For the past 30 days much of the planet will be glued to radios and TV’s as a festival of football unites diverse people from Angola to Australia and from Sweden to Saudi Arabia. Much to my annoyance as I'm not football crazy...

But how do you choose who to cheer for when your own team isn’t playing (or if they didn’t qualify!!! What about the coolest flag design (probably Brazil)? Maybe the best holiday destination or food?

HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Urban Eyes, an intermedia project by Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva. Urban Eyes uses wireless technology, birdseeds and city pigeons to reconnect urban dwellers with their surroundings.

The Urban Eyes feeding-platform stands in one of London's public spaces. By landing on the platform, pigeons tagged with RFID chips send aerial photographs of their locality to surrounding Bluetooth-enabled devices. In this work pigeons become maverick messengers in the information super-highway, fusing feral and digital networks. HTTP Gallery provides an interface to the project, mixing live and documentary footage and offering visitors an opportunity to experiment with Bluetooth.

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.

by Bruce Sterling
SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004

The last speech at an awards ceremony can't be too short.
I'm Bruce Sterling, I'm a science fiction writer. I write novels. This is the first time I've ever been to SIGGRAPH. I always wanted to go.

My closet is full of old SIGGRAPH demo tapes. They're on VHS. I like to haul them out and play them for people at house parties. These are romantic icons of a lost world, these antique SIGGRAPH demo reels.

Harvie Branscomb, St. Louis Missouri, U.S.A. May 13 2005: Warning: this text contains opinions and observations that can not be considered objective or factual reporting. This information may be irrelevant or in some cases, toxic. Handle with care. This is also true of almost everything else you are reading elsewhere. For a completely different perspective, visit www.mediaresearch.org

St.Louis Missouri, USA is the gateway to the American West, home of Pulitzer and capital city of a state located in the center of the USA. Voters here chose Bush in the 2004 election. St Louis is the weekend home of the National Media Reform Conference.

by Neal White

An introduction to the Critical Practices element of the Post graduate Departments. Writing and commentary aimed at stimulating debates and response for future publication.

What is missing?

Exformation and practice

In his essential work, especially for anyone wishing to study this area, Charlie Gere explores the advent and the development of issues relating to what he terms ‘Digital Culture’ . Gere explores the inter-relation of critical theory, technological and cultural discourse within the framework of a historical study. Successfully and articulately exploring the relationship between cybernetics, systems and information theory, cultural activity and the outcomes of digital media experiments in art and technology, we begin to get the message; that digital culture is less instrumental than it is a discourse set in relation to its own medium, that there is a relation between ideas embedded in technology and our cultural activities as a whole. But in examining the production and work at media arts festival, of media art and technology groups, of cultural producers, in the flesh, you would be forgiven for an experience in which you might ask; what is missing?

I attended a workshop loosely based around the EVNT software project but billed as bringing together producers of events and coders of event software to meet each other and “brainstorm the future of event organisation (with an emphasis on the arts), calendaring tools and technologies.”

I wouldn’t really describe myself as belonging to either of those groups but I was very glad I was along for the ride. The introduction to why we were all there generally and specifically as individuals was really interesting. It became clear that although there was a good deal of common ground among us we had such diverse motivations that distinctions like coders and producers weren’t that meaningful.