The first of the Radio Noodles at Node-L podcast Mp3's has been completed.

Listen online to interviews and nostalgia from Sunday March 5th's Buck.Spc Node-L event, reanimating the iconoclastic London cyber cafe Backspace, now a Starbucks coffee shop.

Featuring interviews with the people who were there at the time, find out what they are up to now and hear there anecdotes plus a guide to mid-90s hits and headlines.

Someth;ng, the Interactive Media Art group that generated out of the Ravensbourne MA IDM course, has stablished itself as a venue for the Node.London season, hosting two exhibitions in March '06.

While some members of the group are in France taking Headspin and Midi Balls on a month long french tour, the rest are in London setting up the gallery space ready for the shows.
Traversing Territories / Ryoiki no yukiki: Tuesday 14th of March and
Potentially Someth;ng: Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th of March

Yesterday's event "Digital Reality Fly-Through" at the "Dana Centre" was literaly a quick fly through various aspects of what has become popular under the term "Virtual Reality" within the last couple of years.

Having speakers from various backgrounds on the panel - namely Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli from Igloo, from a UK based multimedia artist group; David Surman, Senior Lecturer in Computer Games Design at the University of Wales, Newport; Marco Gillies, research fellow at the Department of Computer Science at University College London; Tanya Kryzwinska, an academic who conducts research into digital games, and who is the Vice President of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) as well as Martin Packer from Framestores-CFC, a special effects company - promised the discussion to become controversial and suspenseful. However unfortunately the presenters had to rush through their presentations and the way the format was set up did not allow them to talk to each other. Instead, the speechers then moved from table to table in order to discuss with the audience about the topic. Since the time was very limited to the maximum of five minutes "per round", all attempts to dig deeper into the topics about what "virtual reality" is and how it changes preception, creates hopes and fears, enhances visions, enables to become interactive in a different way or clash worlds failed. The "Gong" knocked out any conversations abruptly.

The Dana Centre had their own launch on Thursday with the "Media Art Soapbox" This was an innovative idea, in that it was an opportunity for those involved in Media Art to have there own Soap Box and introduce their work and projects to the audience. Guest Soap Boxers were invited via email to apply and the first to respond were chosen. This introduced serendipity, the mixed bag and the quality was outstanding to say the least.

For centuries, Deptford has been a place of ideas and innovation. Growing from a small fishing village into a busy dockyard town, Deptford once served as England's principal dockyard where historic voyages of Discovery (such as Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, and Captain James Cook) were embarked upon.

The Wireless Wednesday workshop at Boundless this week continues to suggest that Deptford, is inherently a land of pioneers and innovators.

From 13/02/06 – 15/02/06 The New Media Curating List was host to a discussion about NODE.London with contributions from Marc Garrett, Simon Biggs, Geoff Cox, Saul Albert, Luci Eyers, Patrick Simons, Jemima Rellie, Ruth Catlow, Marcia Tanner and Susan Collins. The relevant postings are displayed here so that MAzine followers might get an opportunity to read them and become involved in the discussion from here on in.

Subjective notes about Transmediale 2006

The festival Transmediale is one of the oldest and biggest of its kind in Europe. Held annually since 1988, it started out as a video festival. In the early days the VideoFest, as it was called then, featured works which did not fit into the programme of the Berlin Film Festival - the star studded - drum role, fanfare - Berlinale. In the early 1990s the festival started presenting interactive works on CD ROM - I think this was called multi-media at the time. With changing technologies - adopting net art and generative and software art in the late 1990s - the festival kept true to its beginnings by maintaining the notion of critically engaging with new technologies and presenting a broad spectrum of alternative currents in art, technology and related theoretical production.

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A collaborative text written by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow, for "Media Mutandis: A Node.London Reader" (to be published in February 2006)

There is a Sufi fable in which a group of foreigners sit at breakfast, excitedly discussing their previous night’s exploration. One starts saying “…and what about that great beast we came across in the darkest part of the Jungle? It was like a massive, rough wall.” The others look perplexed. “No it wasn’t!” says one, “It was some kind of python”. “Yeah…” another half-agrees, “…but it also had powerful wings”. The shortest of the group looks bemused- “well it felt like a tree trunk to me.”

This fable aptly illustrates many aspects of the NODE.London experience. The name, which stands for Networked Open Distributed Events in London [1], indicates the open, lateral structure adopted to develop a season of media arts. It is intentionally extensible, suggesting possible future NODE(s).Rio, .Moscow, .Mumbai etc. As participants/instigators in the project’s ongoing conceptualization and praxis, we are just two individuals positioned on the interlaced, scale-free networks of NODE.L (more on these later). As such, our descriptions of this collectively authored project are inevitably incomplete and contestable, with a complete picture emerging only in negotiation with others.

At time of writing we are between the two key milestone events of NODE.L: October’s ‘Open Season’ of conferences (with its focus on media activism) and the Season of Media Arts, planned for March 2006 (which will feature distributed media arts projects, exhibitions and events). Through these events NODE.L offers a rare chance to identify shared purposes, philosophies, resources (such as licenses and tools for knowledge sharing) and common vocabularies between the media arts and tech-orientated, media activist communities.