“There are now approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the United States generating more than 4 billion hours of footage every week. And the numbers are growing. The average American is now captured over 200 times a day, in department stores, gas stations, changing rooms, even public bathrooms. No one is spared from the relentless, unblinking eye of the cameras that are hidden in every nook and cranny of day-to-day life. By shooting his feature entirely from closed-circuit viewpoints (but actually shot with Hi-end cameras - the “dirty” look was created in post-production!), director Adam Rifkin wants to bring forward the question: “who are we when we don’t think anyone’s watching?”
via Diagonal Thoughts.
Sonic Acts XII - the Cinematic Experience is a festival/conference, taking place in Amsterdam from 21-24 of february 2008. Besides a conference, screenings, performances and an exhibition they’ll have a publication which has an interview with me in it!
…and once again, all the great photos in this entry are made by the very talented Anne Helmond!
And on yet another rainy morning in Amsterdam (not surprising, you get used to it after a while!), full of curiosity and hopes for the day, I went to the second day of the Video Vortex - Responses to YouTube conference. I was hoping that today would be more fruitful than yesterday, and indeed, what a pleasant surprise! Well, call me selfish, but instead of giving a general overview I will focus on the session that was the most interesting for me personally: Curating Online Video.
On a rainy morning in Amsterdam (that demanded lots of coffee!), the Video Vortex - Responses to YouTube Conference was kicked off at Club 11. I will be blogging on the conference for movingweb, but I was also there because I have been involved with the project through my work at the Netherlands Media Art Institute where we made an exhibition with the same title and related topics. Well, the program of the conference is quite extensive, and I was very disappointed by some of the presentations today (that seemed unprepared, unfocused, had nothing new to say…a total contrast with the first Video Vortex conference in Brussels!). So I will focus on the gems of today’s presentations!
A little reminder for you all that the Video Vortex 2 conference is starting this friday. If you’re able to get to Amsterdam to attend the conference (see the program here) or visit the exhibition.
I`m really sad that I can’t be there but our editor Malka will give us a detailed backstage coverage after the conference.
Visit a big exhibition during the day, watch some crazy art performances, and then go to a big concert - how does that sound to you? Last Saturday, me and some friends and colleagues visited the STRP festival in Eindhoven. The organisation of the festival describe it the following way: “STRP is unique because it presents visual arts and music ranking alongside film, games, and robots”. So a promising concept! And yes, despite the messy built-up of the exhibition, the dominance of rather older installation works (actually, some of them were developed in the Netherlands and so have been shown plenty of times before), there were some gems! Overall there was a great atmosphere, and since I guess a big part of the public came for the concerts of Roisin Murphy, Trentemoeller, Goose, 2many djs, and so on and so forth, the exhibition did give a lot of people who are normally not involved with media art a chance to experience it! So in that way it seems successful - they had over 18.000 visitors in 3 days!
Well, I hope that nobody is under the impression that we are trying to go commercial here! This is about being in love with media arts, and if there’s an organization that deserves your support, it’s rhizome.org! And it’s not about donation, it’s a membership.
“Founded in 1996, Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Through open platforms for exchange and collaboration, our website serves to encourage and expand the international communities evolving these practices. Our programs, many of which happen online, include commissions, exhibitions, events, discussion, archives and portfolios. We support artists working at the furthest reaches of technological experimentation as well as those responding to the broader aesthetic and political implications of new tools and media. Our organizational voice draws attention to artists, their work, their perspectives and the complex interrelationships between technology, art and culture.”
During the New Cultural Networks Conference in Amsterdam (Friday 2nd of November, organized by Stifo@Sandberg), PIPS:lab presented diespace , the first internet community for people who have passed away!
PIPS:lab are a group of artists from Amsterdam based Sandberg Institute, and what they do is a mixture of new media art projects, theater, performance, (live!) music,…well, it’s really an experience and it really stirred up the audience of the conference!
We Feel Fine is an artwork by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar, and it is truly worth exploring!
It is a huge database that collects ‘human emotions’, or one could better say expressions of human emotions, from weblogs all over the world. Every time the sentences “I feel” or “I am feeling” appear in a blog entry, the emotion (sad, happy, etc.) is identified by the system and saved along with all sorts of other data, for example the gender of the writer, his or her origin, even the local weather conditions. This is possible because blogs are largely constructed in standard ways.
