New Media Workshop

Screen.Grab2

Friday 10/23 8pm

at the Nightingale at 1084 N Milwaukee

ABOUT Screen.Grab2:

Screen.Grab2 presents a sampling of Video and New Media work using the visual vocabulary of network and digital culture. From glitch to screen savers to realtime audio-video noise to experimental dance pop movies, CHIcast converses with the multi-vocal presence of screen based art located within Chicago. Screen.Grab2 is part of a weekend long slate of programs (including two free New Media art making workshops) called Expressive Media Express as part of Chicago Artists Month.

In PART I of Screen.Grab2, Nicholas O’Brien has curated a screening program of digital works by artists based in Chicago.

During In PART II of Screen.Grab2, jonCates has organized a series of performances of digital and analog computers and electronics that will pop offscreen and into the physical space of the Nightingale.

“Although Screen.Grab is designed to enable a dialog between New Media and Experimental Cinema, this installment is also intended to bring together discourses from various mediums through creatively engaging in the familiar frameworks of online and digital tools. The ubiquity of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and digital iconography evident in CHIcast is approached with a playful inquisitiveness and criticality. The work examines our digital interactions through questioning the supposition of the reliable, accurate, personal, and informative qualities found in New Media environments. In repositioning these characteristics away from the initial excitement and subsequent skepticism of New Media, the material found in this screening steer the conversation into a more colloquial and casual shared exploration.” – Nicholas O’Brien

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10/21  8pm  FREE

The Nightingale  1084 N Milwaukee

More: http://upgradechicago.org

Austrian artist and Media Art Historian, Nina Wenhart presents her
latest research:

“ARS ELECTRONICA: re:shaping a city’s cultural identity”

30 years ago the first Ars Electronica festival took place in Linz,
Austria. Ars has grown to be one of the most influential Media Art
festivals and centers in the world. But while much has been written
about it, and still more will be talked about its history when Ars
celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2009, there has not yet been a
comprehensive study about Ars Electronica’s influence on the local
community and its impact on the cultural development of Linz. This
paper investigates the socio-cultural, artistic and geographic traces
Ars Electronica has left on the city of Linz. This Media Art historical
account also details a very personal history, as the author, being four
years old at the time of the first festival and amazed by its fireworks
display, remembers the festival’s beginnings from her personal
experience and – having worked for Ars Electronica’s Futurelab for many
years – from a professional perspective as well.

The main question of this talk is how the then marginal field of art,
science and technology, placed in an even more marginal, working-class
and steel-producing city contributed greatly to the
creation/development of a new cultural identity of the city, the art
scene and the community as a whole. My investigation into the histories
of this cultural institution focuses on the regional impact, regional
being interpreted as geographically located/rooted as well as
interpersonally built.

BIO

Nina Wenhart is an instructor for the „Prehystories of New Media“ class
at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an independent
artist/researcher. She is a graduate student at Prof. Oliver Grau’s
Media Art Histories program at the Danube University in Krems. For many
years, she was the head of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s videostudio,
where she created their archives and primarily worked with the
historical material. She was four years old, when Ars Electronica
started and has stayed connected with it ever since.

Critical Computing:
Models and Challenges for Interdisciplinary Collaboration
2009 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science

November 14-16, 2009

Illinois Institute of Technology
McCormick-Tribune Campus Center, 3201 S State St.
Hermann Hall, 3241 S Federal St.
Chicago, IL

http://dhcs.iit.edu

The annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer
Science (DHCS) brings together researchers and scholars in the
humanities and computer science to advance interdisciplinary
collaborations between the digital humanists and computer scientists,
advancing the area as a field of intellectual inquiry and identifying
new directions and perspectives for future research.

Such collaborative research poses both problems and opportunities:

* How can computation provide new critical and interpretative tools
for humanists?
* How can humanities scholarship help us understand the meaning and
import of computational analysis of human artifacts?

Program:      http://dhcs.iit.edu/program.html
Registration: http://dhcs.iit.edu/registration.html

Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus at Yale University, “An Academic and Otherwise Life, An N = 1.”

Social Science Research Building 122

10/20 5:30 pm

The New Media Workshop is pleased to present

Hollis Frampton: Meta-History and Media Archeology

a discussion co-led by Lisa Zaher, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History and Jim Hodge, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, University of Chicago

Of the arts, only photography, along with its prodigious sibling, the cinema, has appeared during historic time. – Hollis Frampton

An acclaimed filmmaker, photographer and media theorist, Frampton is a major figure in the American avant-garde. Witty and ambitious in scope, his films engage with philosophy, mathematics, and science, offering perspectives on the relation of life and media that transcend deterministic polarizations. This meeting will focus on Frampton’s writings on the historicity of media in three texts:

“Incisions in History / Segments of Eternity”
“For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses”
Interview with Bill Simon on the Magellan Cycle

Friday, October 16
10:30-12:30, Cobb 310
Refreshments will be served

This meeting of the New Media Workshop accompanies Critical Mass: Re-Viewing Hollis Frampton, a series of screenings at locations throughout Chicago between October and January, culminating in a Symposium at the Film Studies Center, University of Chicago in February 2010.

Join us for the season’s first screening on the preceding evening:

Hollis Frampton: Solariumagelani

Thursday, Oct 15, 6.00 pm
Gene Siskel Film Center

BOOK OF MIRRORS: FILMS BY JOOST REKVELD

@ Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N State St

Thursday, October 8, 6pm | Joost Rekveld in person!

Joost Rekveld’s spectacular cinematic treatises on the nature of light have screened around the world, including Sundance, Rotterdam, Media City, and the Dutch Filmmuseum. Inspired by Medieval and Renaissance theories of optics, proto-cinematic technologies, X-ray photography, and visual music, Rekveld uses handmade equipment to produce the optical experiments at the heart of his work’s immersive cinematic experiences. In the award-winning #11, Marey Moiré (1999), Rekveld creates stroboscopic patterns from filaments of intersecting lights; in #23.2, Book of Mirrors (2002) he uses kaleidoscopes to refract light onto the film’s emulsion; and in his latest film, #37 (2009), Rekveld generates swarming tessellations from software used to explore the organic symmetries of crystals. Also featured is the short film, #3 (1994). 1994–2009, Netherlands, multiple formats, ca. 75 min.

Jason Salavon: Spigot

Opening Reception:
Sunday, September 27, 3-5 pm

More Info Here

September 20, 2009 – January 17, 2010, Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery

From September 20, 2009 to January 17, 2010, the Hyde Park Art Center will present a new eight-channel video projection on the Art Center’s façade, by Chicago-based artist Jason Salavon. The large-scale, real-time digital projection will be visible from both inside the gallery and outside the building on S. Cornell Ave.

Though Salavon works with a range of material forms—from photographic prints to video installations and real-time software—the common thread in his artistic investigations is discovering unexpected patterns in daily encounters. Largely influenced by American popular culture and innovations in information technology, Jason Salavon’s work manipulates digitized material while presenting unique approaches to familiar iconography. This exhibition is held in honor of Hyde Park Art Center Board Member and Chair Emeritus, Deone Jackman.

The common thread in his artistic investigations is discovering unexpected patterns in daily encounters

Jason Salavon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Dutch National Foto Institute, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Salavon is currently a studio artist at the Hyde Park Art Center and associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts and the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.

Image: Jason Salavon, Spigot (My Last Three Searches) (detail from previous work), 2008, Dimensions variable, Two computers, video projection, industrial LCD panel, internet connection, Ed. 3 + 1 AP

The Chicago Humanities Forum Presents Adrian Johns, “The Politics of Media Piracy”
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
5:15–6:00 p.m.
The Gleacher Center,
450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive, Room 621, Chicago, IL

Adrian Johns is a professor in the Department of History and chairs the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), which won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading and publishing. He has also published widely in the history of science and the history of the book. Educated in Britain at the University of Cambridge, Professor Johns has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, the University of California, San Diego, and the California Institute of Technology.

This event is open to the public. Please RSVP by October 30, 2009 by calling (773)702-8274 or emailing franke-humanities@uchicago.edu. You may also register online.

More info here

Immerse yourselves in some delicious futurism!

Fast Forward is an immersive multimedia exploration of how our future lives are being shaped today. This exhibit spotlights some of today’s visionaries working toward a limitless, sustainable future.

From cuisine made by ink-jet printers, to urban high-rise farming, to instant-messaged hugs you can feel, you’ll meet pioneers working on these and other amazing ideas that could change the way we live. Inventors tell us in their own words how they’ve worked to take their ideas from “what if” toward “here’s how.”

Test-drive some of these innovations yourself. Add your own visual ideas to interactive displays. Live Internet news feeds about invention and technology show you the future of innovation as it takes shape, minute by minute. Pushing the boundaries of what we can imagine, the ideas and innovators in Fast Forward may even spark your own “what if.”

Tuesday October 6 7pm

Film Row Cinema of Columbia College Chicago, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., on the 8th floor

Tickets can be reserved for no charge here on a first-come, first-served basis.

Biz Stone is co-founder of Twitter, a real-time, one-to-many network that is changing the way people communicate around the world. Previously, Stone helped build other popular social media services Xanga, Blogger, and Odeo. After launching the journaling service Xanga in 2000, he went on to publish two books about the origins and social significance of blogging.

In 2003, Google invited Stone to join a recently acquired Blogger.com team at its Silicon Valley headquarters in a full-time, senior role. Stone helped re-launch the service and grow Blogger significantly worldwide. He left Google in 2005 to rejoin the startup world.

Stone, 35, is a native of Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches an annual master class at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. In the fall of 2008, he debated and won at Oxford Union against the proposition, “The Problems of Tomorrow Are Bigger Than the Entrepreneurs of Today” along with his esteemed teammates, including Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.

Serving as an advisor to startups such as answer community Fluther.com, travel service Trazzler.com (which he co-founded), content encouragement service Plinky.com, and the non-profit organization Justgive.org, among others, allows Stone to share much of what he has learned over the past decade.

For more, click here.