Julian Bleecker

The Biggest Visual Power Show is an intellectual spectacle blending a conference and a pop concert. BVPS mixes movies and live performance, morphs physical experiences into virtual imagination.

This event will be happening May 17 and takes place at the recently renovated Million Dollar Theater on 307 Broadway in downtown Los Angeles.

The theme of BVPS 2008 is Next Nature; the nature caused by human culture. Nowadays, children know more corporate logo's and brands than bird or tree species. Our established image of nature needs to be updated. Our technological world has become so complex and uncontrollable it has become a nature of its own. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.

Visual Power: without visualisation, no reality. Images occupy an increasingly important place in our communication and transmission of information. More and more often, it is an image that is the deciding factor in important questions. Provocative logos, styles and icons are supposed to make us think we are connected to each other, or different from each other.

Each of us is confronted with more images every day than a person living in the Middle Ages would have seen in their whole life. If you open a 100-year-old newspaper you will be amazed by the amount of text and the total lack of pictures. How different things are today: the moment you’re born, covered in placenta, not yet dressed or showered, your parents are already there with the digital camera, ready to take your picture to publish on the family blog for showing the world. Interactivity between people has become an interactivity of screens. We are visual creatures, living amid image layers.

Buy your tickets online before April 30 for only $12.

Technorati Tags: design, event

Posted by Julian at 8:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CALIFORNIA-based, EMERGING Artist Commissions
Call online at http://01sj.org/?p=492

It's not too late to participate in the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of
Art on the Edge (June 4-8, 2008)
http://01SJ.org

With support from the James Irvine Foundation, ZERO1 is seeking to commission
the new presentation of two works for the 01SJ Festival by emerging,
California-based artists.

The commissions are $5,000 each with $500 for travel and lodging expenses.

The work can be in any media in visual arts, performing arts, moving image, and
interactive arts.

Projects will be juried based on the goals of "Intersections," an
Irvine-supported commissioning program by ZERO1 to support emerging California
artists in the creation of new work that uses technology to create
transformative experiences with an emphasis on works that intersect with a
particular place or community and engage audiences in innovative ways. See
http://01sj.org/?page_id=34 for more information about Intersections.

Projects can take place / be sited anywhere within the downtown core of San
Jose, although some preference will be given to nodal areas of the 01SJ
Festival:

-- Circle of Palms-- Chavez Plaza (especially Saturday, June 7)
-- SOFA district along 1st St. (especially Friday night, June 6)
-- the Passeos between Chavez Plaza and San Jose State University
-- San Jose City Hall
-- San Jose State University near the San Jose Public Library

More information about other programs of the 01SJ Festival can be found at
http://01sj.org

Other areas, including indoor sites will be considered, but all projects must
obtain any necessary permits and permissions (with the help of ZERO1).

To submit a proposal email the following information with INTERSECTIONS in the
subject header to intersections@yproductions.com

-- Brief statement about the project and its relation to Intersections
-- Detailed description of the project including rough installation and site
diagrams and / or performance plans
-- Budget
-- Bio or CV or link
-- Links to online examples of no more than 5 past works

Artists must live and work in California and be considered "emerging." The
definition of an emerging artist is contextual. ZERO1 seeks to support those
artists who have significant potential yet who are under-recognized and have
not received acknowledgment as established creators from fellow artists and
other arts professionals. Examples of recognition and acknowledgment include
exhibitions, reviews, commissions, performances, grant awards, residencies,
fellowships, publications and productions. Factors such as race, gender and
geography can play a role in determining whether or not an artist is emerging.
The term emerging refers to artistic development, professional accomplishment
and recognition, not to stylistic evolution within an artist's work.

Submissions are due via email only by 10:00 pm PST on Friday, May 9. The
commissions will be selected by Monday May 12. Projects must be installed by
midnight, Wednesday, June 3 and be on site through Sunday June 8 or be
performed sometime June 4-8, 2008.

Further information and questions: intersetions@yproductions.com

Call online at http://01sj.org/?p=492

Posted by Julian at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A very intriguing and curious bit of momentary disruptive street pixel art.

Seen on 9th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues in NYC's Lower East Side. So far, anonymous.

Bravo, whoever.

Posted by Julian at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ian Bogost is featured in this NPR story on video games — entertaining diversions or substantial implication-rich forms of creativity? There's no one answer, only conversations around this topic. With the video game industry proclaiming that it is all grown up (110%+ growth in the last year, etc), the "industry" will decide for itself what video games become, what their role will be as cultural artifacts, and what the larger public considers them to be.

Cobbling together a few choice bites from Bogost, I get this:

Artists have a long tradition of pushing the status quo, but not game designers, despite being important culture makers of the 21st century...I'm not sure the game industry wants to see games as an art form. I think they want to see games as a primary form of entertainment..Art is about changing the world. Entertainment is about leisure.

Posted by Julian at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This Sunday there was a feature in a New York Times Magazine on the work Nokia Design is involved in in shaping and clarifying broad, global topics through design, technology and research. Very well-written piece, featuring members of a small international design studio that I will be joining in the near future.

More on that.

Previously there was another project that recently bubbled up to the public spotlight is called Remade, a phone made entirely from upcycled and recycled materials. The Economist had a piece on Jan Chipchase — Digital Nomad

Posted by Julian at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alex Galloway came by to do a short talk discussing his new game "Kriegspiel" based on Guy Debord's "The Game of War" This is a curious strategy game that Debord created while in the midst of a bit of a creative flat-spin. It was created in an artisinal mode, with 5 hand crafted editions constructed with a collaborator. Evidently one of the sets — made with metal pieces — was recently on display in NYC on loan from Debord's widow. Galloway has some interesting archival style insights into the historical context of the game's development and Debord as a cultural figure of some importance, and I recommend finding whatever he has written on the topic. (It seemed as though he was reading from working-notes for a longer bit of work on this.)

What I find most interesting in this context is the articulation that Galloway has performed between historical archival work and the expression of these "findings" through this game. The game is, by Galloway's own description, based entirely on the original rules of Debord's game design. Alex describes himself as fascinated by games, but not at all a game designer. Thus, finding a cultural hero of academics and scholars world-wide who also happens to have designed a game makes for an excellent scholarly project. It skirts the boundary between an activity some critical scholars might poo-poo (game design) and an activity the most conservative scholars could at least chomp on (a proper archival inquiry into the life, history and ideology of a curious figure of some importance.)

Once (and quite a bit "still") a critical scholar might excavate material from "the archives" (dusty library basements, personal notes moldering in a widow's attic, interviews with aging contemporaries of the subject, etc.) and then construct a series of insights and anecdotes based on those findings, find a publisher and then stitch together a book on the matter. What Galloway is doing is expressing these insights and anecdotes into a hybrid expression of his findings — a digital, networked game as well as more traditional scholarly essays on the topic. This is significant and important for all the reasons I state over and over here. It's no longer a viable means for scholarly inquiry to create and circulate ideas and culture solely through dusty old forms like ink on paper. This is a hybrid forms that express both a theory (in this case, Debord's projection of what strategy is in a rhizomatic, networked era, even though it was constructed many decades before the internet) as well as providing a point-of-entry for someone who has never had a reason to look into this Guy Debord character. For that, Alex's work is super important.

Parenthetically, I first met Alex back in 2000 when he was doing a residency at Eyebeam (an art-technology center in New York City) while I was preparing to do my residency there. He was working on Carnivore, another important "theory object" instance. I learned a lot about what it was to construct engineering objects that wore culture on their sleeves quite noticeably. It was then that I started understanding how this important hyphenated form called art-technology could offer an opportunity to create and learn about ways to create technological instruments that were more properly and obviously "culture." Whereas that is always the case — that technology is not outside of culture — it is often hard to find frameworks and communities and mechanisms that allow one to experiment with the mixture. The goals therein are to understand that technology, as culture, is "made" and not "given." As such, it can be done "otherwise" and need not be the mass-manufactured, extant forms we have today. It can be hand-made properly, even hand-made and massively multiple, but with new entirely preposterous forms that create new ways of seeing, understanding and being in the world.

Posted by Julian at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)