Amsterdam at the moment, working in the Media City project at NIMk, thought i'd take a few minutes for some updates here:

A lot of stuff happened since the SuicideMachine's release, busy times indeed. The project recently got nominated for the 'Digital Communities' [sic!] award in the Ars Electronica festival, we're preparing a publication and open source release, and there's numerous talks and exhibitions of the work coming up, so watch out for that.

Last month (feb) there was the Gamezone festival in Antwerp, courtesy of Villanella, where i organised part of the exhibition related to videogame art. Some shots of that are here, and many thanks to all the artists who participated!

We'll have some new additions to the work in our exhibition space in Vienna, that's here, where now still an 'offline' exhib model of the SuicideMachine is presented - next week we'll add the great Mobile Broadcasting Unit by the VIE branch of the Graffiti Research Lab - and surely we'll take it out for a spin or two in month's ahead...
Also on June 8th we'll be opening a new show with, among others, a new site-specific work by Damian Stewart, possibly a small workshop and tunes by Robotcowboy!

In Rotterdam there's two 'FOO_bar's' coming up; one focussing on live performance and dance combined with realtime audiovisual's, where our current Artist in Residence Marie-Hélène Parant will show her work EXTASE, and there'll be some talk/discussion and several other works on show - that's April 18th at WORM.
The next one will be on May 7th, and will feature the amazing Duracell, Perrine Bailleux, AiR Philip Lammer and a grrl oriented workshop by Stefanie Wuschitz + more!

On May 1st the exhibition 'CECI N'EST PAS UN CASINO' will open at Casino Luxembourg, where i'm showing nOtbOt.
Other confirmed exhibitions later this year include new site-specific work at the Melkweg, a new iteration/derivate of nOtbOt in a show at NIMk, and a larger exhibition showcasing moddr_ + side-programming at iMAL in Brussels...

Tired of your Social Network?

Liberate yourself and your 'friends' with a web2.0 suicide!
The Web2.0 Suicide Machine lets you effectively delete all your energy
sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and
completely do away with your web2.0 alterego. The machine is developed in
the moddr_lab at WORM (Rotterdam), and serves as a metaphor for the
http://suicidemachine.org website which moddr_ hosts; the belly of the
beast where the web2.0 suicide-scripts are maintained...

Our services currently run with Facebook.com, Myspace.com and LinkedIn.com;
simply enter your username and password for the required service, and our
machine will systematically login to your account, change your profile
picture, and then one by one delete all of your friends.

For more specific information on the Web2.0 Suicide Machine please have a
look at the videotour and FAQ on http://suicidemachine.org

'unfriending' has never been this easy,

Commit NOW!

http://suicidemachine.org
http://wormweb.nl
http://moddr.net

made a small fix for the Netradiant package for *nixes, after a recurring "assertion failure" bug on machines with an Intel graphics board - so if your 'radiant.x86' fails to start with a message like so:

libs/convert.h:206
assertion failure: decode: invalid character: AE

you might wanna try the binary thats here instead. Questions and comments via here
.

opening an exhibition space in the MQ in Vienna with moddr_ and WORM (i'm there from 9th till 14th of november btw!), first show holds new work by JODI - workshops @ moddr_ by TagTool crew, Derek Holzer, HOTGLUE and Julian Oliver - showing work at TENT. till end of November - and then off to Berlin to spend the holidays with old and new friends, and of course 26C3 !!!

i'm giving a presentation on my work and other activities at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, November 6th - 20.20 at the NAI.
Since i don't really do slideshow-style presentations, i'm making a Pecha Kucha Bot ;)

tonight i'm showing an installation at the 'Nacht van de Geschiedenis' in the lovely hotel Krasnapolsky, it's a shoot-em-up rendition of the famous wintergarden in the hotel, pic bleow:

coming weeks i'll be in Japan, first in and around Tokyo where i'll give a talk at the excellent Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory and to meet up with Alvaro...



... after that i'll head over to Yokohama with the 5uper.net crew for the Japanese edition of the CodedCultures festival. I'll be showing work and giving a presentation at the YCC, there's a symposium at the Tokyo Art Uni and there's one of the famous minimal tokyo nights in UNIT.

excerpt below partly on my 'TODO' work:

Mediated_Remains: hidden bits of ourselves
*
The following text is an excerpt from Josephine Bosma's essay 'Mediated Remains: hidden bits of ourselves', june 2007.
*


Defragging Culture

There are also other trails through the static. The digital terrain is layered, logical, but 'flexible'. We create distinctions and rules in this environment that are by no means demanded by its structure. We tend to disregard the importance of what we choose to leave out (and what we can only hide from sight). As we develop our physical selves in this further mediated environment (as in Katherine Hayles' posthuman) we accumulate a huge amount of technological and cultural debris in our trail, which is just as telling about us as our 'official', neatly raked path is. In the digital age the amount of hastily discarded trash and obscured technological traces has grown exponentially.
This explosion of technical, cultural and social traces might be a nightmare for authorities, but they offer a radically fertile ground for all kinds of explorations. The fecundity of our current media environment is almost poisonous in its strength. It is because of this that we witness an explosion of all kinds of play with existing digital structures (like SecondLife, Google or social software such as MySpace). Artists and designers are tapping into the boiling sources of our information flows and they find a huge amount of superfluous, hidden, 'cached', filtered, forgotten or trashed material to toy with. This is the new wealth: a simultaneous, indistinguishable production of culture and cultural sources.

In 1998 the american artist Perry Hoberman presented an installation called 'Systems Maintenance' at the Rotterdam based institution for unstable media V2. In this installation the audience was invited to allign a set of furniture in physical space with its copy in digital space, the result of which could be followed realtime via a projection on the wall. This deceivingly simple work revealed its magic when interacting with it. It turned out to be very, very difficult to allign the apparently identical objects in the two different worlds. Frustration and despair grew by the second. 'Systems Maintenance' was a brilliant combination of poetic and conceptual gestures. I was reminded of it when seeing Walter Langelaar's project 'TODO (Tangled_Object_Description_Overview)'. Langelaar uses 3D object material from Second Life which is 'mixed' with a representation of the WORM building (in which the Media Design graduation show takes place) taken from Google Earth. The new virtual structure that is created this way is then 'collided' with the original building. Differences are emphasized by adding them to the original building physically, by "perforating" the real space with virtual architecture. Whereas Hoberman lets the audience actively experience the awkward split between physicality and activity in real and virtual environments, Langelaar chooses a more subtle approach.
Much like Jan Robert Leegte, just like Langelaar originally a sculptor, he creates a sense of estrangement by literally placing virtual objects outside of the digital grids into the real world. If Hoberman is skeptical of our new environments, Leegte and Langelaar experience it much more as a room for play and surprise.

The mathematical structure of the internet, despite the human landscape created in it, simply begs for systematic and generative art practices to explore it. Like traditional sculptors will see a lump of clay or wood and feel the possible structures inside of it, artists working with the net see connections and metastructures most of us are blind to.

more pics and video on this one soon..

3 DVD's playing selected work gathered from different sources, while the machine on the left runs a modded Call_Of_Duty4 showing the Chernobyl/Pripyat area...



i must say it was real great to put up a show in a shipping container ;)
thnx kees!

new works in BLURRR at TENT. Rotterdam, with Nina Boas, Iddo Drevijn, Sophie Krier, Walter Langelaar, Gyz La RiviÈre, Strange Attractors, Studio Spass, EsmÉ Valk and Volksrekorders - till 15th of November.



then on Thursday 100909 i'm showing a collage type installation at the GOGBOT festival in Enschede, with work by several artists and authors, revolving around a cultural thread inspired Andrei Tarkovsky’s "Stalker", to a more contemporary rendition in form of the videogame "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl" and the ensuing "fan fiction" or fanfic's...
come look me up, i'm playing curator in a shipping container on market square ;)



then the next day (110909, yes it's another crazy week) i'm showing some /tmp projections outside in De Wereld van Witte de With:

"The World of Witte de With ushers in the cultural season of the dozens of leading arts centres and galleries located on the 'cultural axis': the Witte de Withstraat and the Museumpark of Rotterdam."

Oscar just sent a link to a post on his blog, including the video below, showing the final moments of configuring the latest paralevel at Arteleku...

Basically what you see is the reddish cube controlling a custom gamelevel (projected on the ceiling) via camera tracking (using the excellent Gamuza), and additional navigation done via a 3D accelerometer (hacked Nintendo Nunchuck + Xbee's). I'll post some more detailed info on the build process and tech setup soon...

currently working on a new project at the excellent Arteleku, in the Interactivos?'09 entitled "Mixed episodes in Hybrid Bases" ::



"Mixed/Hybrids – Episodes/Bases. Such transversal, permissive concepts allow us to prepare alliances and exchanges where the poetries of architectural spaces and of any situation. They provoke explorations and relations between what seems not to have a simulated purpose and those small minuscule narrative derivations between consumers and users. They provoke episodes, mixed chapters in hybrid bases stimulating a combination of devices and forces between what is intervened and the intervener, an interactive transit, a fugitive reading between what is contingent and its container."

Moises Mañas & David Cuartielles

with a short bit on the new nOtbOt ::

blabla

via TAGR.TV

here's some shots from my work at the 'Fluid Architectures' show in the NiMK, a more detailed desciption is here, and a video will be up soon..


(camera + me on camera)

yesterday i went to an amazing place to visit the beautiful MaaKali, which turned into a truly inspiring experience. The place is called Villa Ockenburgh and it's an old hotel-slash-youth-hostel which is now run by StichtingZ. The main building houses several artist studios and projectspaces, surrounded by gardens and a park, proper estate style...
oh yeah and it's at the beach too ;)



Next to the villa there's this excellent building by Frank van Klingeren which totally reminded me of my old academy, AKI.
The building has been empty for several years now and for some reason got completely trashed by dutch ME idiots, who apparently needed some target practice, and it then got further vandalized by local youth...


(solid steel trying to blend in...)

Since i'm in for a small 'retraite', i might just hang out there for some weeks come summer to work on projects, aaaahhhh

quite a crazy week; flew off to Vienna last Tuesday to setup for the opening of the CodedCultures festival and symposium, first time showing the new nOtbOt hardware and casing (pic below). Press conference and opening on Wednesday, great times, and then flew back to Amsterdam Thursday evening to setup for the Fluid Architectures show at NIMK on Friday. Setting up there was no less problematic than usual, ended up recoding much of the work on the day itself (which turned out real nice actually) and more on that show soon...



the Coded Cultures exhibition is on till the 7th of June, the show at NIMK till 16th of August.

last week we presented one of our upcoming projects, tentatively dubbed the 'Web2.0 Suicide Machine!', at the Urban Studio Symposium for the Hogeschool Rotterdam.

Tomorrow, Friday 15th, I'll be presenting a new nOtbOt and giving a short talk at the 'Digital Material' book launch, at Studio T in Utrecht.

giving a talk tonight at Dorkbot Vienna, showing off the new hardware base for nOtbOt, which is kind of a project in it's own - but more on that later, and a brief intro on moddr_ and previous works.
Kindly hosted by monochrom and Coded Cultures, around 19.00 at Metalab.

just got back from the LinuxWochen in Linz, which was quite amazing...


>> spot TUX ;)

went over to do the VGA Tester workshop with Arjan Scherpenisse, which was really great!
Despite a huge hangover from the great party the night before at OK, I still managed to cram this moddr_ logo thingie together like below - the circuit generating the image is in the lower-right corner ::



cheers to Arjan and workshop participants, and all the wonderful people i met over the last few days - and thnx dan for letting me crash ;)

during the month of April I'll be resident artist at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, courtesy of Quartier21.

I'll be working on several projects and events leading up to the CodedCultures festival, so drop me a line if you're around or maybe see you there!

since my posting 'ere seem to stay somewhat sporadic anyhow, here's a whole string of new stuff i'm doing in coming times...



CODED CULTURES is a binational festival (Austria – Japan) in the year 2009 to explore new artistic practices and creative ability profiles within media integrated project-cultures and digital media related art, focusing on Japan and Europe.

I'll be showing work in the exhibition which takes place at Quartier21 in the Museumsquartier of Vienna - from 27th of may till 8th of june - and then later in the year in Yokohama(!!!) from 14th till 18th of October.



Also starting in May is an exhibition at the 'Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts' (or NIMK for short) on fluid architecture in which i'll be making a new site-specific work for the institute, and also i'll be giving a workshop.
The plan for this is to combine tech developments made in the nOtbOt and [[recursive]descent] projects into a new piece which deals with the NIMK building and context itself - let's say the working title is 'The Institute and it's Double'..

This show also features the excellent Pablo Valbuena and Mark Napier, and is curated by Susanne Jaschko.

On the 15th of May i'll be showing nOtbOt at a book presentation for the University of Amsterdam, i'll also be giving a talk there on my 'access' to digital media as an artist - which will probably entail me giving many kudos to all the wonderful opensource projects i've been able to base my work on.



For the 2009 edition of the GOGBOT festival i've been invited as a guest-curator for a videogame oriented part of the exhibition, where i'll also be showing new work made within the Fallout game series - that should fit nicely with the 'Atompunk'(?) theme i guess ;)

more on that here by BruceS...

then somewhere in the meantime some good friends and I are setting up a new studio+gallereh/parteh facility in Berlin someplace (so watch out if u see me crashin into stuff over there again), doing a lot of cool stuff with moddr_ at WORM, and re-working q3aSocialLadder with some Chlorgeschlecht tunes!

and surely there's more to add... soonish.

feels like i'm spending more time in Berlin than in Rotterdam lately ;)
from the 23rd on, for a full week i'll be participating in a daytime program of events which under the theme 'STRUCTURES – Backing-up Independent Audio-visual Cultures' will address both theoretical and practical aspects of today’s independent and experimental music production at the intersections of pop and sound & media arts.



More specifically, you can find us at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien - where xxxxx hosts an experimental nine day structure, widening the scope of construction and constructivism to embrace the social and economic structures of production and performance. Public interface is to be made explicit, inviting participation, visit and conversation.

Works produced during this week will be on show in the Bethanien gallery during the month of February.



Then on 30/31 of January i'll be showing several works/installations at C-BASE, Berlin's famous hacker space.

From their site:
"Join us for two days with a selection of installations, video-screenings, virtual worlds, electronic-noise performances and DJ-VJ live shows. We prepare for a battle with VJ Shithead, VJ Sandwoman, the Berlin-based noisecore live act Chlorgeschlecht, video artist Jan van Nuenen and game hacker Walter Langelaar.



If we survive the first night, we expect more to explore with Poppekastkrakers with electrotheatro, Paul Klotz with whitelight LED art, C-men micromusic visuals, Unyx, Via Oral’s nouveau hippie dada, Reinier Kranendonk with his running meat machine and more state-of-the-art computer- and web-technology by Eelco Wagenaar & Arjan Scherpenisse, Sander Veenhof, Angelo Vermeulen, Danja Vasiliev…"

DADAMACHINIMA is an exhibition I curated for Planetart on the topic of 'avant-garde videogame modification', showing great work by some of my favourite people in this particular field...
hell, it even holds a brand spankin' new JODI, so if yr around Amsterdam go check it out!

artists on show include Aram Bartholl, Julian Oliver, JODI, Gottfried Haider, Ludic Society, Joan Leandre, Paul B. Davis, Marc van Elburg, Friedrich Kirschner Gordan Savicic and maself..

Big thanks to teh moddr_ crew and WORM for backing this up.