception: Friday, September 10, 7 � 10 PM
Exhibition Dates: September 10 � October 9, 2004
Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12 - 6 PM and by appointment

POST
1904 East 7th Place
Los Angeles, CA 90021
213-488-3379
www.post-la.com

Certain Traces
Dialogue: Los Angeles/Prague, 2004

artists:
Kim Abeles (USA), Lynn Aldrich (USA), Deborah Aschheim (USA), �S.E. Barnet (USA), Barbara Benish (USA/CZ), Maura Bendett (USA), �Erika Bornov� �(CZ),Jiri Cernicky (CZ), Tomas Cisarovsky �(CZ), Martin Durazo (USA), Jitka Havlickova (CZ), Eva Jelinkova (cz), Ivan Kafka (CZ), Habib Kheradyar (USA), Vladimir �Kokolia �(CZ), Jan Kotik (USA/CZ), Alena Kotzmannova (CZ), Daniel Martinez (USA), Karl Matson (USA +), Leland Means (USA), Jan Merta �(CZ), Vladimir Merta(CZ), Christian Mounger (USA), Petr Nikl (CZ), ��
Tomas Ruller (CZ), �Stepanka Simlova (CZ), tyler stallings (usa), Margita Titlova (CZ), Marnie Weber (USA), Alexis Weidig (USA), �Liz Young (USA)
������
Venues & Dates:

In Los Angeles:
Pomona College museum of art August 31-October 10, ����
Reception: Saturday, September 11, 3-5 p.m. �Music: �Strings of _umova� /Performance: Liz Young
S.C.A.P.E. September 4- October 10
�Reception: sept. 4
CzechFront Gallery September 8-October 10
Reception: Wednesday Sept 8 , 6 p.m.
Post September 10-october 9, 2004
�Reception: Friday, September 10, 7-10p.m.
�Performance: Tomas Ruller
Sam Francis Gallery@ Crossroads Sept. 9-october 9
�Reception: Thursday, September 9, time 6-8 p.m.
Barnsdall September 8-october 24
�Reception: Sunday, September 12, 2-5 p.m.
Music: �Strings of _umova� /Performance: Tomas Ruller & Habib Kheradyar

�in prague
Kampa Museum=November 16-December 31
�Vernissage=November 17, 2004 /time?
�Performance: Tomas Ruller & Habib Kheradyar
Karlin brewery=November 15-december 15
�Vernissage= November 19, 4 pm + performances/music

Certain Traces:
Dialogue Los Angeles / Prague 2004

LOS ANGELES, July 15, 2004 � A series of exhibitions at six different Southern California venues will feature painting, sculpture, installation and performance by 14 artists from the Czech Republic and 14 artists from Los Angeles beginning on August 31, 2004 at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA. ��

Exhibitions will also be on view at the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, Hollywood; Post Gallery in downtown Los Angeles; Guggenheim Gallery; S.P.A.C.E. in Corona del Mar; the Sam Francis Gallery at Crossroads in Santa Monica, and CzechFront Gallery on Wilshire. �On November 17, the exhibition will open at the Kampa Museum and the Karlin Brewery in Prague.

�Certain Traces, New Dialogue Los Angeles/Prague� is a 15-year commemoration of the historic Dialogue: Prague / Los Angeles show of 1989/1990 that defied Communist sanctions and presaged the final dissolution of communist Czechoslovakia. As an anniversary event, Certain Traces celebrates the achievement of the original show and expands the original concept of open dialogue to explore the meaning of creative discourse for a diverse group of artists from Los Angeles and Prague in a newly defined open society. ��

The original show gathered 12 Czech artists willing to risk official sanction to take part in an open artist exchange with 12 Los Angeles counterparts. �While 15 years has brought immeasurable change to the political and cultural landscape in both countries, the basic notion that inspired Dialogue: Prague/Los Angeles that a creative discourse in the arts might rise above national border to promote artistic innovation, mutual understanding and goodwill remains unchanged. �This is the starting point for Certain Traces: �Dialogue Los Angeles/Prague 2004.

Under the auspices of the Czech Consulate in Los Angeles, the �exhibition is curated and organized by Barbara Benish, Los Angeles artist who has been living in Prague for the past 11 years, with the generous assistance of Pomona College Museum curator Rebecca McGrew. Ms Benish�s work is also included in the exhibition. �The exhibition in Prague is co-curated by art historian Sarah Brock, Prague resident since 1993.

The prestigious Museum Kampa overlooking the Vltava, will exhibit a selection of both Czech and American artists and an alternative, artist-run warehouse space in Prague � in keeping with the original grassroots character of the original Dialogue show � will provide the second venue for the November opening in Prague.

For further information please contact the gallery.

The New Games Day

I am currently organizing a Field Day to test outdoor physical games proposed by The New Games Movement. Please refer to my latest entryfor details.

Natalie Jeremijenko at Telic

Natalie Jeremijenko

'A Game Goose'

Saturday, September 11, 2004, 7pm - 9pm

Telic
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
T: 323.962.5069 or 323.664.1220
http://www.telic.info

A *Game Goose:

An aquatic robotic goose allows you to approach and interact with actual non simulated geese in situ. These biological geese are fully unpredictable and capable of exceedingly rude, challenging and interesting behavior. You are invited to pilot the robotic goose, play with, follow, and attempt communication with the other geese. Try various goose calls and your own goose imitations for your mutual cultural enrichment. See if you can persuade the geese you are worth talking to. If you succeed in any meaningful interaction upload your interpretations. [http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/ooz/goosespeak/]

Goosing--playing goose--uses repurposed hunting decoys for a technology of approach and reciprocity. This robotic goose interface is part of OOZ, a zoo backwards and without cages. This project produces technological interfaces to facilitate interaction and re-script human non-human relationships.

*In hunting terms GAME, as in, wild animals, birds, or fish hunted for food or sport, implies similar scripts of interaction to those used in computer games, as in, first person shooters. Yet GAME also manages to retain a certain ready-and-willingness, as in "game for a swim". This project retrieves some of these less played games into the telic imagination.

Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker Club

The Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker Club at c-level this Sunday September 12th 2004, 8pm.

1) Casual chatting while waiting for stragglers

2) Meeting announcements + planning.

3) Adam Overton, a sound and performance artist from Atlanta, has been developing a series of sitting meditation performances that use homemade EEG, ECG, and respiration sensors, along with custom sound software developed in the open source programming environment, SuperCollider. He will be giving a short performance and demonstration.

4) Jeff Cain will present details from RHZ amateur radio network, a project for REBEL REBEL at the New China Town Barber Shop. RHZ is an experimental peer-to-peer radio station aiming to create an open source broadcast from a legal network of micro-radio stations that share content over the internet. RHZ is designed to follow the parameters of FCC regulation, abide by copyright law, and use only free open source software to distribute information, while simultaneously allowing the network to grow limitlessly with each new participant.

5) Free form mingling and problem solving for those who brought stuff, working or non.

The Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker Club is an open group formed for people interested in doing cool things with electronics. All levels of experience are welcome to attend and participate. The group meets some sunday early every month, at 8pm, at c-level, in Chinatown Los Angeles. To sign up for the discussion and announcement list, visit http://www.c-level.cc/classes/hackerclub.html

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

Directions to c-level:

1. Find yourself in front of "FULL HOUSE RESTAURANT" located at 963 N. Hill Street in Chinatown. 2. Locate the alley on the left hand side of Full House. 3. Walk about 20 feet down the alley (away from the street). 4. Stop. 5. Notice dumpster on your right hand side. 6. Take a right and continue down the alley. 7. Exercise caution so as not trip on the wobbly cement blocks underfoot. 8. The entrance to C-Level is located 10 yards down on left side, behind a red door, and down a black staircase.

for more information email info@c-level.cc or visit http://www.c-level.cc

Ars Electronica 2004

Dancers Robert Tannion and Desiree Kongerod play with projected lines in the Austrian composer Klaus Obermaier's "Apparition."

Ars Electronica, the world's oldest and largest art and technology festival, ended yesterday.

Here are some early reports:

Ars Electronica Asks What Will Be Next (New York Times, today)

City Survives Art Geek Invasion (Wired News, Sept 7)

On the Danube, art, technology and society converge (International Herald Tribune, Sept 6)

Have 25 Years of Progress Helped? (Wired News, Sept 1)

Oh, yeah, I guest curated the symposium and "timeline�25" exhibition and website.

D. Jean Hester Guest Speaker in CTCS 505 - Survey of Interactive Media

From time to time I will be having notable guest speakers who have something compelling to say about Interactivity. This Thursday in the Ron Howard Screening Room at ZML, D. Jean Hester (a CNTV BFA!) will be presenting work and discussing insights on Interactivity.
The announcement for our guest is available here:
D. Jean Hester Announcement
Guests are more than welcome, of course. CTCS 505 meets from 2-6p in the Ron Howard Screening Room at ZML, and includes a lecture along with the guest speaker's remarks, so please keep in mind that this is proper class session.
If you're interested in what the week's lecture will discuss (week 3), as well as what our tentative list of future guest speakers looks like, please see the syllabus here:
CTCS 505 Course Page

software structures

head over to the whitney's portal site to view a nice collection of work by Casey Reas (groupc.net), Jared Tarbell (levitated.net), et. al. Obviously, Casey is now at UCLA, and did a great workshop with he and Ben Fry's Processing software last year (maybe he'll do it again?), and I've been telling everyone I know about Jared's stuff at levitated for years. Amazing designs, check them out.

WiFi.ArtCache

Well, there isn't a toot-your-own-horn category, but this project I am exhibiting may be of interest to some of you who are interested in pushing the boundaries of Flash-based interactive art. This is a CFP, in effect. We are looking for Art-Technologists interested in contributing work that would be exhibited using the WiFi.ArtCache at the upcoming Spectropolis event during the first week of October.

WiFi.ArtCache is a platform for experimenting with location and proximity based digital art media.

By simply coding to a provided ActionScript 2.0 API, Flash artists are able to create an interactive experience that changes based on how many people have downloaded their work, how many people are currently interacting with their art object, or whether it is currently in range of the WiFi.ArtCache.

The WiFi.ArtCache, developed by Julian Bleecker with support from Eyebeam Atelier, is a server containing a WiFi access point. When exhibited at the Spectropolis event at New York City Hall Park (October 1-4, 2004.), the WiFi.ArtCache will contain a storehouse of art objects. Visitors to the event can download these art objects onto their 802.11 equipped laptops and experience the artists' interpretation of location and proximity effects. WiFi.ArtCache is looking for art-technologists willing to contribute during Spectropolis. Deadline for submissions is September 26th. Submissions, questions and inquiries should be sent to wifiartcache at techkwondo dot com.

Additionally, the WiFi.ArtCache will contain a generic storehouse of digital ephemera that visitors can upload and download to the server. Scratchy audio, yellowed digital documents, discolored image files and spoiled emails can all be found and dropped off at the WiFi.ArtCache.

Cell-outs and Phonies

Cell-outs and Phonies, to be held at the L.A. Center for Digital Art from August 6-27 wants to demonstrate how camera phones have evolved into expressive art mediums.

Short films will be shown on LCDs and projected while other images are printed, up-linked or never removed from the actual phone.

The opening reception next Friday will feature music composed with ring tones by German experimental group Super Smart --who had launched their last album in ringtone format for mobile phones-- and continuous screenings of cell phone videos.

via wmmna -> via rhizome

I'm going, if anyone wants a ride...I'm looking at you Erin.

IMD fall exhibition proposal

It's been proposed before, and I'm throwing it out for discussion again. Not sure how formal we'd make it. While formal spring thesis exhibits I'm sure will be the norm from this year on, a fall exhibit I think would be valuable to showcase current work. My feeling is that this would be more of an informal affair showcasing finished work as well as research. One concern is booking space, or finding alternative space.

hp+ scott

SENT Phonecam Art Show Opens in LA

SENT: america's first phonecam art show : July 10-17

Location: Downtown Standard Hotel, 550 South Flower St., LA 90071

LOS ANGELES- sixspace presents the groundbreaking art project SENT, the first major exhibition of camera phone art in the United States. Sponsored by Motorola and co-curated by technology journalist Xeni Jardin and sixspace owners Sean Bonner and Caryn Coleman, the project examines the camera phone's potential as a creative tool.
The online portion of the project is now available for viewing at www.sentonline.com. An in-gallery exhibit takes place from July 10-17, 2004 at the Downtown Standard Hotel in Los Angeles.

LAATHC

Back from vacation The Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker Club - coming at you : c-level this Saturday July 3rd 2004.

Schedule:

1) Casual chatting while waiting for stragglers
2) Meeting announcements + planning.
3) Marcos Lutyens and Oliver Hess will discuss their history after meeting at LAATHC including explorations of architecture, psychology, neurophysiology, design, entertainment, and life. They will detail recent work including performances, installations, visualizations, with such a range of technologies it would literally make your brain explode.
http://www.lutyens.net
http://www.choubun.com
4) Free form mingling and problem solving for those who brought stuff, working or non.

The Los Angeles Art and Technology Hacker Club is an open group formed for people interested in doing cool things with electronics. All levels of experience are welcome to attend and participate. The group meets at 7pm monthly at irregular intervals, At c-level, in Chinatown Los Angeles.

To sign up for the discussion and announcement list, visit
http://www.c-level.cc/classes/hackerclub.html.

Untitled War

Machine Project announces "Untitled War", a medieval battle staged inside the gallery space. On July 17 from 6 to 8pm, armored warriors will engage in gut wrenching, full-contact combat with assorted melee weapons.

"Untitled War" is the latest project by artist and uber-gamer Brody Condon. Working in the mystical confluence of contemporary art practice, 3D games, and historical combat reenactment, Mr. Condon's work is engaged in locating and fabricating situations and visual works where computer games and game culture leak outside of the gaming box and into lived experience. In "Untitled War". Condon's ongoing work on SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism, www.sca.org) culminates in a full-contact battle royale staged inside of Machine Project, located in Echo Park Los Angeles.

"Untitled War" is a performative event combining fantasy role-playing, fabricated history, extreme sports, and computer games. Warriors from various historical periods from the SCA will endure an ongoing First Person Shooter Game style Deathmatch battle. Live camera views (similar to the spectator camera views found in online FPS games) will be streamed online and projected next door at the Echo Park Film Center, creating a game-like viewing experience for those outside the space.

Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
213-483-8761

http://www.machineproject.com/

Supersonic opening

Opening reception on Saturday, June 12, 6 to 11 PM

An unprecedented region-wide exhibition of all the artists graduating the MFA programs at Art Center College of Design, California Institute of the Arts, Claremont Graduate University, Otis College of Art and Design, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego and USC.

This will be the first major exhibition to be held in �The Wind Tunnel,� a colossal, 16,000 square-foot exhibition hall at Art Center College of Design�s new South Campus located at 950 South Raymond Avenue in Pasadena California.

open 11 AM to 8 PM Daily
Art Center College of Design
South Campus
Wind Tunnel Exhibition and Event Hall
950 South Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, California 91105

also

Symposium: Art in Southern California: From the 90s to Now (with Mike Davis, etc)
Date: Sunday June 13
Time: 10.30 am to 1.00, 2.15 to 6.30 pm
Location: Silver Screen Theater, Pacific Design Center
Admission: Free (come early to guarantee a seat)

http://www.artcenter.edu/supersonic/index.html

D|MA 2004 MFA exhibition opening

June 10th, 2004 @ 6:00 pm
New Wight Gallery

A display of second year graduate work by Michael Chu, Osman Kahn, Lucas Kuzma, Anne Niemetz, Daniel Sauter, Doug Smarch. Exhibition will be on view from through June 24. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday 9am to 4:30pm.

New Wight Gallery
11000 Kinross Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095

http://www.design.ucla.edu/

sent

here lies the first ever phone-cam art show, curated by los angeles/web uber-presence xeni jardin. Invited participants include some chick from Will and Grace, Weird Al Yankovic, and Dallas Mavs owner/crybaby/spoiled brat/soon-to-be-reality-TV star/blogger Mark Cuban.

Dorkbot Socal Meeting

dorkbot
people doing strange things with electricity
http://www.dorkbot.org/socal

JUNE 5th 2004 - 8pm (SATURDAY)
UCLA Design | Media Arts
Host: Casey Reas

LUCAS KUZMA: The Ecstasy of Communication
A population of sound-making devices interacting with each other and the sounds in their environment. Using models from computational neuroscience as a basis, they emulate some of the features of organic neurons as well as those of artificial neural networks.

PAUL YARIN: LTS2000
The ISM60 is an interactive sensing module for laparoscopic skill training and measurement. The module is a rotating sensor carousel with several coordination and knot tying tests. It provides a video overlay with task data, error count, and score.

PERRY HOBERMAN: Wormhole
A networked installation, connecting at least two remote sites. Participants at one site can manipulate and mutate projected objects and send them as obscure messages to participants at another site.

Hybrid Vigor

The Beall Center for Art and Technology

presents

HYBRID VIGOR
open lab / exhibition / performance GROUP SHOW

June 4-19

Opening Reception Thursday, June 3, 6-9 pm

The Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) graduate program was launched this year at the University of California, Irvine. Students in this pioneering program have organized this "open lab" exhibition showcasing their own work and selected new media and interdisciplinary arts initiatives across campus.

http://beallcenter.uci.edu/hybridvigor/index.html

The Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine
Information: (949) 824-6206
Hours: Mon. - Sat., noon-5 pm; Thursdays until 8 pm

Ant Farm: 1968-1978 at Santa Monica: Museum: of Art, June 5- August 14, 2004

Opening reception: Friday, June 4, from 7-9 p.m.

Ant Farm: 1968�1978 is a retrospective of the underground architectural collective whose core members were Doug Michels, Chip Lord, and Curtis Schreier. As a group, the members of Ant Farm helped break down established boundaries between architecture and art, between conceptual and physical production, and between their lives as individuals and their artistic production. Ant Farm was responsible for such iconic works as Cadillac Ranch (Chip Lord, Doug Michaels, Hudson Marquez, 1974)�a modern Stonehenge of ten 1949 to 1964 model Cadillacs buried nose down just outside of Amarillo, Texas�and Media Burn (1975, 25:43 min, color, sound)�a performance on July 4, 1975, where members of the collective drove the Phantom Dream Car, a customized 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz convertible, through a wall of flaming televisions in the audience-filled parking lot of the San Francisco Cow Palace. Both works illustrate Ant Farm's signature critique of the mainstream culture and media of their day.

www.smmoa.org

Casey Reas "TI"

Casey REAS show in Chinatown this Saturday night:

Casey Reas
"TI"
Saturday, May 15, 2004, 7pm - 9pm
http://dma.ucla.edu/telic/index2.htm

telic
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
T: 323.962.5069
http://www.telic.info
info@telic.info

Interactive Videodance at UCI

The Beall Center for Art and Technology is pleased
to present the premier of
Active Space: Interactive Videodance

by Lisa Naugle and John Crawford
with Fr�d�ric Bevilacqua

Opening reception: Wednesday May 12, 8-9 pm

The Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine
is located in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts
Building 712 in the Arts Plaza, Irvine, CA
http://beallcenter.uci.edu

"Interactive Videodance," a Beall-sponsored research project in the
Active Space environment, makes its premiere in a performance and
installation. Active Space combines the human body with video sensing
systems, motion capture animation, software development, and
interactive video and sound design to generate visual imagery and
sound.

During the performances, dancers and choreographers will demonstrate
the artistic potential of the Active Space project. The installation
component enables visitors to "play" the space, improvising and
exploring new ways to interact with others through computer
technology.

Lisa Naugle, assistant professor of dance at UCI, is the recipient of
the Cecil and Ida Green Honors Professor's Award, 2000. Naugle was a
member of the Nancy Hauser Dance Company and has performed and
choreographed in London, Amsterdam, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary
and Canada, as well as throughout the U.S.

John Crawford is a digital media artist, interactive performance
director and software designer. He teaches videodance, motion capture
animation and digital arts at UCI. Since 1992, his digital media work
has been performed and exhibited across North America and in Europe,
and he has taught extensively in performance and technology in New
York, Seattle and Vancouver, Canada.

Frederic Bevilacqua, who has taught physics and helped develop optic
sensors, is researching multi-media music installations through IRCAM
in Paris.

Interactive Videodance Performance:
May 12-14, 7 pm
May 15, Noon Matinee and 7pm
May 20-21, 7 pm
May 22, Noon Matinee and 7pm
Performance time: 50 minutes
Limited Seating
Gratis tickets: 949) 824-2787

Active Space Exhibition:
May 13 - 22, 2004
Gallery Hours:
Monday - Friday 12-5 pm
Saturday 1-5 pm
Sunday 12-5 pm
Free and open to the public
Information: 949) 824-4339

World Wide Panorama

On Saturday, March 20, more than 180 photographers in 40 countries around the world celebrated the Equinox by creating VR panoramas. This site showcases the results of their efforts.

The Geo-Images Project

Self Organizing Systems Conference @ UCLA

Electronic Literature Organization

Friday, April 30, 8:30 am - 5:30 pm
EDA Room, UCLA Kinross Building
11000 Kinross Avenue
Westwood, CA 90095

Speculations about spontaneous creation - of awareness, self-organization and evolution - have recurred across cultures, through time, and over space. In the last half-century, we have developed the algorithmic and computational technologies that can bring life and form to these ideas - as digitally inspired reactive and intentional entities inhabiting galleries, laboratories, and literature.
The conference will bring together artists, humanists, and scientists for panel discussions about the present and future of these trends.

Organized by Nicholas Gessler and Katherine Hayles

Schedule:
8:30-9:00 am: Coffee, Juice and Pastries

9:00-9:30 am: Introductions
Katherine Hayles, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, UCLA (conference co-organizer)
Roberto Peccei, Vice Chancellor for Research, UCLA
Nicholas Gessler, Co-Director, Human Complex Systems Group, UCLA (conference co-organizer)
9:30-11:00 am: Panel 1 - Self-Organizing Processes
Moderator Nicholas Gessler, UCLA

Jean-Pierre H�bert, Artist in Residence, UCSB Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. �Art Is/As Algorithms: rEvolution of Kazimir Malevich�s �Black Square� from 1915 to the Present and Other Examples�
Additional examples include Jean Tinguely�s �Meta Malevich� and �Meta Kandinski,� sculptures and conceptual art, as well as current perspectives on these and other works.

Charles Ostman, Institute for Global Futures. �The Emergent Evolutionary Eventstreams of NeuroAesthetics: The Intersection of Biological Metaphors in Computing and the NeuroAesthetic Influences of Nature�

For millennia, in virtually every indigenous culture known to exist, humankind has probed, explored, and even amplified the apparent aesthetic potential of the natural world via the lens of artistic expression. Recently, this mechanism of �aesthetic nourishment� has been translated into the realms of computing, particularly in the arena of computation that utilizes biologically inspired processes and algorithms to manifest a new form of aesthetic nourishment, via the lens of exploration into the realms of �virtual nature.� This poses the question of a new realm of evolutionary influence upon our current and future cultures, catalyzed by aesthetic influence from realms beyond the boundaries of organic nature.

Nathan Brown, UCLA Dept. of English. �Imagining Materiality at the Limits of Fabrication�

From Derrida�s graphic materialist to more recent work by Johanna Drucker, N. Katherine Hayles, and Steve McCaffrey, the materiality of writing has been figured and refigured�tracked through its unstable modes of participation in an emergent medial ecology�over the past forty years. But what happens when we resituate scriptural materiality in relation to, and as an element of, condensed matter research at the �limits of fabrication��at the intersection of physics, solid-state chemistry, and molecular genetics enabled by nanotechnology? I want to suggest that such a structural coupling of �art� and �science� constitutes the site of irritability at which the ethico-political stakes of technologically producing self-organizing solids� should be imagined.

Michael Dyer, UCLA Dept. of Computer Science. �The Death of the Static Visual Artist�

Evolutionary programs could remove the division between the artist (as producer of art) and the viewer (as consumer of art) by turning everyone into a producer of art through the application of selectional pressure (i.e., taste). This �death� won�t happen for literature or the visual performance arts because there are few artificial generators in these areas (and they are very primitive) and also the process of applying selection pressure in these areas is too slow and tedious.

11:00-11:30 am: Break

11:30 am-1:00 pm: Panel 2 - Evolving Systems
Moderator Margie Luesebrink, Electronic Literature Organization

Michael Chang, UCLA Dept. of Design | Media Arts. �Cellular Automata and Morphology�

Computers have become more and more capable of producing simulations. Future art, science, and research using evolutionary programming can take advantage of simulating �cellular morphogenesis.�

Casey Reas, UCLA Dept. of Design | Media Arts. ". . . ---. . ."

The creation of self-organizing systems as a contemporary artistic practice has roots in works dating back over forty years. Working with modern digital computers introduces new possibilities and methodologies for working within this domain. A range of current works based on scientific research and simple behaviors build a foundation for an exploratory and aesthetic approach to self-organizing systems.

Brian Attebery, Idaho State University Dept. of English. �Literature as a Self-Misregulating System�

Literary production and criticism all too often form a closed loop: writers write variations on what they have written before, and the critics praise them for meeting expectations. Generally these expectations have to do with writing about the moral dilemmas and psychological turmoil of characters that just happen to resemble those same writers and critics. To break out of the loop, literature needs periodic infusions of new ideas from history, politics, and especially science, which can question the most basic assumptions of human nature. The writers who have successfully integrated ideas from genetic engineering, nanotechnology, or neuroscience into science fictional narratives may be among the most important writers of our era, although you wouldn�t know it from most critical discourse.

Kate Marshall, UCLA Dept. of English. �Non-Productive Waste and Systemic Interrogation in
Contemporary Fiction�

Popular and critical accounts of contemporary fiction form a literary system inflected by the distinction between productive and non-productive forms of Bataillan �expenditure.� As a test case, Don DeLillo�s 2003 novel Cosmopolis, panned by critics for its inability to escape the destruction it portrayed, both formally and thematically enacts a form of waste that refuses to reroute negative expenditure into productive meaning. While DeLillo has been considered a �systems novelist� by Tom LeClair for taking the principles of self-organizing systems as his thematic concern, Cosmopolis and the texts that surround and constitute it provide a way of examining how a work functions as, rather than merely describes, the system.
1:00-2:00 pm Lunch

2:00-3:30 pm: Panel 4 - Cultural Worlds
Moderator to be announced.

Simon Penny, UC Irvine ArtsComputationEngineering Program. �Living with Agents: Experiments in the Aesthetics of Behavior.�
Over the last decade, the technical complexity of intelligent or autonomous agents and their possible interactions has developed rapidly, yet by and large, HAI (Human Agent Interaction) is unexplored, the idea of the socially intelligent agent is underdeveloped, the concept of a culturally intelligent agent remains shapeless. Complex communities of agents �in silico� remain, for the most part, graphical traces, images or text, locked behind the screen like fish in an aquarium, to be influenced by the mouseclicks and keyboard strokes of a solitary sedentary user. Modalities of human interaction with agent systems has remained constrained by conventional notions of interface and limitations of commercial sensor/effector technologies. I will present documentation of several works utilizing custom sensor scenarios, in which an agent or agents share physical space with a user, whose bodily gesture and dynamics perturb the system.

Bill Tomlinson, UC Irvine ArtsComputationEngineering Program. �Communities of Agents�

A lone autonomous agent may find out about its world by exploring; a community of agents, on the other hand, can exchange information among its members, thereby becoming a distributed learning system. This system breaks down, though, when certain agents provide incorrect or deceptive information. Computational social relationships can help agents remember the weak links and keep the distributed learning process on track.

Colin Milburn, Harvard Dept. of English. �The Horrors of Goo: Nanotechnology and the Logic of
Control�

Nanotechnology�s spectacular rise to prominence over the past several years has been accompanied by increasing concern over the potential dangers of self-organizing nanosystems, such as the emergence of hostile artificial intelligences or the worldwide destruction of the biosphere in an apocalypse of �gray goo.� These fears embody a cultural fantasy, endemic to modernity, that our technology will somehow get "out of control," run amok, and take over the world. Such fears negatively impact public moral support for nanoresearch, as well as the venture capital and governmental funding made available to nanoscientists. I will talk about some recent popular representations of nanotechnology that have contributed to public perceptions of nanotechnology as a science �in control� and in no danger of giving way to �gray goo.� Taking a psychoanalytic approach to these texts, I hope to briefly suggest that nanotechnology becomes a �safe� science not by any feat of intellection or engineering, but rather by a rhetorical logic of control that appeals to scientific authority.

Nicholas Gessler, UCLA Human Complex Systems Group. �Artificial Culture: It�s Agents All the Way Down�

Bertrand Russel was once confronted by a woman who claimed that the Earth is carried on the back of a giant turtle, standing on the back of another - �turtles all the way down.� Today, from nanoscience to cosmology we are confronted with the problem of how smaller �computational turtles� (John Smart) give rise to a pyramid of turtles of increasing sizes. �Old turtles in new shells� are reappearing in conferences on �computational synthesis,� �dynamical hierarchical synthesis� and �dynamic ontology.�

3:30-4:00 pm: Break

4:00-5:30 pm: Panel 3 - Emerging Minds
Moderator Katherine Hayles

Dario Nardi, UCLA Center for Governance. �Agents Are Systems Too�

Over 2,500 years in various cultures, similar patterns in individual behavior have been repeatedly identified. Until recently, people called these patterns �types��essentially static boxes without scientific grounding in the reality of human diversity. But today we understand that a finite number of attractors�dynamic patterns�necessarily appear in many (all) highly complex systems. Agents, as individuals, self-organize within the systems of which they are a part. I will argue that psychology�s current trait-based ideology is hopelessly mired in 19th century statistical tools. A new understanding will add tremendously to the realism of our models and simulations, and also act as a critical counterpoint to our individual biases as model creators.

Brooks Landon, University of Iowa Dept. of English. �More Brains: The Magnificent Arrogance of Science Fiction�

A good part, if not the greatest part, of science fiction is not as much about science or technology or the future as it is about finding ways of getting smarter. Indeed, SF might be considered the literature of radical auto-didacticism with learning machines�of various shapes, sizes, ontogenies, and ontologies�the recurring subject of SF narratives, while those narratives also present themselves as learning machines. In these terms, the self-organization of knowledge, ideas, cognitive processes�always an important aspect of literary experience�becomes the organizing principle, defining characteristic, and primary agenda of science fiction.

Rudy Rucker, San Jose State University Dept. of Computer Science. �The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul�

The title embodies a dialectic triad: (thesis) we can computer-model a personality by an interactive super-blog that I term a lifebox; (antithesis) we feel like we have a soul or spark that can�t be captured by a program, but (synthesis) it may be that certain kinds of naturally occurring computation are in fact rich and unpredictable enough to behave like a mind. Examples of these rich computations are the cellular-automata-like rules that create the markings on cone shells and, more generally, activator-inhibitor rules which produce spots, stripes and scrolls. I would also submit that the textures of events within a novel are themselves driven by activator-inhibitor computations in the author�s mind.

Sue Lewak, UCLA Dept. of English. "'I'm sure those are not the right words': The Language of �No-Sense�and Self -Organizing Systems in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, approaches the idea of self - organization through the dissolution of macroworld rules. Indeed, it is through Alice's negation of conventional rules that she develops the ability to "form" a coherent microworld system. Thus, as Alice's gradual acclimation into the wondrous language of �no-sense� indicates, self-organization at the microscale lies in the ability to perceive an existing system, rather than in the creation of a new one.

Self-Organizing Systems: rEvolutionary Art, Science, and Literature is sponsored by a DiMI Grant from the University of California, UCLA Human Complex Systems, UCLA English Department, UCLA Design | Media Arts Department, Electronic Literature Organization, and the Center for Digital Humanities.

Takahata Reminder

Tomorrow and Saturday: Films of Isao TAKAHATA from Studio Ghibli.

The program includes a screening of three of Takahata's films on Friday April 23, and an academic symposium on "Animation and the Contemporary Japanese Imagination" on Saturday, April 24. Featured speakers include Mr. Takahata, Steve Alpert (Senior Vice President of Studio Ghibli), and Anne Allison (Chair of Duke University's Anthropology Department).

Takahata-san

"This special two-day event features and explores animation and its relation to traditional and contemporary Japanese culture and society. We are particularly pleased to have the participation of celebrated director Isao Takahata, who has been invited to USC as a Provost's Distinguished Visitor. Mr. Takahata is one of the founding figures in Japanese animation, and is co-founder, together with Hayao Miyazaki, of the celebrated Studio Ghibli."

Link.

Facial Motion Capture with Dave Blackburn

Dave Blackburn, a past speaker to SCFX and the Division of Animation and Digital Arts, will be presenting techniques and challenges of animating digital faces, with a focus on facial motion capture, on Friday, 23 April, 7:00pm. He will be joined by Kim Van Holden, a digital facial animator, and will be speaking in the Ron Howard Screening Room in the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts.

A Tribute to Ray Harryhausen

The Division of Animation and Digital Arts (DADA) is proud to present a special event honoring the stop motion animation and special effects legend Ray Harryhausen.�A�75th Anniversary Event, it will be held on Monday, 19 April, from 3:00pm-6:00pm in the George Lucas Building, Room 108.

Seating for this event is limited. Priority seating is available to DADA students, students in the special effects classes and SCFX members. Students, faculty, and staff from other divisions are welcome. RSVP to animseminar@yahoo.com, subject line: Harryhausen Tribute. After those with RSVPs have been seated, seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series VII

The IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series VII - "Human Activity Understanding from Video Sensors", held on Friday, 9 March, 12:00pm-1:00pm in SAL 101.

Isaac Cohen is a researcher at the USC Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems and IMSC. His current research interests in computer vision are video segmentation, detection and tracking of moving objects, and postures and gestures recognition.

The increasing availability of video sensors in daily life environments have motivated many applications related to human activity monitoring. Dr. Cohen will discuss the automatic inference of spatio-temporal constructs from video data in two contexts:
-Video surveillance, where human activity understanding relies on accurate detection and tracking of the moving objects in the scene
-Vision-based user interfaces, where human postures and gestures are important for understanding user activity and interaction

Everyone is welcome, and there will be free pizza and soda!

ALERT! SHAMELESS PLUG: tintin @ THE ROXY

Hey folks.

So this tiny music label I've been running for about a year now has a band out on tour now, and they are playing here this coming tuesday. We just released their new CD, which was recorded by Chicago prodcuer Keith Cleversley, who has worked with lots of notable 'alternative' players such as Flaming Lips, Spiritualized, Mercury Rev, Hum and the Posies. The record has being doing amazingly well. an mp3 sample is here or visit their site at tintinmusic.com

I'm really trying to motivate people to go to this show, so here's the deal:

Free copy of the new CD and half off the ticket price of $10.00 if you want to go.

Pay the $10 at the door, and I'll give you $5 back. And yes, I'm aware that I sound like a used car salesman.

::tin tin:: @the Roxy April 13. For directions, see here

Sorry for the shameless plug, probably inappropriate for this space, but eh... leave comments if you're interested.

Annenberg Symposium, 4/5/04

The USC Annenberg Center for Communication and the USC Annenberg School for Communication will commemorate the legacy of the late Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg this spring as they host the fourth annual Walter H. Annenberg Symposium.
The event, which is scheduled for Monday, April 5th, features John Seely Brown � internationally recognized for his research and writing on learning and society in the digital age � as the keynote speaker. In addition to continuing an annual spring tradition at USC, this fourth symposium serves as a showcase of cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary communication research and education taking place at USC. [And featuring CNTV's Interactive Media Program and the CNTV/IMSC collaboration mobile game: ch�j�.]
The symposium kicks off with a project exposition taking place in the Embassy Room at the Davidson Conference Center. Students, faculty, and event guests will have the opportunity to view projects ranging from interactive game design, to database narratives, to robotics.
In addition to the keynote presentation, speakers will include USC President Steven B. Sample, USC Provost Lloyd Armstrong, USC Trustee Wallis Annenberg, Annenberg School Dean Geoffrey Cowan, and Annenberg Center Executive Director/Cinema School Dean Elizabeth Daley.

Davidson Conference Center � Embassy Room
Monday, April 5, 2004
11:00 AM
Admission: Free
More info and online RSVP: http://www.annenberg.edu/calendar/invite/fourth_annual.php

Guest speaker for CTAN 502: Machiko Kusahara

Machiko Kusahara will present her research in CTAN 502 on Tuesday, April 6.

Abstract: Mobile phone, or "Ketai", has become a major platform for daily communication and information retrieval in Japan. However, it is much more than a communication tool. With attached camera, video, GPS, and all sorts of available applications and services, Ketai has already become a medium that represents the popular culture. This lecture explores the current status of Ketai Culture in Japan through a visual tour, and tries to analyze its background from cultural and historical aspects.

For more information:
http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/

Biography:
http://www.f.waseda.jp/kusahara/aboutme.html

Famous authors of "Game Design Workshop"

Professors Chris Swain and Tracy Fullerton signing copies of their new book on Game Design at GDC.

Index @ Post

Announcing: Index @ Post

Exhibition Dates: March 27 through April 24, 2004

Reception: Saturday, March 27th, 7 - 10 pm

1904 East Seventh Place
Los Angeles, California 90021
[map]

Exhibiting Artists:
Janie Geiser, Lane Hall, Perry Hoberman, Lewis Klahr, Bill Leavitt,
Lisa Moline, Lisa Parks, Mat Rappaport, Miha Vipotnik, Paul Zelevansky

Curated by: Lane Hall, Lisa Moline, Paul Zelevansky

[link]

HyperText: Explorations in Electronic Literature

The Electronic Literature Organization presents
HyperText: Explorations in Electronic Literature

Friday, March 19, 7:00 PM, at the UCLA Hammer Museum Westwood
Free and Open to the Public

Talan Memmott is the creative director and editor of the online hypermedia literary journal Beehive . In 2001, he won the trAce-Alt-X New Media Writing Award for his work Lexia to Perplexia.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is the co-editor of The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003), and Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (MIT Press, forthcoming). He has collaborated on such new media works as Screen and Impermanence Agent.

For more information, please visit http://www.elliterature.org

Oskar Fischinger Screening

Retrospective Tribute to Oskar Fischinger (1900-67)
and
Book release celebration for Optical Poetry by Bill Moritz

Filmforum at the Egyptian Theater
Sunday March 14 at 7:00pm
The American Cinematheque
6712 Hollywood Boulevard
323-466-3456

Optical Poetry is a culmination of William Moritz's 34 years of research and work with the Fischinger Archive, which began upon his meeting Elfriede Fischinger, Oskar's widow, in 1969. Earlier in 1958, as a student at USC�s School of Cinema, he recalls, "I saw my first Fischinger film, and it popped all my buttons!"

Fischinger's pioneering experiments in Visual Music and the melding of graphic arts, abstract design, and sound were instrumental in shaping animation into an art and cinematic form and inspiring animators to pursue its aesthetic potential. An accomplished representational animator who eventually worked uneasily under contract for Paramount, MGM, and Disney, Fischinger produced numerous abstract animated films over his lifetime, invented machines such as the "Wax Machine" and the "Lumigraph" for creating images, and became an accomplished and influential abstract painter.

http://www.filmforum.org/Mar14/Mar14.html

MGLA March Mtg.

Tuesday, March 16 @ LA Film School from 7:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.

MGLA has a very exciting meeting planned for March, � hi lighted by the folks who performed motion capture and tracking for the Lord of the Rings. They also have presentations on character animation, scriptwriting, and a new set of plug-ins for After Effects. They'll have time for demo reels, DV411 will be in the lobby during the break (as well as refreshments provided by Discreet), and we have over $2000 in prizes to give away at the end.

Link to MGLA mtg. info.

Reminder: Anne Balsamo talk 3/10/04

Anne Balsamo will be visiting the Interactive Media Division and Institute for Multimedia Literacy tomorrow.

Here's the schedule:
Lunch discussion in Zemeckis 201: 12:15pm to 1:30pm
Lecture in Zemeckis 201: 1:30pm to 2:30pm
IML roundtable @IML: 3pm-5pm

Biography:
Anne Balsamo is Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Lab and a founding partner of Onomy Labs, a Silicon Valley-based technology design firm. She has faculty affiliations with the Stanford University�s Center for Design Research and the Stanford University Feminist Studies Program. Until 2001, she was a principle scientist and a member of RED (Research on Experimental Documents) at Xerox PARC, where she did collaborative research on experimental documents and new media genres. She served as project manager and new media designer for the development of RED's touring museum exhibit, XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading. Prior to joining the research staff at PARC, Balsamo was an associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she taught courses in communication and culture, and science, technology and gender. She was also the Director of LCC's Graduate Program in "Information Design and Technology." Her first book, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke, 1996) investigated the social and cultural implications of emergent bio-technologies. She is currently working on a new book titled, Designing Culture: A work of the Technological Imagination, that examines the relationship between cultural theory and the design of new media.

Virtual Reality: Truth Behind the Screen?

JC Herz, Author of Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds

College of Letters, Arts & Sciences Speaker Series: J.C. Herz
March 9 and 10, 2004 | Bovard Auditorium
General Public: $10
USC Faculty/Staff, Senior Citizens: $8
USC Students w/ Valid ID: $5

J.C. Herz is the principal of Joystick Nation Inc., a research and design practice that applies the principles of game design to products, services, and learning systems. Drawing from an understanding of ecology, online social dynamics, complex systems and information theory, J.C.'s focus is multiplayer interaction design, and systems that leverage the intrinsic characteristics of networked communication. Clients include multinational corporations, nonprofit organizations and the U.S. Defense Department.

J.C. sits on the National Research Council�s Committee on Creativity and Information Technology, and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency�s study group on patterns of emergent behavior in massively multiplayer persistent worlds. She is the author of two books, Surfing on the Internet (Little Brown, 1994), an ethnography of cyberspace before the web, and Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Little Brown, 1997), a history of videogames which traces the cultural and technological evolution of the first medium that was born digital, and how it shaped the minds of a generation weaned on Atari. J.C. published 100 essays on the grammar and syntax of game design in New York Times between 1998-2000.

via the Daily Trojan, and USC Spectrum

LA SIGGRAPH Meeting in "Real-Time"

The Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH is having its March meeting on Real-Time Visualization (this might interest more of you than the usual VFX topics . . . ). The meeting is next Tuesday, 16 March.

Dan Schmit from Engine Room will be demonstrating �Real-Time Pre-Visualization" using on-set filmmaking technology that combines live action principal photography and computer generated imagery including 3D sets and environments, characters and animated objects in one effective �real-time� shooting event.

Kevin Bjorke from NVIDIA will speak about the next generation of Cinematic Effects. He will demonstrate and discuss some of the newest applications for high-end graphics in real time.

Barnabas Takacs, the founder of Digital Elite Inc. will present real-time virtual humans. The latest advances in real-time graphics hardware have created the opportunity to create real-time responsive and reactive synthetic humans that incorporate multiple layers of non-verbal communication, body language and gestures.

And to top it off two NVIDIA Quadro FX 500 boards will be given away by PNY!

The evening is co-hosted by NVIDIA and PNY.

As always, there is a social hour from 6:30pm-7:30pm, and then the program usually runs from 7:30pm-9:30pm. This month it's at the Covel Commons at UCLA.

Tower of Terror @ DLR

"The big news at the Disneyland Resort this season is the much anticipated West Coast version of The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Set to open in early May, the attraction will be similar to the popular Disney-MGM Studios version at Florida's Walt Disney World, with one notable exception: the elevator cars will not move horizontally."

Read More

IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series VI

The IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series VI - "Special Effects R&D Topics", held on Friday, 5 March, 12:00pm-1:00pm in SAL 101.

In this talk, J.P. Lewis will mention some issues and trends in motion picture special effects, and relate these problems to research projects at IMSC. Topics will include virtual actors, face tracking and computer vision, and software development.

J.P. Lewis is a research associate in the IMSC Computer Graphics and Immersive Technology Lab. He has software R&D credits on films including The Matrix Reloaded, Forrest Gump, and 102 Dalmatians.

Everyone is welcome, and there will be free pizza and soda!

(And for my usual editorial comment, J.P. Lewis is an amazing guy, who worked as the director of software R&D at Disney's Dream Quest Images/The Secret Lab before coming to USC, and at Industrial Light and Magic even before that, and speaks to a lot of groups, including the local USC Linux Users Group.)

8th Annual IMSC Student Conference

I already posted about trying to get in a paper for this conference, but here's info on the conference itself:

8th Annual IMSC Student Conference

"ImmersiPresence: The New Experience"

Friday, 26 March, 10:00am-3:30pm, Davidson Conference Center

Our 8th Annual Student Conference will focus on the theme "ImmersiPresence: The New Experience." Recently developed technologies give us new ways of experiencing reality, as well as more convincing virtual realities. This is probably the most exciting stage in research, where we are continually challenging and crossing the borders that define reality. IMSC, as the NSF�s only Engineering Research Center designated for multimedia and Internet research, is at the forefront of these technologies with projects such as Remote Media Immersion, Augmented Virtual Environments, and Panoramic 360-degree video.

Our keynote speaker, Dr. Jim Baker, President of the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc., will provide valuable insights on our theme both broadly and as it relates to their research and developments. A panel of faculty and industry members will also be discussing the theme. There will be about one dozen short IMSC student research presentations from both the undergraduate and graduate level.

The conference and lunch are FREE to all speakers and attendees.

Seats are limited, so sign up now!

Rapture

"Throngs of men, dressed in natty white shirts, and an undulating sea of women, cloaked in flowing black robes, move with gear-like synchrony, at once orderly and mismatched, in Shirin Neshat's dual- screen projection piece Rapture, currently on view at UCLA's Fowler Museum in Los Angeles..." continue reading

Rapture is currently screening at the Fowler Museum on the UCLA Campus (Sunset and Westwood entrance), thru July 27. Info: 310-825-4361.

E-LIT

HyperText: Explorations in Electronic Literature is a yearlong performative reading series that will highlight some of the most innovative literary work in digital media.

Their event this Friday, February 27, 7:00 pm at the UCLA Hammer Musuem:
Deena Larsen and Geniwate will be reading/performing some of their eliterature works. The event is free.

The 2004 Toy Fair's Top 10 Strangest Products

Last week I visited the 2004 Toy Fair in NYC, which spanned the entire the Javitz Convention Center. It seemed under-attended (more exhibitors than shoppers), distanced (tobacco breath, bad hair, plaid), and just a tad angry (like being in Shakes-the-Clown land), which, I assume, was due to the economy. Not the best year for Amazing Live Sea Monkeys, Baby Einstein, or Color-a-Cookie. This article in Underground Online is a good summary of the pulse.

CTAN 501 Speaker: Andreas Kratky

Guest speaker for CTAN 501 tomorrow afternoon is Andreas Kratky, head of the Multimedia Studio at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany).

Time: 2:00 PM, Tuiesday Feb.24
Location: Lucas 108

RES Screening Series 2

RES presents the second in a monthly series showcasing brand new music
videos, short films and motion graphics.

MORE INFO

John Klima@bank 2/7-->3/13

John Klima has a show at the Bank in Downtown LA from 2/7 --> 3/13. More Event info can be found here.

flavorpill says:

Designing and constructing 3-D games that involve a panoply of materials, media, and technologies, Klima incorporates everything from the most refined Department of Defense satellite images of combat and troop movements to a coin-operated kiddie helicopter ride. The result is a familiar hodgepodge of the arcane, futuristic, funny, and dire that comes very close to presenting life as it actually is. Or at least, life as it would be if we lived in a post-apocalyptic penny arcade.

IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series V

The IMSC Student Council Presents Speaker Series V - "Synthesizing Realistic 3D Talking Faces", held on Friday, 20 February, 12:00pm-1:00pm in SAL 101.

Zhigang Deng, a graduate student in the IMSC Computer Graphics and Immersive Technologies (CGIT), will be discussing the history of research in facial animation, its various current applications, and USC's, own research in this field. Deng will also be showing the exciting video results of his recent work, and talk more specifically about his eye motion synthesis project, which will be published in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

Everyone is welcome, and there will be free pizza and soda!

(As a P.S., I've taken classes with Zhigang before, and he's absolutely brilliant.)

Annie Leibovitz:

8th Annual IMSC Student Conference - "ImmersiPresence: The New Experience"

The IMSC Student Council is hosting its 8th Annual Student Research Conference, with this year's topic as "ImmersiPresence: The New Experience." The conference will be at the Davidson Conference Center on Friday, 26 March.

The conference will feature 10-12 paper presentations, a keynote speaker and panel of speakers discussing the theme, and a catered lunch!

Right now there is a Call for Papers.

The conference will be free to all speakers and attendees, and there will be monetary awards awarded to the Best Papers!

Paper Submissions:

Any IMSC student researcher may submit paper proposals on their research, regardless of topic (I am checking on whether this also can include CNTV-IM students).

Download the proposal template, and send it in by February 13th to the IMSC Student Council. You will be notified of your acceptance by February 20th. Final papers will be due March 16th.

William Gibson: "Pattern Recognition" Reading

from flavorpill :
"Gibson reads from his latest novel, in which cutting-edge technology is commonplace and real value lies in those intangible human qualities such as intuition. Rich and powerful men trying to obtain something that lies just beyond their wealth, a chic yet vulnerable heroine with an allergy to corporate logos, and a few Lou Reed references make this a page-turner. But more important, Gibson might be telling us that the marriage of man and machine could ultimately be something quite beautiful."

when: 2/6/04 @ 7:30pm
where: barnes and noble westwood
10850 w pico blvd

LA SIGGRAPH Meeting on Visual Effects Producing

LA SIGGRAPH is focusing our February meeting on asking Visual Effects Producers for their perspectives on the future of visual effects. The meeting is on Wednesday, 11 February, at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre in Hollywood.

First, our panel of accomplished television, feature and commercial Visual Effects Producers will provide a brief look at the current "state of the art" of visual effects production. Next, they will consider the possible futures of the field in terms of tools, technologies, organizational structures, market trends and other factors. Speakers will focus on the impact these changes will likely have on the career paths and options for current and aspiring visual effects practitioners.

There is a social hour from 6:30pm-7:30pm, but the event starts officially at 7:30pm. However, only members are allowed in at 6:30pm until around 7:00pm (or people who want to become members by paying $35 for the year--gets you into all LA SIGGRAPH events for the year). THE EVENT IS $15 FOR NON-MEMBERS.

And, as always, if you want to go, and want to carpool, let me know . . . I'll be taking off right after the CTIN 511 forum that day . . .

Story Engines: A Public Program on Storytelling and Computer Games

Location: Stanford University
Time: Friday, February 6, from 9 am to 5 pm

This conference, inspired by the Fictional Worlds, Virtual Experiences: Storytelling and Computer Games exhibition, brings together scholars and game developers to present current thinking about the place of storytelling in computer and video games.

Open to the public, no admission fee; no reservations, open seating
Fairchild Auditorium, 291 Campus Drive, near the Cantor Arts Center at the Stanford Medical Center
Call 650-725-3155 for information

9am
Introduction and Master of Ceremonies
Tim Lenoir

9:15-10:30am
Morning Session I:
Keeping It Real: Performance and Realism
Henry Lowood, Stanford University. On narrative in historical/military simulations.
Jane McGonigal, UC Berkeley. From her work on gameplay in everyday spaces.

10:45am-noon
Morning Session II:
Embodiment: What's It Like to be in a Digital Narrative?
Scott Bukatman, Stanford University.
Casey Alt, Stanford University. On the space of the digital narrative in early narrative game genres.

Lunch Break

1:15-2:30pm
Communities and Characters
Kevin O'Hara, Sony Online Entertainment. How player communities shape and contribute to the story worlds of online games.
Katherine Isbister, Stanford University. From her work on character development in computer and video games.

Coffee Break

3:15-5:15pm
The Big Picture: Do Games Need Stories?
Haden Blackman, LucasArts
Warren Spector, Ion Storm
Will Wright, Maxis/EA

The 4th Great Big 70mm Festival

One more before I forget . . .

The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre presents "The 4th Great Big 70mm Festival (Jan. 22 - 25), a four day series featuring five 70mm films, including Jacques Tati's masterpiece "Playtime" and the restored Todd AO print of Ken Annakin's "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines." Also screening are new prints of the musical "Hello Dolly!", Stanley Kramer's "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and a rare screening of Walt Disney's landmark film "Sleeping Beauty." Scheduled to appear in person is director Ken Annakin.

I'm going (along with some other IM people) to see "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" next Sunday, so anyone is welcome to join me. Just let me know.

All screenings are at the Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the historic Egyptian (6712 Hollywood Boulevard between Highland and Las Palmas) in Hollywood.

From Super Technirama 70 to Ultra Panavision to Dimension 150 and more, the 70mm large-screen format promised -- and delivered -- a Barnum-esque world of spectacular sights and 6-track sounds. From 1955 to 1970, the Golden Age of 70mm Filmmaking, there were nearly 60 Hollywood features shot in large format, with many more released in special engagements as 35mm-to-70mm blow-ups.

This semi-annual series is a very rare opportunity to experience 70mm as it was meant to be seen: on a big, beautiful screen, with booming six-track multi-channel sound.

Visual Effects Bake-Off

Since people gave me a bad time for forgetting to post about last week's visual effects discussion about Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (sponsored by LA SIGGRAPH), I'm trying to make sure I don't miss any more . . .

The Visual Effects Award Nominating Committee, made up of all voting members of the Visual Effects Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), will be nominating 3 films from the 7 selected at an event commonly referred to as the Visual Effects Bake-Off.

Each of the 7 selected films screens a 15-minute reel of the most-impressive effects shots, and then the 4 nominated individuals for that film (usually the supervisors) are allowed 5 minutes to present why it was so impressive and answer a few questions.

This year's Bake-Off is next Wednesday, 21 January 2004. It's supposed to start at 7:30pm, and the doors are supposed to open at 6:30pm but they could possibly open before that time.

If you would like to get in, you should arrive at least an hour ahead of time, around 5:30pm.

SCFX officers will be leaving around 4:30, so once again, if you would like to get in, it is recommended that you show up early.

More Than Recommended

The UCLA Hammer has an astonishing retrospective of artist Lee Bontecou.
Bontecou Exhibit at the Hammer

IGDA on Campus

USC and their program of Information Technology Program have invited
the LA Chapter of the IGDA to USC. The program has three minor
degrees in video games and is working on a major. The facility
maintains extremely well equipped game labs each with PS2s, Game
Cubes, Xboxs and high end game PCs at every station, and other state
of the art equipment.

Time: Tuesday, Dec. 16th. 7PM.
Place: USC campus in room OHE540

This is the fifth floor of Olin Hall of Engineering.

Campus map (Olin Hall is in square 5B):
http://www.usc.edu/assets/maps/upc_map.pdf

"Mobile Connections" in Manchester

The futuresonic04 International Festival of Electronic Music and Media Arts shall explore the theme of mobile connections, bringing together media artists, musicians, game developers and technical innovators working in wireless and locative media, to present a range of artistic projects, workshops and debates.

Just as recording enabled sound to be heard apart from the place and time of its creation and radio made possible remote listening, so a new generation of communication media is now reconfiguring perceptions of space and time, and transforming the nature of the art object and the musical event.

The emergence of locative media art, predictions of the imminent bursting of the 802.11 bubble, and the introduction of location based services for mobile phones have brought into focus a set of interests concerned with wireless and locative media, and have created a space that increasing numbers of artists are starting to explore.

mobile connections will explore how wireless technologies enable place and location to be experienced in different ways, and look at the diverse ways in which artists have pushed the limits, and solicited unexpected or unforeseen results, from communication media past and present, from the radio and turntable, to mobile telephony, streaming and wireless LAN.

'04 open house

so,

a) the lab is done (for all intents and purposes)

b) we have some projects

c) we have an entire month before next semester, a time we can use to make more stuff

we need to have an open house early next semester -- get ourselves on the map, have some fun in our new space, etc.

I challenge everyone to get something done over the break, be it finishing up an existing project or prototype, getting their servo motors running like a charm, polishing off a performance piece, or programming some stupid / fun toy or game. Something. The lab is open, and if you're not here, well...most of you have laptops anyway, so no excuses. Let's get some stuff together and show it off.

On the Farm

This Saturday, December 6, 2003, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation Los Angeles, Sam Easterson will talk about the exhibit, currently on display at the CLUI, ON THE FARM: LIVE STOCK FOOTAGE BY LIVESTOCK, and will discuss his work of outfitting wild and domesticated animals with videocameras.

Talk begins at 7PM. Admission is free. Space is limited, so arrive early to be sure to get a seat. For location and direction information go to:
http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/contact/contact.html

A CLUI Independent Interpreter Program Event. More info: http://www.clui.org/

The CLUI Los Angeles Exhibit Hall is open noon to five PM, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, or by appointment. Admission is free.

Tom Jennings: Story Teller

Mark Allen's (C-Level, LAATHC) new gallery space, Machine opens this Saturday afternoon, December 6th from 1-4pm with "Story Teller" by Los Angeles artist Tom Jennings.

Story Teller is an experimental narrative about British mathematician/code breaker Alan Turing told using obsolete media -- perforated paper tape, teletype, phoneme-speech, glowing phosphors and ink-on-paper. The text is encoded 8 bytes per inch on a 700 foot roll of paper tape, which runs through a variety of cold war era technology on a daily eight hour journey from spool to floor.

Historian of cold war computing and archivist of obscure and extinct technologies, Mr Jennings is the founder of FidoNet, the largest amateur computer network in the world, as well as a recipient of Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award.

LA SIGGRAPH Meeting on The Haunted Mansion

The Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH is having its December meeting on the visual effects of The Haunted Mansion. The meeting is sponsored by Side Effects Software, the makers of Houdini (probably the best visual effects animation software out there, in terms of particle systems, etc.), and also, Sony Pictures Imageworks will be recruiting at the meeting. The meeting is next Tuesday, 9 December.

As always, there is a social hour from 6:30pm-7:30pm, and then the program usually runs from 7:30pm-9:30pm. This month it's at the Bradley Hall at UCLA.

Again, if anyone wants to go and needs a ride, let me know . . .

Paul Debevec

Paul Debevec is speaking to the Interactive Animation class on Tuesday, 2 December, at 2:00pm, down in the IML. Unfortunately, the room will be pretty crammed, so please let me know (jason.scott@usc.edu) if you want to come so we can set up enough chairs.

If you're not familiar with Paul, or his work here with the Institute for Creative Technologies, it's probably worth a look. His work led to being able to composite the backgrounds in The Matrix, and his research in HDR is regarded as the foremost in the world. Check it out . . .

Tomoe Moriyama Lecture @UCLA

UCLA DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN|MEDIA ARTS
PRESENTS: FALL 2003 LECTURE SERIES CURATED BY ERKKI HUHTAMO

Tomoe Moriyama (Japan):
�Magic Shadows - Perspectives on Japanese Media Art�
Tomoe Moriyama is the curator of media art in the Images & Technology Gallery of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. She also lectures at the University of Tokyo and elsewhere. Tomoe Moriyama has curated numerous exhibitions, often connecting �old media� with the most recent creations by contemporary Japanese media artists. Her lecture will provide perspectives on the Japanese media art scene based on her own experiences.

Lectures will be held in the EDA, Kinross North Building, 11000 Kinross Avenue, Westwood, 6PM - 8 PM. Refreshments will be provided.

Rhythm and Hues Presentation

Rhythm & Hues Studios will be giving a presentation on the work that they are currently doing in feature animation, commercials, interactive games and design tomorrow, Wednesday, 19 November, 7:00pm-9:00pm in LUC 108. They will talk about job opportunities at R&H but more importantly, scholarships and internships for students who are currently studying for a career in this field.

USC Electronic Digital Game Expo

This Thursday, 20 November, the Information Technology Program is hosting E.D.G.E. (Electronic Digital Game Expo) at Town and Gown from 5:00pm-11:00pm. The Xbox, Activision, Electronic Arts, the Sony Playstation, and Blizzard are just some of the companies that will be there, and they will be joined by SCFX, the Institute for Creative Technologies, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the School of Fine Arts to cover all areas of gaming technology.

Scott Snibbe Lecture

The Beall Center for Art and Technology cordially invites you to attend a "Meet the Artist" Lecture with Scott Snibbe in association with Screen Series, on exhibit through December 13, 2003

Thursday, December 4, 2003, 7pm
Nixon Theater, Building 720, second floor
Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine
Information: (949) 824-4339 � http://beallcenter.uci.edu

Josh Clayton Jitter Presentation...

... tomorrow Friday evening November 14th from 7 to 10 PM in the ZML.

All IM students are invited & encouraged to attend.

UPDATE!
Due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict,
the presentation will begin at 8:30 PM instead of 7.

Scott Snibbe Opening

Opening on Wednesday at the Beall Center:
Screen Series by Scott Snibbe
November 12 - December 13
Opening reception November 12, 6-9 pm

A stunning meditation on light and shadow, Screen Series functions on a number of levels, introducing the audience to the history and technique of the earliest cinematic cameras as well as allowing viewers to create cinema directly with their bodies. Six rectangles of pure white light react to visitors as they move between projector and screen, physically interrupting the beams of projected light. In Screen Series, Snibbe has developed a work that belies its technical complexity and brings the process of the earliest moving image photography into the twenty-first century. The work reintegrates the functions of image capture, development and projection by combining camera, projector and computer into a single light sensing and emitting apparatus.

Scott Snibbe is an award-winning San Francisco research artist and computer scientist who explores direct physical perception and the nature of the self through the use of electronic media [...] http://www.snibbe.com/

NOTE: Unfortunately the opening confiicts with Julia Scher's lecture at UCLA.

max workshop Wed. 11/12

another max workshop:

time: Wednesday, 11/12, 1:00 'til a couple hours after
where: zml

I hope that some 1st yrs. can make it, although I know this probably isn't a great time.

_wc

Speech Processing Lecture

In case any of you are interested in this kind of stuff, Shrikanth Narayanan is giving a lecture on his recent research in automatic speech recognition algorithms, spoken dialog and multimedia systems, speech synthesis, and speech production modeling TOMORROW, 7 November, 12:00pm-1:00pm in OHE 122. There's also FREE PIZZA AND SODA, courtesy of the IMSC Student Council, who is sponsoring the lecture.

Shrikanth Narayanan is the IMSC Research Area Director, and is a USC Associate Professor in Linguistics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and at the Signal and Image Processing Institute.

Julia Scher talk at UCLA

UCLA DEPARTMENT OF DESIGN|MEDIA ARTS
PRESENTS: FALL 2003 LECTURE SERIES CURATED BY ERKKI HUHTAMO

November 12: Julia Scher (USA): �There Is No Image Vault�

Julia Scher�s art focuses on the subjects - surveillance and cybersphere. Aiming at the exposure of dangers and ideologies of monitoring systems, Scher creates temporary and transitory web/installation/performance works that explore issues of power, control and seduction. She has shown numerous works at major art institutions in the United States and in Europe. She has also lectured at Harvard University, Princeton University and Rutgers University.

Lectures will be held in the EDA, Kinross North Building, 11000 Kinross Avenue, Westwood, 6PM - 8 PM. Refreshments will be provided.

max workshop Friday 11/7; 6-8 PM, ZML

I'll do a Max workshop on 11/7 from ~6-8 PM in the ZML (RZC 201), and if people are interested, another one on 11/12.

This is an attempt to try and accomodate everyone. 1st years seem to have issues with Wednesday...please, please rsvp in the comments so I don't show up to an empty room on friday night.

if there is something you really want to learn how to do, post that as well. otherwise, I'm going to do a basic overview of the max environment, data structures, objects and messages, and basic control elements.

max workshop (non c-level variety)

it seems as though some people are interested in getting some experience with max (the /msp/jitter variety). I know that c-level is having their tutorial, which should be good, and I urge people to go if they want. However, since maybe people won't be able to find the hole in the wall that is the c-level space, or want to learn some stuff without straying too far from campus, I thought maybe I would try and hold a workshop in the zml. I want to try and gauge experience and interest in such an event, so if you could all post comments about when would be the best time. The lab is currently being built up, but if there is no construction going on, the space is certainly workable. I've heard from a couple people that Wednesday night would work well, which is fine with me. Maybe 8ish to 10:30-11:00ish. So maybe let's do this: I'll see what the situation is with the zml this week, and anyone who is interested in attending (or helping, if you already know the software) post comments on whether you can come on Wednesday night or not. And if you can't make it Wednesday, post on what days are good for you and we can try and work something out. We've been doing some max stuff with Perry, which I think has been really helpful to people in our class, but I think that maybe this would provide an opportunity for some 1st years to get some experience with this environment, which I feel has been very useful for producing certain types of interactive experiences.

yeah, ok?

UCI Wolf Project

Here are some photos from the 511 field trip to UCI's "Interactive Wolf" Project:

C-Level: MAX/MSP Workshop

The following is an e-mail sent out to the C-level e-mail list. C-level's a cool group of creative people, that includes Eddo Stern. Click the link for a description:

"Hey everyone, Clay Chaplin is going to start a three week Max workshop this
Sunday at C-level. The workshop will begin at 4pm sharp and run for about
two hours. There will be two more sessions on the following Sundays (Nov
9th and 16th).

Please note that unlike most things at C-level, this will actually start on
time. Clay will be covering both using MAX and using it to interface with
electronics. Those of you who came to the last meeting and signed up, we've
reserved a spot for you. Everyone else please email him directly to reserve
a spot. Seats are limited and you must reserve a space to participate. His
email is > cchaplin@shoko.calarts.edu

Shockingly, this is a free workshop. Directions to C-level (in case you've
forgotten) can be found here >

http://www.c-level.cc/map.html

find below more info on what will be covered during the first meeting....

DAY1 - The Basics of Max/MSP

- What is Max/MSP? Where do I get it? How can I do something interesting
with it without learning an entire programming language? What can I do with
it?

We'll be starting the first of three Max/MSP workshops this Sunday at
4:00pm. Bring along your laptop and if possible download a copy of the
software before hand. Here's the link to the company that supports it:
www.cycling74.com. The software will work without limits for 30 days.
Max/MSP runs on OSX, OS9, and Windows (not sure which flavor). I'll be
using version 4.2.1 on OS X during the workshops.

We'll get started talking about Max and what you can do with it for your
art. If you would like to begin early there are a nice set of tutorials
included when you download the software."

IM Calendar

It came up in conversation in the 511 Seminar that it'd be good to have a calendar for everyone to post meetings, events, etc. so that people can keep track of scheduling and not miss events. Though we have an events/exhibit page, I think people agreed it'd be better to have a calendar to organize it all. Is anyone willing to work on implementing one?

meet the directors

Virgin Megastore on Sunset
10/28/03 - 7:30pm
Meet the Directors!
Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham will be in the store all at the same time to celebrate the release of the DVD series Work of .... This will include a 45-minute screening, followed by a Q & A session and DVD signing.

(Note, you must have pre-ordered the DVDs from the Virgin Megastore in order to attend the event. [And they are doing the same thing with the Tenacious D DVD on Nov 4th.])

this or class, this or class.....

IMSC Industry Day

The IMSC Student Council is hosting an Industry Day next Thursday, 30 October from 10:00am-2:00pm in the Gerontology Auditorium. While the people coming will probably be more along the engineering-side of things, they are aware that some artists and non-technical people are interested in coming. Companies like Rhythm & Hues will be there.

The Industry Day is free, but you need to sign up in OHE 106 (Engineering Student Affairs, my old stomping grounds) and leave a $10 deposit that will be returned at the event.

Motion Capture Speaker

Dave Blackburn, a pioneer in virtual reality and real-time graphics and president of Virtual Ventures is coming to speak on motion capture techniques next Tuesday, 2:00pm-5:00pm, down in the IML.

Dave is coming to Vibeke Sorenson's class (I'm assuming it's her Interactive Animation class this semester, ironically), so all of the IM students are invited.

Immersive News

"On October 25th, join the Associated Press Television/Radio Association (APTRA) members at the University of Southern California for APTRA's first ever workshop on Virtual Reality Journalism.

"USC's Integrated Media Systems Center, in collaboration with the Annenberg School for Journalism, will describe its research using 360-degree video cameras and virtual reality headsets to put the viewer in the actual news scene. The video results are stunning as you look around the scene and watch the reporter tell the story and conduct interviews.

"USC Professors Skip Rizzo, Larry Pryor, and Alexander Sawchuk will discuss the future implications for this form of news media capture and presentation, show an actual news story shot in Southern California and demonstrate how this potential "News of the Future" is done. The equipment will also be available for a hands-on recorded and live demonstration!

"The event will take place on Saturday, October 25, 2003, from 9:30am to 12:30pm at USC's Gerontology Auditorium in the Gerontology Building on the Main USC Campus.

"The cost: $10 for students and $15 for others
Limited number of Free Student Tickets-Call 213-740-9819"

Alright, now that all the info's out there for you, my couple of comments:
1. Once again, ironic that dual research goes on in multiple departments at USC, and we don't know abou it.
2. I have an issue with using the term "Virtual Reality" in this context. This is immersive, but I feel that they're taking the term a bit too far.

I'm still going to try to go, though . . .

[Added Thursday, 23 October] Well, I got 7 free tickets, so if you want to go, let me know.

LA SIGGRAPH Meeting

The Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH is having its October meeting on "Games: Raising the Bar" - and is co-hosted by Discreet. The meeting is this Wednesday, 22 October.

"This year video games are pushing the envelope in graphics and game play, producing a cinematic or near cinematic interactive experience. The bar of game quality is being raised to cinematic levels. What will this mean for those in computer graphics, especially those in the entertainment industry? With cinematic quality within grasping distance and game revenue now greater than theater box office, what will the future bring? Come and see because the bar has been raised much further than you think."

There is a social hour from 6:30pm-7:30pm, and then the program usually runs from 7:30pm-9:30pm. This month it's at the Covel Commons at UCLA (everybody say, "Eeeewwwwww . . .").

I'll be going after our seminar (I'm one of the staffing volunteers), so if anyone wants a ride, let me know.

Casey Reas Presentation

Casey Reas will be giving a presentation on his programming environment Processing this Thursday October 16th at 6:30pm during Perry Hoberman's Experiments in Interactivity class in the ZML. First year IMD students are invited (and encouraged) to attend.

Girls and Gaming Series

For anyone interested:

The Center for Feminist Research
Girls and Gaming Series
presents

Marsha Kinder
usc school of cinema

Mark Harris
usc school of cinema

Kristy Kang
usc annenberg center for communication

Runaways: Girls & Video Gaming

Wednesday, October 15
Doheny Memorial Library Intellectual Commons
12:00-1:30

For a light lunch, please RSVP to 213-740-1739 or cfr@usc.edu.

The Importance of IMSC / Protecting Your Intellectual Property Rights

The IMSC Student Council presents Isaac Maya speaking on:
"The Importance of IMSC / Protecting Your Intellectual Property Rights"

While Maya will be mostly speaking onthe relevancy and importance of the IMSC (which could also be interesting), he is going to discuss how to protect your intellectual property (ideas) so you can profit from your ideas without restricting your ability to publish your work.

Friday, Oct. 17th, NOON-1:00 in OHE 122.
Pizza and soda will be provided at the event.
(For more information on IMSC: http://imsc.usc.edu/scouncil/)

ZML update

Some interactive media happening at the ZML for Parent's Weekend:

and the screens finally arrive (@300 lbs.):

Amusement Park Trade Show

IAAPA, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, is having their annual trade show next month in Florida:

The IAAPA Orlando 2003 Convention and Trade Show is the largest show world wide for the Amusement and Entertainment Industry. Last year's show attracted over 28,000 attendees from a variety of facilities such as Amusement Parks, Aquariums, Attractions and Leisure, Family Entertainment Centers and much more. It is the ultimate opportunity for facility owners and managers to discover new products, advances in technology, and ways to increase customer satisfaction and enhance their business for 2004 and beyond.

You can join (and get a subscription to Funworld magazine) here.

ArtFutura 2003

The 14th annual ArtFutura digital art/tech/culture festival is going on right now (Oct 9-12, Barcelona). Parts of the conference is being livecasted (in WMP9). Also, Marta Peirano is live blogging ArtFutura at elastico.net (SYSTRAN es_en).

SCFX

THE GAMERS - a film by the SCFX club/crew. Haven't heard about this yet, but apparently they are screening their first work. 8pm at Norris on 10/20/03. RSVP to productions@gamersthemovie.com

More info about this SCFX club can be found at SCFilm.net

AIM V: SYZYGY The Human Remix

Hi everyone! I interned for this festival last year, and they are having their call for entries again. I thought some of you may have projects that you'd like to enter. for more information, visit www.usc.edu/aim

Art in Motion V: SYZYGY. Presented by the USC School of FIne Arts in partnership with the Armory Center for the Arts.

FESTIVAL THEME
AIM V: SYZYGY calls for entries that explore the question of the human/machine ‘remix’. Derived from a Greek root meaning “yoked or paired”, syzygy implies a state of interdependent duality that speaks to the increasingly permeated relationship between human and machine.

As instantaneous, disembodied communication becomes the constant condition of our lives, and the distinction between biology and technology blurs, so a new experience of self is emerging. It is one of ‘distributed subjectivity’: the state of being (either alternately or simultaneously) both an embodied and a disembodied entity that is supplemented, multiplied, and mediated by technological apparatus. In this renegotiation of what it is and means to be human, we are exploring the ramifications of the ‘remix’ – its impact on human relationships (from global to interpersonal), on perception and the expression of subjectivity (human and/or machine), and on the experience of being a body (physical or virtual, flesh or machine).

The AIM V: SYZYGY (The Human Remix) exhibition will be held March 7 – June 6, 2004 at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena. AIM V will also include screenings on the video billboards on West Hollywood’s Sunset strip and satellite lectures and events in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Cusco, Peru.

SCREENING COMMITTEE
All entries will be viewed, and final selections made by the AIM V Screening Committee: AIM Director Lynzie Baldwin; Amauta Technologies President Carlos Battilana; artist Caroline Clerc; and artist and AIM Co-founder Janet Owen. The jury will view all selected works and award the $500 AIM Student Award and the $1000 Bernay Kurland Grayson Award for Creative Excellence which is open to both students and professionals.

RULES
Works must be ‘time-based’ and address the festival theme (however obliquely). Works may be submitted by professionals, amateurs, or students
of any age, working in any discipline. AIM defines ‘time-based’ to include: Internet-based projects such as websites, collaborative networks, and
technologies for spatializing information; works utilizing wireless technology or wearable computing devices; hardware design; architectural and urban design projects; digital media such as CD-ROMs and DVDs; performative, installation, and augmented reality projects; video, digital video, animation; computer games; and sound pieces - as well as various emerging hybrids that elude traditional categorization.

All submitted works must be completed after September 1, 2001, and entries must be postmarked no later than November 30, 2003.

Submission to AIM is free.

Submit proposals and/or copies of projects (no originals please) in the form of a DVD (NTSC), VCD, VHS (NTSC), Mac/PC CD-ROM, or URL, as appropriate. Other formats can be accommodated only by prior arrangement with AIM.
1. All entries must be postmarked no later than November 30, 2003.

2. All works submitted must be new works: completed after September 1, 2001. A pre-existing work which has undergone substantial alteration shall be considered a new work.

3. AIM will take all reasonable precautions to ensure the safety of materials in its care, but no original or irreplaceable materials should be submitted under any circumstances.

4. All works must be submitted by the artist principally responsible for them. For collaborative works one artist may represent the group, but said artist will remain the individual with whom AIM communicates.

5. All works must be complete enough for presentation at the time of submission.

6. Submit work in the form of a DVD (NTSC), VCD, VHS (NTSC) copy, a Macintosh CD-ROM, or a URL, as appropriate. Other formats can be accommodated only by prior arrangement with AIM.

7. Final responsibility for a work’s presentability lies with the artist. Failure to deliver a presentable copy for exhibition shall render the work ineligible.

8. AIM will view all submitted works and select those to be exhibited. The jury will view all exhibited works, and select award winners.

9. Members of the AIM jury shall not be eligible to enter works for festival competition, but may have works on exhibition.

10. All rights to any given work remain with the artist. However, submission to the festival constitutes agreement on the part of the artist that Art In Motion has the right to publicly show his/her entered work as part of the festival and/or as part of on-going festival-related activities and promotions, without remuneration.

11. AIM is not responsible for lost, misdirected, or delayed entries. Materials will only be returned if the entry includes a U.S stamped, self-addressed envelope.

12. All legal responsibility for any work submitted remains with the artist. AIM assumes no liability for any exhibited work.

13. All jury decisions are final.

Lessig @ USC

A Debate: The War over Music
Stanford law professor Larry Lessig debates Hilary Rosen, former CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, on issues surrounding downloading music, internet piracy and copyright laws in the world of cyberspace.

Every day from Tue, October 21, 2003 through Wed, October 22, 2003 from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm
University Park Campus: Bovard Auditorium (ADM)
Admission: General Public, $10; USC Faculty and Staff, $8; USC Students, $5

More info here

3dFilm Expo

On the way to the 3D Film Expo:

At the 3D Film Exo:

AlphaWolf at UC Irvine

The Beall Center for Art and Technology
presents Through the Eye of the Wolf

September 23 - October 26
Bill Tomlinson & Sam Easterson
Opening reception with the artists: Tuesday, September 23, 6-9 pm

Ever wonder about life in the pack? Through the innovative use of
technology, these two award-winning artists deliver the lives of
wolves to the doorstep of our senses. "Through the Eye of the Wolf"
pairs Bill Tomlinson’s internationally acclaimed "AlphaWolf," an
interactive simulation of the social lives of wolves, with Sam
Easterson’s astonishing digital footage of wolves, captured through
his “embedded” micro-recording systems.

Information: (949) 824-4339
Hours: Monday - Saturday 12-5, Friday until 8pm
Address: 712 Arts Plaza, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697
Directions and information: http://beallcenter.uci.edu

Plant Media Project

From C-Level

Traditional Broadcast News (print, radio, tv, internet) is irrelevant. Get your news from plants!

The Plant Media Project by Marc Herbst is a window and lobby installation at 33 1/3 Books in Echo Park. 33 1/3 Books is often described as >=the anarchist bookstore near the Downbeat Café.? I know it as a place that sells book, magazine and newspapers. The art project is a site-specific presentation of collage, print, sculpture, and flyer that butts against concept-based art and media theory.

The exhibition runs from now until when Frank Sosa, owner of 33 1/3 asks me to take it down. There will be an opening party on Thursday September 18th from 7:00 PM till ‘round 9:00 PM. Strangely, we call it an opening event, even though the show will have been up for some time. Treats will be served.

33 1/3 is at 1200 N. Alvarado Blvd

Netmage: Live Media

Creative and innovative images in art, media, communication.
4th edition.
Bologna, 21-24 January, 2004
International Live Media Floor

Applications for the International Live Media Floor section of Netmage are now open. Netmage will take place in Bologna from the 21st to the 24th January 2004.

With this next edition we want to reinforce the presence of Netmage as an international meeting point dedicated to Live Media: a series of performance practices that use, and integrate, audio-visual devices (digital, electronic, cinematographic, technological, pre technological etc.) to construct an active relationship with the audience.

With Netmage 03 we wanted to introduce the term ˜Live Media" to best describe the wide range of instruments and solutions that are used by artists, musicians, technicians and crews from vastly differing starting points: going beyond, though obviously not excluding, the forms of mixing sound and image that are covered by the term Vj-ing.

The results from the previous edition of Netmage proved this method correct; a multiplicity of approaches, aesthetic orientations and live performance procedures emerged providing a field of lively and varying research that we believe important to respect, support and disseminate.

We are aiming for innovation and originality, for forms that reflect the pleasure of risk-taking, a taste for experimentation, originality.

The Live Media Floor, as part of the festival’s programme of special events, workshops and conferences, is the heart of Netmage. It represents an international point of reference for the area of live media and Vj’ing; it is, above all, an instrument open to research, for the gathering of new productions and projects in the attempt to describe the contemporary aesthetic and audio-visual scene.

Abandoning the competitive mechanics of contests we have turned instead to Live Media Floor, an open stage and gathering point for confrontation, meeting and confirmation between performers and audience.

Announcement

The Live Media Floor is open to all comers who want to try their hand at the art of generating and/or mixing live sound and image in whatever shape or form.

To this end the participating candidates must provide
- A detailed list of technical elements involved
- A list of participating technicians
- A demo tape (VHS, DVD, CD-rom, cd audio)
- A detailed schedule for the presentation of the project

The projects selected by the Festival’s artistic panel will make up the programme of events.

Deadline for application:

Material should be sent to:
Netmage, via cà Selvatica 4D, 40126 Bologna
No later than 10th November, 2003.

For information and application on line:
www.netmage.it _____________ bando@netmage.it

Participating projects:

Those selected will be advised by the 10th December, 2003. Following selection the candidates will agree with the Festival the definition of the technical requirements needed to execute their project in performance.

Those selected will receive a contribution of €1,000 towards accommodatio
The Festival will provide organisational assistance for the period those selected are required to be in Bologna.

Netmage, via cà Selvatica 4D, 40126 Bologna
Fax (+39) 051 220900
bando@netmage.it
www.netmage.it

Please excuse any doubling up of email, if you do not wish to receive our email send a reply with the following in the subject line: basta e.mail per me.

Application Form:

Name of artist/group/crew
Composition of the group/crew
Name of musician or musical support
Site address:
Email
Tel
Fax
Support used
Technical requirements
Attachments
Description of project (as attachment where possible)
Brief biographical note of artist/group/crew

Authorisation for the use of brief extracts from the work for publicity and promotional purposes on TV and radio.

Please note that material sent will become part of the festival archive and will not be returned.

Please make sure that all parts of the application form have been filled out.

Digital Art Awards 2003

Digital Art Awards 2003

CATEGORIES AND PRIZES============================
--Digital Cinema Grand Prize (1):
500,000YEN
--Interactive Grand Prize (1):
500,000YEN
--Digital Music Grand Prize (1):
500,000YEN

SUBMISSION PERIOD ===============================
--June 15th, 2003 - September 16th, 2003

Invisible College: 9/4/03

Coco Conn and Peter Giblin are proud to invite you to the second in a series of biweekly events:

Invisible College
Thursday September 4, 2003
8pm till 2am...
Door $5.

Program begins at 9pm:
Violin accompanied by real time 3D

Part-time radicals, authors, and negotiators will side-step critical issues as they address advances in nuclear-pulsed propulsion, anarachy and dictator cults.

World 3-D Film Expo

World 3-D Film Expo: September 12 - 21, 2003

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: August 19, 2003

World 3-D Film Expo to Unspool at Egyptian Theatre With Over 33 Classic and Rare Feature Length 1950's Treasures and Over 20 Short Subjects, including Four Los Angeles Premieres & A Screening of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, Seen And Heard In Stereophonic Sound For The First Time in 50 Years!

Special Guests to include INFERNO star Rhonda Fleming; KISS ME KATE star Kathryn Grayson and "Miss 3-D" Among Others

World 3-D Film Expo Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Margot Gerber, mgerber@bgerber.com
323.461.2020, ext. 115
Date: August 19, 2003

World 3-D Film Expo to Unspool at Egyptian Theatre With Over 33 Classic and Rare Feature Length 1950's Treasures and Over 20 Short Subjects, including Four Los Angeles Premieres & A Screening of IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, Seen And Heard In Stereophonic Sound For The First Time in 50 Years!

Special Guests to include INFERNO star Rhonda Fleming; KISS ME KATE star Kathryn Grayson and "Miss 3-D" Among Others

September 12 - 21, 2003

Hollywood - SabuCat Productions will present the largest 3-D tribute show ever mounted anywhere in history, from Friday, September 12 - Sunday, September 21 at the Egyptian Theatre (6712 Hollywood Boulevard) in Hollywood. The 10 day festival, which celebrates the golden era of 3-D filmmaking, will include many of the best known 3-D titles of the 1950's, such as HOUSE OF WAX, KISS ME KATE and CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, but will also offer fans of the format an opportunity to see some of the more obscure 3-D movies, many of which have not been seen in 3-D in over 50 years! L.A. Premieres include THE NEBRASKAN; FLIGHT TO TANGIER, JESSE JAMES VS. DALTONS; THE GLASS WEB. The films star favorites from the golden age such as Rock Hudson, Rita Hayworth, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Vincent Price, the Three Stooges, Casper the Ghost, Beany & Cecil, and many others.

In all, 33 features and 21 short subjects will be shown along with a "rarities" show consisting of rare, wonderful, stereoscopic images, many of which have never been seen in a public setting. In person guests will speak at selected screenings. Guests will be announced as they are confirmed. All prints will be 35mm and run in the "double-interlock", Polaroid System, the original method (and still the best method) for showing true 3-D. All guests listed below are appearing schedule permitting.

Festival organizer Jeff Joseph says, "Many of the prints that we're running are the last in existence... and in some cases the original negatives no longer exist. Due to the complexity of projecting these films in the stereoscopic format, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience these movies the way they were meant to be seen."

It has been over 50 years (November 26th, 1952) since BWANA DEVIL, opened at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood. While not the first 3-D feature film (which was POWER OF LOVE, U.S.A., 1922), the popularity of BWANA DEVIL was the direct cause of the production of a total of 50 3-D films from 1952 through 1955, often referred to as the golden era of 3-D.

The following is a complete schedule of the series. Shorts will precede the feature unless noted otherwise. All shows will be presented with an intermission as they were originally shown. Guests attending each show are listed at the end of the film synopsis. If you are interested in learning more about tickets, press information, etc. please see the bottom of this press release.

The Festival kicks off on Friday, September 12th at 7:00 PM with HOUSE OF WAX (1953, 88 min., color) directed by Andre de Toth. Cast: VINCENT PRICE, PHYLLIS KIRK, FRANK LOVEJOY. Fifty years later, HOUSE OF WAX still thrills, entertains, and reveals stereoscopic wonder. Jack Warner invented the term "sensation," and set his technicians to building a 3-D camera in December, 1952, just after the opening of BWANA DEVIL. But as the Warner 3-D camera would take a few months to build, Jack contracted with Milton Gunzburg to use the Natural Vision cameras (used first on BWANA DEVIL). In a matter of days, a reworked script from 1933's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM became THE WAX WORKS and finally HOUSE OF WAX. Advertised as the "First 3-D Film from a Major Studio," WAX was and still is the quintessential 3-D film. A wonderful blend of ageless story, good color, fun settings, and another 3-D first: stereophonic sound. Although the one-eyed director de Toth couldn't see 3-D, he understood perspective and framing better than many cameramen. Jack Warner demanded de Toth have at least some 3-D "gags" and the most obvious is the famous paddle ball scene featuring Reggie Rymal. Sadly, Andre de Toth passed away October 28, 2002 and Reggie Rymal December 25, 2002.

Guests: Paul Picerni (lead actor) and Mrs. Andre de Toth are scheduled to attend.

With short film, "Motor Rhythm" (1939, 10 min., color) One of the earliest examples of 3-D, this short was created by John Norling for the 1939 World's Fair. Not seen theatrically in over 50 years, we're going to have one of the first public screenings of this stop-motion rarity. This clever novelty short simulates the manufacture of an automobile. Dancing to the beat of the music, the automotive parts find their own particular places in the mechanism.

Friday, September 12 | 9:30 PM
STRANGER WORE A GUN, THE (1953, 83 min., color) Cast: RANDOLPH SCOTT, CLAIRE TREVOR, LEE MARVIN. Director: ANDRE DE TOTH. Columbia brought in one-eyed director Andre de Toth (HOUSE OF WAX) to be the trail boss of Randolph Scott, Claire Trevor, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and other characters. Typical western plot of the time, but many more 3-D gags than WAX, so duck! Not seen in 3-D in over 50 years!

Saturday, September 13 | 11:15 PM
GORILLA AT LARGE (1954, 84 min., color) Cast: CAMERON MITCHELL, ANNE BANCROFT, RAYMOND BURR. Director: HARMON JONES. Fox's second 3-D feature, set in a carnival involving a killer gorilla. Bancroft is radiant, Mitchell young, and Burr sinister with an excellent supporting role by Lee J. Cobb. Watch for Lee Marvin's bit.

Saturday, September 13 | 1:30 PM
CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON (1954, 64 min., b&w) Cast: SONY TUFTS, VICTOR JORY, MARIE WINDSOR. Director: ARTHUR HILTON. Astronauts land on the moon and get in trouble when they meet a race of leotard-clad humanoid cats. So-bad-it's-good sci-fi appeals to trashy camp fans with its cheesy art direction and lurid cat fights. Music by... Elmer Bernstein!

With short film, "Adventures Of Sam Space" (10 min., color) A dramatic flight to the year 2001, when Earth is at war with pirate planets from outer space! This cartoon was not released until 1960, as "Space-Attack", when it ran with "September Storm". And even then, it was run in CinemaScope, distorted from its correct aspect ratio. This cartoon has been completely lost...until now. We will be presenting a brand new, fully restored print!

Saturday, September 13 | 4:15 PM
GOG (1954, 85 min., color) Cast: RICHARD EGAN, CONSTANCE DOWLING. Director: HERBERT L. STROCK. This very rare title hasn't been seen in 3-D since its premier over 50 years ago! One of the last 3-D's of the golden era, it evokes memories of the 1950's TV show SCIENCE FICTION THEATER. Directed by Herbert L. Strock, who is planning to attend the screening... and who also hasn't seen this film in 3-D in over half a century!

Saturday, September 13 | 7:00 PM
KISS ME KATE (1953, 109 min., color) Cast: HOWARD KEEL, KATHRYN GRAYSON. Director: GEORGE SIDNEY (II). MGM's big 3-D production of the famous Broadway play. Flawless 3-D, colorful production numbers (including Bob Fosse), energetic direction from George Sidney. First time shown in stereophonic sound in Los Angeles in 50 years! Certainly a classic in many respects.

Guests: KATHRYN GRAYSON, TOMMY RALL, WILLIAM TUTTLE (MAKEUP ARTIST). Q&A TO FOLLOW THE SCREENING.

With short, "Lumber Jack Rabbit" (1953, 7 min., color) Excellent Bugs Bunny cartoon, directed by Chuck Jones. Bugs Bunny wanders into the land of giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, and his equally huge dog. Bugs, after the huge carrot patch, outwits the giant hound.

Saturday, September 13 | 10:15 PM
In Stereophonic Sound for the first time in 50 years! IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953, 81 min., b&w) Cast: RICHARD CARLSON, BARBARA RUSH. Director: JACK ARNOLD. Universal also took notice of BWANA DEVIL's success and quickly constructed their own 3-D camera. Secrecy surrounded their first 3-D film which started filming in January, 1953, based on a story by Ray Bradbury. A highly atmospheric film which stands on it own without 3-D. Arnold spares the 3-D gimmicks, allowing a few "natural" effects to remind us it's a 3-D adventure. One of the top five 3-D films, the "space" special effects are 1953 modest budget. Yet, allow yourself to fall into the 3-Dimensional heart of this serious-themed sci-fi and you'll remember it forever. Not seen in Polaroid 3-D in over 50 years!

Guest: Actress Kathleen Hughes will introduce the feature.

NOTE: The short subject, "Nat King Cole" follows the feature presentation, as this is the order that these were originally shown.

With short, "Nat King Cole With Russ Morgan's Orchestra" (1953, 20 min., b&w) The great Nat "King" Cole sings his hit song "Pretend," then swings out with "It's Crazy." Russ Morgan and his Orchestra play "Wang Wang Blues" (watch out for that sliding trombone!) The Gene Louis Dancers enact "The Bull," songstress Joan Elms croons "Blue Moon" and the Marvels perform some wild acrobatic stunts. This entertaining musical short was prepared by Universal-International as a companion piece to IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, and this is the first time they are being presented together since 1953!

Sunday, September 14 | 1:00 PM
ROBOT MONSTER (1953, 63 min., b&w) Cast: GEORGE NADER, CLAUDIA BARRETT. Director: PHIL TUCKER. Found on most "worst film" lists, this is a must-see. Supposedly shot on either a $15,000 or $20,000 budget over a few days time, and it shows. But remarkably the B&W 3-D is generally pretty good. George Nader and cast perform a living comic book of sci-fi from a young boy's perspective...and this flick hasn't been seen in 3-D in 50 years! Music by Elmer Bernstein.

With short, "Stardust In Your Eyes" (1953, 4 min., b&w) Cast: SLICK SLAVIN. Made by the same people who produced "Robot Monster", this short was designed to be run before it, but: it never was. So, this is another short that's never been seen, until now! Famous rockabilly singer Slick Slavin shows us how various popular screen stars will appear in the fabulous new medium of 3-D movies.

Sunday, September 14 | 2:45 PM
FLIGHT TO TANGIER (1953, 90 min., color) Cast: JACK PALANCE, JOAN FONTAINE. Director: CHARLES MARQUIS WARREN. This film has never played in 3-D in Los Angeles, even in its original release. This will be it's Los Angeles 3-D premiere! Perhaps Palance's first "good guy" role, oddly cast with Fontaine. Certainly oil and water, but the Technicolor 3-D is great. Not seen in 3-D in over 50 years! This was one of only 2 films shot in Technicolor "3-strip" AND 3-D... meaning 6 rolls of film were being shot at the same time!

Sunday, September 14 | 5:45 PM
STEREO-TECHNIQUES 3-DIMENSION (1953, 50 min.) This is a show consisting of 5 short subjects. After "Bwana Devil" was released (but before the first studio films came out), theaters needed some 3-D product. So they imported 5 shorts and tied them together under the title "Stereo Techniques". Most of these shorts haven't been seen in 50 years, and certainly not in the format and way they were intended. The shorts are:

AROUND IS AROUND SHORT (1951, 10 min., color)
This short, produced by Norman McLaren, with 3-D supervision by Raymond Spottiswoode, will be run as part of "Stereo Techniques". Lines and figures are used in color in an abstract, animated, form.

BLACK SWAN SHORT (1952, 13 min., b&w)
This short will be run as part of "Stereo Techniques". This is a ballet subject with the story enacted to the music of Tchaikovsky.

NOW IS THE TIME (TO PUT ON YOUR GLASSES) (1951, 3 min., color)
This short will be shown as part of "Stereo Techniques". This introductory film is based on a light, humorous angle. Because the third-dimensional figures and system is so completely different, this diversion sets the stage for the longer subjects.

ROYAL RIVER (1951, 9 min., color)
This short will be run as part of "Stereo Techniques". In Technicolor, this is a casual trip on a slowly moving boat down the Thames River, showing pictures of the English countryside, touching on the foliage and rolling lawns. An old castle along the shores is also seen, the cameras picking up the entire vista. This gives the viewer the impression of actually being present on the boat ride. A stunning, wonderful 3-D short!

SOLID EXPLANATION (1951, 8 min., b&w)
This short will be run as part of "Stereo Techniques". This takes the audience into an English zoo, where the antics of the giraffes, seals, fish, and bird life are explained by a British commentator.

Sunday, September 14 | 7:00 PM
CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954, 82 min., b&w) Cast: RICHARD CARLSON, JULIA ADAMS. Director: JACK ARNOLD. The last great Universal Horror Monster, the Creature is both scary... and sympathetic. This is a truly terrific film, not to be missed. And it hasn't been seen in a theatrical setting in proper Polaroid 3-D in 50 years... until now!

Guest: Actress Julie Adams will appear in person after the screening for discussion.

Sunday, September 14 | 9:15 PM
CHARGE AT FEATHER RIVER, THE (1953, 95 min., color) Cast: GUY MADISON, FRANK LOVEJOY. Director: GORDON DOUGLAS Warner Bros. second 3-D feature (after "House of Wax" has some of the best 3-D photography and "comin' at ya" effects shots ever done! Released in the summer of 1953, this western has something for everyone!

Showing with: 3-D TRAILER SHOW

Monday, September 15 | 7:00 PM
ARENA (1953, 83 min., color) Cast: GIG YOUNG, JEAN HAGEN director Richard Fleischer RICHARD FLEISCHER This action-packed western has not been seen in 3-D in over 50 years! Thrilling rodeo scenes and the great direction of Richard Fleischer make this a can't miss flick!

Special Guest: Barbara Lawrence, director Richard Fleischer, George Wallace, Robert Horton, William Tuttle (Q&A TO FOLLOW THE SCREENING).

Monday, September 15 | 9:30 PM
REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955, 82 min., b&w) Cast: JOHN AGAR, LORI NELSON. Director: JACK ARNOLD. Last title from the golden era, this sequel to CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON is almost as good as the original; entertaining and scary! The 3-D is right on, especially the underwater scenes shot in Marineland's (Florida) big tank. Fish swim out of the screen into your face. And check out that fellow in the lab... Clint Eastwood! Not seen in 3-D in 50 years!

With short, "Working For Peanuts" (1953, 7 min., color) Chip and Dale, two hard working chipmunks. have to search for their daily meal of peanuts. Donald Duck is the zoo keeper who tries to prevent them from stealing peanuts from Dolores the elephant. This wonderful Disney cartoon had very few 3-D playdates in its original November, 1953 release.

Tuesday, September 16 | 7:00 PM
BWANA DEVIL (1952, 79 min., color) Cast: ROBERT STACK, BARBARA BRITTON, NIGEL BRUCE Director: ARCH OBOLER. 1952 through 1955 was the golden era of 3-D cinema. Worldwide over 60 3-D films were made. Many are still the best examples of stereoscopic film art. When the major studios turned down Arch Oboler's idea to shoot a movie in 3-D, he did it himself... the result was "Bwana Devil", which was the first 3-D feature to be seen around the world, and was the cause of the golden era of 3-D, which we are celebrating at this festival. While in no way a classic, this film needs to be seen in the proper format to be appreciated.

Special bonus: An interview with the late, unsung hero of 3-D, Lothrup Worth.

With Short Film, M.L.GUNZBURG PRESENTS 3-D (1952, 6 min., b&w) Also known as "Time For Beany", the short was produced by Gunzburg (one of the fathers of 3-D) to introduce audiences to the "Polaroid" 3-D process. This short was designed to go before "Bwana Devil", so that's where we're running it. Stars puppets Beany and Cecil, with the assistance of Lloyd Nolan. Voices by Daws Butler and Stan Freberg.

Guests: Shirley Tegge ("Miss 3-D") and Stan Freberg.

Tuesday, September 16 | 9:15 PM
DANGEROUS MISSION (1954, 75 min., color) Cast: VICTOR MATURE, PIPER LAURIE. Director: LOUIS KING. RKO put together a pretty good yarn with a good cast (including Vincent Price) and a forest fire in 3-D. Very good 3-D throughout. This seldom seen thriller was produced by... Irwin Allen!

Wednesday, September 17 | 12:30 PM
MAN IN THE DARK (1953, 70 min., b&w) Cast: EDMUND O'BRIAN, AUDREY TOTTER. Director: LEW LANDERS. Edmond O'Brian and Audrey Totter star in this suspenseful crime story about a criminal who looses him memory...but does he know where the stolen loot is?

Wednesday, September 17 | 2:30 PM
HANNAH LEE (1953, 75 min., color) Cast: JOHN IRELAND, JOANNE DRU. Director: LEE GARMES, JOHN IRELAND. Noted cameraman Lee Garmes (GONE WITH THE WIND) and actor John Ireland teamed to co-produce and co-direct this typical, low budget, Western of the era (1953). MacDonald Carey and Joanne Dru co-starred with Ireland. This had a troubled release, with Ireland/Dru suing the distributor claiming poor distribution. There weren't many 3-D showings and the title was changed to OUTLAW TERRITORY. It is very rare, and this may be the last public showing ever.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is the only surviving 3-D print of this feature, and is in faded Eastmancolor. Due to its rarity, we have decided to run it anyway, but please be advised that the color is "off" on this title.

Wednesday, September 17 | 5:15PM
JESSE JAMES VS THE DALTONS (1954, 65 min., color) Cast: BRETT KING, BARBARA LAWRENCE. Director: WILLIAM CASTLE. Another excellent Columbia western, William Castle directs this one, starring Brett King and Barbara Lawrence. Not seen in 3-D in over 50 years!

This film has never played in 3-D in Los Angeles, even in its original release. This will be its Los Angeles 3-D premiere!

Wednesday, September 17 | 7:00PM
PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE (1954, 84 min., color) Cast: KARL MALDEN, PATRICIA MEDINA. Director: ROY DEL RUTH. Warner's follow up to HOUSE OF WAX. Similar time period, but very different flavor. More 3-D effects than WAX, and Malden's performance is slick. Pure 3-D entertainment!

Wednesday, September 17 | 9:45PM
GLASS WEB, THE (1953, 81 min., b&w) Cast: EDWARD G. ROBINSON, JOHN FORSYTH. Director: JACK ARNOLD. Edward G. Robinson and John Forsythe star in Universal's and director Jack Arnold's second 3-D feature. This is one of the first films dealing with television production... and it's complicated by murder... in 3-D! Not seen in 3-D in over 50 years.

This film has never played in 3-D in Los Angeles, even in its original release. This will be its Los Angeles 3-D premiere!

Guests: KATHLEEN HUGHES (Q&A TO PRECEDE THE SCREENING)

With short, "Hypnotic Hick" (1953, 8 min., color) This terrific Woody Woodpecker cartoon hasn't been seen in years! Woody Woodpecker decides to make a fast buck when he takes on the job of serving the tough Buzz Buzzard with a subpoena. This is one of the most enjoyable 3-D cartoons, with some great off-screen effects, and terrific use of depth as Woody tangles with Buzz at the top of a construction site.

Thursday, Sept. 18 | 7:00 PM
FORT TI (1953, 73 min., color) Cast: GEORGE MONTGOMERY, JOAN VOHS. Director: WILLIAM CASTLE. Set in the 18th century, the film recounts the exploits of Rogers' Rangers, a band of adventurers devoted to seeking out a "northwest passage" through Canada. At this juncture, however, Major Rogers is more concerned with helping the British forces at Fort Ticonderoga during a series of French and Indian raids. Top billing is bestowed upon George Montgomery as Captain Pedediah Horn, Rogers' right-hand man. The film boasts two leading ladies: Joan Vohs, as a suspected French spy, and Phyllis Fowler as a married Indian woman who falls in love with Captain Horn. Fort Ti was filmed in 3-D, and in typical William Castle fashion the stereoscopic gimmick is exploited to the hilt.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The 3-Stooges short "Spooks" will be shown AFTER the feature film, "Fort Ti". This is how this feature and short were designed to be shown... and they haven't been shown properly in over 50 years!

With short, "Spooks" (1953, 16 min., b&w) Cast: LARRY, MOE, AND SHEMP. Director: JULES WHITE. In their first 3-D appearance, the 3 Stooges are private investigators hired to find a missing girl. They disguise themselves as bakery delivery men, and stumble across her in a mysterious house where she is the victim of a mad scientist and his assistant. This classic Stooges short contains some of the most effective off-screen gimmicks of any 1950's 3-D title, including Moe's famous finger-poke, and the mad scientist with the hypodermic needle. And watch out for the Shemp Bat, one of most surreal visual gags in ANY Stooges short!

Thursday, Sept. 18 | 9:15 PM
MAZE, THE (1953, 81 min., b&w) Cast: RICHARD CARLSON, VERONICA HURST. Director: WILLIAM CAMERON MENZIES. Actor Richard Carlson's second 3-D film, this mystery film is classic low budget fun. The 3-D is very good, including bats flying in your face. Directed by production designer William Cameron Menzies (GONE WITH THE WIND), most of the story takes place in a dark castle (emphasized in B&W 3-D), and offers a mystery with an odd, surprising payoff.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The short "Doom Town" will be shown AFTER the feature film, "The Maze". This is how this feature and short were designed to be shown... and they haven't been shown properly in over 50 years!

Guest: PETER KURAN (Q&A TO PRECEDE THE SCREENING)

With short, "Doom Town" (1953, 13 min., b&w) This unusual short received very limited distribution in 1953, and has not been seen since. This is the story of a nuclear test explosion done on May 17, 1953. In addition to the short itself, we have added something special: Newly discovered and declassified footage of the bomb blast aftermath.. the buildings being blown over, the trees being uprooted... all in never before seen 3-D! Peter Kuran ("Trinity and Beyond"), who discovered and preserved this footage, will be on hand to present the material and answer questions.

Friday, September 19 | 7:00 PM
INFERNO (1953, 83 min., color) Cast: ROBERT RYAN, RHONDA FLEMING, WILLIAM LUNDIGAN. Director: ROY WARD BAKER. 20th Century Fox was fully promoting their answer to 3-D, CinemaScope, but hedged their bet by releasing this 3-D gem. It's a very satisfying crime adventure filmed on location in the California desert. Ryan is wonderful as a husband left to die in the desert by his wife and her lover. Excellent 3-D photography puts you there!

Guests: Actress RHONDA FLEMING (Q&A TO FOLLOW THE SCREENING)

With short, "On The Ball" (1952, 10 min., b&w) This British short from 1952 was never shown in the U.S... until now! A stereoscopic angle on sport, with John Arlott commentating.

Friday, September 19 | 9:30 PM
DIAL M FOR MURDER (1954, 105 min., color) Cast: RAY MILLAND, GRACE KELLY, ROBERT CUMMINGS. Director: ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Alfred Hitchcock was of two minds on this. It is not one of his finest, but his use of 3-D (strictly artistic except for one gimmick shot at the end) truly made this claustrophobic stage play interesting to see. In fact, the subtle use of 3-D in this film enhances it. The cast is great, highlighted by John Williams' London inspector investigating a "murder" committed by Milland's wife, Grace Kelly. Look around: The more you look, the more you see.

Saturday, September 20 | 10:30 AM
MAD MAGICIAN, THE (1954, 72 min., b&w) Cast: VINCENT PRICE, MARY MURPHY. Director: JOHN BRAHM. OK, this one is usually trashed as a rip off of "House of Wax". Why? Well, same producer and same writer as WAX. Vincent Price going mad. Time period the same. Hmmm. But, it stands on its own as having very good 3-D (B&W), and watching Price as he evolves into the persona macabre for which he is most known.

Saturday, September 20 | 12:30 PM
"RARITIES IN 3-D" We will be showing over 90 minutes of some of the rarest stereoscopic material in existence. This is a clip show, not complete features or shorts. Not only will there be material considered "lost" for many years, but there will also be material never heretofore known to have been shot in 3-D. This is the show for the 3-D fanatic! Much of this material will never be seen again. This show is being put together until the day before the presentation, so sorry, no titles will be made available until the day of the show.

Please note: Due to the technical complexity of this presentation, the admission price for this show will be $15 per ticket

Saturday, September 20 | 4:00 PM
I, THE JURY (1953, 87 min., b&w) Cast: BIFF ELLIOTT, PEGGY CASTLE. Director: HARRY ESSEX. This film noir hasn't been seen in 3-D in over 50 years! Terrific black and white cinematography by John Alton ("Raw Deal", "T-Men") and starring Biff Elliot as Mike Hammer, this is one of the rarest of our feature screenings.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The short subject, "Pardon My Backfire" follows the feature film, as it was originally shown in this order.

Guest: BIFF ELLIOT (Q&A TO FOLLOW THE SCREENING)

With short, "Pardon My Backfire" (1953, 16 min., b&w) Making the most of the 3-D medium, this has the 3 Stooges running an automobile repair shop, and becoming involved with three crooks running from the law. The boys eventually capture the burglars and hand them over to the police, but not before everything available has been thrown at the audience!

Saturday, September 20 | 7:00 PM
MONEY FROM HOME (1953, 100 min., color) Cast: DEAN MARTIN, JERRY LEWIS. Director: GEORGE MARSHALL. This terrific Martin & Lewis film, was done up in glorious Technicolor (this was the first of two films using dual three strip Technicolor cameras), the 3-D is natural, and avoids gimmicks. And you can check out a harem in 3-D!

With short, "Boo Moon" (1954, 8 min., color) Poor Casper scares away all the Earth people, so he goes to make friends with inhabitants on the moon. They also fear him, until he becomes a lunar hero by driving off the ferocious Treemen. The outstanding use of depth and perspective in this cartoon make it (arguably) the very best example of stereoscopic animation from the 1950's. Magnificently restored by the 3-D Film Archive, this wonderful cartoon (not shown in 3-D since 1954) will be one of the highlights of our event!

Saturday, September 20 | 9:30 PM
SECOND CHANCE (1953, 82 min., color) Cast: ROBERT MITCHUM, LINDA DARNELL, JACK PALANCE. Director: RUDOLPH MATE. RKO's first 3-D featured their top stars, and is enjoyable to watch, especially with bad guy Palance (fresh off of SHANE acclaim). Shot on location in Mexico, it's the first Hollywood 3-D feature shot on a foreign location. Robert Mitchum is terrific...and there's wonderful 3-D on a hanging tram!

With short, "Melody" (1953, 10 min., color) This excellent Disney cartoon depicts how music is born. Various methods, including abstractions, are used to trace the development of a musical composition.

Sunday, September 21 | 11:30 PM
GUN FURY (1953, 83 min., color) Cast: ROCK HUDSON, DONNA REED. Director: RAOUL WALSH. Rock Hudson stars in this excellent Columbia western, shot on location in Arizona. This well produced film was directed by Raoul Walsh, and also stars Donna Reed and Lee Marvin.

Sunday, September 21 | 1:45 PM
NEBRASKAN, THE (1953, 68 min., color) Cast: PHIL CAREY, ROBERTA HAYNES, LEE VAN CLEEF. Director: FRED SEARS. Cowboys and Indians fight it out... it's 1953, so guess who the bad guys are? This Columbia western hasn't been seen in 3-D in over 50 years!

This film has never played in 3-D in Los Angeles, even in its original release. This will be its Los Angeles 3-D premiere!

Sunday, September 21 | 4:30 PM
DRUMS OF TAHITI (1954, 73 min., color) cast: DENNIS O'KEEFE, PATRICIA MEDINA. Director: WILLIAM CASTLE. William Castle directs Patricia Medina (also seen in "Phantom of the Rue Morgue") and Dennis O'Keefe in this South Seas Island adventure... with volcanoes erupting, and flames throwing!

NOTE: The short "Down the Hatch" follows the feature, as this is the order in which these were originally shown.

With short, "Down The Hatch" (1954, 16 mm, b&w) Cast: HARRY MIMMO. Director: JULES WHITE. After a ruby has been stolen, the thieves devise a plan to smuggle the gem out of Italy and into America. They decide to employ Harry Mimmo, a simple peasant, whom they think will not draw suspicion as he carries the valuable stone. This Columbia short was done as a "pilot" for comedian Harry Mimmo and only released "flat". It has never been seen in 3-D in a public setting....until now! A true rarity!

Sunday, September 21 | 7:00 PM
FRENCH LINE, THE (1954, 102 min., color) Cast: JANE RUSSELL, GILBERT ROLAND. Director: LLOYD BACON. Don't miss this rarely seen film, with Jane Russell really "coming at you"! As the ad copy says, "J.R. in 3-D! It'll Knock BOTH your eyes out!"

Sunday, September 21 | 10:00 PM
MISS SADIE THOMPSON (1953, 91 min., color) Cast: RITA HAYWORTH, JOSE FERRER. Director: CURTIS BERNHARDT. This was Columbia's attempt at an "A" film in 3-D. Well produced, shot in tropical paradise, and featuring some excellent performances, including support from Charles "Buchinksy" Bronson, and starring a radiant Rita Hayworth!

With short, "Love For Sale" (1953, 10 min., b&w) Cast: BELLA STARR. Dan Sonney Productions specialized in rather sleazy "adult" material in the late 40's and early 50's. This short was shot in 2-camera 3-D, but only released (very briefly) in very poor anaglyphic (red/blue) prints. We have printed...for the first time ever!...this short in it's proper left eye/right eye format, and will premier it here! This features stripper Bella Starr in a dance routine, as well as a slick gambler and a party girl in a sensual dance sequence.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

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The 3-D format is often thought of as "gimmick" filmmaking. While it was one of the many mid-20th century inventions of the motion picture industry to give audiences a big screen experience to compete with the new phenomenon of television, for the most part 3-D, (like the Cinemascope format for example), was used to great effect in high quality studio productions with some of the most talented industry professionals behind the camera. Such producers/directors as George Sidney, Alfred Hitchcock, William Cameron Menzies (THE MAZE), Budd Boetticher, Raoul Walsh, Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk photographed films in the third dimension, as did cinematographers like John Alton (I, THE JURY), Karl Struss and Lucian Ballard (INFERNO). They often utilized depth as an integral aspect of the dramatic narrative. Seeing these films flat today on television or home video totally diminishes the impact of the original stereoscopic cinematography. The filmmakers composed, designed and intended these movies for 3-D presentation, and that's theway in which they should be seen. This unique series will give audiences that opportunity.

The presentation of 3-D has garnered a bad reputation over the years, mostly due to anaglyphic (red/blue) presentation, poor projection, lab problems, and so on. Actually, when shown with proper (Polaroid) presentation, good prints, professional projectionists, and so on, 3-D from the 1950's looks spectacular. The feeling of depth actually tends to suck you inside the action. It is not just a function of "coming at you" scenes (such as when objects are thrown at the audience), but is also used effectively in smaller, more intimate settings, such as in Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER.

This once-in-a-lifetime retrospective will give fans, historians and critics the unique opportunity to re-assess one of the most unjustly maligned aspects of cinematic history. Due to an awful succession of gimmick films throughout the 1970's and 80's, as well as poor quality re-issues of the older films in the inferior red/blue anaglyph system on television, 3-D movies of the 1950's have basically gotten a bad rap.

There is a printable version of the schedule on the website. Detailed information about the festival, film schedule, etc. can be found at:

http://www.3dfilmfest.com

TICKETS:
Tickets are available online. Advance tickets are recommended as shows are expected to sell out. Tickets are $10 with the exception of the rarities show which is $15. A festival pass ($320) includes admission to all 35 shows, plus a festival souvenir booklet.

The festival can be reached at:
Phone number: 661 538-9259
Fax number: 661 793-6755
*Special note: Although at the Egyptian Theatre, this festival is not a program of the American Cinematheque.

PRESS MATERIALS & INTERVIEWS:

Broadcast quality video clips will be available. To obtain clips for broadcast please e-mail your mailing address to us and your deadline for receiving materials.

Hi-Resolution, downloadable film stills and original poster images are available on this private "press only" page on the website:

http://www.3dfilmfest.com/3dpress.php

Festival organizer and 3-D expert Jeff Joseph is available for interview. He can be reached at his SabuCat Productions e-mail: sabucat@sabucat.com or at the festival phone number listed above.

UCB Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Fall 2003 - Spring 2004, UC Berkeley
Monday Evenings, 7:30-9:00pm, 160 Kroeber Hall
All Lectures are free and open to the public.

2003:

25 Aug: Mark Hansen, UCLA Statistics
Listening Post: Rendering the Evolving Landscape of
Online Public Discourse (Or: a Statistician, an Artist
and 200,000 Complete Strangers)

15 Sep: Shawn Brixey (DXARTS, UW) and Richard Rinehart, BAM & Art
Navigating the Maze: Collaboration and the Chimera Obscura

10 Nov: Jim Campbell, Artist, San Francisco
Formula Art : Computers as One Dimensional Translators

24 Nov: Nina Katchadourian, Artist, New York
Every Single Thing Around You Could Be Trying to Tell
You Something: Talking Popcorn and other Mildly
Paranoid Ideas Sprung Largely from the Everyday
2004:

2 Feb: Marie Sester, Artist, New York
Paradise under Surveillance:
Transparency, Visibility, and Network Access

23 Feb: Peter Selz, Curator, emeritus UC Berkeley
Directions in Kinetic Sculpture:
From George Rickey to Jean Tinguely

15 Mar: Vivian Sobchack, UCLA Film Studies
A Leg to Stand On:
On Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality

5 Apr: Christopher Alexander, Architect and Professor of
Architecture Emeritus, UC, Berkeley
The Nature of Order: Unification of Humanity
and Computers: a Realistic Path to the Future

For updated information, please see:
http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/

Robowars in LA

On August 16th and 17th, Steel Conflict will hold our 4th fighting robot tournament. This time we'll be invading the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, Ca. We're expecting a sellout crowd in one of the coolest venues in Los Angeles.

Shared Realities (in a hot tub...)

DECONversation / Maurice Benayoun, Pierre Levy, and Steve Mann, moderated by Derrick de Kerckhove

What would happen if we took what is restricted to some, nonpolitical, personal, concealed, domestic, tacit and implicit and made it open to everyone, in physical view of others, impersonal, acknowledged and explicit? Post-post cyborg, performance artist and visionary Steve Mann as well as virtual reality artist Maurice Benayoun and the French cyberspace philosopher Pierre Levy will take part in a HOT TUB PANEL discussion mediated by the director of the Marshall McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, Derrick de Kerckhove. The topic of discussion will be fictitious truth, virtual fiction, realiction, and conjured reality.

DECONversation / Maurice Benayoun, Pierre Levy, and Steve Mann, moderated by Derrick de Kerckhove

at DECONISM Gallery, 330 Dundas St. West, Toronto

(across the street from the Art Gallery of Ontario),

tickets available at the door.

What would happen if we took what is restricted to some, nonpolitical, personal, concealed, domestic, tacit and implicit and made it open to everyone, in physical view of others, impersonal, acknowledged and explicit? Post-post cyborg, performance artist and visionary Steve Mann as well as virtual reality artist Maurice Benayoun and the French cyberspace philosopher Pierre Levy will take part in a HOT TUB PANEL discussion mediated by the director of the Marshall McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, Derrick de Kerckhove. The topic of discussion will be fictitious truth, virtual fiction, realiction, and conjured reality.

The personal will turn political as the three intellectuals debate what is real, whilst submerging themselves in a translucent, networked, interactive and IMMERSIVE multimedia art installation. Displaying the private DECONversation as a public event will allow for an interactive reversal between the counterpublic and the counterprivate. The reversal will come into full effect as microphones and cameras will project the communal bath by means of simulation and simulacra, in the guise of Plato's Caves, into another spatial reality. Professor Steve Mann's vision that: In the coming decades we will live in an age of shared realities and new levels of cultural discourse Steve Mann and Hal Niedzviecki (Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer, Canada: Doubleday, 2001) p.38., will be exposed in the process of becoming.

Michelle Rosshandler: PR/Curator Deconism Gallery: mrossh@po-box.mcgill.ca
Steve Mann: Director Deconism Gallery: 416.593.9330 mann@eyetap.org

Brainwave Building Blog

Deconism Gallery/Arts Complex was designed as a blog --- something we call "buildinglog" (which, like cyborglog, abbreviates to "glog").

We've all seen smart buildings, smart lightswitches, smart toilets, and intelligent user interfaces, but what happens when you have "smart people"? What happens when you wire up the "intelligence" onto people?

2003 August 14th and 15th we explore what happens when the intelligent building meets intelligent occupants.

The August 14th event will be an intellectual discussion about the relationship between cyborglogs and buildinglogs. Three panelists (Maurice Benayoun, Pierre Levy, Steve Mann), moderated by the Director of the Marshall McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, will enter an immersive multimedia space (a brainwave bath) while discussing the implications of the post-cyborg age.

The August 15th event will be an actual collective (de)consciousness where the occupant-cyborgs interact with the building, to create an audiovisual experience from their brainwaves, as part of a brainwave (de)concert performed by jazz musicians Bryden Baird, James Fung, Dave Gouveia, Sandy Mamane, and Corey Manders.

For more information, see http://eyetap.org/deconism/index.htm
http://wearcam.org/ctheory/
www.benayoun.com

D|MA MFA Exhibition Opening

The UCLA Department of Design|Media Arts MFA thesis exhibition is the culmination of the Master of Fine Arts Degree program. The exhibition showcases the diverse research and practices of these emerging artists through their projects in the field of New Media (art, design, science, technology).

Thursday, June 12th, 6:00pm @ EDA (104 North Kinross)
New Wight Gallery (Kinross) 11000 Kinross Avenue Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-4:30pm Admission: FREE Parking rates are $7 weekdays before 5pm, $4 after 5pm and on weekends. Parking is available in Lot 32 adjacent to the Kinross building.

Kim Hager critically explores the Western human relationship to animals as spectacle and myth. Her video installation consists of sculptural objects which contain entwined allegories that include autobiographical characters, the Borrametz, and other "living" creatures. Namrata Mohanty installation is inspired by an Indian spiritual city Benares populated with huge crowds of people visiting the city to celebrate death and rebirth of the human body. The installation is in the form of an immersive virtual space of fire and water creating a zone for new human body formations, portraying rituals of burning of the dead or dipping into the holy river Ganges flowing through Benares. Dolores Rivera uses video to explore the relationship between the immigrant domestic worker and her college-educated daughter. The work delves into situations about home, labor, and education, documenting survival strategies and expanding dialogue among these women. Ashok Sukumaran's Interior Design work is an attempt to physically puncture the black box in which media art usually resides. Live elements from the "outside" - the sun, the view, and ambient sound- are let into a mediated oom・ where they form dynamic relationships with the interior itself, the bodies of visitors, and each other. This project is part of Ashok's continuing search for a reconciliation between real space (the physical and social contexts in which we all live), and the often idealized spaces in which pervasive computing and machine vision (will) operate. Fabian Winkler's interactive installation is inspired by the buzzing sounds of powerlines in urban L.A. A hammock, woven from powerline wires, collects electromagnetic information of its surrounding space. By approaching tUCLA Design Media Arts - Upcomi.ems
he installation, visitors add electricity to the system and trigger electric arcs dependent on their interactions.

The EDA is located at Kinross 104 on the first floor of the new Kinross North Building located near Lot 32 at the corner of Gayley and Kinross. Parking may be purchased for $7 at the information kiosk located at Lot 32. http://www.ucla.edu/map/sectors/zoomde89.html

World 3-D Film Expo!

World 3-D Film Expo to Unspool at Egyptian Theatre With Over 30 Classic and Rare Feature Length Treasures and Over 20 Short Subjects, All Screened Using the Original Polaroid "Double-Interlock" 3-D System

September 12 - 21, 2003

Hollywood - Sabucat Productions will present the largest 3-D tribute show ever mounted anywhere in history, from Friday, September 12 - Sunday, September 21 at the Egyptian Theatre (6712 Hollywood Boulevard) in Hollywood. The 10 day festival, which celebrates the golden era of 3-D filmmaking, will include many of the best known 3-D titles of the 1950's, such as HOUSE OF WAX, KISS ME KATE and CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, but will also offer fans of the format an opportunity to see some of the more obscure 3-D movies, many of which have not been seen in 3-D in over 50 years! Some of these titles include: I, THE JURY, JESSE JAMES VS. THE DALTONS, GOG, and GLASS WEB. In all, 33 features and 21 short subjects will be shown along with a "rarities" show consisting of rare, wonderful, stereoscopic images, many of which have never been seen in a public setting. In person guests will speak at selected screenings. Guests will be announced as they are confirmed. All prints will be 35mm and run in the "double-interlock", Polaroid System, the original method (and still the best method) for showing true 3-D.

http://www.3dfilmfest.com/

Festival organizer Jeff Joseph says, "Many of the prints that we're running are the last in existence... and in some cases the original negatives no longer exist. Due to the complexity of projecting these films in the stereoscopic format, this may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience these movies the way they were meant to be seen."

Daniel Symmes, noted 3-D historian and 3-D filmmaker, is working with Jeff in organizing the technical aspects of the Expo, as well as providing background information on the films. "This is a totally unique event in film history," says Symmes. "It is my dream come true to see all this wonderful, stereoscopic art at one time. Nobody has ever seen all these films together - not even when they were originally released."

It has been over 50 years (November 26th, 1952) since BWANA DEVIL, opened at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood. While not the first 3-D feature film (which was POWER OF LOVE, U.S.A., 1922), the popularity of BWANA DEVIL was the direct cause of the production of over 60 3-D films from 1952 through 1955, often referred to as the golden era of 3-D.

The 3-D format is often thought of as "gimmick" filmmaking. While it was one of the many mid-20th century inventions of the motion picture industry to give audiences a big screen experience to compete with the new phenomenon of television, for the most part 3-D, (like the Cinemascope format for example), was used to great effect in high quality studio productions with some of the most talented industry professionals behind the camera. Such producers/directors as George Sidney, Alfred Hitchcock, William Cameron Menzies (THE MAZE), Budd Boetticher, Raoul Walsh, Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk photographed films in the third dimension, as did cinematographers like John Alton (I, THE JURY), Karl Struss and Lucian

3-D Festival

Ballard (INFERNO). They often utilized depth as an integral aspect of the dramatic narrative. Seeing these films flat today on television or home video totally diminishes the impact of the original stereoscopic cinematography. The filmmakers composed, designed and intended these movies for 3-D presentation, and that's the way in which they should be seen. This unique series will give audiences that opportunity.

The presentation of 3-D has garnered a bad reputation over the years, mostly due to anaglyphic (red/blue) presentation, poor projection, lab problems, and so on. Actually, when shown with proper (Polaroid) presentation, good prints, professional projectionists, and so on, 3-D from the 1950's looks spectacular. The feeling of depth actually tends to suck you inside the action. It is not just a function of "coming at you" scenes (such as when objects are thrown at the audience), but is also used effectively in smaller, more intimate settings, such as in Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER.

This once-in-a-lifetime retrospective will give fans, historians and critics the unique opportunity to re-assess one of the most unjustly maligned aspects of cinematic history. Due to an awful succession of gimmick films throughout the 1970's and 80's, as well as poor quality re-issues of the older films in the inferior red/blue anaglyph system on television, 3-D movies of the 1950's have basically gotten a bad rap.

Detailed information about the festival, film schedule, etc. can be found at: http://www.3dfilmfest.com. There is a printable version of the schedule on the website. Tickets will go on sale on May 1, also on-line. Tickets are $10 with the exception of the rarities show which is $15. A festival pass ($320) includes admission to all 33 shows, plus a festival souvenir booklet.

The festival can be reached at: Phone number: 661 538-9259 Fax number: 661 793-6755

*Special note: Although at the Egyptian Theatre, this festival is not a program of the American Cinematheque.

"Programming Media" by Casey Reas

"Programming Media" by Casey Reas
18:00 on 13 May 2003
On the UCLA campus, Kinross South Room 133

Contemporary media art and design artifacts are constructed with software. Software is a medium with unique qualities and programming languages are materials with specific properties. Casey Reas will present diverse projects from 2000 - present to elucidate unique aspects of software including response, dynamic form, interactive information visualization, behavior, and emergence. Issues of exploring programming within the context of the electronic arts will be presented through discussing Processing, a new educational software exploration.

Casey Reas is an associate professor at the newly established Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in northern Italy. With Ben Fry of the MIT Media Lab, he is currently developing Processing, a platform for learning fundamentals of computer programming within the context of the media arts. Reas' work explores kinetic systems through diverse digital media including software art, prints, animation, installations, and responsive sculpture. In 2001, Casey received his M.S. degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he was a member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG). Casey has lectured and exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the United States. His work has recently been shown at the American Museum of the Moving Image, Ars Electronica, New York Digital Salon, Museum of Modern Art, P.S.1, and Siggraph.

http://www.groupc.net
http://www.proce55ing.net
http://www.interaction-ivrea.it
http://acg.media.mit.edu

“ Topological Media and Softwear”

Wednesday, May 7th 6:30pm Sha Xin Wei Lectures “ Topological Media and Softwear” (Kinross South 133)

The Topological Media Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology studies gesture and embodied use of hybrid computational-physical materials at multiple scales. We are investigating how to build, inhabit and use sensate or active matter, combinations of computational systems and physical materials that are sensitive to environmental features or to our activities, and respond by changing their form or appearance. Our experimental design uses continuous media such as cloth and non-woven materials, video projection, radio and sound fields. The experimental aspect of this work proceeds at two scales. The micro scale concerns topological responsive media, which includes time-based media and computationally-augmented fabrics. The macro scale concerns the architecture of responsive media spaces, which includes augmented reality, sensor-based interactive environments, projected and ubiquitous media. We describe the Topological Media Lab's recent work in gesture and performance, realtime media choreography, responsive media and softwear instruments or wearable media. Sha Xin Wei's practice ranges from complex, collaboratively built installations to realtime video and wearable sound textures that respond to gesture. These works explore the relations people create with one another in the presence of dense, continuously evolving responsive media. Since 1997, Sha has worked with the art research group, sponge, which he co-founded in San Francisco to produce public phenomenological experiments. Major series of projects include the TGarden play spaces, Hubbub public speech-painting, and the Sauna urban immersion installations. Sha is now embarking on the Softwear Instruments project which explores gesture and subject fields using sensate, gestural, media-saturated fabrics. Sha has degrees in mathematics from Harvard and Stanford Universities. Sha teaches computational media and critical studies of techno-science as an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia InstituteSha Xin Wei Lectures Next Week-.ems
of Technology. Sha's research in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center and the New Media Center concerns gesture and agency in the presence of hybrid material, and how we shape, inhabit, design sensate or active matter

The EDA is located at Kinross 104 on the first floor of the new Kinross North Building located near Lot 32 at the corner of Gayley and Kinross. Parking may be purchased for $7 at the information kiosk located at Lot 32. http://www.ucla.edu/map/sectors/zoomde89.html

***Please note that all lectures scheduled to take place in Kinross South 101 will now be located at Kinross South 133

Napster Audio and Video: Innovations in the Network

What are the possibilities for internet based distribution and production
of video and audio?

Napster, Gnutella and their descendant have demonstrated famously the
sheer scale of p2p filesharing systems, and the difficulties of exploiting
this for the benefit of traditional entertainment products under
traditional intellectual property regimes. However, less attention has
been paid to the emerging audio and video products and the new genres of
cultural product that exploit netbased distribution and production. This
panel will survey different experiments and projects in this realm,
specifically, projects that are designed to promote and sustain diverse
cultural resources, generating demonstrable social value.

Tuesday, April 15 4:00 PM
Center for Advanced Technology at NYU
719 Broadway 12th floor (between Waverly and Washington Place)
live webcast at http://xdesign.eng.yale.edu/AVsystems
cat.nyu.edu/meaow/glocal3.ram

Panelists:

Christian Nold: is the author of the Author of Mobile Vulgus, a
controversial book about politically activated crowd dynamics. He is
currently at the Royal College of Art where he is developing the Community
Edit system.

Pit Schultz lives and works in Berlin. Currently involved into radio
projects he is the cofounder of bootlab.org, klubradio.de, nettime.org,
mikro.org.

Natalie Jeremijenko is in the Faculty of Engineering, Yale University,
where she runs the Experimental Product Design program(xproduct)--a
program and courses that explore technological innovation for social
progress. She currently has an exhibition at Art in General that
demonstrates several audio and video systems designed for the notforprofit
arts sectors to promote participatory institutional agendas.

Sal Randolph lives in New York and produces independent art projects
involving gift economies and social architectures, including Free Words,
the Free Biennial and Free Manifesta. She has recently been developing new
work in the areas of open source/copyleft music distribution (Opsound) and
political organization (0pcopy).

Respondents:

Neil Seiling--former Executive Producer of PBS television series Alive
>From Off Center. A Media Arts Curator since 1978, with an emphasis on
building links between multi-disciplinary artists and their audiences
through media development. Served on inaugural panel for short films at
1995 Sundance, and NEA Film/video Panel.

Alan Toner-Studies collaborativity, and the effect of information
enclosure on cultural production and social life. Native of Dublin,
Ireland. Studied Law at Trinity College Dublin, and NYU Law School. He is
currently a fellow in the Information Law Institute at NYU Law. Member of
Autonomedia editorial collective.

Remote Respondents:.
Zeljko Blace is a co-founder of [mama], a media lab and culture club in
Zagreb. He is presently taking part in a number of projects: Kultura NOVA,
a multimedia institute organized by the European Cultural Foundation &
Open Society Institute. Zeljko has organized and curated a number of new
media events: GenArt2002, an annual exhibition, and recently Reality Check
for Digital Utopia, a digital culture encounter.

Mark Davis is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information
Management and Systems, UC Berkeley. His work is focused on creating the
technology and applications to enable daily media consumers to become
daily media producers. His research and teaching encompass the theory,
design, and development of digital media systems for creating and using
media metadata to automate media production and reuse.

Kate Rich is a sound engineer and activist. She is known to work for the
bureau of inverse technology.

THE CAT'S MEAOW LECTURE SERIES
www.cat.nyu/meaow

The NYU Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) has
partnered with Creative Time (CT) and Rensselaer's iEAR
Studios to host a series of speakers on 'Media Art or
Whatever' (MeAOW). The CAT's MeAOW is an
Artist/Technology forum that hosts speakers whose work
rethinks technological innovation and demonstrates different
possibilities for the use and promulgation of new technologies.
The goal of this occasional series is to provide a venue where
artists can engage technologists to contest the visions of the
future that are implicitly and explicitly embedded in the new
technologies rapidly being adapted as the dominant vehicles of
cultural experience. Hosted by Natalie Jeremijenko and Chris
Csikszentmihalyi

DIRECTIONS:

Center for Advanced Technology, NYU
719 Broadway 12th floor (between Waverly and Washington Place)
N/R to 8th Street
A/C/E/F to West 4th St.
6 to Astor Place

TO RECEIVE EMAIL NOTIFICATION OF SUBSEQUENT
LECTURES IN THIS SERIES, SUBSCRIBE AT:

http://www.cat.nyu.edu/mailman/listinfo/cat_lectures

bill viola at the getty

Will, Mike and I went to see the Bill Viola exhibition at the Getty today. Great pieces and loads of inspiration and something everyone should check out. It runs until April 27 and is free ($5 to park). You really have no excuse/reason to check this out before it leaves. For more on my thoughts about the show, check my posting.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

From the Museum's Website:

Although the path has not always been smooth, over the years The Museum of Jurassic Technology has adapted and evolved until today it stands in a unique position among the institutions in the country. Still even today, the Museum preserves something of the flavor of its roots in the early days of the natural history museum - a flavor which has been described as "incongruity born of the overzealous spirit in the face of unfathomable phenomena."

I personally really enjoyed the visit. I enjoyed the "overzealous spirit" and think that incongruity is perhaps more interesting and entertaining than the alternative - or perhaps I'm just entralled by the idea of a group of scientists staked out in an amazonian jungle trying to capture an elusive "x-ray" bat that can fly through solid objects. Anyway, I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts about the trip - and perhaps this would be a good way to start some dialogue on this site.